2004,2005 Exhibition

This exhibition finished in Spring 2006. The items described here are no longer on public display in the Library. Information about current Library exhibitions is available on our events page.

The exhibition was opened in the library by Seamus Heaney on 16^th June 2004 and was open to the public until Spring 2006. The following is the short description of the exhibition that was published at the time.

This exhibition contains the most spectacular sixteenth and seventeenth-century books on astronomy and astrology, illustrated with splendid woodcuts and engravings. There are pictures of early telescopes and observatories, comets and planets, star maps and moon maps. The first description of the transit of Venus, made by the young English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks, and published by the much more famous Polish astronomer Hevelius, is in this exhibition. Works by Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Newton, Halley, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes are all here.

A fourteenth-century astronomical manuscript in Irish is also on display, and a letter from Archbishop Marsh describing a comet that appeared over Dublin in December 1680/81.

There are intriguing books on astrology. Here we have John Dee the astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I who named an appropriate day for her coronation, and the writer of almanacs John Partridge who was the victim of an elaborate hoax by Jonathan Swift. There is also a book by Richard Saunders with illustrations of the lines of the face, which he thought were governed by the planets and even allowed one to spot 'the character of a murtherer'.