Help Solve a Tudor Mystery at RBML

King Henry VIII and his inner circle are once again in the public spotlight with the recent American premiere of the miniseries Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s 2009 novel. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library proudly holds a piece of this fascinating Tudor history and we’re calling on our readers to help us find […]

Annotated Books and Hidden Genealogies

Rare books are as much artifacts as they are texts and there is no better proof of this than the ways in which early readers bound, annotated, and otherwise customized their books. Paper in particular was much scarcer in the early modern period than it is today, so fly-leaves and margins were prime spaces in […]

Frances Wolfreston: A Woman Reader of the Late Renaissance Revealed

A rare book is seldom dumb. If you know how to listen, it can speak volumes (pardon the phrase) about who owned it, why it was read and how often, where it was sold, what the purchase price was, when its binding was fitted, and so on. Take the Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s The Schoole […]

Roxburghe Copy of the Comedies of Aristophanes (Incunabula Q. 881 A7 1498)

Aristophanous Kōmōdiai ennea = Aristophanis Comoediae novem. Venetiis: Apud Aldum, MIID Idibus Quintillis [1498] This is the editio princeps, or first printed edition, of the Greek text of Aristophanes’ comedies. The work includes nine comedies, but not Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae, the texts of which were yet to be discovered.  It was printed in 1498 by […]