Medieval and Renaissance Bibles: Manuscripts and Early Printing
The Prothro Collection consists of nearly 500 Bibles from eight centuries, beginning with a handsomely illuminated manuscript of St. Jerome’s Latin Bible, written at Paris c. 1250, and an important manuscript of John Wycliffe’s late fourteenth-century translation of the New Testament into Middle English. The fifteenth-century transformation of the Bible, and of reading in general, is represented by a single leaf from Gutenberg’s first printed Bible (c. 1455) and ten other books printed with moveable type before 1500.