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The old book collection of the University Library of Cluj -Napoca contains items of mixed origins: The library of the Transylvanian Museum Association, the book collection of the university, the library of the Reformed College of Orăștie (Szászváros) etc. The goal of this paper is to present a segment of this diverse collection: We have selected fifteen protestant theologians, so-called "protestant reformers," who were active during the 16th century: Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Georg Major, Johann Brenz, David Chyträus, John Calvin, Thédore de Béze, Pietro Martire Vermigli, Heinrich Bullinger, Rudolf Gwalther, Ludwig Lavater, Johannes Oekolampad, Wolfgang Musculus, Benedictus Aretius and Girolamo Zanchi. I have examined a total of 97 prints from this theologians. Nearly half of these volumes were in the Carpathian Basin before 1600. Among the owners of that time, there is a similar number of Transylvanian Saxons and Hungarians from the Partium and Transylvania, the former in slightly larger proportions. Throughout the 17th century, these were the most important groups of owners as well, but now the group of the Transylvanian Reformed Hungarians is the largest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing number of known plants, and the need repeatedly to correct their names and their taxonomic attributions, demanded strategies for combining the static nature of a printed book with the fluctuating nature of the information it contained. From the second half of the seventeenth century botanists increasingly relied on publishing multiple updated editions of a book instead of attempting to correct, polish, and thus delay the appearance of a manuscript until, in the author's opinion, it was finished. Provisional by nature, iterative books offered a solution. They were transient, open-ended and open to intervention, whether by one or multiple authors. Taking as an example the posthumous publication of orphaned material and manuscripts, a widespread phenomenon in eighteenth-century botany, this essay will focus on the sequence of iterative books that were published during the first half of the eighteenth century, based on the herbaria and papers left behind by the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646–95). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a co-ordinated series of publications in the final years of the seventeenth century, a diverse set of commonwealth texts was entrenched into the canon of whig political thought. This article explores that canon through the lens of the history of the book. A key figure in the formation of this canon was the printer and bookseller John Darby. This article reconstructs Darby's role in the commonwealth opposition to the perceived failures of the Williamite revolution. Using bibliographical methods to establish his output, it shows that from the earliest days of the revolution Darby reprinted a broad range of historic whig texts, ranging from works of history and memoir to collections of poems. These texts provided a language, a rationale, and a model for opposition activity. He also manufactured pamphlets that adapted country principles to contemporary political circumstances. By shifting the focus from John Toland to his printer, the article suggests that the canonical whig texts were one part of a much broader and more ambitious programme to establish an historic canon of oppositional literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To analyse the second volume of Pérez Goyena's Ensayo de bibliografía navarra, a compendium of prints published between 1601 and 1700. The work is not without erratas and other shortcomings, and so it needs to be updated with the introduction of new findings. Methodology: This work explores the bibliographer's method and techniques for studying prints and books in the kingdom of Navarre during the seventeenth century. To do so, a variety of approaches have been applied: for instance, the location and consultation of exemplars in local, provincial and national libraries and digital resources (for foreign libraries), and the study of documents such as trials, notarial protocols and administrative documentation, mostly from the General Archive of Navarre. Results: Along with new testimonies located in libraries and archives, the study highlights the problems facing the attempts to update the history of books and printing in Navarre in the seventeenth century and prepares the way for future research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution investigates the catalogue of publications by Francesco De Franceschi, printer, publisher and bookseller between 1561 and 1599, and his heirs, who took over his business until 1624, as recorded in the stockbook of Bernardino Giunti (Los Angeles, University of California Library, Department of Special Collections, call number 170/622), also a printer, publisher and bookseller in Venice at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Each entry of this De Franceschi section has been matched with the edition it was meant to describe, in order to analyse the price of each book according to the Giunti stockbook as the result of material features and book marketing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Voet (1619-1669), law professor at the University of Utrecht, opened his most famous work, published in 1657, with an unusual discussion of the five different types of auctores of juridical books (juris libri)--a precious source for the history of authorship in the jurisprudence and in the early modern respublica litteraria in general. This essay discusses the key concepts for his understanding of auctor and auctoritas in the field of jurisprudence, as well as the motivations for this uncommon inquiry into the notion of authorship. Besides his personal reasons (the rumors about the illegitimate authorship of some of his works), the detailed taxonomy of legal auctores also helped him to build a cogent argument against the validity of canon law in the United Provinces. His aim was to redesign the history of legal tradition and to dispute the authority of certain canon law sources, such as Gratian's Decretum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the edition of the book "Leviathan" by philosopher Thomas Hobbes, edited by Noel Malcolm, as part of a symposium of authors. Emphasis is given to topics such as the reception of the political philosophy of Hobbes, royalist criticism, damage to Hobbes' reputation, and his representation of his own critics.

