The Great Art of Consonances and Dissonances

The Musurgia universalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni of Athanasius Kircher, 17th-century Jesuit and polymath. Rome, 1650. Beinecke call number: Vi2 013

The Festivities for Ernst August

From Lorologio del piacere, a festival book depicting the visit, in the summer of 1685, of Ernst August, Duke of Braunschweig-Luneburg, to the villa of Marco Contarini in Piazzola, outside Venice. Entertainments included aquatic pageants, Barbary horses, songs and banqueting. Beinecke call number: Italian Festivals 112.

This is one example from the Beinecke’s Italian Festival Books collection, several dozen works printed by individuals or localities in early modern Italy to commemorate the pageantry created for formal occasions such as visitations, funerals, coronations, or weddings.

Above, the Barbary horses; below, the banquet.

Below, snippets from the music for the occasion.


The Italian Festival Books collection has been scanned and can be found in the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections, with the keyword Italian Festivals. The Italian Festival Books collection is in the public domain and no permissions are required for the use of these images, although the Beinecke does request that it be acknowledged as the source.

Book of Secrets: Alchemy and the European Imagination, 1500-2000

Excerpts from the Beinecke’s Mellon MS 41, George Ripley and Richard Carpenter.  Emblematic Alchemy in English verse, with an English version of the Visio mystica of Arnold of Villanova. England, unsigned, about 1570.

This nineteen-foot long alchemical scroll is one of twenty-one known “Ripley scrolls,” an elaborately illustrated guide to the alchemical process, associated with the fifteenth-century English alchemist, George Ripley.   This particular copy was given to Yale in 1965 by Paul Mellon, as part of the collection of alchemical books and manuscripts begun by his first wife, Mary Mellon.   Mary Mellon became interested in alchemy through her support of the psychologist Carl Jung, whom she heard speak at a lecture in the Plaza Hotel in 1936, when Jung had just begun to propound his theory of alchemical symbolism as an example of a collective unconscious, his idea of a shared understanding of symbols across time and cultures.

The scroll has been scanned and included (as Mellon MS 41) in the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections.  It will be on view in the Beinecke Library’s  forthcoming exhibition, “Book of Secrets: Alchemy and the European Imagination, 1500-2000,” January 20 – April 18, 2009.

The Year of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary

In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth in 1709, a definition from the first edition of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) will be posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight on Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, the Beinecke’s new word-a-day dictionary blog. Words will be taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections, held in the collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Paradise annotated

“Many men, many minds, and many opinions,” quotes Edwards Bowens (his book), in his copy of Paradise Regained (London: by J.M. for John Starkey, 1671), bought on June 28, 1709. Beinecke call number: 1977 2532. Bowens also signed his copy of the fifth edition of Richard Capel’s Tentations: their nature, danger and cure (London: by E.B. for J. Bartlet, 1655); Beinecke call number Mhc5 C170 T2 1655.

Readers of Paradise Regained seem not to have suffered from a lack of opinions, judging by the Beinecke’s second annotated copy, with text corrections and a manuscript essay with several dozen poems bound in at the back (Beinecke call number Osborn pb117). Modern day Milton enthusiasts will be interested in the BBC’s John Milton festivities to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth.

The Paleographical Commons

This image is taken from Beinecke’s Osborn b349, a commonplace book of the 1620s, signed by one Francis Grosvenor and containing notes in secretary and italic hands on a broad range of topics, including witchcraft, geography, aphorisms, cosmology, and fee tables, as in the example above.

This commonplace book, and a range of other examples, have been uploaded as high-resolution scans on the Beinecke’s Paleographical Commons, a resource for examples of early modern British paleography. The site can be found on flickr, as part of the Beinecke’s Flickr Laboratory, a project to provide open access to public domain images from the Beinecke Library collections.

Mrs Christian Kerr Her Arithmetic Book

The arithmetic book kept between 1716 – 1730 by Mrs. Christian Kerr, of Chatto and Sunlaws, in the Scottish border county of Roxburghshire. The notebook contains Lady Kerr’s sums, household accounts, notes on arithmetic and tables of weights and measures.

Along the way, Lady Kerr veers off into a list of the books she bought in Edinburgh in 1724, including titles such as History of the Buccaneers, Farquhar’s plays, and Cooke on forest trees. On the facing page, Kerr lists the books she possessed in March of 1725.

The notebook also contains poems addressed to Kerr on her birthday, and to her husband on his 71st birthday. Below are her arithmetic exercises on “double fellowship,” facing the calligraphy exercises often found joined with the study of mathematics in early modern women’s notebooks. Beinecke call number: Osborn c102

Memoranda as to payments to informers

Documents authorizing payments to informants, signed by the Recorder of London, Thomas Jenner (1606/7 – 1676) and relating to prosecutions under the Conventicle Act of 1664. The Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670 prohibited meetings of more than five people, and were used as legal means to prosecute Quakers and other non-conformist religious sects.  Beinecke call number: Osborn MSS File 4443.

Projections of the new world

From the 1559 Venetian manuscript portolan atlas of Battista Agnese (c. 1500 – 1564), Genoan cartographer. The atlas also includes a traditional portolan chart of the Mediterranean, along with some twenty other maps and views and two pages of distance computations.

Agnese includes a cartographic projection of the globe in this atlas, indicating his engagement with the early modern discussion on how best to represent the three-dimensional globe on a two-dimensional surface. Beinecke call number: MS 560. For further images from the atlas, see the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections. A full description of the manuscript’s contents can be found in the finding aid.

Agnese wrote in 1559, some ten years before the publication of the Flemish geographer Gerard Mercator’s world atlas of 1569. Mercator’s cylindrical projection of the globe remained the standard until the Peters projection of the early 1970s. The Mercator projection can be seen in the late 16th-century silver disk seen below, showing the Francis Drake voyage.

Silver map of the world showing the track of Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation engraved or struck on a flat silver disc by Michael Mercator. Beinecke call number: Taylor 15.

Elegant, Well-Educated, Needs Title

The preliminary state of the titlepage to an unknown book, probably a late-18th century French scientific work. A recent acquisition.