Tagged: ORBI

Oregon Rare Books Initiative Speaker, April 19, 2017

List of Events for the Oregon Rare Books Initiative, 2016-2017

One may not think that the first stock market crash in 18th century Holland could be attractive, but the engravings in the 1720 work Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid, or The Great Mirror of Folly, show otherwise. By using art as satire, the creators of The Great Mirror could reflect on international reactions to the fiscal calamity that they lived through. The book’s many engravings used symbols to make fun of the financial crisis in the Netherlands. For example, it helped to entrench the now-common economic term “financial bubble.” The Oregon Rare Books Initiative is pleased to announce that on April 19, Professor Catherine Labio from the University of Colorado-Boulder will speak about the book in the Knight Library Browsing Room at 4:45p.m. Prof. Labio is a comparative literature professor who has edited several works on this topic and researches the financial world of 1700s Europe. During her talk, the University of Oregon’s copy of Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid and ten different financial works from the 18th century will be available to view. Please join us!

Angela Rothman

Special Collections and University Archives Intern

I blog for SCUA about the University of Oregon Museum of Art. Please see my other writing here.

Rare Discovery | Oregon Rare Books Initiative Lecture Series

On March 16, Elizabeth Yale from Iowa University’s Center for the Book gave the second presentation of the Oregon Rare Book Initiative 2016 Lecture Series. ORBI was formed in 2013 to promote awareness of the rare book collections in UO’s Special Collections and University Archives and to promote their use in research at all levels.

Yale’s talk addressed how scholars collaborated in the 17th century to gather evidence, banding together in support of each other when confronted with scientific controversies (such as the origin of fossils). In doing research with the UO rare book collections, Yale discovered a letter (until now unknown to scholars) by John Ray pinned to the endpaper of his own copy of the book Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1713). In this letter Ray asks Edward Lhuyd to translate from Latin into English a letter that Lhuyd had published in his Lythophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1695). The pinned letter not only demonstrates the collaborative nature of scholarship of the late 17th/early 18th century, but also scholars’ interest in continually revising published works through new editions as new evidence came to light. Continue reading →