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New Light on the Rylands Gutenberg Bible
In 2013, the John Rylands Library in Manchester used multi-spectral imaging to recover an almost completely erased ownership inscription in volume I of their Gutenberg Bible (figure 1).[1] The provenance of this Bible had been unknown prior to its nineteenth-century owner, George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834), until the previous year when Eric Marshall White,…
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Finding Scottish University Graduates in Early Modern Records
Inspired by a recent query from one of my postgraduates, I thought there might be some value in providing a quick tutorial in how to locate the academic backgrounds of early modern Scots with university degrees. Let us suppose you find a Scot in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century document with the honorific “M[aste]r”. Unlike its more…
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Brunet: The Great Bibliographer
Jacques-Charles Brunet (1780-1867) was probably the greatest bibliographer of the nineteenth century, perhaps of almost any century. The son of a bookseller, his universal Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres first appeared in three volumes in 1810 and continued to re-appear in increasingly expanded editions over the course of his lifetime. Organised alphabetically,…
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Armorial Bindings at the Signet Library: I. Bishop Cesi’s Leslie
I recently had the pleasure of teaching a workshop on descriptive bibliography at the Signet Library, the second I’ve now given there for postgraduates keen to develop their book historical skills. Last year I had noticed a splendidly bound copy of Bishop John Leslie’s De origine moribus, et rebus gestis Scotorum (Rome, 1578) decorated with what…
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Bonny Prince Charlie’s Cornwallis
I am currently revising an odd article on the odder Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851). Sharpe – failed minister, successful collector, occasional editor, prolific artist – was a friend of Sir Walter Scott and a fixture of the Edinburgh scene for many decades, but lacks modern recognition. He deserves it, though, and not least because of…
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Heraldic Reference Works
A short-list of useful reference works on heraldry, compiled for the benefit of University of Stirling postgraduate students attending the “Introduction to Heraldry” workshop on 26 September 2022. Europe Britain France Germany (Holy Roman Empire) Italy Identifying Armorial Supralibros
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Wee Willie Winkie, Bookbug, and the Impoverishment of Modern Scots
This evening my wife and I were singing ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ to our two year old. It’s a lovely – if slightly creepy – nursery rhyme with a good tune and we were refreshing our memory of the words, dulled by rather too many years of adulthood, by looking at the text as printed in…
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Like Planks From a Shipwreck
Tanquam tabula naufragii, like planks from a shipwreck, was a common image used by early modern writers to describe the remains of antiquity. Inherent in the image was a sense of loss, of the impossibility of ever fully recovering what had once been. The metaphor has appealed to me ever since I first came across…
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Appletons’ Cyclopaedia and a Mysterious Literary Hoax
Alert readers of my blog will have noticed that last week’s post on the Restoration scholar and poet Roger Trosse is a fraud; no such man existed and the all-too-plausible biography, though populated with plenty of real individuals – George Hickes and Francis Cherry, among others – is idle pastiche. I hope this small exercise…
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The Curious Life of Roger Trosse (1651-1709)
Trosse, Roger (1651-1709), theological scholar and poet, was baptised 14 June 1651 at Saint Mary Major, Exeter, Devon, the third son and seventh child of Thomas Trosse of Woodbury, Devon, and Elizabeth Webb, daughter of John Webb of Exeter, gentleman. The Presbyterian minister George Trosse (1631-1713) was an uncle. After attending Blundell’s School, where he…
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Kelsey Jackson Williams 