The University Library has acquired Early European Books Collections 1 and 2 published online by ProQuest.

Complementing Early English Books Online, Early European Books aims to provide researchers and students with access to all works printed in Europe before 1701 and held in the partner libraries, regardless of language, together with all pre-1701 works in European languages printed further afield.

The value of the collections is enhanced by the use of full-colour, high-resolution (400 ppi) facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts. There is extensive metadata for each work.

Collection 1 is drawn from the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen. It offers a comprehensive survey of its holdings of items listed in Lauritz Nielsen’s Dansk Bibliografi 1482–1600 and its supplement. All of the Royal Library’s Danish and Icelandic imprints produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fall within its scope, from the earliest works printed in Denmark – Breviarium Ottoniense (Odense Breviary) and Guillaume Caoursin’s De obsidione et bello Rhodiano (‘On the siege and war of Rhodes’), both printed by Johann Snell in Odense in 1482 – through to works by the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe (1546–1601).

Collection 2 from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze focuses in particular on four of the library’s collections:

• The Nencini Aldine Collection: more than 1,000 editions printed by the Aldine Press
• Marginalia: a collection of more than 80 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century volumes which have been identified for the importance of the marginal annotations, including those written by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) on his own personal copies of works by Euclid, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso and Horace.
• Incunabula: almost 1,200 volumes, including rare first editions of the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and 100 volumes by the controversial preacher Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498).
• Sacred Representations: over 600 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of sacre rappresentazioni, popular verse plays depicting Biblical scenes, episodes from the lives of the saints and Christian legends, which were originally performed in Florence and elsewhere in Tuscany and are considered by scholars to form the foundations of Italian theatre.

Early European Books is available throughout the University and off campus at http://eeb.chadwyck.co.uk/ or follow the  link from the Library’s electronic resources A-Z list.