Death and the Doctor: Dying, Burying the Afterlife in the Seventeenth Century

This exhibition looks at the experience and ideas of death, the corpse and posthumous life in seventeenth–century England.

Reading Euclid at Eton

"All boys should have a competent knowledge of Mathematics before leaving school." Edward Hawtrey, Head Master of Eton, 1851 Eton College Library and Archive were recently approached by the Reading Euclid research project (based at the University of Oxford) for material relating to the role of the mathematician Euclid in the curriculum at Eton between...

Transformative conservation: ‘The Lamentation’

As the newly appointed Conservation Steward, I’ve been working over the past nine months to improve how we care for the objects in the College Collections, commissioning specialists to perform conservation treatments and carrying out preventive care as well as in-house conservation treatments. Recently we commissioned a particularly interesting treatment on a painting called The Lamentation by Pietro Testa--a...

A spoonful of brimstone and treacle

From a book held in the College Archives [COLL EST HL 1], dated 1693, a recipe for aches and pains: Recipe for curing ache, 1693   A reicut to Coore the Eche [A receipt to cure Ache] A hanfull of box A hanfull of wormwood A hanfull of Isope [hissop] A hanfull of Rewe [rue]...

The Galeria Farnese in print

I have just finished cataloguing a very beautiful book previously owned by William Hanbury of Kelmarsh Hall, Northamptonshire. Judging by the bookplate, this may be the William Hanbury who rebuilt Kelmarsh in 1732 to a design by James Gibbs, producing a house which Pevsner describes as being ‘in an impeccable taste’.   Hanbury’s interest in Italian...

A binder’s Valentine’s Day gift

This fine binding, given to College Library by John Hely-Hutchinson, was made by the binder Alexander Cleeve, who worked in Westminster at the end of the 17th century.  The binding is red ‘turkey’ leather, tooled in gold, and including the distinctive vase with leopard’s head tool which belonged to Cleeve. Inside, a page has been inserted,...

‘A dainty peece of entertainment’: John Milton’s early poems

This is the excerpt for your very first post.