The article discusses the edition of the book "Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes, edited by Noel Malcolm, as part of a symposium of authors. Emphasis is given to topics such as comparing different versions of the book from 1651 and 1668, the historical context of royalist authority and subjugation in Great Britain, and the relationship between sovereignty and the law of nature.

In 1612, a Spanish fleet captured a French ship whose stolen cargo included the entire manuscript collection of the Sultan of Morocco, Muley Zidan. Soon, the collection made its way to the royal library, El Escorial, transforming the library into an important repository of Arabic books, which, since then, Arabists from across Europe sought to visit. By focusing on the social life of the collection, from the moment of its capture up through the process of its incorporation into the Escorial, this article examines three related issues: the first regards the social trajectories of books and the elasticity of their meaning and function, which radically altered in nature. The second part of the article examines the circulation of the Moroccan manuscripts in relation to a complex economy of restrictions over the reading and possession of Arabic manuscripts in early modern Spain. Finally, the third part focuses on the political and legal debates that ensued the library's capture, when the collection became the locus of international negotiations between Spain, Morocco, France and the Dutch United Provinces over Maritime law, captives, and banned knowledge. By placing and analyzing the journey of Zidan's manuscripts within the context of Mediterranean history, the paper explains (1) why Spain established one of the largest collections of Arabic manuscripts exactly when it was cleansing its territories of Moriscos (Spanish forcibly converted Muslims), and (2) why the Moroccan collection was kept behind locked doors at the Escorial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Burton called his period 'this scribling age', in which the copiousness of printed matter and the multitude of authors caused problems both of discernment - how to distinguish true scholars from intellectual quacks? - and of quantity: how can the scholar hope to master the 'vast Chaos and confusion of Bookes'? This article addresses Burton's engagement with these questions, and examines both his attempt to establish a polymathic persona, and the relationship of the Anatomy to other compendious genres of the period. Section II of this essay compares Burton's versions of polymathy with Johannes Wower's De polymathia tractatio (1603), showing how, in both the Anatomy and his academic play, Philosophaster, Burton contrasts the true polymath with the figure of the 'polypragmatist', representing a kind of miscellaneous learning which is shallow, deceptive, and mercenary. The third section examines Burton's relationship to another model of disciplinary multifariousness: the encyclopaedia, understood by Burton not as a genre, but as an ethos. In the fourth section, attention turns to polyantheas and other compendious literary genres. Burton's complaints about such shortcuts to learning are shown to participate in the controversy over the scholarly method which followed the publication of John Selden's Historie of Tithes (1618). The final section addresses polymathic style: Burton's ambiguous relationship to Erasmian copia, and the struggle to find a voice amid the clamour of citations demanded of the scholar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity of the anonymous printer of the unauthorised edition of Rochester's “Poems on Several Occasions”, 1680 has been sought without success ever since it first appeared. This paper explores the background against which it appears and identifies the printing house involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most significant printers of German-language heterodox, spiritualist, and hermetic works in the seventeenth-century United Provinces has long been its most enigmatic. Between late 1645 and early 1650, Hans Fabel (1616-after 1650) originally of Wetzlar, printed or published at least sixty-two books and pamphlets at his offices in Amsterdam. In sheer quantity, these works made him one of the most prolific printers of German-language books in the United Provinces during this short period. However, in the secondary literature on the European book trade, Fabel has been dismissed as a ‘fictive imprint’ or a virtual publisher. Drawing on a variety of heretofore unknown or overlooked sources, both manuscript and print, this article presents for the first time a detailed bio-bibliographical account of Fabel's Amsterdam enterprise. It situates his activity within a variety of different contexts, the most important of these being his participation in the overlapping correspondence networks product of the dislocations of the Thirty Years’ War, particularly those of the London intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (ca. 1600-1662), and the Silesian mystic Abraham von Franckenberg (1587-1652). Indeed, the Thirty Years’ War was crucial to the trajectory of Fabel's business. The printer's own youthful experiences of the conflict in Wetzlar probably engendered within him an inclination to specialize in printing spiritualist works which condemned religious squabbling and conflict; his networks provided his business with customers, copy, and investors, and, finally, the end of the conflict in 1648 appears, along with economic considerations, to have decisively influenced his decision to leave Amsterdam and return to his native Germany. This investigation is seen as a further contribution to charting the terra incognita of the heterodox and clandestine bookmarkets and cultures of central Europe during the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

