Incunabula

Rare Books. Old Books.  Often people try to equate the terms, but “rare” is not necessarily “old,” neither is “old” necessarily “rare.”  We’re fortunate that the Rare Book Room does have some “old” books which are both, including some incunabula.

Incunabula, from the Latin for “things in the cradle,” is the term used for early printed books, generally for those printed prior to 1501.  Those first years after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type (around 1450) are considered the “infancy” of printing and many of those early printed books were designed to mimic earlier manuscript volumes (“written by hand”) with their fonts, illumination, and rubricated letters.

The Rare Book Room holds some complete incunabula (Seneca’s complete works, The Life of St. Thomas a Becket, and Saturnalia), some individual leaves (from the Weltchronik), and some early manuscript leaves (from a medieval manuscript Bible) in its collection.

Opera Philosophica. Epistolae, etc./ Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Venice, 1492. (Bound in early Italian parchment with leather thongs.)

Somnium Scipionis ex Ciceronis libro de republica excerptum. / Macrobius, Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius. Venice, 1492.

Leaf from Weltchronik / Schedel, Hartmann. Augsburg, 1497. (With rubricated capitals.)

Leaf from a Medieval manuscript Bible. Paris, ca. 1250. (On vellum with initial capitals in red and blue.)

Vita [et}processus Sancti Thome Cantuariensis martyris super libertate ecclesiastica. I[m]pressa fuit Parisius : Per magistrum Iohannem Philippi …, et [con]pleta anno D[omi]ni [27 Mar. 1495]”]