Minerva

1801

Minerva was the goddess wisdom and of arts and crafts. The following is extracted from the BBC North web site:

The statue shows that the shop below (what is now Shared Earth) was once a bookshop. You can see Minerva's left arm is resting on a pile of books and if you look closely you can see an owl peeking out from behind her. The inscription below is dated 1801 and attributed to John Wolstenholme.
Between 1580 and 1607 the shop was owned by John Foster, who was said to have had a stock of around 3,000 books - which at that time was considered extremely impressive.

Ref: BBC North, hidden York.

Photo: taken Sunday morning, 29 April 2007
Photo Copyright Dave Woodcock 2008.