Archaeology of Reading corpus BACKUP
Buchanan, De Maria Scotorum regina (1571?)
Castiglione, Il cortegiano (1541)
Castiglione, The covrtyer (1561)
Domenichi, Facetie, motti, et burle (1571)
Freigius, Ioan. Thomae Freigii Paratitla (1583)
Frontinus, The strategemes, sleyghtes, and policies of warre (1539)
Guicciardini, Detti, et fatti (1571)
Livius, Romanae historiae principis (1555)
Machiavelli, The arte of warre (1573)
Melanchthon, Selectarum declamationum (1564-67)
Olaus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555)
Smith, De recta & emendata linguæ Anglicæ (1568)
Tusser, Fiue hundred pointes of good husbandrie (1580)
[The structure and content of this imprint are described in the corresponding essay, below, on Harvey’s Latin-language Buchanan, De Maria Scotorum regina (1571?), in the Archaeology of Reading corpus of books.]
This is one of many pro-English tracts opposing Mary Queen of Scots, written by the worldly humanist and literary Scot (and one-time tutor of Michel de Montaigne at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux), George Buchanan. This utterly partisan polemic inaugurated in print a discourse that had already begun years earlier in 1568 with Mary’s exile in England and Queen Elizabeth’s subsequent requirement of the Earl of Mornay, James Stewart, that he defend his armed opposition to his sovereign Scottish queen with proof of her illegal actions. This book, perhaps more than any other, shaped the now familiar narrative of Mary as an increasingly unhinged tyrant who ultimately descended into reckless criminality and desperate conspiracy. The text embodies both the formality and the sense of inevitability that surrounds a criminal show trial performed before a court of law, balancing argument and the piling on of an overwhelming body of evidence (following on actual 1568 commissions convened in closed hearings on the matter at York and Westminster). The material printed here for the first time in October 1571 was an immediate response to the Ridolfi Plot, which would have married the Queen of Scots to the Duke of Norfolk and unseated Elizabeth at the hands of Spanish invaders. An English-language translation in an affected Scots dialect—suggesting no English participation though, in truth, a work of pure English propaganda—Ane detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes (1571), appeared immediately thereafter to amplify the effect of this Latin original.
Mary’s son, King James VI of Scotland, reviled Buchanan’s more extreme brand of popular sovereignty (Buchanan’s strong response to Mary’s presumed tyranny), particularly as it was promoted in his later chronicle of Scotland, the Historia of 1582, which was ordered purged by the Scottish parliament shortly after its appearance in print. Ever a close student of ill-advised speech against a crowned head, Harvey’s extensive manuscript quotations on the final page of the present volume from Book 2 of James’s Basilikon Doron captures the subsequent harvest of Buchanan’s defamation of this future king of England’s mother in De Maria Scotorum regina, including James’s full-throated and definitive rejection of the “infamous invectives” of Buchanan himself. See Tricia McElroy, “Performance, Print and Politics in George Buchanan’s Ane Detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes,” in Caroline Erskine and Roger Mason, eds., George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 49-70.
This quintessential dialogue on the ideal qualities of the courtier was universally acknowledged as a must-read text of the Italian Renaissance: an essential export of the energy, erudition, and sophistication that had come to be associated with the courts of Italian princes and aristocrats since the quattrocento. Its setting over four nights of lively conversation within the Renaissance palace of the Duke of Urbino, and its many interlocutors—princely and aristocratic, ecclesiastical and lay, male and female—present a microcosm of a polite and learned elite that embodied all the qualities of the ideal courtier: politician and ambassador, philosopher and musician, warrior and wit. The first two books present the classic image of a “Renaissance man” as master rhetorician and orator, a cautious and prudent person, but also pleasant and amusing. The third and fourth books turn, respectively, to the ideal “Renaissance woman” and to the intersection of politics and philosophy, above all to love itself. The goal of the courtier was to command the approbation of any audience without any apparent effort (sprezzatura, a kind of effortless, perfect nonchalance; or, as Harvey described it in the final annotated pages of his 1561 English translation of the Courtier: “The rarest men extend their utterest possibility, with a fine (as it were) familiar sleight.”
