Yesterday, I spent several hours looking through a card catalog in the Houghton. A card catalog! They don’t have a reliable electronic catalog for their manuscript collection, and were mildly apologetic. Actually, I find card catalogs amusing; it’s as close to time travel as we get. The one I looked through, a chronological catalog of all the manuscripts from the 9th century through the 16th, contained many deeds of property and endowments, fragments of the Bible and Koran, antisemitic laws and decrees issued in various European countries, biographies of classical authors written in the Middle Ages and Renaissance… It also had several singularities of note. I wrote some of them down; the Latin, where applicable, should be mostly easy to figure out:
- Miscellanea medica, alchemica, et astrologica. Bound in contemporary pigskin over wood boards.
- French, XV cent.: La somme des vices et des vertus.
- Cessdis, Jacobus de, fl. 1290. De ludo scacchorum. (Of the game of chess.) The binding record on this one states: "19 cent. half sheep."
- English, I think, manuscript on mercantile arithmetic.
- James IV, King of Scotland. Solemnity of the marriage of James and Margaret, daughter of Henry VII.
- Rules of a charity-school and cofraternity (I have to assume England here as well).
- Bradamante, Donato, 1444?-1514. A 1512 receipt for salary as architect of St. Peter’s.
- Raphael’s receipts for work done in the Vatican.
- Giovio, Paul, letter to Federigo II, duke of Mantua. "Sends medicine, announces that plague is over in Rome." (1524, so unlikely the Black Death – I wonder which plague?)
- Collection of Italian love poems addressed to prostitutes and servants, ca. 1561.
- Italian recipe book: "Contains recipes for perfumes, ointments, medicines, glass, bombs, alchemy, and iron tempering."
- A declaration of the state of Spain and Portugal, translated into English, 1608.
Blow my mind, Batman.
