Browse Exhibits (4 total)
Inscribed Illuminations and Inspirations: Manuscripts at Bridwell Library
Originally exhibited August 8, 2016 – December 16, 2016
The Elizabeth Perkins Prothro Galleries
Introduction
Surveying the wide range of manuscripts in Bridwell Library Special Collections representing the Christian, Judaic, and Islamic traditions, this exhibition includes items produced between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries in numerous locations throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The array of texts, languages, letterforms, illuminations, and illustrations provides evidence of both known and unrecorded scribes, artists, readers, and owners as well as insights into the cultural, historical, bibliographical, and aesthetic contexts in which these manuscripts were created.
These works both complement and supplement printed holdings in significant collecting areas for Bridwell Library including scripture and worship, devotion, theology and church history, and religious instruction and study. Focusing on these genres, Bridwell Library continues to build a diverse and instructive collection of manuscripts, many of which demonstrate how handwritten books and documents remained essential facets of religious and intellectual life following the introduction of printing in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century.
Invention and Discovery: Printed Books from Fifteenth-Century Europe
Originally exhibited February 2–May 3, 2010
Introduction
Since 1962, Bridwell Library has built one of the finest collections of fifteenth-century printed books held in America. Numbering more than one thousand volumes, Bridwell’s collection of pre-1501 imprints is not merely a gathering of early typographic specimens. It is a rich and wide-ranging library of fifteenth-century reading material that reflects the mainstreams of European theological and humanist thought during the Renaissance period. Based on Classical, Christian, and medieval traditions, the early printed editions represented here helped lay the spiritual and intellectual foundations of the modern age.
This exhibition presents sixty books and broadsides printed between c. 1455 and 1500. The selections highlight unique copy-specific characteristics that focus attention on the various ways in which Europeans in past centuries discovered the power and potential of Gutenberg’s invention. Early readers were not content to leave their books exactly as they came off the presses, but were inclined to engage in their contents mentally and to intervene in their appearance physically. Employing local artisans to provide rubrication, illumination, and bindings, readers added their own annotations, inscriptions, and other signs of ownership and use. As a group, the exhibited items reflect the active participation of countless individuals in the initial spread of printing across Europe.
Peter Schoeffer: Printer of Mainz
Originally exhibited September 8–December 8, 2003
Entry Hall
Introduction
After Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1397–1468), Peter Schoeffer was the most influential individual in the early history of printing in Europe. Born about 1425 in Gernsheim, near Mainz, educated at Erfurt University, and trained as a calligrapher in Paris, Schoeffer had become involved in the new art of printing by 1455, serving as an employee of Johann Fust of Mainz, who was then financing Gutenberg’s “work of the books” – doubtless the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. As Gutenberg’s helper, later as Fust’s junior partner, and finally on his own, Schoeffer remained at the forefront of Europe’s printers for the better part of five decades, producing an impressive array of essential theological and legal editions. Before his death in 1503, he had done more than any other to introduce important publishing innovations and to set technical standards that would shape the history of the printed word.
This web-exhibition presents selected highlights from Peter Schoeffer: Printer of Mainz. A Quincentenary Exhibition at Bridwell Library, displayed from 8 September to 8 December 2003.
Six Centuries of Master Bookbinding at Bridwell Library
Originally exhibited: February 9–April 29, 2006
The Elizabeth Perkins Prothro Galleries
Introduction
The fiftieth exhibition in The Elizabeth Perkins Prothro Galleries at Bridwell Library was the first devoted entirely to historic bookbindings. Selected for their beauty, quality and historical interest, these bindings exemplify the important stylistic developments of European and North American bookbinding from the late Middle Ages to the present day. The exhibit is not intended to be comprehensive but as an introduction to the most splendid and well-made bindings owned by Bridwell Library. Included are works by binders from England, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Mexico, and the United States. This digital exhibit is a sampling of the bindings shown during the gallery exhibition in 2006.