France was engulfed in a series of vicious civil wars between Catholics and Protestants from 1562 to 1598. Perhaps as much as one third of the population perished as a result of war, famine and disease. 

Print was deployed by both sides as a weapon of war, and to sustain the morale and enthusiasm of their troops and supporters.

This is the title-page of a pamphlet produced in the city of Poitiers in west-central France in 1567 by the faction urging loyalty to the King.

The cheap and hasty nature of the printing in a small regional city during a period of warfare explains why no other copy of this edition survives.

Citation: Advertissement A Tous Bons et Loyaux subiectz du Roy (Poitiers, 1567),
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#457

The Church of England identified itself as a reformed church which had rid itself of the abuses and innovations of the Roman Catholic Church. As such, every year bishops conducted ‘visitations’ to check on religious life in the parishes within their diocese.

This unique survival from 1584 asks 32 questions of all church wardens and others active in the parishes across the English diocese of Winchester. Taken together, the questions were designed to ensure the clergy, schoolmasters and parishioners within the diocese were orthodox in their beliefs, and orderly and sober in the performance of their religious duties. 

The bishop was particularly interested in hearing about any parishioners who refused to attend religious services, were of ‘ill repute’, or had been ‘reconciled to the Popish religion’.

Citation: Interrogatories to be enquired of by the Church-wardens and Sworne-men within the Diocesse of Winchester (London, 1584).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#458

This is a unique survival of a 1586 edition of a set of songs by the very popular composer Jacques Arcadelt (1507–68).

Arcadelt was born in Flanders but travelled to the court of Alessandro de Medici in Florence in the 1530s. His most popular work took the form of madrigals, short songs written in a deceptively simple style for unaccompanied voices.

The song ‘Il bianco è dolce cigno’ (shown on left-hand page) is based on a poem by Giovanni Guidiccioni (1480–1541). It describes the gentle white swan who dies for love, punning on the ‘little death’ of the act of love.

Citation: Archadelt Primo Libro De Madrigali; a Quattro Voci, Novamente Ristampato (Venice, 1586).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#459

This schoolbook was published in the French city of La Rochelle in 1587. It was designed to introduce children to the complex rules governing Latin nouns and verbs.

The text is ascribed to Pierre de la Ramée (1517–72), a leading French philosopher, theologian and educational thinker. 

Schoolbooks are some of the rarest survivals from the period because they tended to be heavily used before being discarded. This book found its way into the collection of Elias Bouhéreau (1643–1719) and came out of France along with all of his other books when he fled the country in 1686.

Citation: P. Rami Nominum et Verborum Declinationes (La Rochelle, 1587).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#460

This is a catechism, a very popular form of print which introduced schoolchildren to the essentials of Christianity in the form of questions with ideal answers which they were expected to learn by rote.

The woodcut image on the title-page depicts a schoolroom with children seated at their lessons. A dog chews a bone in the middle of the floor, while two boys in the foreground are up to some sort of mischief.

The dog-eared nature of the pages indicates that this book was heavily used. The final pages show extensive evidence of gnawing by vermin, probably mice. Had this copy not found its way into the book collection of the noted scholar Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), it would almost certainly have been destroyed, and all traces of this edition would have been lost.

Citation: Christianæ Pietatis Prima Institutio ad usum Scholarum Latinè Scripta (London, 1593).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#461

This pamphlet recounts the fictional misfortunes of a certain Richard Hasleton of Braintree in Essex, who supposedly left London in 1582 on a merchant ship bound for the coast of Turkey.

The author’s tale of woe includes being attacked by Turkish warships on the return leg of his journey and enslaved in Algiers. He was then forced to toil as an oarsman on a North African ship before he was shipwrecked off the coast of Spain and fell into the hands of the Inquisition. He miraculously managed to escape back to North Africa, from which he was finally able to return to London, a full decade after he originally set sail.

A Discourse of the Miserable Captivitie is an example of a popular genre of fiction which used travel narratives as a vehicle for the crudest of patriotic sentiments.

Citation: A Discourse of the Miserable Captivitie of an Englishman, named Richard Hasleton (London, 1595).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#462

An early example of printing in the Irish language.

