Baltimore’s Oldest Book? Aristotle’s Physica, ca.1300
This image representing a handsome marginal diagram of the physical properties of haloes and rainbows is one of several that adorn this profoundly influential textual compilation of the natural philosophical works of Aristotle. On a material level, it is a remarkable physical specimen of high medieval manuscript production. Its several technical diagrams are as beautiful as they are minutely detailed. Almost certainly read within any number of institutional collections, many of the openings in this large-margined copy are filled with elaborate textual glosses written by many different hands, include charming manicules, complex textual bracketing, interlinear marginalia, and other evidence of close readings over many centuries.
The latter-day provenance of this manuscript is just as fascinating as the historical artifact itself, for it also closely tracks the seminal efforts, periodic failures, and ultimate achievements of Baltimoreans who sought to found institutions of cultural significance dedicated to learning long before the founding of Johns Hopkins University. Indeed, the Peabody Aristotle may well constitute the first known medieval object in Baltimore history, if not the oldest historical object associated with the city’s early history in general. An early modern manuscript note on the title page of the Aristotle clearly places it in the French Aquitaine region, where it was accessioned as part of the library of the Jesuit College of Agen, probably during the seventeenth century. It then appears to have crossed the Atlantic with William Howard, son of the American Revolutionary War hero and Maryland governor John Eager Howard. Dr. Howard may have acquired the volume during a medical training tour in France, ca. 1817–19, which he punctuated with a successful scaling of Mont Blanc in July 1819. William Howard is sometimes described as the first American to have done so and related his accomplishment in print as the Narrative of a Journey to the Summit of Mont-Blanc (Baltimore, 1821) shortly after his return.
After it crossed the Atlantic and settled in Baltimore, extensive notes in the Physica further reveal that the Aristotle was later bequeathed by Howard in 1834 to the Baltimore Athenaeum—a private gentlemen’s association dedicated to literature, science, and the arts. There it reposed in a special case in the Athenaeum’s anteroom, though for hardly more than perhaps one year. The manuscript almost perished before its longer-term association with the Peabody Library could even begin, for the Baltimore Athenaeum was destroyed by a devastating fire in February 1835. Thankfully, an unknown bibliophile had the presence of mind to toss the volume out of a window to save it from the flames. It was quickly recovered from “a gutter in front of the edifice” by none other than Brantz Meyer, the American diplomat, early political historian of Mexico, and founder of the Maryland Historical Society. As the Athenaeum was reduced to rubble, Meyer chose to deposit the volume in the home of Peter Hoffman, a prominent political figure and wealthy merchant-owner of Baltimore’s Hoffman Paper Mills.
Years later, the manuscript came under the legal stewardship of the Baltimore attorney Edward Otis Hinkley, who would later distinguish himself in print as the editor of the new, post–Civil War Constitution of the State of Maryland (Baltimore, 1867). By 1849, Hinkley had determined that ownership of the Aristotle manuscript should be transferred to the Library Company of Baltimore, a private subscription library incorporated in 1797. The Library Company had just been relocated within the newly rebuilt Baltimore Athenaeum, whose phoenix-like recovery had been made possible through an ambitious fund-raising appeal, allowing it to reopen in 1848 at the corner of Saratoga and St. Paul Streets. Periodic financial troubles, compounded by court proceedings involving its shareholders, soon caused the Library Company to dissolve during the mid-1850s, with substantial portions of its great library collection being transferred to the Maryland Historical Society—an allied cultural organization founded in 1844 and also housed in the rebuilt Baltimore Athenaeum.
While the precise circumstances surrounding the subsequent transfer of the Aristotle manuscript from the Library Company collection to the George Peabody Library are not entirely clear, it joined many other rare books in doing so—including a finely illustrated, medieval Evangeliarium encompassing the gospel of Matthew and a fragment of Mark. A promising, if also periodically contentious, relationship had grown up between the Maryland Historical Society and the newly founded Peabody Institute, including designs that the Historical Society would later move with the Library Company collection into the Peabody Institute under the administration of the Peabody’s Board of Trustees.
These two institutions also came to resemble the profound divisions within the city and the nation, with many Unionists associated with the Peabody Institute, and many Southern state sympathizers leading the Historical Society. The American Civil War inevitably brought these tensions to the boil, scotching early plans for cooperation and what the founding Peabody trustee John Pendleton Kennedy characterized as a problematic situation of “double administration.” The merger was not to be, though an amicable divorce was effected by George Peabody himself, Kennedy, and others. It was finally determined during the period of the Peabody’s postwar construction and opening in 1866 that the Peabody Institute would be founded as a new and entirely independent cultural institution.
To strengthen cultural ties and to mend fences with the Maryland Historical Society, Peabody—who was a Historical Society member and had already underwritten the extraordinary cost in 1852 of the transcription of Maryland-related manuscript documents kept in English archives—contributed $20,000 to the Historical Society’s publication fund. In this same spirit of postwar resettlement, this medieval Aristotle manuscript made its way onto the shelves of the George Peabody Library, presenting posterity with a lasting memorial, indeed a totem, of the aspirations, struggles, and cultural achievements of Baltimoreans. A shared cultural space and research library collection of international breadth was established in the Peabody Library that could physically embody and connect the city of Baltimore to the much broader history of Europe, the Americas, and the wider world, reaching all the way back to the distant medieval past and onwards to the present moment.
But this colorful journey did not quite end there. By 1986 the state of Maryland combined forces with Johns Hopkins University to preserve the then ailing independent Peabody Institute. Those negotiations determined that the medieval Peabody Aristotle constituted a work of art and should thus be removed to the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis along with the Peabody’s collection of sculptures, paintings, and other artifacts. However, thirty years later, in 2016, the Aristotle manuscript was returned to the Peabody Library collection through a long-term loan arrangement between the state of Maryland and the Sheridan Libraries. Within weeks of its return, the Peabody Aristotle began receiving steady use and intensive scholarly attention, as well as direct application in the classroom with undergraduates and graduate students. It is now the premier early source of natural philosophical thought and technical illustration in the library collections of Johns Hopkins University.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
David Bostock, Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle’s Physics (Oxford University Press, 2006); Edward Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Catholic University of America Press, 2010); Earle Havens (ed.), Bibliomania: 150 Years of Collecting Rare Books for the George Peabody Library (Sheridan Libraries, 2017), 83–86; Helen Lang, Aristotle’s Physics and Its Medieval Varieties (SUNY Press, 1992).
