Blog

The Elect

From the weeks running up to Election Day until the inauguration in January, a group of recently acquired photographs on view in the Annex adopts various angles on democracy and electioneering.

From Subiaco to Salzburg: St. Augustine in Austria

One of the first books printed in Italy is St. Augustine’s De civitate dei. It was printed at the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco on 12 June 1467 by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. A recent reference request took me to our copy of the Subiaco De civitate dei. As was traditional, the printers left space in the type-set page for the addition of hand decoration and painted letters. The style of painting often tells you were the book ended up after it left the printing press and hopefully who its first owner was. The Morgan’s De civitate dei left Subiaco and crossed the Alps to Salzburg, where the artist Ulrich Schreier decorated the book for Bernhard von Kraiburg (1412–1477), Bishop of Chiemsee (Bavaria).

A Noble Copy of Orlando Furioso

Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso is one of the great masterworks of English literature. It made this sprawling epic poem easily accessible in court circles where there was a constant demand for Ariosto’s stories of sieges, battles, quests, enchantments, damsels in distress, and feats of chivalry. Harington dedicated it to Queen Elizabeth, who is said to have commanded him to perform the task of translating nearly forty thousand lines of Italian verse as a punishment for having shown one of the ribald episodes to the ladies of the court.

Fostering Schoolchildren's Growth: The Medieval Model

Born of the commitment to offer the Morgan Library & Museum’s famed collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts as a resource to New York City schoolchildren, the Morgan Book Project aims to integrate book arts into Common Core State Standard-based curricula and the Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts.

A Novel for Halloween: Mary Shelley’s annotated copy of Frankenstein

What would Halloween be without monsters, and what would monsters be without Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)? The work has been cited as the most widely published English novel of all time—a book, written by a 19-year-old, that launched a thousand translations, imitations, and adaptations on stage and screen.