In 1614 the Franciscan college at Leuven in Belgium established a printing press with a typeface in Irish. The item on display was printed on that press soon after it was established. It is the only known surviving copy of Suim Riaghlacha S[an] Phrionsias, a short summary of the Franciscan rule which governed the Order.

This fragile text survives because it was bound into a manuscript notebook compiled by an unidentified Irish member of the Franciscans. A note on the first page of the notebook suggests that it was at some point present in the library of the Irish College in Prague. It is not known how it subsequently made its way to Marsh's Library.

Citation: Suim Riaghlacha S[an] Phrionsias ([Leuven], c.1614).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#464

This news pamphlet was produced by the leading London publisher of news, Nathaniel Butter, and was based on translations of two recent Dutch pamphlets.

The striking title-page claims to show the effects of the great flood of Holland in January 1624. The first part of the pamphlet describes how the melting of heavy winter snows had burst through a network of dams and dikes, ensuring that some meadows in the vicinity of Utrecht were under 20 feet of water. The second part tells the tale of a man who found a three-year old boy dressed in green under a hedge near Utrecht. The child spoke to warn of the imminent end of the world, and then vanished into thin air.

This pamphlet reminds us that news was rarely dispassionate or factual. All events were likely to be reported and interpreted through the religious and ideological anxieties of the day.

Citation: Newes from Holland, true, strange, and wonderfull (London, 1624).

This handsomely-printed item is a poem of 65 lines written to mark the marriage of Elizabeth de Geer to Professor Tobias Andreas in Amsterdam on 26 May 1643.

The tradition of the ‘epithalamium’, a poem or song addressed to a bride on her wedding day dates back to classical Greece. During the Renaissance some were bawdy, but those produced for high status recipients such as Elizabeth were much more restrained in the advice they offered to new brides.

We know nothing about Elizabeth herself, but her father Louis de Geer (1587–1652) was a prominent merchant, industrialist and financier. The bridegroom Tobias (1604–76) was professor of history and Greek at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

This unique copy survives only because it was bound into a volume which contains a number of significant political and theological works.

Citation: Epithalamium In Honorem... Tobiæ Andreæ... et... Elizabethæ De Geer (Amsterdam, 1643).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#466

The English general Oliver Cromwell is infamous in Ireland for his military campaign of 1649-50. 

This unique item was printed in Cork city in early 1650. It is Cromwell’s reply to a claim by the Irish bishops that he intended to ‘extirpate the Catholic religion’. Cromwell attacked the bishops as hypocrites who lied to the ‘poor laity’ and enslaved them with ‘abominable and anti-Christian doctrine and practices.’ 

He claimed his troops had come to restore peace and avenge the massacre of Protestant civilians in 1641. The common people of Ireland could, he said, enjoy full liberty if they laid down their arms and abandoned the Roman Catholic faith. To those who would not submit, he promised the ‘utmost severity’.

Citation: A Declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, For the undeceiving of deluded and seduced People (Cork, [1650]).

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Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#467

The Netherlands and the English republic were at war between 1652 and 1654.

This broadsheet describes the remarkable invention of Mr de Lisson, built in Rotterdam for the Dutch navy. The text is in Dutch (on the left) and French (on the right). It describes a vessel which was fast and manoeuvrable, but had no cannons, relying instead on a long steel battering ram to hole enemy vessels below the waterline.

The propulsion mechanism was secret, but it seems to have consisted of a tightly-wound metal spring connected to a clockwork mechanism which moved the paddle wheel at the back of the vessel.

The vessel never saw action. Long before it was finally sold for firewood in 1658, the vessel had been labelled ‘het malle schip’ (the silly ship) by the Dutch public.

Citation: Ware en correcte Afteekening naer tlevan gedan (Amsterdam, 1653).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#468

During the 1650s, the Cromwellian army which conquered Ireland required a large amount of taxes to finance its upkeep. This book contains several unique survivals of official orders raising taxes during the 1650s in Ireland, including this Declaration. 