The runaway popularity of the text also makes it a revealing barometer of the book trade and the transmission of taste inside Italy and across the Alps, appearing in some 40 editions up to the year of Harvey’s birth, and at least 125 during the decade immediately following his death, in the original Italian (editio princeps, Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1528), as well as Spanish, French, Latin, German, and English translations. Harvey characterized his own 1541 Italian-language Castiglione in an annotation elsewhere in his library as “one of my best for the art of jesting,” alongside Cicero, Quintilian, and Sir Thomas Wilson’s modern 1567 Art of Rhetorike (quotation at fol. 69 in the latter). [See also the corresponding description of Harvey’s 1561 Castiglione in the Archaeology of Reading corpus, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby.] Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), esp. 1-54.
[The structure and content of this imprint is described in the corresponding essay, above, on Harvey’s Italian-language Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, in the Archaeology of Reading corpus of books.] It is especially interesting to examine Harvey’s annotated copy of a fairly early Italian edition of Castiglione’s Courtier (University College London’s 1541 copy of the Giolito edition) alongside his separately annotated, early English translation of this monument of Renaissance courtly literature. Thomas Hoby was a gentleman traveler and a courtier himself whose long continental sojourn during much of the reign of queen Mary I was likely motivated by religious causes. Hoby undertook this translation, his most lasting and influential literary achievement, in Paris while still in his early twenties (1552-53), though the work remained unpublished until the appearance of the Seres imprint of 1561. Seres, a loyal servant of William Cecil, was bestowed a lifetime privilege to print psalms and primers, though he also favored the publication of English translations of influential classical, and more recent and presumably saleable, continental works, particularly during the 1560s and 1570s. Among the more notable examples are Arthur Golding’s lively and influential Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar (encouraged by William Cecil himself) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses(echoes of which have been detected in Spenser and Shakespeare), as well as modern treatises such as Thomas Blundeville’s translation of Frederico Grisone’s Offices of Horsemanship.
Harvey’s annotations throughout the English Covrtyer are effusive with praise, admiration, and vitality, nowhere more so than in the back matter of the book, amid the final summary “A Brief Rehearsal of the Chief Conditions and Qualities in a Courtier” (190r-92v) and “Of the Chief Conditions and Qualities of a Waiting Gentlewoman” (193r-94v). There, as elsewhere, Harvey’s courtly paragon seems always to be the personal figure of his friend and patron, Sir Philip Sidney, literally his “Castilio, sive Aulicus,” which echoed a chorus of similar praise, living and posthumous, for the young Sidney: “The most beautiful demeanor of the princely grace, from general and special decorum” [Aulica[e] gratia[e] pulcherrimus habitus, è generali, et speciali decoro]. It is unlikely that Harvey could read such a book as this without recalling his own presentation at court before the Queen during a Royal Progress in 1578, where she allowed him to kiss her hand and reportedly professed that Harvey himself had the look of an Italian. See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), esp. 55-80; L. G. Kelly, “Hoby, Sir Thomas;” and Elizabeth Evenden, “Seres, William,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.
It is perhaps ironic that Harvey wrote on the title page of one of the two books bound together in this volume, both of them dedicated to the bon mot, “There is hardly any end to discourses [Discursuum vix ullus finis]” (fol. 73r). The 360-degree, wrap-around manuscript annotations that fill nearly every centimeter of white space in this narrowly margined book—consisting of a complete copy of Guicciardini’s Detti e fatti (1571), and a partial fragment of its companion imprint, Domenichi’s Facietie (1571)—positively burst at the seams, sometimes inspiring vertigo (especially when you rotate the images at 90-degree angles in the Archaeology of Reading viewer). Big things do sometimes come in small packages, however, and Harvey’s little octavo Domenichi/Guicciardini volume presents one of the most challenging, and revealing discursive spaces in all of Harvey’s great enterprise of annotation. Taken together, it is in this composite volume that Harvey shows most clearly to the latter-day reader the single, most utterly idiosyncratic aspect of his reading practice: the deployment of a personal dramatis personae, each character of which periodically struts across the stage of a book, much like a player delivering lines from Harvey’s own mental script, and embodying either an aspect of his own psyche, or one of his obsessional categories of self-cultivation. By far the most common of these (in this volume, and in the Archaeology of Reading corpus more generally) is Eutrapelus, a figure whose every facet seems to express Harvey’s powerful ambition to master modern languages, particularly in the service of wit, puns, and jests that “draw salt from the earth and light from the world” (fol. 82v; a gesture to the gospel, Matthew 5:13-16 that reverberates throughout the volume: see also fols. 47v, 185r).
