Hands-on History: Making and Knowing in Early Modern Europe: Home
Welcome!
The above images are drawn from Early European Books Online, a ProQuest database that features digitized European books printed before 1700. Many of the texts are medical, alchemical or pharmacological and feature all kinds of recipes (including culinary). Often, since the digitized images were scanned from the original books, marginalia and annotations are present.
- Recueil de recettes et secrets concernant l'art du mouleur, de l'artificier et du peintreLink to the digitized version of BnF Ms. Fr. 640
CLIO and Other Catalogs
Start with CLIO to find books and journals in Columbia University library collections. (Use the Pegasus catalog to find books and journals in the Law Library collection.)
Then try WorldCat, the largest online catalog in the world, with over 100 million book and journal records.
To find dissertations, start with Proquest Digital Dissertations (US and UK) and also check DART, Europe's e-theses portal.
Other useful resources include:
- Center for Research Libraries
CRL makes primary and rarely-held research materials available to Columbia affiliates via interlibrary loan and document delivery. CRL holdings are strong in newspapers, foreign dissertations, and international materials. - Borrow Direct
Borrow Direct enables Columbia University students, faculty, and staff with library borrowing privileges and active e-mail accounts to request material from Brown University, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. - Interlibrary Loan enables eligible Columbia University affiliates to borrow material from other libraries and universities and obtain copies of articles or book chapters from titles that are not owned or available at Columbia.
- Columbia University Libraries homepage features other useful research guides, library hours, information about Digital Scholarship, and more.
History of Science Collections at Columbia
In Butler Library, materials in the general stacks with call #s
- QD23.3-27 (alchemy)
- TX642-840 (cooking/recipe books)
- RS153-441 (pharmacy and materia medica)
will be useful. Dewey Call #s 609, 610, 615 are also worth a look. See the Butler Stacks Map for locations.
Mathematics Library (303 Mathematics Hall)- includes fascinating materials on the history of science and technology; older books have Dewey Decimal call #s (those beginning with call #s 508, 509, 520, 521, 540, and 542 focus on the history of natural sciences, chemistry, and scientific techniques).
Health Sciences Library (701 W. 168th St.)- has a strong reference collection on the history of medicine, diseases, and pharmacology as well as fascinating Special Collections/archival materials. See CLIO for more details.