Classics and the Special Collections

THE RODERIC BOWEN LIBRARY

The University’s Special Collections – now housed, with the University’s Archives, in the new, purpose-built Roderic Bowen Library alongside the Main Library – contain much valuable and exciting material for the research student in Classics.  The entire collections comprise about 20,000 volumes printed before 1850, including 67 incunabula, together with manuscripts and other items.  Works on Classical subjects feature prominently.

There is a particularly rich selection of Classical texts and editions, especially ones dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.  The University’s Founder, Bishop Thomas Burgess (1756-1837), was an eminent and productive Classical scholar in his early career, who visited Europe on several occasions to study manuscripts, and enjoyed friendly relations with many eminent Classicists both in Britain and on the Continent.  On his death he bequeathed his entire personal library to his Welsh foundation.  Lampeter thus possesses not only his own entire oeuvre, but also many important editions from his time and earlier.  Dryden’s Virgil, Bentley’s Terence, Heyne’s Vergil [1st German and English editions] and Tibullus [2nd edition, 1777], Wyttenbach’s Plutarch Moralia and Tyrwhitt’s Aristotle Poetics are just some of them, and many are annotated by Burgess himself.  To these can be added a large number of similar works from another great benefactor, Thomas Phillips (1760-1851), whose gifts began in 1834 and continued until 1852, the year after his death.  Among the books received from him are numbers of particularly opulent eighteenth-century editions, and volumes of the Aldine and Delphin Classics.  There is thus the potential for study of the history of Classical scholarship, particularly from around 1700 to 1850, with a rich seam of material, much of which has never been properly examined.

A second field of Classical interest which is especially well represented in the Collections is books by travellers to Italy, Greece and the Levant from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries.  Many of the later examples contain fine engravings which are of singular importance.  Pre-eminent in this aspect of the study of the Classical world are such works as George Sandys’ A Relation of a Journey begun An: Dom: 1610 (3rd edition, 1627), Sir George Wheler’s A Journey into Greece (1682), Bernard Randolph’s pamphlets The Present State of the Morea and The Present State of the Archipelago (1686 and 1687), Robert Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and The Ruins of Balbec (1757), Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian… (1764), Thomas Major’s The Ruins of Paestum (1768), the first three volumes of Stuart and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens (1769, 1787 and 1794), and Le Chevalier’s Description of the Plain of Troy (1791).   From the nineteenth century, Sir William Gell’s Pompeii, Edward Dodwell’s Views in Greece, and Edward Lear’s Views in Rome and its Environs are only the best known among a wide selection.  Most, though not all, of these were again Phillips’ gifts, and it was Phillips, too, who gave one of Lampeter’s greatest Classical treasures, a complete set of Piranesi’s huge folio volumes, Le Antichità Romane.  The potential here for study of the authors themselves, their engravings, their reports and the monuments they recorded, is huge.