As Harvey tells it in an especially unguarded moment of clear self-exposition, Eutrapelus is a picture of the courtly extrovert, a memorable orator and the natural life of any party (which Harvey, by all accounts, was not). The persona derived from the classical Roman eques Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus, a witty Roman and friend of Mark Antony mentioned repeatedly by Cicero): “Eutrapelus scornes himself, till he teaches all other, to pronounce more sensibly; to expresse more liuely; to speake more effectually; to resolue & persuade more powrefully, then anie other heretofore” (fols. 5v-6r). He continues further along in the Guicciardini: “Each is most prudent and most splendid. Others assert serious matters, but only Eutrapelus carries out serious matters. He accomplishes exceptional things. Eutrapelus changes great into small, and small into great.” This is the “mysterious transformation [arcana metamorphosis] of Eutrapelus,” Harvey continues, where the “serious matters of others must be converted into playthings. Your playthings must be converted into serious matters.” Seeming to enjoin himself to a lasting memory of the point, Harvey completes this strain of self-obligation in the second person singular: “One associates with strangers hyperbolically or ironically, but withhold this tendency with your friends. Apart from your own matters, all is for naught” (82v). Harvey has been so warned by his dear friend, Eutrapelus, who whispers in his ear from the margins of his books.
These imprinted texts, which seem to captivate Harvey and seduce his Eutrapelus, are basically playful and unserious – at turns flip and piquant and hardly canonical. The Italian merchant of Antwerp, Lodovico Guicciardini, is far better remembered for his Descrittione di…tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567), dedicated in the Italian and subsequent French editions to the monarchs of Spain and uniquely descriptive of the most noteworthy Netherlandish painters of that time, reflecting Philip II’s passion for their art. The eponymous Lodovico Domenichi, a humanist translator and editor of classical works, is similarly remembered for other books: his Polybius, Plutarch, and Pliny the Elder, and more recently for editing in 1559 one of the earliest collected editions of women poets (as well as a couple of frauds: the false “Letter of Aristeas” and a fake, neo-Latin Senecan play). Their relatively light texts, as is suggested by their respective, informal titles, appear almost as well-coiled springboards for Harvey’s fertile imagination and love of wordplay. They are not so much “wisdom literature” as echo-chambers in which he can overhear himself saying wise and clever things in polite conversation and in company (Harvey signed and dated the Guicciardini “1580,” suggesting that he may have annotated the volume while still eyeing a position at court). These light literary passages invoke the sense of a theater for the performance, ostensibly ex tempore, of Harvey’s extensive reading and ready command of the best works on a given or curious topic, sometimes digressing even into mini-bibliographies such as his memorable litany of thaumaturgy, which is barely connected to the presumed “anchor text” of the printed page on which it appears:
After the Introduction on Magic in Albertus Magnus’s De Mirabilibus Mundi, Roger Bacon’s De mirabili potestate artis et naturae, Pomponazzi’s De incantationibus, with Agrippa’s aptly titled De occulta philosophia and De inceritudine et vanitate scientarium. No collection of Thaumaturgy is more propitious than the De vita Apollonii Tyanei: with Gandini’s Stratagemata and the Polytechnics, Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. With Giovanni Battista Porta’s Phytognomonica, Albertus on physiognomy, and the De Secretis of Cardano and Wecker (fol. 34r).
See “Guicciardini, Lodovico.” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online (Oxford University Press, online edn., Sept. 2016) http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T035507; Deanna Shemek, “The Collector’s Cabinet: Lodovico Domenichi’s Gallery of Women,” in Pamela Benson and Victoria Kirkham (eds.), Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 239-62. AOR Bookwheel Blog Entries: Chris Geekie, “Harvey’s Joke Books;” “On Readers and Repetition.”
