Browse Exhibits (1 total)

Fifteeners

The Fifteeners

Incunabula or incunables are the very first examples of books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed with moveable type in Western Europe. They range from the very first examples of the two-column Latin Bible produced by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450s to works printed through the end of the year 1500. The term "incunable" derives from the Latin word cunabula for "cradle" or "origin", hinting at their status as the earliest of all books. Incunabula are also sometimes referred to as "fifteeners" from their appearance in the fifteenth century.

Despite their European origins, incunabula can be found in library collections throughout the United States today, with the greatest concentration in the Library of Congress. While the largest collection of fifteeners at Harvard—more than 2,600 titles—may be found in Houghton Library, the Countway Library of Medicine, with over 800 items, holds the largest collection of medical incunabula in this country and one of the finest collections of this type in the world.

In 2002, the Countway Library embarked on an ambitious and long-needed project to describe and catalog fully its holdings of incunabula and make online descriptions of these items accessible to scholars and researchers for the first time. All of the books and woodcuts in this exhibit have been drawn from the collections of the Boston Medical Library and the Harvard Medical Library and have one common element—each is at least five hundred years old. The Fifteeners highlights some of the extraordinary treasures in the Countway's incunabula collection and allows the public a glimpse of these rarest of printed medical works.