Main Content
Summary
Author: (Kilner, Joseph)
Title: The account of Pythagoras's School in Cambridge ; as in Mr. Grose's Antiquities of England and Wales, and other notices.
Publication: (No publication details, but Oxford (?), for private distribution early 1790s).
Price: £695
Reference: 07832
Full Description
Folio. v + (1) + pp 5-56 + (4) + pp 59-158, 9 engraved plates (of which 2 folding). Contemporary full calf, repaired and slightly cracking at joints, and bumped at outer corners, recent label on spine. Nineteenth century engraved armorial bookplates of Frances Mary Richardson Currer (1785-1861 : see Seymour de Ricci, English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, pp.141-3) and of her heir Sir Mathew Wilson, Bart. (1802-1891). Later pencil inscription on verso of front free endpaper inaccurately identifying the author of the book as the Cambridgeshire antiquary William Cole (whose surname is here mis-spelled "Cale"). A good, clean, fresh copy internally.
A rare book devoted in part to "Pythagoras's School" in Cambridge, a stone-built house of early mediaeval date which predates the earliest college and university buildings in the city, and in part to the early history of Merton College, Oxford, owner of this Cambridge property since the 1270s as part of the college's endowment from its founder Walter de Merton. As the book carries no author's name or publisher's imprint, it has puzzled bibliographical scholars (see the long discussion of it in the recent British Architectural Library catalogue, in which it features as no. 3742), but the question of its authorship at least is straightforward, for the internal evidence of its text shows that it was written by an individual associated with Merton College, Oxford, and that its primary intended purpose was for circulation among members of that college, and a contemporary inscription in a copy in Durham University Library, indicating that it was written by Rev.Joseph Kilner (c.1721-1793), one of two brothers who were Fellows of Merton in the second half of the eighteenth century, conforms with indications in older works of bibliographical works of reference that it was written by an individual named Kilner.