David Pearson's discussion of the formation of a directory of seventeenth-century book owners is taken up and extended in this article. Pearson's ’landscape of book ownership‘ has material dimensions which could usefully be included in such a directory. Housing books in a room, on shelves, surrounded by additional collections, are all contributions to this landscape. Pearson's call for a reference framework is answered by the proposal of a typology of early English library rooms, based on their attributes of scale, fittings and location with the plan of the country house. Case studies are drawn from an intensive study of the county of Norfolk. Archival evidence supports a re-evaluation of the problem of the name of the book room: study, library or closet? Personal collections housed in closets are linked to single owners, but the study or library can be seen as the open resource for the household, rather than assuming that it is primarily for the male owner of each generation. The reappraisal of the different roles of these spaces within the house allows notions of shared use to break down some existing boundaries in the scholarly literature, particularly over the gendered nature of the closet. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article contains an annotated chronological catalogue of advertisements for printed dramas appearing in English serial publications between July 1646 and November 1668. Topics considered include issues with dating early modern print materials such as competing calendars, booksellers' advertisements, and extant catalogs of seventeenth-century dramas by scholars W. W. Greg and Sybil Rosenfeld.

The article aims to make visible some nuances of the 17TH century in Spain and the New Granada with emphasis on articulations and tensions that made up this cultural and social space through the analysis of the letrados and its position in the Hispanic cultural field of the 16th and 17TH centuries. This article also discusses the traditional thesis about the cultural isolation and obscurantism in the American colonies before the eighteenth century through the analysis of the circulation of books and knowledge between mainland Spain and its colonies, and the heterogeneous character of the lawyers that affect the symbolic monopoly of the Catholic Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an overview of our current state of knowledge around English private libraries of the seventeenth century, covering such aspects as size, contents, sources, storage, and owners' attitudes to their books. It identifies areas where our information is poor, or based too much upon small numbers of well-known examples, and highlights the need for further research and better reference tools. The value of having a better understanding of this field, in the wider context of book history, is also considered. The author refers to his web-based listing of book owners of the period and suggests a model for its expansion into a fuller directory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent work in early modern English collecting and bookbinding has shown the extent to which readers viewed books as malleable collections rather than unified totalities. This essay expands our understanding of these practices by examining a series of volumes collected and bound during the second half of the seventeenth century. These volumes show texts transformed by their proximity to other, often incongruous imprints, as well as readers registering their own presence amidst the chaotic print world of Civd War England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1617 third edition of the book "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" by Nicolaus Copernicus, published under the title "Astronomia instaurata (Restored astronomy)" in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, edited by Nicolaus Mulerius, and produced by Willem Janszoon. It considers why this edition is considered the most correct edition of Copernicus' work compared to the earlier 1543 and 1566 editions. The 1821 review of the book written by the French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre is also considered.

