Collecting Aldrovandi

Like many early modern physicians, Edward Worth was fascinated by all things scientific and his set of volumes by Ulisse Aldrovandi was certainly one of the jewels in his natural history collection. The breadth of the Aldrovandi set, covering as it did volumes on birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish, mollusca, crustacea, insects, plants, monsters and geology, provided him with a cornucopia of sources, both ancient and early modern, textual and visual. In effect, it offered him a seventeenth-century encyclopaedia of natural history. For Worth, who had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1699, it would have been a prized purchase for this reason alone.

Illustrissimi & excellentissimi Ludovici Henrici, Comitis Castri-Briennij… bibliothecae, ad ejusdem filium Constantiae in Normannia episcopum pertinentis, catalogus. A catalogue of the library of his excellency Louis Henry de Lomenie, Count de Brienne… to be sold…the 28th of April, 1724 (London, 1724), p. 46.

However, there were other factors influencing Worth’s purchase of the Aldrovandi set, for while he was fascinated by the content, he would also have taken pleasure in the fact that his volumes had previously been owned by the French book collector Louis-Henri Loménie (1635–98), Comte de Brienne. We know that Worth purchased his Aldrovandi set from the sale of the Brienne library in 1724 because Worth, a connoisseur collector, not only left his wonderful library to Dr Steevens’ Hospital but also the sale and auction catalogues for the last ten years of his life, thus allowing us to reconstruct how he created his collections.[1] Among these is the 1724 catalogue of the sale of the Brienne collection, which took place at London.[2] As this image demonstrates, Worth bought all 13 volumes from this sale for the price of £9, 9 shillings and 1 pence. When one considers that £39 per annum has been suggested as an average income, it is clear that such a purchase was only possible for someone as wealthy as Worth.[3] In addition, the 1720 plague in France, coupled with a stock market crash in the same year, forced many collectors to sell their prized possessions – a situation which greatly benefited a contemporary wealthy collector such as Worth.

As the above title page of the Brienne sale makes clear, the 1724 sale included not only the library of Louis-Henri but also books belonging to other members of the Brienne family. The title page not only refers to Louis-Henri as ‘Secretary of State to Louis XIV and Ambassador at Rome’ but also mentions the library of his ‘Son the late Bishop of Coutance in Normandy’. As Birley has pointed out, there were a host of discrepancies here for Louis-Henri had never held an ambassadorial post in Rome (or anywhere else), and the bishop of Coutances was his brother Charles-François (1637–1720).[4] The rather convoluted history of the Brienne collection (which mirrored the rather convoluted life of Louis-Henri) perhaps explains some of these mistakes, but it is clear that the London booksellers responsible for the sale, James Woodman and David Lyon, were not above embellishing the truth when it came to promoting their sale.[5]

Ulisse Aldrovandi, Dendrologiae naturalis scilicet arborum historiae libri duo : Sylva glandaria, acinosumque pomarium ubi eruditiones omnium generum una cum botanicis doctrinis ingenia quaecunque non parum juvant, et oblectant Ovidius Montalbanus … opus … collegit … Hieronymus Bernia … in lucem editum dicavit (Bologna, 1668), front cover: detail of the panel stamp of the comtes de Brienne.

Even if Worth had not bequeathed his copy of the 1724 Brienne sale catalogue, it would still be clear that he had bought all 13 volumes from the collection of Louis-Henri, for they bear the latter’s distinctive coat of arms on their covers. The two cows, seen here in the 1^st and 4^th quarter of the coat of arms, represent the House of Béon while the rampant crowned lions in the other quarters refer to the House of Luxembourg. Both draw attention to the prestigious ancestry of Louis-Henri’s mother, Louise de Béon-Luxembourg (d. 1665)). According to legend, the House of Luxembourg was descended from the mysterious fairy Melusine, and Louis-Henri specifically drew attention to this by adding a representation of Melusine to the top of his coat of arms. There she may be seen combing her hair while bathing in a tub, (a reference to her transformation into a half-serpent while bathing). Significantly, though Louis-Henri’s son, Henri-Louis (d. 1743), made some changes to the device, he retained this reference to the fairy Melusine.

TEXT: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library.

Sources

Anon., Illustrissimi & Excellentissimi Ludovici Henrici Comitis Castri-Briennij … Bibliothecae Ad ejusdem Filium Constantiae in Normanniâ Episocopum pertinentis, Catalogue. A catalogue of the library of his Excellency Henry de Lomenie, Count De Brienne … (London, 1724).

Birley, Robert, The library of Louis-Henri de Lomenie, comte de Brienne and the bindings of the Abbe du Seuil (London, 1962), pp 1–131.

Boran, Elizabethanne, ‘Dr Edward Worth: a connoisseur book collector in early eighteenth-century Dublin’, in Elizabethanne Boran (ed.), Book collecting in Ireland and Britain 1650–1850 (Dublin, 2018), pp 80–103.

Hume, Robert D., ‘The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power— and Some Problems in Cultural Economics’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77, no. 4 (2015), 373–416.

[1] On Worth as a collector see Boran, Elizabethanne, ‘Dr Edward Worth: a connoisseur book collector in early eighteenth-century Dublin’, in Elizabethanne Boran (ed.), Book collecting in Ireland and Britain 1650–1850 (Dublin, 2018), pp 80–103.

[2] Anon, Illustrissimi & Excellentissimi Ludovici Henrici Comitis Castri-Briennij … Bibliothecae Ad ejusdem Filium Constantiae in Normanniâ Episocopum pertinentis, Catalogue. A catalogue of the library of his Excellency Henry de Lomenie, Count De Brienne … (London, 1724).

[3] Hume, Robert D., ‘The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power— and Some Problems in Cultural Economics’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77, no. 4 (2015), 376.

[4] Birley, Robert, The library of Louis-Henri de Lomenie, comte de Brienne and the bindings of the Abbe du Seuil (London, 1962), pp 1–131.

[5] On this see Boran, ‘Dr Edward Worth: a connoisseur book collector’, pp 91-3 and Robert Birley, The library of Louis-Henri de Lomenie, comte de Brienne and the bindings of the Abbe du Seuil (London, 1962), pp 1–131.