Freigius’s logical treatment of the Digesta seu Pandectae, the digest of Roman civil laws dating back to the 6th-century CE Roman emperor Justinian I, informed a significant portion of Harvey’s larger education as a legal scholar at Cambridge during his studies there between 1578 and his attainment of the degree of Bachelor of Laws in 1584, a period, Lisa Jardine and William Sherman have observed, that overlapped with his secretarial service to the Earl of Leicester during which he provided particular “knowledge transactions” with members of the earl’s circle of friends and advisers. They also observe the manner in which Harvey’s systematic reading of Freigius—well represented by a carefully ramified tree in the front matter of the book whose roots and branches embody fundamental categories of legal thought (taken even to a quarternary level of sub-division)—appears to have been coordinated closely with another sub-set of books in his own library, in particular Nicolaus Vigelius’s Iuris civilis totius absolutissima methodus (Basel, 1561; British Library C.60.e.14); and Ioachim Hopperus, In veram iurisprudentiam Isagoges (Cologne, 1580; Gonville and Caius, Cambridge H.6.12). Harvey’s coordination of notes and virtual conversation between these and Freigius’s Synopsis pandectarum suggests that he particularly prized the latter for its “method of general logic” (vs. Hopperus’s more “particular legal method,” for example). At the same time, the ever-pragmatic Harvey was not himself a stickler for strict method and precise legal dialectic:
The best laws are precious things, even without the best method. I am content with making a virtue of necessity…the wisest and most useful means of accomplishing anything. I think carefully about the goal, working more punctiliously on a particular form of justice than a general form of method, just as I do on internal questions of logic, compared with external questions of style. It does not please me to please others. And it does not please me that they are displeased by things that have been considered and tested (front matter, emphasis added).
Though not a commonly reprinted book, its author was certainly important to Harvey for he listed Freigius as a “famous writer of Germany” in the long catalogue of contemporaries that had witnessed their own personal esteem for Harvey himself, either in print or in personal correspondence (see Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, 1594, sig. F1r) in one of his several very public, but largely unsuccessful, printed “quarrels” with the leading Elizabethan pamphleteer and satirist Thomas Nashe. Many copies of Freigius’s Paratitla survive in institutional collections, perhaps aided by its association with the much-admired, if also controversial, Basel printing house of Henricpetri, which produced many famous books; perhaps the best known of these, at least in the latter day, is their 1566 edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, in addition to serial Henricpetri publication, in ever expanding editions, of Sebastian Münster’s ubiquitous, illustrated world encyclopedia the Cosmographia liber. See Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, “Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England,” in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts, eds., Religions, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 102-24.
This book, produced by Henry VIII’s longtime official printer Thomas Bethelet was translated from the Latin by the accomplished Henrician diplomat, humanist, and propagandist Sir Richard Morison. Morison, one of the earliest advocates in England for the modern works of Machiavelli (represented elsewhere in the Archaeology of Reading corpus), combined the latter two of his many activities—humanist scholarship and militant propaganda—to help gird the island nation for war with France and the Holy Roman Empire. The four-book, military Strategemata of the ancient Roman Sextus Julius Frontinus seems (at least in early modern historical retrospect) to have been an ideal choice, for the Roman general had presumably based part of his study on his pursuit of war with the tribes of Britain and Germania. In truth, this is difficult to tell because Frontinus’s work is generic in nature, and likely a derivative imitation of other more significant ones by military theorists such as Valerius Maximus. The Strategemes of this former legate of Britain nonetheless served a latter-day purpose, assuring its dedicatee, Henry VIII himself, of Sir Richard’s capable support through scholarship and letters turned to eminently practical purposes. A similar impulse of scholarly application and of being “studied for action” would dominate Gabriel Harvey’s own approach to classical literature, much as it did other modern authors like Machiavelli.
Harvey purchased his Frontinus in May of his personal wunderjaar of 1578 (apparently for 20 pence), but revisited the book at least twice again later, annotating it thoroughly. The first date to appear in Harvey’s hand is 1580 (notably, that same year is also written by Harvey on the title page of his heavily annotated Machiavelli, Arte of warre): the year of an invasion of Spanish and papal troops in Ireland and the much-publicized inauguration of the Jesuit Mission to England; also the year of the “English Fury” of Mechelen against Spain, the Low Countries apparently being more on Harvey’s mind at the time: “Is not Ingland ouerlauish, in ayding [the] Low Cuntryes, & France?” (fol. 76v). The motivation behind Harvey’s subsequent repair to the Stategemata in 1588, the year of the invading Armada, is unambiguous, as he indicated in the title page annotation: “1588. The Revolution of my Reformation, or the Year of my Habituation” [Reuolutio mea[e] Reformationis, seu Annus Assuetudinis]. His association between the account of Cassius’s use of fire ships and those that helped to defeat Philip’s Armada, for example, seems to vindicate utterly Harvey’s pragmatic antiquarian impulse: “Owr Inglish pollicy against the Spanish Armada, this other day. ἕυρηκα [eureka]” (fol. 105r). See Tracey Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: The Careers of Sir Richard Morison, c. 1513-1566 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 107-9. K. F. Pantzer, “Berthelet, Thomas,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.
