A tome donated by grateful students in 1587 has been bought back by Christ Church College – 300 years after it was sold as a duplicate.
A group of nine students clubbed together to donate the copy of Euclid’s The Elements of Geometrie in the late 16th century after receiving their Master of Arts degrees. The college was the first in Oxford to encourage graduating students to donate cash or a book to the library.
The names of the scholars were written on the title page. They included James Calfhill, later headmaster of Durham Grammar School, and vicar Edmund Gwyn whose granddaughter, actress Nell Gwynn, became Charles II’s mistress in the 1660s.
Ancient book re-found and returned to the Library at Christ Church, Oxford. 08/02/2022 Picture by Ed Nix
Dr Philip Beeley of the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology said of the 500-year-old artefact: “Books which have been visibly used or which contain ownership details are particularly valuable because they provide important clues enabling the creation of a historical narrative.
“The recent acquisition by Christ Church of a copy of the 1570 Billingsley edition of Euclid’s Elements in the vernacular, donated to the College by nine contemporary undergraduates, is a wonderful resource and will be avidly scrutinised by historians pursuing such investigations further.”
Librarians at Christ Church got rid of the book – the first English translation of Greek mathematician Euclid’s The Elements of Geometrie – in the 18th century as they already had a copy of the leather-bound tome.
It spent almost a century on the shelves at the John Rylands Library in Manchester and passed between a number of private collections before, now, returning to Oxford after it was bought thanks to donations from the Friends of the National Libraries, Dr Fiona Hollands and Ethan Berman.
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