Rare Books and Manuscripts Library

We’ve all heard about Martin Luther, “father” of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. But how many of us know about Philip Melancthon, Luther’s ablest assistant and the man the arch-Reformer called the Lord’s “learned champion”?

Born in 1497 in Bretten, a small town located in Germany’s Kraichgau Valley, Melancthon (Greek for “black earth,” or Schwarzerd, his family name) enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1509, qualifying for his Master’s degree in Greek and Classical studies by the time he was fifteen. Heidelberg denied him the degree on the grounds of his extreme youth, but the University of Tübingen wasn’t so shortsighted and accepted him as an official Master’s candidate in philosophy and humanistic studies, conferring the degree upon him in 1516. Two years later, at the tender age of 21, Melancthon was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg. It was here that Philip’s life would change forever after meeting his colleague from the theological faculty, the fiery, reform-minded Augustinian monk, Martin Luther. Together, Philip and Martin would work together to lay the groundwork for the Reformation that would shake the religious, political, and cultural foundations of Christendom and forever change the face of Western society.

In contrast to Luther, Melancthon was soft-spoken and calm. Luther himself described their differences, noting how their opposing personalities worked together harmoniously: “I am rough, boisterous, stormy and altogether warlike. I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils. I must remove stumps and stones, cut away thistles, and thorns, and clear the wild forests; but Master Philip comes along softly and gently sowing and watering with joy, according to the gifts which God has abundantly bestowed upon him” (Luther’s Preface to his Commentary on the Colossians). Luther’s words blasted his opponents and hammered home his notions on reform; Melancthon’s—although no less forceful—were more calmly reasoned and discursive. And while Luther issued his revolutionary writings in rapid-fire succession, jumping from topic to topic as it suited him, Melancthon’s approach to spreading evangelical reform was more methodical.  Nowhere is this measured approach more apparent than in his massively influential text, Loci communes theologici (or Theological Commonplaces).

First issued in 1521 and based on his school lectures on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Melancthon’s Loci was the first systematic explanation of Protestant theology. Whereas authors of earlier medieval systematic theologies like Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus (to name only a few of hundreds) explicated faith by analyzing it through the lens of secular philosophy and rationality and a reliance on earlier traditional authoritative writings, Melancthon eschewed the notion that philosophy or the writings of man could reveal truth more fully or clearly than the words of the Bible itself. In his Loci he highlighted the pre-eminency of the Scriptures above all else, claiming that all there is to know about God and correct doctrine is to be found in the Bible alone. Although he published the Loci in 1521, he continued to work on it for years, issuing major revisions and expansions of the text over the next three decades. These subsequent editions witnessed a mellowing of Philip’s attitude toward the utility of philosophy in biblical study, but they maintained a strict adherence to the primacy of the Bible as the root of faith. The various versions of the Loci came to dominate the expression of Lutheran thought and belief, so much so that Luther himself praised the work in the highest possible terms, stating: “You cannot find anywhere a book which treats the whole of theology so adequately as the Loci communes do… Next to Holy Scripture, there is no better book” (from Luther’s Table Talk).

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Ohio State is overjoyed to announce that we have recently acquired two of the major revised editions of the Loci. While we’re still waiting for a copy of the 1521 first edition to enter the fold, we count ourselves lucky to have obtained copies of both the 1535 and 1555 revisions.

These editions were not simple reissues of the text with minor corrections. Rather, in each Melancthon substantially adjusted his earlier thinking, radically rewriting and expanding his own theology. The 1555 edition, for instance, includes a major redevelopment of Philip’s opinions on free will and nearly quadruples the length of the 1521 version. Additionally, Philip also supplied new introductory epistles to his readers in each version. Our 1535 copy was printed in Wittenberg by Joseph Klug; and the 1555 was printed in Basle by John Orporinus. Both copies have come to us in their original, elaborately tooled bindings and, as an added bonus, the 1555 copy includes contemporary marginalia added by an engaged reader.

These two books represent a significant addition to the Library’s wonderful assembly of Reformation materials, The Harold J. Grimm Reformation Collection (http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/finding/reformhome.php). While the Grimm holdings are particularly strong in German and Lutheran materials, until this year it had not included Melancthon’s Loci. Considering that this text represents the fundamental statement of Lutheran doctrine and the first work to attempt a systematic accounting of Protestant theology and dogmatic, we realized we simply had to acquire copies of its major editions. As well as supplementing our already strong Lutheran holdings, these volumes will also better contextualize and inform other aspects of our collection, such as our copy of John Eck’s Enchiridion locorum communium adversus Lutherum (Ingolstadt: Alexander Weissenhorn, 1543).

