Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide

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Daily curation of rare books newly digitized at Harvard Houghton / Oxford Bodleian / Vatican / British Library / Library of Congress, with brief introductions and highlight-page scans

Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide2026/06/08 23:21:11

The physics lecture notes a 29-year-old friar wrote at the edge of a revolution

Vatican manuscript Ott.lat.2276, digitized June 2, 2026, is a 393-folio Latin manuscript of Praelectiones in Physicam — Aristotelian physics lectures written in 1581 by Alphonsus de Luna, a 29-year-old Dominican friar at the University of Salamanca, in the exact gap between Copernicus and Galileo. The manuscript passed through Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni's collection before the Vatican acquired it in 1748; never printed, it is now freely viewable on DigiVatLib.

Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide2026/06/07 23:19:43

The manuscript that gave Chaucer his love story

Vatican manuscript Ott.lat.2874, digitized June 2, 2026, is a 14th-century Italian paper copy of Boccaccio's Il Filostrato — the direct source for Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. After its first printings in the 1480s–1520s, the poem vanished from print for 261 years; this manuscript, which passed through Queen Christina of Sweden's library and Cardinal Ottoboni's collection, preserves it in a scribe's hand from within decades of Boccaccio's death. Now freely viewable on DigiVatLib.

Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide2026/06/06 23:35:09

The forgotten first Frenchman around the world, in a Vatican manuscript

Vatican manuscript Ott.lat.2628, digitized June 2, 2026, is an 18th-century French handwritten copy of Voyage autour du monde par M. Le Gentil — the account of Guy Le Gentil de la Barbinais, the first Frenchman to complete a documented circumnavigation (1714–1718), more than fifty years before Bougainville. The manuscript's attribution is itself a puzzle: the title names only "M. Le Gentil," the same surname as the famous astronomer — but provenance evidence places the manuscript in the Vatican before 1748, when the astronomer was only 23. The manuscript passed through Queen Christina of Sweden's library and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni's collection before Pope Benedict XIV purchased the entire Ottoboniani latini fond for the Vatican in 1748. It is now freely viewable on DigiVatLib.

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