early mordern histry of chemistry

Early Modern History - Printed Books

The Department contains many older works on national, regional, and local history and customs. Both universal histories, such as Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (the Liber Chronicarum of 1493), and more modern historical works, including those by writers such as Machiavelli, Seyssel, Hume, and Voltaire, are represented. The history of Italian city-states is one focus of the Henry Charles Lea Library. An extensive collection of broadsides and pamphlets documents multitudinous aspects of civic life and its regulation in Brunswick (Brauenschweig) from 1547 through 1857, while a substantial collection of mazarinades documents seventeenth-century French political controversies.

Mico Chlucco the Long Warrior or King of the Siminoles - Frontispiece from Travels . . .by William Bartram (London: J. Johnson, 1792) American history is heavily collected. The Robert Dechert Collection contains printed materials relating the experiences of French explorers of North and South America, as well as documenting North American Jesuit relations. Works that illustrate Native American life and costumes are another emphasis of the Dechert Collection. Early examples include several volumes of Theodor De Bry's India occidentalis (Frankfurt 1591); later examples include M'Kenney and Hall. Later North American travel literature is also strongly represented. Early narratives of the Lewis and Clark expedition and such nineteenth-century illustrated books as those by Maximilian Wied von Neuwied and Karl Bodmer complement some of the great rarities of later western overland travel, including works by Zenas Leonard and John Hale.

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, engraved by C. Goodman and R. Piggot from an original painting by Martin for the Analectic Magazine Published by M. Thomas, 1818 Philadelphia-centered materials include early works by William Penn and other Quaker leaders of the Pennsylvania colony, and historical narratives. Significant examples of Benjamin Franklin's work as a Philadelphia printer are preserved in the Curtis Collection, donated by the Curtis Publishing Company and containing more than 280 titles printed by Franklin and his associates between 1719 and 1780. Of particular importance to the history of the University of Pennsylvania are Franklin's pamphlets--some written as well as printed by him--concerning the educational philosophy upon which he hoped to establish the Academy out of which Penn was to grow. For related holdings see the list of manuscripts concerning political and social history in modern America.



A recently-acquired collection--The Esther B. Aresty Collection of Rare Books in the Culinary Arts--includes predominantly printed sources but also some manuscript items that document the history of cookery and also shed ancillary light on women's literacy, the history of medicine ("recipes" could be medical as well as culinary), household organization, behavior, and other aspects of early modern and recednt life. Texts run from fifteenth-century editions of Platina and manuscripts of Apicius, through La Varenne, Brillat-Savarin, and other seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century cookery writers, to a small selection of twentieth-century cookbooks.