Originally published in 1525, Eck’s treatise offered a point-by-point response to the Loci from the Roman Catholic point of view. Over forty separate editions of Eck’s response were published between 1525 and 1576, making it perhaps the most popular Catholic handbook of the Counter-Reformation. Taken together, our copies of Melancthon’s Loci and Eck’s Enchiridion allow us to see Protestant and Catholic teachings (and polemic) in dialogue and help us gain a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the theological issues at stake and the rhetoric the different camps used to score their points. As we build our collections, we build our understanding of and appreciation for the past and all that it can tell us about the present and the future. So, let’s welcome Philip’s Loci to our collections!

Now all that remains is to track down that pesky 1521 edition…

Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator

It’s not every day that I have the pleasure of announcing that the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at OSU has acquired an original medieval codex, and I’m pleased to say that today isn’t one of those days either. Pleased, you might ask? Yes, because today I happily announce that we have just added three medieval books to our collection! These acquisitions mark the first complete medieval manuscript additions to RBMS’s collection in over twenty years. All three manuscripts were acquired based on a range of criteria: content, scriptural style, codicological context, uniqueness and, most importantly, their ability to serve as valuable foundations for individualized and classroom teaching and ongoing research. Each manuscript is distinct and includes qualities that previously had not been available in OSU’s manuscript collections.

Our first new addition is Pseudo-Sextus Aurelius Victor’s De viris illustribus Romae, a historical work that includes seventy-six summaries of the lives of famous Romans.  Although a sixteenth-century inscription in OSU’s copy attributes the work to Suetonius and one recent scholarly opinion credits Pliny the Elder as its original author, the true authorship of this text has been contested for centuries. Produced in Italy in the late-fifteenth century (ca. 1450-1475), OSU’s copy (one of an estimated five examples in North America) is written in a fine humanistic script. Adding further flavor to the item is its binding: a leaf from a late-twelfth century decorated Italian Lectionary. Taken together, the book’s text and the binding’s late Carolingian script offer students a wonderful opportunity to see side-by-side Italian humanistic script and the original scriptural style upon which it was modeled. The manuscript also provides interesting codicological fodder, giving readers a chance to see a fifteenth-century binding error and a number of later inscriptions and paratextual additions.

An early-fifteenth century noted Cistercian Processional in Latin (with some rubrics in Dutch) is our second new codex. The manuscript includes an array of text and music used during processions for important liturgical feasts and celebrations such as the Purification of the Virgin, Palm Sunday, Corpus Christi, and others. Also included are the antiphons sung to celebrate the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday. The text is written in formal gothic bookhand in brown ink and red rubrications. The manuscript is particularly valuable from a codicological standpoint, surviving, as it does, in its original leather-covered pasteboard binding. Pasteboard bindings were not common prior to the early-sixteenth century, a fact that makes OSU’s volume extremely interesting not just because of its early date, but also because the pasteboard is made from sheets of parchment—rather than paper—that are glued together. Although OSU has several examples of medieval musical manuscripts in its collection of disjunct leaves, this volume is the first musical medieval codex to come to the University.

Original medieval vernacular manuscripts can be hard to come by, but occasionally a fine example appears on the market. Our third manuscript addition is a lovely little volume of prayers, masses, and a sermon likely produced in northern Italy between 1375 and 1425. The first twenty-three folios include an array of prayers and masses in both Latin and Italian, but the book’s final 128 folios feature a macaronic sermon written mostly in Italian, but with occasional Latin additions. Luke 14:16 (“Homo quidem fecit cenam magnam”) is the sermon’s main theme, but other subjects such as the two natures of Christ, the influence of the heavens and planets on everyday life, Purgatory, Hell’s punishments, and the glories of Paradise are also discussed. Unfortunately the text’s original binding doesn’t survive, so we’re deprived of any inscriptions or marks of ownership that may have helped us piece together its provenance. Given its small size (93 x 66 mm)–note the small scale by comparing the text to the elegant thumbs holding it open–and the fact that most of it is in the vernacular, this book may have been intended for personal rather than institutional use.

All three manuscripts are welcome additions to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library’s growing collection of original medieval documents and will prove to be popular, highly useful teaching and research tools. One ambitious and gifted student has already begun historical and codicological research on the Cistercian Processional, and work toward producing an edition and translation of the Italian prayer and sermon manuscript is also underway.  Students from the French department have also conducted in-depth, hands-on analysis of one of the manuscripts during a class session at the Library earlier this quarter. Although the manuscripts are amongst the Library’s oldest holdings, it’s clear that they are already finding ways to speak to today’s students and scholars.

Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator

As OSU employees consider an annual contribution to the Campus Campaign we’d like to take this opportunity to point out that gifts may directed to funds that support the Charvat American Fiction Collection and/or several areas within the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Fund code numbers are included below for your convenience. We’d be happy to your questions about any of these!

• Bennett Avant Writing Collection – 660398
• Charvat American Fiction Fund – 309347
• Keenan Library of Astronomy Fund – 604183
• Meek Thurber Endowment – 604829
• Rudolph Children’s Science Endowment – 606234
• Wing Rare Books Endowment – 667645

The Rare Books & Manuscripts Library is pleased to announce the completion of an ambitious project to digitize the seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book of Sir Henry Bellingham. The project is live at http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/bellingham/. This project was researched, designed, and created by Sarah Shippy, a graduate student in OSU’s Department of History. Essentially scrapbooks of useful knowledge, commonplace books were privately produced notebooks in which readers recorded valuable and practical extracts from books that they read. Bellingham’s commonplace book offers researchers a fascinating look into Sir Henry’s personal reading habits and sheds light on the wide variety of topics—including history, religion, law and government, literature, science, and domestic affairs—that were popular with readers during the mid-seventeenth century. In addition to including a full digital reproduction of the manuscript, the website also includes detailed background information on the manuscript itself, its historical context, and the life of Sir Henry Bellingham.

Savants throughout history (along with a fair number of quacks and hucksters) have interpreted comets streaking across the sky as heralds of doom or harbingers of great change. Perhaps had we here at OSU’s Rare Books Library been wearing our divinators’ hats earlier this month we would have associated the arrival on our doorstep of an extremely rare seventeenth-century book about comets with the current world financial crisis (doom indeed?) or the imminent 2008 Presidential election (great change?). Prophets and soothsayers we are not, however, and the book that sped through the ether from New York to Columbus (courtesy of FedEx—one of the Prime Mover’s many tertiary subordinates) hopefully heralds no changes other than the influence it might have on the research agendas of scholars interested in historical astronomy. The book in question—Hypographe: Flagelli Saturni & Martis. Das ist: Beschreibung des erschrecklichen Cometsterns, welcher im Octobri, Novembri und Decembri des 1618…, published in Leipzig by N. & C. Nerlich in 1619—is a small quarto volume consisting of 12 leaves of black-letter German text and a woodcut vignette on the title page depicting the comet and its tail. The author, Paul Hintzsch—a German doctor and astronomer, provides modern researchers with a tidy summation of the astrological and astronomical observations of and discussions surrounding the appearance of the “Great Comet of 1618”, also known as “the Angry Star” due to its extremely long tail, reddish hue, and lengthy duration (it was visible to the naked eye for over seven weeks in late 1618 and early 1619, even remaining discernible during the day). Astronomers across Europe commented on the cosmic phenomenon, astrologers everywhere excitedly interpreted its meaning, and doomsayers and pessimists from Scotland to Sicily witnessed portents and prodigies in its fiery tail. Even King James I of England wrote about it, penning a poem that reminded its readers that even if the comet were a celestial sign, it would remain unintelligible to mere mortals:

Yee men of Brittayne wherefore gaze yee so,

Vpon an angry starre? When as yee knowe

The Sun must turne to darke, the Moone to

bloode,

And then t’will bee to late to turne to good.

O bee so happy then whilst time doth last,

As to remember Doomesday is not past:

And misinterpret not with vayne conceyte

The character you see of Heauen’s heighte:

Which though it bringe the World some newes

from fate,

The letter is such as none can it translate:

And for to guesse at God Almighties minde

Were such a thinge might cosen all mankinde:

Therefore I wish the curious man to Keepe

His rash imaginations till hee sleepe…

Perhaps we should all remember the gist of King James’s lines when trying to predict who will be the next President or how the world’s financial ship will right itself. As for me, I’ll limit my “rash imaginations” to dreaming of the books that in future will become part of OSU’s rare book constellation.

Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator

Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, was one of sixteenth-century England’s most influential religious and political figures. Best known, perhaps, for writing and compiling the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the summation and embodiment of the Reformed English liturgy, Cranmer also wrote a variety of other treatises, including a text that OSU has recently acquired and added to its outstanding Reformation collection. Cranmer’s Defensio verae et Catholicae doctrinae de Sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi Seruatoris nostri…, is a later Latin translation of his English exploration of the controversial doctrine of the Eucharist (A defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our Saviour Christ, 1550). Cranmer’s English original was translated by Sir John Cheke, one-time tutor to Edward VI, secretary of state, member of the Privy Council, and noted author in his own right. OSU’s copy is a 1557 second edition of Cheke’s translation, and unlike the first edition—originally issued in London in 1553—it was published abroad (in Emden, Germany) because of the catholic Queen Mary I’s accession to the English throne, her regime’s hostility toward Protestantism, and her imprisonment and execution of Cranmer in 1556. As the title page states, Cranmer revised and approved this second edition from his prison cell: “ab autore in vinculis recognita & aucta”. Bound in with Cranmer’s text is a Latin work by John Foxe (of Book of Martyrs fame) printed ca. 1580 by John Day. The book, Syllogisticon hoc est: Argumenta, seu probationes et resolutiones…De re et Materia Sacramenti Eucharistici, is a treatise consisting of a series of brief arguments and responses discussing various contentious points lying at the heart of the Eucharistic controversy that dominated Catholic and Protestant polemic alike throughout the Reformation.

Our conjoined copy of these two texts is bound in contemporary English calf with oval arabesque ornaments in the center of both the front and back covers. As an extra bonus, the sixteenth-century binder was considerate enough to include a pair of very interesting parchment end-leaves that had previously seen life as part of a glossed thirteenth-century Latin Psalter. The leaves bear text from Psalm 89 and its corresponding gloss. Also included is a heraldic bookplate revealing that this volume was once part of the private library of Hugh Cecil Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale (1857-1944), first president of England’s National Sporting Club, Arctic explorer, friend to Kaiser Wilhelm, and flashy man-about-town famous for his liaisons with some of the more famous actresses of his day.

All in all, I think it’s safe to say that this is an interesting book…

Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library has acquired this past summer a complete run of The Paris Review from its very first issue in 1953 through the Spring issue of 2008.   The Paris Review is arguably the most pretigious and influential literary journal of the latter half of the twentieth century.  Its contributors form the pantheon of twenthieth-century iconic writers and include Nobel Prize, Pultizer Prize and National Book Award winners in addition to winners of virtually every international literary award.  A select, very seclect list of those writers will indicate the distinction of The Paris Review:  Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, Gabrial Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Vladimire Nabokov and Harold Pinter.  And, I reiterate, these are just a few of the hundreds of contributors to The Paris Review over the past 55 years.  In addition to the writing, the decorative design of the literary review is remarkable and will please students of the book arts.  The collection, which is in very good condition, was acquired from Ralph Sipper Books in Santa Barbara, California. 

Another new acquisition has just arrived:

Serious Reflections on the Dangerous Tendency of the Common Practice of Card-playing; Especially of the Game of All-Fours, as It Hath Been Publickly play’d at Oxford, in this present Year of our Lord, MDCCLIV. In a Letter from Mr. Gyles Smith, to his Friend Abraham Nixon, Esq; of the Inner Temple. London: Printed for W. Owen, at Homer’s Head near Temple-Bar, [1755].

This nifty little 24-page octavo pamphlet offers a humorous attack on the popularity of card games and card-playing by students at Oxford. Describing card-playing as a “heinous and crying Sin” and cards themselves as “the Devil’s Books,” these Serious Reflections lament the popularity of cards with all segments of society, from dukes to porters, and from “the Duchess in the Drawing-Room, to the Cinder-Wench on the Dunghill.” The author calls for some form of official “discouragement” or sanction—preferably passed by Parliament—to be imposed on card games because they “manifestly tend to corrupt the Principles and Morals of the People, to subvert all Order and Authority, and confound the Notions of Right and Wrong.” Additionally, the author laments, card games supplant education: “It is a melancholy Thing to think, how much all good Learning hath suffered by this unaccountable Attachment. The Arts and Sciences are either entirely neglected by us, or pursued only in Subordination, or Subserviency to it.” Lest the reader be confused, however, the author takes pains to point out that he is by no means attacking the gentlemanly pursuit of gaming, or betting, a pastime he defends by stating that every gentleman “hath a Right of disposing of his Lands, Tenements, and Monies, in what Manner he pleaseth, and of transferring them to another, upon any Terms and Conditions which may be agreed upon between them.”

A contemporary reader identified the pseudonymous author as Benjamin Buckler, writing this name toward the bottom of the title page in the copy we have just acquired. Buckler was bursar of All Souls College, Oxford, beginning in 1752, and was a prominent local Tory. He was the author of A Complete Vindication of the Mallard of All-Souls College (1750), and he may have been the author of A Philosophical Dialogue concerning Decency (1751; ascribed to Samuel Rolleston), a scatological work exploring different cultural habits in lavatory use. In 1777, Buckler was elected Keeper of the Archives of Oxford University, and he died in 1780.

Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator