Every term we feature a rare and interesting item from our collection.

Michaelmas Term 2026

Coopers Chronicle,
conteininge the whole discourse of the histories as well of this realme, as all other countreis …

What is the purpose of studying history? According to ChatGPT, it is ‘to understand how the past has shaped the world we live in today.’ But the idea that history is primarily a tool for understanding how the present developed has a short history of only two or three hundred years. The Greek historian Herodotus, sometimes known as ‘the father of history’, said he wrote so that what had happened should not fade over time and great deeds lack renown; the Roman historian Livy, writing four centuries later, thought that what made knowing about events useful was being able to see what you should choose to imitate, and what you should avoid as shameful. This view, that history had a moral, didactic purpose, persisted through the Middle Ages, and alongside it grew the idea of the universal history, in which the whole history of humankind from the very beginning (at that time taken to be the Biblical account of the Creation) to the author’s own day was set out as a linear progression, often with an emphasis on discerning patterns or a continuous theme.

A distinction was also made between history, as a literary genre, and chronicles. According to the monk Gervase of Canterbury, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, the task of a chronicler was to calculate years, months and days, to recount briefly the deeds of kings and princes that occur within them, and to record events, portents, or miracles; it was the historian’s job to write expansively about events and turn them into a work of literature. In addition, a work of history was generally regarded as complete in itself, whereas chronicles could be adapted, expanded or continued by later writers. The main manuscript of Gervase’s own Gesta Regum, a chronicling of the kings of Britain (later England), breaks off in the year 1210, which is probably the end of Gervase’s own contribution, then jumps back to 1207 and is continued by other authors up to 1328.

In 1532, Johann Carion published his Chronica, a concise history of the world from its creation (as recorded in the Bible) up to his own day, written in German. This quickly became a popular history textbook throughout the Protestant world, and, like medieval chronicles, was adapted and expanded by other authors (copyright as we understand it did not exist in Germany at the time). In England, Thomas Lanquet began a translation of Carion, but also included accounts of the pre-Roman kings of Britain (which he admitted were legendary). He had reached the reign of Tiberius as Emperor of Rome when he fell sick and died, at the age of only twenty-four, and the work was taken over by Thomas Cooper, the son of an Oxford tailor who had become a fellow of Magdalen. Cooper added so much to Carion’s framework, introducing British and other material and bringing it up to the year 1547 (it was published in 1549), that Carion became not the original text but only one of many sources.

In 1559 an unauthorised new edition of Lanquet and Cooper’s Chronicle was published by Robert Crowley, who made some alterations to the earlier text and extended the chronicle to the accession of Queen Elizabeth I. Cooper was seriously displeased by this, and brought out his own new edition in 1560, complaining not only that the pirated edition was a dishonest act and done only for the sake of profit, but also that he had found almost five hundred faults and errors in it, calling it ‘the attempte of certayne persons utterly unlearned’. This is followed by the dedication to the Earl of Bedford, in which Cooper sets out his view of the benefits of studying history: the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms and their rulers shows that all things are mutable, and the examples of the virtues of noble men and vices of the worthless teach us what to follow and what to avoid.

It is a copy of this 1560 edition which is on display here – and the process of revision did not end with its printing. It has been annotated, in places heavily, probably within a hundred years of being printed, but the book has later been rebound, removing any trace of who its first owners might have been (as well as trimming off the annotations). But there are several indications of later ownership – there are three bookplates inside the front cover, together with an entry from a bookseller’s catalogue and a biographical note of Cooper in faint pencil, and one bookplate inside the back cover.

Of the bookplates in the front, that of Edward Burton must be earliest, as the others overlay it, but which Edward Burton? The coat of arms shows two sets of arms – those of Burton on the left, but those of the Corbett family on the right, so almost certainly Edward Burton D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity 1829-1836, who married Helen Corbett.

Below it is a small bookplate showing it once belonged to a W. P. Turnbull, and on the book’s front flyleaf is inscribed: ‘Wm. P. Turnbull | Philadelphia | U.S. | 1860’ – there is a William Paterson Turnbull, born in Scotland in 1830, who emigrated to the USA and settled in Philadelphia, according to the online Gazetteer for Scotland.

Finally, there is a bookplate of Harvard College Library (subsequently stamped ‘released’, to our relief!), which records it as the gift of Mary Bryant Brandegee in memory of her grandfather, William Fletcher Weld. It was Mrs Brandegee’s generosity which in 1908 enabled Harvard to buy a collection of almost 12,000 books, mostly antiquarian, which had been amassed by Richard Ashhurst Bowie (1836-1887) – and it is Bowie’s bookplate which is affixed inside the back cover.

Previously featured volumes