As the protestant reformers busied themselves attacking the papacy and the sale of indulgences, many who stayed within the Catholic fold realised that something needed to be done to rejuvenate the church and stop it disintegrating. One such was Berthold Purstinger of Chiemsee, who produced various defences of the Catholic Church against Lutheranism.

The Greek alphabet first appeared in print in Latin texts which incorporated Ancient Greek quotations, from 1465 onwards. Over time, however, from the first setting down of the Homeric epics to the beginning of the modern era, the Greek language had undergone many changes, enough to make the publication of this translation from ancient to modern forms viable. It is based on a 14th-century paraphrase of the ancient text by Konstantinos Hermoniakos, who was working in one of the fragments of the Byzantine Empire left after the Fourth Crusade.

This text is one of a number of early treatises on the use of the abacus printed around the turn of the 15th century. The woodcut diagrams represent counters on the lines of an abacus, and the whole treatise covers addition, subtraction, multiplication and topics in arithmetic.

Knighted in 1521, More rose to become Lord Chancellor before being executed for high treason in 1535. He is a saint to the Catholic and a predecessor of Marx to the Communist.

This edition of the Book of Psalms was the first polyglot printing of any part of the Bible. Polyglots allowed scholars to compare the various versions of the scriptures by arranging them in parallel columns, and developed from the traditions of Jewish scholars.

One of two variants of the Complutensian or Ximenes Bible held by the Library. This was the first polyglot edition of the Bible printed so that scholars could compare the various translations.

The coronation feast, complete with spectators, and a detail of a long-suffering parader carrying the kettledrums, in Francis Sandford's book detailing James II's accession, produced two years after the event, and one year before James was removed from the throne by the "Glorious" Revolution.

Exquemelin had hands-on experience of life as a privateer, having retired from the profession in 1672. Originating in Normandy, he had been sold into slavery on the sugar plantations, but after suffering beatings and starvation, escaped to make his fortune on the high seas. He had this memoir first printed in Dutch in 1676, although as he was not a professional writer the publisher added an extra chapter and abridged the original French manuscript to make it more palatable to the reading public of Holland.

John Seller was hydrographer to Charles II and James II and produced a prolific output of maps, charts and geographical and nautical publications, being granted a monopoly for the former for thirty years. This work contains fifty-five plates all of which are brightly hand-coloured in this copy. The plates shown here portray the sun, the moon, and various comets.

The first edition of Sir Isaac Newton's most famous work, which contains the summation of his theories on the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which now bear his name.