The article discusses the state of the web database "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts" (Bibliography of Books Printed in the German-Speaking Lands in the 17th Century, VD 17) as of December 2011. Information is provided on funding for the project, participating libraries and archives, and a master plan for the full digitization of the 17th-century books. Anticipated future developments are also outlined.

The Conquest of the New World was at the basis of a highly significant change in the history of knowledge and it anticipated several processes which we will later see as important motivating factors in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this essay, we intend to demonstrate that these processes may already be observed in the writing of the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo; its presence is to be closely related to the experience of American nature. The importance of the New World is thus seen as a major event in the conception of modern science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo examina la distribución de la literatura española del Siglo de Oro en el virreinato del Perú, específicamente la difusión del libro "El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha" de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. El autor enumera los procedimientos de exportación de libros y otros materiales para las Américas y los controles de la Inquisición.

In bibliology, the methodology of historical studies entirely depends on an applied approach. The author adheres to the historical approach that says that a science development is traced with a kind of its historical logic, with all ways of its development, including those that are dead-end. Based on such approach and starting from G. Peignot's concept of bibliology, the author logically traces trends of bibliology development in Western Europe beginning from the 17th century. The author concludes that by the beginning of the 19th century when Peignot presented his works, in the science there had already been the established corpora of scientific knowledge used by this outstanding French bibliologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first complete Moscow-printed Bible (1663) was designed to be impressive, starting with its opening two leaves: the illustrated title page, and - in particular the elaborate woodcut frontispiece. The present study considers the significances of these pages on four levels, in relation to (i) the semantics of production; (ii) precedent in Muscovite and Ruthenian print culture; (iii) immediate responses; and (iv) subsequent longer-term impact. Thus, although based on just two images, the article explores a broad range of issues in Muscovite visual, verbal, technological and political culture across the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idiosyncrasies of Hobbes's composition process, together with a paucity of reliable autobiographical materials and the norms of seventeenth-century manuscript production, render interpretation of his political theory particularly difficult and contentious. These difficulties are surveyed here under three headings: (1) the process of "serial" composition (meaning the production of multiple, often expanded, versions of a work), which was common in the period; (2) the relationship between Hobbes's three political-theory texts—the Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan, which is basic to defining the textual embodiment of his theory, and controversial; and (3) his method of writing. I argue that Hobbes's composition process undercut his intention to produce a deductive, logical theory of politics and opened the door to inconsistency and muddle in his arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents discussion of three 17th-century publications written by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens related to the development and use of th pendulum clock. The writing and publishing of the "Horologium" in 1658, the "Kort Onderwijs," or "Brief Instructions," of 1665, and the "Horologium Oscillatorium" of 1673 are each described in turn. Discussion is given outlining the contents of each monograph as well as information on the initial printing and early recipients of the work. Further commentary is provided discussing the context and significance of the works within the history of clock design and nautical navigation.

The article discusses the bibliographical text "A Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England," by William London, a Newcastle-upon-Tyne bookseller. This catalog was produced between 1657 and 1660. An overview of the contents of the book catalogue is presented, highlighting several notable titles and characteristics of those included. Comments are given relating the conditions of the literary trade of the era through the implications of the bibliography. Also included is a brief biographical sketch of William London.

The article discusses the early modern practice by book publishers and printers of post-dating works published at the end of a year. Several works detailing the purchase of post-dated pamphlets and books are considered including "Catlogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 1640-1661," and "The Luttrell File: Narcissus Luttrell’s Dates on Contemporary Pamphlets 1678-1730," by Stephen Parks.

The article focuses a copy of the book "Certaine Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England," by Francis Bacon and published in 1604. The Bishop of London prevented the printer from finishing the printing of the book so a number of copies available are finished in manuscript form. The author is seeking information about copies of this book so that he may complete a publishing history of the book.