Detailed records about the collection of taxes from this period do not survive, but it seems likely that Cromwell’s New Model Army was able to ensure a very high degree of tax compliance. Who in their right mind would refuse to pay?

Citation: A Declaration for The Payment of Custom and Excize (Dublin, 1654).

The English republican politician Henry Neville (1620–94) published a short work of prose fiction entitled The Isle of Pines in 1668, which opens with the discovery by a Dutch ship of an English-speaking community on an island near Madagascar.

Readers differ sharply as to whether The Isle of Pines describes a utopian or dystopian society. It has been described variously as a political satire, a work of pornography, and a forerunner of fictionalised accounts of travel such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.

The Isle of Pines was speedily translated into French and Dutch, and we exhibit a unique copy of a French translation produced by the Amsterdam publisher Marcus Doornik (1633–1703) at an unknown date in the late 1660s or early 1670s.

Citation: Description de l’Isle de Pines. Ou nouvelle découverte d’une quatriéme Isle dans les Terres Meridionales inconnuës (Amsterdam, c.1668).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#470

This sheet published by John Newton of London advertises a method he had developed to survey and value ‘all Sorts of Timber, Wood, and Bark, standing and growing.’ 

He also undertook ‘Conversions and Improvements of Land, according to the newest Methods now us’d in England for growing Corn, Hops, Fruit of all Kinds, seeds of all Sorts for raising Pasture and Hay on poor Land’.

The fact that the address (three lines from the bottom of the sheet) at which one could contact John Newton was left blank might suggest that he travelled around Britain and Ireland with a stack of pre-printed advertisements, and that his local contact details would be written in whenever he arrived in a town or village.

Citation: An Advertisement ([London], c.1670).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#471

There was an outpouring of loyal sentiment across these islands when King Charles II died suddenly in February 1685. He was succeeded by his brother, who reigned as King James II.

James was a Roman Catholic but was widely popular among the general Protestant population in Britain at the time of his accession.

In Ireland, James was naturally hailed by Roman Catholics, but many Anglican Protestants hoped that he would guarantee the finely-balanced constitutional, religious and land settlements. 

James’s clumsy actions over the next three years led to a widespread fear that he meant to introduce the twin evils of what the poet Andrew Marvell decried as ‘popery and arbitrary government’. This paved the way for a Dutch invasion of England in 1688 and several years of brutal warfare in Ireland.

Citation: On the Sacred Memory of our Late Sovereign (Dublin, 1685).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#472

William of Orange was at war with Louis XIV of France, and when he invaded England in November 1688 his primary aim was to detach England from its alliance with France.

King James II fled in the face of William’s slow military advance on London, encouraged by some of his most senior officers who sympathised with the invasion.

James quietly slipped away to France on 23 December 1688, and this text is based on a hand-written note he left behind to defend his actions and counter the ‘slanders’ of his enemies. The text was printed at London and reprinted at Edinburgh and Dublin. The item on display is the only surviving copy of the Dublin edition.

Citation: His Majesties Reasons For withdrawing Himself from Rochester, Writ with His Own Hand, and ordered by Him to be Published (Dublin, 1688).

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Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#473

After his escape to France, James II made his way to Ireland where he rallied a considerable military force. William of Orange, who had been proclaimed as King William III by his supporters, naturally sailed for Ireland to confront the military threat to his new regime.

The culmination of the war in Ireland was the Battle of the Boyne, fought on 12 July 1690.

These verses by the French soldier and poet Charles de Saint-Évremond (1613–1703) note that William was wounded at the Boyne, compare him to both Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and praise him as ‘LE HEROS DES HEROS’.

The publication of this item in Utrecht reminds us that William’s battles in Britain and Ireland were part of a wider, European war against the power of Louis XIV of France.

Citation: A Sa Majesté Britannique Guillaume III (Utrecht, 1691).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#474

This schoolbook was designed to teach Latin to the boys of St Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar School in Dublin, which was established in 1547. This is the only surviving copy of the 1694 edition. The book was reprinted at intervals throughout the eighteenth century, but the cheap format and its active use by generations of schoolboys have ensured that copies of these later editions are also extremely rare.

