De homine
On Man
Published c. 1300s
Albert Magnus
(1193-1280)
The oldest book in the collection is a handwritten manuscript dating to the 1300s titled De homine by Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. Later canonized Saint Albert, he was a naturalist and scholar. Approximately 50 copies of De homine were produced during the 14th century. The McGoogan Library’s copy was studied by German scholars during the 1990s. Due to variances in the text, the scholars identified it as one of the copies likely to have been produced by a university scribe. University scribes, charged with distributing knowledge, worked quickly and were less exacting in their transcription than Catholic monks.