Half-Portrait of Woman, Obscured at Edges

This untitled piece is one of a portfolio of forty drawings attributed to Samuel Cooper (1609 -1672), the English miniature painter. The works are of unidentified subjects, traced in red ink on transparent paper. Beinecke call number: Osborn fb 122.

There are forty drawings in Osborn fb 122, all of which have been scanned and included in the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections. The Cooper portfolio is in the public domain, and these images can be used or downloaded without any need for permissions.

The Diverse Nations Habilimented

Above, the title page for the first edition of Pietro Bertelli’s Diversarum nationum habitus (Padua, 1589), a sixteenth-century Italian costume book. The work was published with fold-out procession scenes and over a hundred engravings of paired figures, usually divided by region or social hierarchy.

Some of the engravings were issued with moveable flaps, as in the example below of the Venetian courtesan.

Beinecke call number: 2001 765. Further images from Bertelli can be found in the Beinecke’s Digital Images collection, with a search for Bertelli or by call number.

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.