Citation: Peter Davys, Adminiculum puerile, or, an help for school boys... For the Use of St. Patrick’s-School (Dublin, 1694).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#475

A propaganda cult grew up around King William III during the 1690s, which was aimed at building and consolidating public support for a regime which had been established by force of arms and was assailed by enemies both within the kingdom and across Europe.

This cheap, short pamphlet provided a standard hagiography of William’s ‘Life and Glorious Actions’ before his death as the result of a fall from his horse. It concludes by hoping for a ‘happy Government’ under William’s successor, Queen Anne.

Citation: An Account of the Life and Glorious Actions of William the Third (London, 1702).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#476

This is a proposal for the development of a spa resort around a natural spring in the parish of Killeshin in County Laois, about 85 kilometres south west of Dublin.

The author, John Powell, suggested the water had such remarkable medical properties that it ‘will soon Silence the Fame of all others’, including the newly fashionable spa town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent in southern England.

Powell claimed the water from Killeshin was useful in treating general problems with appetite, digestion and the lungs, but that it was also very effective in the treatment of specific ailments such as diarrhoea, dysentery, ‘Piss-Pot Dropsy’ (diabetes), gonorrhea and other diseases ‘contracted by Carnal Copulation with a woman’.

Powell’s proposal came to nothing.

Citation: John Powell, Nature’s Triumphs over Nature’s Infirmities: Or, A Discourse of a Mineral Water Lately found out near the Town of Carlow, Tryed and Approved of (Dublin, 1705).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#477

The Palatinate was a German territory of the Holy Roman Empire located on both sides of the middle section of the river Rhine.

It was subject to frequent incursions by French troops during the conflict known as the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). Much of the Protestant population of the area fled the troubles, and in 1709 about 3,000 of these refugees arrived in Ireland.

This proclamation asked that the ‘Poor Strangers’ be treated well because they were victims of ‘the same exorbitant Power of France’ which had driven so many thousands of Irish Protestants to seek refuge in England in 1688, where they had been ‘kindly received and charitably supported’.

The Lord Mayor asked that the refugees not be charged excessive prices or given sub-standard goods and services. The proclamation required all officers of the City to ‘apprehend such Persons, as shall at any time assault, insult, reproach, or abuse any of the said Palatines, in order that such Offenders may be prosecuted with the utmost Rigour of Law.’

Citation: A Proclamation by the Lord Mayor of the City of Dublin (Dublin, 1709).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#478

The Revocation by Louis XIV in 1685 of the religious toleration extended under the terms of the Edict of Nantes saw around 200,000 French Protestants go into exile abroad. 

The first Keeper of this Library, Elias Bouhéreau (1643–1719) was one of these ‘refugees’, and it should be noted that this English word is derived from the experience of these unfortunate réfugiés.

This example of French-language printing in Dublin reminds us that as many as 5,000 réfugiés eventually came to Ireland. This pamphlet describes the form of prayers to be used in 1710 by French Protestant congregations during a day of prayer asking for the continuance of God’s blessings upon the military forces of Queen Anne and her allies in Europe who were fighting against the French King.

Citation: Formulaire de Prieres Dont on se servira Dans toutes les Eglises & Chapelles de ce Royaume d’Irelande (Dublin, 1710).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#479

The bookseller Edward Lloyd ran a coffee house on Cork Hill near Dublin Castle from 1709 to 1713. Coffee houses had a close association with the printing trade, as they were ideal meeting places and venues for the exchange of news and information.

This is the only known copy of issue no. 6 of Lloyd’s News-Letter in existence. The News-Letter was four pages long and, like all Dublin newspapers of the day, contained little domestic news, concentrating instead on digests of British and European news culled mainly from London newspapers. 

Lloyd did, however, use his News-Letter to attack the Whig party in Ireland in the strongest terms. After the Whigs came to power in 1714 he sold his business interests and fled to London, where he spent the rest of his life.

Citation: Lloyd’s News-Letter, no. 6, 30 Dec 1712 – 3 Jan 1713.,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#480

In May 1711, John Arthur of Cabra in Dublin opened his home to a niece of his wife who had recently returned from France. She was welcomed ‘with all Imaginable Friendship’ and acted as a tutor in French to the young man of the house, Master Benedict Arthur. 

