Early European BooksEarly European Books traces the history of printing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.
Lund University has access to:
Collection 1 : Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Royal Library, Copenhagen)
This collection offers a comprehensive survey of the Royal Library's holdings of items listed in Lauritz Nielsen's Dansk Bibliografi 1482—1600 and its supplement (1919—1996). All of the Royal Library's Danish and Icelandic imprints produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fall within its scope, from the earliest works printed in Denmark — Breviarium Ottoniense (Odense Breviary) and Guillaume Caoursin's De obsidione et bello Rhodiano ('On the siege and war of Rhodes'), both printed by Johann Snell in Odense in 1482 (Lauritz Nielsen 29 and 39 respectively) — through to works by the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe (1546—1601) issued from his private press at Uranienborg, on the island of Hven, before 1597. Other notable works of Tycho in this collection include his De nova et nullius ævi memoria prius visa stella ('On the new and never previously seen star'), published in Copenhagen in 1573 (Lauritz Nielsen 429).
Collection 2 : Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (National Central Library of Florence)
This collection contains early printed volumes from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. The selection of works focuses on four collections of particular historic and bibliographic importance within the library's holdings from this period: the Nencini Aldine Collection, Marginalia, Incunabula, Sacred Representations
Collection 3 : Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (National Central Library of Florence), Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the
Netherlands), The Wellcome Library, London, and Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Royal Library, Copenhagen)
This collection is substantially larger than the previous collections, containing 3 million pages in total, from volumes scanned at four different libraries. It encompasses works in all major European languages, printed in the cities which led the explosion of the print industry in the early modern era, such as Nuremberg, Basel, Leiden, Paris and Venice. This breadth of scope gives a wide-ranging overview of the intellectual life and historical upheavals of early modern Europe. The collection contains the founding works of modern sciences such as botany, anatomy and astrology, together with accounts of travel, exploration and warfare, and influential works of literature, philosophy and humanist thought. In the field of religion, users will find editions of the works of the Church Fathers, early Bible editions in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and vernacular translations, missals, psalters and breviaries, Protestant sermons and tracts, and Counter-Reformation publications of the Catholic Church.
