The Items

With the invention of the printing press in 1440 CE by Johannes Gutenberg, it became a lot easier to spread knowledge through books. The pages could be exactly replicated and workers no longer had to write out each book by hand, making creation and publication much faster. Although at first books were still hand-illustrated, rapidly after the introduction of the printing press came the use of the woodcut. A woodcut is created by carving lines out of or into a block of wood and then coating it in a thin layer of ink; the block is then pressed ink-side down onto a sheet of paper and lifted to reveal the image. These became widely used in books for the same reasons as the printing press, and some printers even incorporated the woodcuts into the platen alongside the words. This meant that letters and images could be stamped at the same time. Engravings, developed later on, are used in the same way as woodcuts and are made in a similar process except the design is etched into metal, which allows for finer detail.

Alongside the printing press came a multitude of other discoveries and inventions. The Renaissance period - "re-naissance" meaning "re-birth" in French - was a period of intellectual originality. Many astronomers, mathematicians, and anatomists made breakthrough discoveries and wrote them down to be published. The use of the woodcut in early modern scientific books was crucial, as it allowed the discoveries to be illustrated and explained in ways that are sometimes impossible to do with only words. It also allowed for images of plants and animals to be included, which in turn made them easier to recognize in the wild and cultivate at home. 

This exhibition is organized into two sections. Earth, or books having to do with living things, includes plants, animals, and the body while Heavens, or books having to do with less tangible topics, includes math and astronomy. Each book was created between 1482 and 1653, putting them right at the forefront of what is considered today to be "early modern" science, but the topics and writings in a few items go all the way back to the 10s and 20s CE. Some are more illustrated than others, but all have several woodcuts, which are curated to show here.

To see how the books look all together - perhaps to compare size - please click the "Exhibition" tab. To see each individual item or explore the theme of each case, please click the appropriate tab. The cases:

- Earth, or Case 1

- Heavens, or Case 2