This article focuses on three intriguing additions made to Oxford, New College, MS 287, a small 16th-century book which, though outwardly inconspicuous, was made for King Henry VIII.  Dry-point is a mode of writing or drawing with a pointed tool, such as a stylus, to create inkless impressions on a surface.  Occasionally, readers and owners added their names to their books in dry-point.  Discussed here for the first time, these additions offer tantalising clues as to the manuscript’s provenance, which is shrouded in mystery.  And it is possible to make the case that the dry-point addition reads ‘Henr[y? or ricus?] viii’.

Digitally annotated composite ARCHiOx recording of the dry-point addition to ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Oxford, MS 287, f. 2v [detail]

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library and Archives, Oxford

MS 314 (c. 1450–70) is something of an infamous manuscript among Chaucer scholars. At first glance, it seems like a fairly standard copy of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s famous unfinished poem. Absent the illuminations and gilding of more celebrated manuscripts such as the Ellesmere, the simple rubrication of MS 314 might even strike readers as plain. However, it takes only a brief page-through to realise that this manuscript is hardly as tight-laced as its stiff binding would suggest.

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Oxford, MS 314, f. 82v [detail]

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library and Archives, Oxford

One of several intriguing features of MS 274 is the map of the world that appears prior to the manuscript’s copy of the first nineteen books of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. It was clearly designed to express the Aristotelian theory that only the known world, comprising Asia, Europe, and Africa, protruded above the ocean, in opposition to theories that proposed the possibility of antipodal lands beyond and beneath the known world.

World map in a 12th-century English manuscript of Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio
Trinity ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Cambridge, MS R.9.23, f. 60v [detail]
© The Master and Fellows of Trinity ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ, Cambridge

Trinity ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Cambridge

Of all the ancient texts that have shaped history, the Iliad is among the most widely read, copied, and studied. Whilst the broad impact of the Iliad across macroscopic physical and temporal spaces is well-documented, the propagation of the texts themselves may offer cultural and historical insights on a more microscopic scale, where individual scholars can be found leaving their mark on history and our understanding of Homeric work. This is a tale of two Iliads, Trinity ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Dublin MS 922 and Oxford ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ MS 298.

Trinity ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Dublin, MS 922, f. 31v [detail]
© The Board of Trinity ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Dublin

Trinity ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Dublin

Among the many manuscripts held at Oxford is a large Greek codex containing works composed by Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC–c. 50 AD). One of the most interesting aspects of ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ MS 143 is that it is a combination of two groups of Philo treatises that come from different manuscript families. Although the compilation of what came to be MS 143 is not known, it appears that this book is a secondary binding of two already-completed codices. 

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Oxford, MS 143, f. 3r

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library and Archives, Oxford

What is now kept in a protective blue box in ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, at shelfmark MS 298, is actually two manuscripts in one, plus later additions—one, written at the beginning of the 13th century which contained the Iliad, and another, written a century later with Homeric exegetical material. At some point in the 15th century, a group of—at least two—scribes decided to merge the manuscripts.

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Oxford, MS 298, f. 110r [detail]

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library and Archives, Oxford

Dating to the first quarter of the 13th century, MS 98 contains the only complete version of the Proverbia of William de Montibus (d. 1213). What visual and interpretative effects did the ordinatio of this manuscript have on the envisioned reception and use of its texts? 

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Oxford, MS 98, f. 59v [detail]

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library and Archives, Oxford

Isaac Newton’s sketch of his experiment
with a camera obscura and two prisms

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, MS 361/2

In late 1636 a young ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ fellow named Daniel Vivian was given leave by the college to travel abroad for a year. This was an unusual but not unknown academic digression. We know in granular detail about this early version of the ‘Grand Tour’ because Vivian kept careful notes on every single place he visited, and then wrote these up as an extended, literary prose narrative of 350 quarto pages, preserved in his own calligraphic manuscript, complete with a sheaf of commendatory poems by his friends tipped into the front of his manuscript.

Daniel Vivian’s Grand Tour, 1636–37
²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library, Oxford, MS 348, f. 2 v [detail]

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ Library and Archives, Oxford