Penn Libraries acquire annotated English Bible that belonged to Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1720)

An annotated English Bible that belonged to Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1720) and passed down through his family for three centuries has returned to Philadelphia. Pastorius, credited with being the founder of Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), emigrated from Germany in 1683 and quickly became an important figure in the new colony. This Bible joins two Pastorius manuscripts already in the collection of the Kislak Center, The Young Country Clerk’s Collection, the earliest practical legal treatise written in British North America, and the Beehive, a massive commonplace book in which he gathered together, like a bee, selections from the hundreds of books he had read. Both manuscripts have been at Penn since 1949, when they were given to the Library by members of the Pastorius family. Two manuscripts by Pastorius’s father, Melchoir Adam Pastorius, were given to Penn by Joseph George Rosengarten in 1908. See Unique at Penn for more →