Gold leaf and Graffiti in a copy of the 1462 Mainz Bible

This article discusses an illuminated copy of the fourth printed edition of the Latin Vulgate (Mainz, 1462), or 48-line Bible, which is now in the Perne Library at Peterhouse, Cambridge. It considers the history of the book in the late sixteenth century, when it passed between two lawyers (Justinian Kidd and Edward Orwell) in London, and its path into the collection at Peterhouse, via John Cosin, later bishop of Durham. It assesses evidence that the volume was initially considered to be a manuscript, rather than a printed book, and details the peculiar use made of its illuminations in the eighteenth century by a group of young scholars at Peterhouse and Trinity College, who carved their names into the gold-leaf decorations.</jats:p

Isaac Newton learns Hebrew: Samuel Johnson's Nova cubi Hebræi tabella

This article concerns the earliest evidence for Isaac Newton’s use of Hebrew: a manuscript copy by Newton of part of a work intended to provide a reader of the Hebrew alphabet with the ability to identify or memorize more than 1000 words and to begin to master the conjugations of the Hebrew verb. In describing the content of this unpublished manuscript and establishing its source and original author for the first time, we suggest how and when Newton may have initially become acquainted with the language. Finally, basing our discussion in part on an examination of the reading marks that Newton left in the surviving copies of Hebrew grammars and lexicons that he owned, we will argue that his interest in Hebrew was not intended to achieve linguistic proficiency but remained limited to particular theological queries of singular concern.Michael Joalland’s work was supported by the University of Suwon, 2013. The images are reproduced courtesy of the Syndics of The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library

Books in the News in Cromwellian England

This article offers detailed analysis of the patterns of book advertising in Marchamont Nedham’s government-sponsored newsbook, Mercurius Politicus. It contends that, for a brief period, Politicus was the nearest thing that the mid-seventeenth century had to a literary periodical and contests standard accounts that Politicus was only successful because government monopoly made it so. Instead I show that Politicus was instrumental in creating an image of the Commonwealth and Protectorate as a Republic of Letters; the cheap print of its small advertisements insisted that the publication of a book was an event, that London was a city of the book, and that its inhabitants might respond to the uncertainty of political revolution by eagerly imagining a future comprised of new books as yet unread

Commentary: Landmark articles on copper in the field of human health

No abstract.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35051/1/1027_ftp.pd