Week 1



Manuscript on artillery and fireworks from the time of king Frederik III. The first coloured page is signed Carl Christman.
The Manuscript Department, Gl. kongelige Samling 352, folio.

Week 2



The Wise Men on their way to Bethlehem.
From the "Folkeungepsalteriet", a sumptuous manuscript of David's Psalms, which probably belonged to the Swedish royal family Folkunge. It was made in Southern England, c. 1150-75, and the miniatures are viewed as a masterpiece of English Romanesque art.
The Manuscripts Department, Thott 143, folio.

Week 3



Hand-coloured celestial map with the path of a comet observed by the physicist Rasmus Bartholin in Copenhagen in 1665. From Stanislav Lubieniecki: Theatrum Cometrum, Vol. I, Amsterdam 1666, fol., a richly illustrated work with a printed dedication to king Frederik III.
Department of Main Collections (University Library Department), Hielmstierne No. 152, folio.

Week 4



Jelly fish (Medus Andromeda) from the waters near Egypt shown in plate 31 in Petrus Forsskåls' Icones 1776. Folio.

Week 5



Kirsten Klein (b. 1945): Mid Winter at the Island of Mors. 1987.
Silver-gelatine, 251 x 376 mm, acc. no. 1999-73/4.
The National Museum of Photography.

Week 6



The mythological giant Atlas, whose name Gerard Mercator introduced as the term for a book of maps, stands here on the earth with the firmament resting on his shoulders. Coloured title-page engravings from Justus Dankert's Atlas, c. 1680 and later.
The Map Collection. Folio.

Week 7



Scenes from Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's 1200 page long account of the lives and history of the Indians in the Andes, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The first new chronicle and good government). The text, and its c. 400 pen drawings, is known only from this one manuscript, produced in 1613-15 and addressed as a memorandum to Philip III of Spain. The Indians' important nutritional source, the potato, is dug up and carried home.
The Manuscript Department, Gl. kongelige Samling 2232, kvarto. The whole work was in 2001 published on the internet.

Week 8



This album amicorum belonged to the Austrian Baron Stephan Haymb von Reichenstein. He spent the years 1575-76 at Constantinople, where he had the album bound with a covering of silk brocade. One of the samples of Oriental paper interleaved in the album, a marbled sheet in a swirled Turkish pattern. The production of marbled paper is a traditional Turkish craft, which at that time was unknwon in Europe. Not until the 1600s did the technique spread to Europe.
The Manuscript Department, Thott 1279, kvarto.

Week 9



Jørgen Brønlund's diary from the Danmark expedition to Northeast Greenland 1906-08. In his last pencilled entry in November 1907 he writes: "I arrived here in fading moonlight, and could not go on because of frostbite in my feet and darkness. The other's bodies are in the middle of the fjord in front of a glacier (about 18 km) ... Hagen died November 15 and Mylius about 10 days later." The diary and the expedition's maps were found four months later by his body in the cave.
The Manuscript Department, Ny kongelige Samling 565, oktavo. See the entire diary (in Danish only)


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