Friends of the Library, alumni and supporters of the College are warmly invited to:
Treasures of the Library: Cow Dung, Cures & Gardenly Delights.
Cow Dung, Cures & Gardenly Delights celebrates the historic resources of Christ's College and their portrayal of traditions and practices specific to the Christ's College gardens and college gardens across Cambridge.
The event consists of talks from Professor Jim Secord (FBA), Dr Edwin Rose, as well as a welcome from the College Librarian and Deputy College Librarian.
Alumni are also warmly invited to exercise their dining rights and join us at Formal Hall that evening, at the College's expense. Wine can be purchased at the Buttery before dinner. Guests are also welcome to attend the event and join for dinner (at a cost of £17.94 per guest). Dinner guests must be aged 18 or over, please!
For enquiries, please feel welcome to get in contact at alumni@christs.cam.ac.uk
A schedule of the evening's events can be found below.
Schedule
Welcome
Catherine Ascough, College Librarian
Nicola Hudson, Deputy College Librarian
Herbals and Handbooks: Paper Tools for the Garden and Home
Professor Jim Secord, FBA
Fellow Commoner at Christ’s College and Emeritus Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, books became increasingly affordable and used in a wide variety of ways. The books in the exhibition contain everything from kitchen manuals to illustrated treatises for scholarly use. Professor Secord will suggest what we can learn from the physical copies of books, including how they were made, printed, reproduced and read.
Books and Botany in Cambridge, c. 1660–1830
Dr Edwin Rose
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds and Bye-Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge
Taking examples from the collections at Christ’s College, Dr Rose explores the emergence of botanical scholarship and teaching in Cambridge, starting in the mid seventeenth century with John Ray’s groundbreaking Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam (1660) and ending with a discussion of John Steven Henslow’s botanical research and teaching in the early nineteenth century.
Followed by a display of herbals and recipe books from the Old Library collections