Religion
A sizable number of Bibles and Prayerbooks can be found at the Center, including one of only orty-eight surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, completed around 1455 by Johann Gutenberg, the first Western printer to use movable type. The Gutenberg Bible is on permanent display at the Center, and a digitized version is available online and on CD-ROM for further study. The most significant incunabular holdings are a magnificent illuminated Bible on vellum printed by Nicholas Jenson in 1476 and one printed by Günther Zainer (Augsburg, 1475-76) once owned by William Morris. Two copies of the first complete English translation of the Bible, made by Miles Coverdale (1488-1569) and published in 1535, are also housed here as are five copies of the original (1711) King James version of the Bible. In addition, the Center has first editions of the Rheims New Testament and the Douay Old Testament, which together form the standard Catholic Version in English.
Other rarities include a twelfth-century manuscript of the Gospels in Greek, a sixteenth-century Ethiopian manuscript Bible, and seventeenth-century printed volumes of Anglo-Saxon Biblical fragments. One of the finest extra-illustrated Bibles preserved at the Center is "Macklins Embellished Bible" printed in 1800 and expanded with well over five thousand illustrations, including works after such masters as Rubens, Dürer, Breughel, and Rembrandt. In addition, many modern fine-press editions of the Bible are in the Center's collections.
Books of Common Prayer for the service of the Church of England date from the first one in the sixteenth century through the present day: there are roughly four hundred copies in all, many of which are bound with other religious texts.
Largely unexplored, the Ransom Center's collection of Recusant Literature (1558-1829) consists of close to forty-five hundred books and pamphlets printed in England during periods when Catholicism was proscribed. The collection includes volumes of church history, devotional works, Bibles, and a few manuscripts that document the plight of the exiled French clergy and their reception in England. Of particular interest is the provenance of some of the material showing its migration from England to France and then back to England (whence to Texas).
The ten thousand volumes in the Gottesman Collection of Hebraica and Judaica chronicle the Jewish experience over some three thousand years and include a large number of Bibles, Mishnas, Talmuds, and prayer books, some dating to the sixteenth century. (See also Jewish Studies.)
A religious philosopher of Jansenist bent, as well as a great mathematician, Blaise Pascal (16231662) wrote his Lettres Provinciales (1656) in defense of Antoine Arnauld, who had been ousted from the Sorbonne for his Jansenist leanings. In addition to having several editions of Lettres Provinciales, including the first of the Elsevier editions (also the first edition to have continuous pagination), the Ransom Center houses a collection of seventy-three rare Jansenist pamphlets written in the wake of Pascal's Lettres. All were published from 1656 onwards, with the majority of them dated between 1656 and 1658. Six of them—extremely rare—were written by Pascal himself.
Collections of the writings of several religious or mystical leaders are here, including a group of books by and relating to Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish scientist, philosopher, and religious writer. Manuscripts of British mystic Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) are also present, along with notebooks, correspondence, and over seven hundred volumes of books by and about her. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's (1859-1930) interest in spiritualism is documented by thousands of pages of manuscripts, letters, and diaries, along with hundreds of photographs taken by Doyle and others of alleged mediums, spirits, and fairies. The collection of works by Aleister Crowley (18751947) includes photographs, manuscripts, and other materials relating to The Order of the Golden Dawn, of which W.B. Yeats was a member.
