Frederick Artz Early Printed Books Collection
Oberlin College Library's Special Collections holds approximately 500 texts and text fragments printed before 1650. Of these, approximately 20 books and numerous fragments are very early examples of printing from the first 50 years, known as "Incunabula" ("from the cradle"), including a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible. The collection has been acquired slowly through donations (most notably Frederick Artz) and purchase by librarians. It nicely compliments an outstanding collection of texts on the history of the Book. Special Collections also maintains a card file of early printers that can be searched by name or region. Our early printed books support the teaching of art history, religion, history, modern languages and literature, and classical studies.
Classical literature, as we know it today, would have been all but lost were it not for the work of dedicated medieval scholars who rescued ancient texts from decay and destruction. Italian poets such as Petrarch (1304‒1374) and Boccaccio (1313‒1375), antiquarians such as Ciriaco (1391‒1455) and Poggio (1380‒1459), as well as refugees from the collapse of Byzantine world, scoured the old monasteries of Europe and classical sites in the Mediterranean in search of inscriptions, papyri, and parchment scrolls of Greco-Roman authors and philosophers. They then copied the texts they found from their disintegrating form onto more durable material. It is from this flurry of activity, begun in the mid-14th century, that we must give credit for the modern field of classical studies even existing at all.
With the advent of the printing press in the mid-15th century, Italian printers like Nicholas Jenson and Aldus Manutius were able to feed the demand for books with mass distributions (compared to hand scribed books) of cheaper texts on paper. Famous patrons — the Medici and the Montefeltro families, for instance — made their 15th century courts into centers of the new learning, creating vast libraries. Interest in ancient authors blossomed, and Latin and Greek came to the academic fore once again in the period now known as the Italian Renaissance. It is telling that forty percent of the early printed books collection contains printed texts or text fragments pertaining to classical studies alone. Virtually every major author is represented, from Homer, Aesop, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Plutarch, to Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca and Suetonius, as well as some lesser read authors like Galen. This stands as testament to the importance of classical authors to the growth of a new Humanism, an attitude that study could be directed at those things of, not divine, but human value: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.
Among the works of the period in Special Collections are many texts printed in early incarnation of European vernacular tongues. Of these, the overwhelming majority are texts or fragments in English and Italian. We own a precious volume printed by Wynkyn de Worde (1477‒1530) who was William Caxton's assistant, and influenced the development of printing in England. The early printed books collection also includes a 1602 Works of Chaucer, and Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in Anglo-Saxon and Latin texts in parallel columns.
Those interested in the progress of Italian or the spread of political ideas will find eight works by Machiavelli dating between 1540 and 1674, some translated into other languages. Other examples of secular works include a 1536 edition of Dante's Divine Comedy; a 1553 edition of Castiglioni's The Courtier, and a 1623 edition of Rime di Michelagnolo Bvonarroti, possibly sponsored or collected by Lorenzo de' Medici. There is also a copy of Pietro Francesco Giambullari's De la lingua che si parla e scriue in Firenza. Other languages of note include French, German, and Greek, with a lesser number of examples of Hebrew, Dutch, and Spanish (but including a Covarrubias' 1611 Tesoro de la lengva castellana, o española. We also own numerous titles manufactured by the famous Antwerp printer Christopher Plantin.
The early printed books collection of Oberlin College Library also houses upwards of three hundred religious texts from this pre-1650 period. Some are printings of well-known works of the past, such as the Bible, Augustine, Irenaeus, Boethius, and Aquinas. However, as the Renaissance spread to Northern Europe its energy was harnessed into the service of the Reformation. More prominently featured are multiple works by Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Savonarola, Arminius, and Melanchthon.
We also own two 16th century editions of the Ausburg Confession. The collection also contains a single leaf from the original 1611 King James Bible, and other early Protestant Bibles as well as two 17th century editions of The Thirty-Nine Articlesof the Church of England.
Not to be outdone, we are also in possession of 22 early works written or translated by Erasmus of Rotterdam, including a copy of his 1522 Swiss edition of his Polyglot Bible (heavily annotated). Other examples from the Counter Reformation include Ignatius of Loyola, Peter Lombard, a 1564 edition of Canon Law from the Council of Trent, and 1569 edition of the Vatican's infamous Index librorum prohibitorum and others.