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.

Voyage of the Lightfoot

This ship’s log documents six voyages between England and America, between 1774-1782.  The log consists of printed forms filled in by hand, and contained categories for the courses, winds, distance, latitude, etc.  This particular image is taken from the voyage of the Lightfoot from Charleston to London, September 1 – 27, 1781.  A recent acquisition.

Order of the Planets

These images are taken from the Rudimenta cosmographia of Johannes Honter (c. 1498 – 1549), a mid-sixteenth-century Lutheran reformer and cartographer in Translyvania, or modern Romania.

The world map takes the distinctive “cosmographic heart” shape of cordiform maps, a term coined by the Nuremberg mathematician and cartographer Johannes Schoner in his 1551 Opera mathematica.  The first map of this type was published in 1511; the last in 1566.  See George Kish, “The cosmographic heart: cordiform maps of the 16th century,” Imago Mundi 19 (1965): 13.

From Johannes Hunter, Rudimenta cosmographica (Impressvm in inclyta Transylvaniae Corona 1542). Beinecke call number: Taylor 86.  For more images, see the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections.

A Giacomo of Gondolas

Costume books like those by the Venetian engraver Giacomo Franco touted the splendors of the city’s citizens, their elegance, their architecture, the extravagance of their festivities. Franco’s costume book also indicates the centrality of the gondola to Venetian civic identity, even in the early modern period. Above, the Bridge of Sighs, with gondolas, in this early seventeenth-century bird’s eye view by Franco.

Doge, with gondolas

Gondolas at play

Giacomo Franco, Habiti d’hvomeni et donne venetiane: con la processione della serma. Signoria et altri particolari cioè trionfi feste et cerimonie pvbliche della nobilissima città di Venetia ( [Venice] : Giacomo Franco forma in Frezzaria al’insegna del Sole con priuilegio, [1609]). Beinecke call number: J18 F8475 +609

A competent knowledge of the stops and pauses

In the advertisement for this English translation of de la Mothe-Fenelon’s Telemachus:

An Essay on Punctuation, 12mo.  Fourth edition, price 3s.

“No person can read, or even speak, with propriety or elegance, who has not a competent knowledge of the stops and pauses.” Essay on Elocut.

Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon, The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses.  Translated from the French … with notes, by the author of The Dissertation on the Parian Chronicle.  London, 1795.  A recent acquisition.

Let us apply to Newton

“Let us apply to Newton. He will tell us; Don’t believe me; believe only your Eyes, and the Mathematicks: place yourself in a Room entirely darkened, into which the Light comes only thro’ an Hole exceedingly small; the Ray of Light falling upon Paper will give you the Colour White.”

A plate showing the two rainbows follows several leaves of advertisement at the end of the book, listing Barrow’s geometrical lectures, the Philosophical Transactions, a Builder’s Dictionary, and translation of Virgil, among others.

The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy. By M. Voltaire. Translated from the French. Revised and Corrected by John Hanna, M.A. Teacher of the Mathematicks. With Explication of some Words in Alphabetical Order. London: for Stephen Austin at the Angel and Bible in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1738. A recent acquisition.

Exercising Brachyographically

For the scientifically-inclined verb learner, instructions on the creation of linguistic tables, with directions for their use:

“Take a square sheet of paper of the size of a quarto or post paper; fold it length way into four equal parts, and then open it again; this will procure you 3 perpendicular principal lines. Divide afterwards with a pair of compasses, your page, thus marked with three perpendicular lines, so as to obtain 25 horizontal ones, or there about, which you will draw with a pencil and a rule according to the following directions. … The effect of this preparation will be such as is represented in the annexed Plate I.”

Jean-Nicolas Jouin de Sauseuil, The Brachygraphy of the French verbs … the whole reduced and framed upon the new and only true system of conjugating the French vergs; and accompanied with a copious List of them at the End, and a Key to facilitate the use and understanding of the work. London: by Edward and Charles Dilly in the Poultry; and sold by J. and J. Fletcher, at Oxford; and T. Merril, at Cambridge, 1772. A recent acquisition.

A physical treatise of cherishing natural memory

This volvelle, with its three concentric circles of nine categories, is one of several memory devices or machines from an early sixteenth-century edition of Ramon Lull’s Ars breuis … Raymundi Lull … In cuius castigatione attẽdat lector … Magister Bernardus de Lavinheta … insudarit. [Colophon: Impressum Lugduni : per magistrum Stephanu[?] Baland, Anno Domini. 1514. Die xv. mẽsis Decembris]. Beinecke call number: K8 L97 d51

John Willis (d. 1628) advocated the memory theatre, in which ideas were to be stored visually, as scenes created in great and conscious detail. Willis’s memory theatre is shown here in this English translation of his Mnemonica, or, The art of memory : drained out of the pure fountains of art & nature : digested into three books : also a physical treatise of cherishing natural memory : diligently collected out of divers learned mens writings. London : L. Sowersby, 1661. Beinecke call number: Krf3 618wg.

Aza! Mon cher Aza!

“Aza! mon cher Aza! les cris de ta tendre Zilia, tels qu’une vapeur du matin, s’exhalent & sont dissipes avant d’arriver jusqu’a toi; en vain je t’appelle a mon secours; en vain j’attens que tu viennes briser les …” From the “Lettre Premiere” of Madame de Graffigny, Lettres d’une peruvienne. Nouvelle edition augmentée de plusieurs lettres, et d’une introduction à l’histoire (Paris : Chez Duchesne Libraire …, 1752). Beinecke call number: 1998 1243.

The original break-out novel, Madame de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une peruvienne (1747) achieved almost immediate fame. Graffigny’s life to that point had not lacked interest: separated in 1718 from her husband, widowed in 1725 under mysterious circumstances, Graffigny left the court of the Duchy of Lorraine in 1736 after the Treaty of Vienna. She settled in Paris in 1739, after a two-month stay at the house of Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet which had ended in a falling-out. Her success with the Lettres d’une peruvienne was followed by the triumph of her play Cenie at the Comedie-Francaise.

For more on Madame de Graffigny, whose correspondence with her confidant of twenty five years, Francois-Antoine Devaux, is held in the Beinecke’s collections, see Beinecke Gen MSS 353, the Graffigny Papers.