This woman, Catherine Hackett, then seduced Benedict ‘a Minor of Sixteen Years of Age at a Time when his Resolutions were Weak, and she a Woman experienced in the World, and much above Double his Years’.

Catherine and Benedict eloped to get married in March 1712, but subsequently separated. This document was probably prepared as part of an attempt to have the marriage annulled by the Irish Privy Council.

Citation: The Case of Bennedict Arthur, Esq; (Dublin, c.1715).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#481

The Irishman Richard Gascoigne was living in England when he joined the military forces raised in 1715 in support of the exiled James Francis Edward Stuart, who was known to his supporters as King James III and dismissed by his enemies as ‘the Pretender’. 

Gascoigne was captured by government forces at the Battle of Preston in November 1715, and was hanged, drawn and quartered in London on 25 May 1716.

Gascoigne’s speech from the scaffold expressed his devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and the exiled Stuarts. He asserted that only James III ‘succeeding to the Throne of his Ancestors’ could bring peace and prosperity to these islands.

The publication of this sheet by the reputable printer-bookseller Thomas Humes may have been motivated less by politics than its commercial potential, but it must certainly have caused raised eyebrows among sections of the Dublin public.

Citation: The Speech of Mr. Richard Gascoigne, who was Drawn Hang’d and Quarter’d at Tyburn, for High Treason against His Majesty King George (Dublin, 1716).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#482

The English shoemaker John Whalley (1653–1724) came to Dublin in 1682 and reinvented himself as an author, journalist, astrologer, and quack medic. From 1697 onwards, he published an almanac with predictions for the coming year entitled Advice from the Stars. His newspaper Whalley’s News-Letter (1714–23) was strongly anti-Catholic and revelled in sensationalism.

This sheet was produced to cash-in on public interest in advance of the lunar eclipse of 29 August 1718. Whalley begins by explaining the cause, nature and frequency of lunar and solar eclipses, before describing what contemporaries would see during the eclipse. Whalley’s predictions about the timing of this event were very accurate, according to data about historical eclipses supplied by the United States’ space agency, NASA.

Citation: An Account Of the Great Eclipse of the Moon, which will be Total and Vissible at Dublin... Fryday the 29th of August 1718 ([Dublin], 1718).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#483

This is the text of a sermon preached in the small town of Bantry on 23 December 1720 by Richard Davies concerning an outbreak of plague in the large Mediterranean port of Marseilles. It was printed in Cork early in 1721.

Davies told his congregation (and, later, his readers) that God had shown them a great mercy by visiting the plague upon the French in the first instance. This gave them a chance to repent their sins.

Davies admonished his audience for doing little to show their thanks to God for his great mercies to them, including the crowning achievement of the Revolution of 1688. He urged them to use the misfortune of Marseilles to demonstrate their loyalty to ‘his Majesty King George and his illustrious Family’.

As with the pamphlet (item X in this exhibition) about the floods in The Netherlands in 1624, news was here filtered through the religious and political concerns of the day.

Citation: Repentance our best Preservative against the Plague: In a Sermon Preached at Bantry (Cork, 1721).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#484

After decades of warfare and centuries of religious strife, the concepts of economic growth and improvement within a stable political system were very much in vogue in Ireland during the first decades of the eighteenth century.

The Dublin Society was founded in 1731 to promote agriculture, manufacturing and science in Ireland. This advertisement was produced on Irish-made paper by Aaron Rhames of Capel Street, the official printer to the Dublin Society. It advertises the services of James Scot of County Down who had much experience in Scotland and Ireland of the ‘great Improvement of Land, which is made by Marle’, a fertiliser derived from soils composed of clay and limestone.

The Dublin Society also used this printed advertisement to give notice of the services of a James Haffield, who had experience of planting hops, and the invention by Edward Constable of High Street, Dublin, of modifications which improved the performance of agricultural ploughs.

Citation: Advertisement (Dublin, 1733).,
Marsh's Library Exhibits, accessed December 26, 2024,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/exhibits/show/unique#485