It is perhaps ironic that Harvey wrote on the title page of one of the two books bound together in this volume, both of them dedicated to the bon mot, “There is hardly any end to discourses [Discursuum vix ullus finis]” (fol. 73r). The 360-degree, wrap-around manuscript annotations that fill nearly every centimeter of white space in this narrowly margined book—consisting of a complete copy of Guicciardini’s Detti e fatti (1571), and a partial fragment of its companion imprint, Domenichi’s Facietie (1571)—positively burst at the seams, sometimes inspiring vertigo (especially when you rotate the images at 90-degree angles in the Archaeology of Reading viewer). Big things do sometimes come in small packages, however, and Harvey’s little octavo Domenichi/Guicciardini volume presents one of the most challenging, and revealing discursive spaces in all of Harvey’s great enterprise of annotation. Taken together, it is in this composite volume that Harvey shows most clearly to the latter-day reader the single, most utterly idiosyncratic aspect of his reading practice: the deployment of a personal dramatis personae, each character of which periodically struts across the stage of a book, much like a player delivering lines from Harvey’s own mental script, and embodying either an aspect of his own psyche, or one of his obsessional categories of self-cultivation. By far the most common of these (in this volume, and in the Archaeology of Reading corpus more generally) is Eutrapelus, a figure whose every facet seems to express Harvey’s powerful ambition to master modern languages, particularly in the service of wit, puns, and jests that “draw salt from the earth and light from the world” (fol. 82v; a gesture to the gospel, Matthew 5:13-16 that reverberates throughout the volume: see also fols. 47v, 185r).
As Harvey tells it in an especially unguarded moment of clear self-exposition, Eutrapelus is a picture of the courtly extrovert, a memorable orator and the natural life of any party (which Harvey, by all accounts, was not). The persona derived from the classical Roman eques Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus, a witty Roman and friend of Mark Antony mentioned repeatedly by Cicero): “Eutrapelus scornes himself, till he teaches all other, to pronounce more sensibly; to expresse more liuely; to speake more effectually; to resolue & persuade more powrefully, then anie other heretofore” (fols. 5v-6r). He continues further along in the Guicciardini: “Each is most prudent and most splendid. Others assert serious matters, but only Eutrapelus carries out serious matters. He accomplishes exceptional things. Eutrapelus changes great into small, and small into great.” This is the “mysterious transformation [arcana metamorphosis] of Eutrapelus,” Harvey continues, where the “serious matters of others must be converted into playthings. Your playthings must be converted into serious matters.” Seeming to enjoin himself to a lasting memory of the point, Harvey completes this strain of self-obligation in the second person singular: “One associates with strangers hyperbolically or ironically, but withhold this tendency with your friends. Apart from your own matters, all is for naught” (82v). Harvey has been so warned by his dear friend, Eutrapelus, who whispers in his ear from the margins of his books.
These imprinted texts, which seem to captivate Harvey and seduce his Eutrapelus, are basically playful and unserious – at turns flip and piquant and hardly canonical. The Italian merchant of Antwerp, Lodovico Guicciardini, is far better remembered for his Descrittione di…tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567), dedicated in the Italian and subsequent French editions to the monarchs of Spain and uniquely descriptive of the most noteworthy Netherlandish painters of that time, reflecting Philip II’s passion for their art. The eponymous Lodovico Domenichi, a humanist translator and editor of classical works, is similarly remembered for other books: his Polybius, Plutarch, and Pliny the Elder, and more recently for editing in 1559 one of the earliest collected editions of women poets (as well as a couple of frauds: the false “Letter of Aristeas” and a fake, neo-Latin Senecan play). Their relatively light texts, as is suggested by their respective, informal titles, appear almost as well-coiled springboards for Harvey’s fertile imagination and love of wordplay. They are not so much “wisdom literature” as echo-chambers in which he can overhear himself saying wise and clever things in polite conversation and in company (Harvey signed and dated the Guicciardini “1580,” suggesting that he may have annotated the volume while still eyeing a position at court). These light literary passages invoke the sense of a theater for the performance, ostensibly ex tempore, of Harvey’s extensive reading and ready command of the best works on a given or curious topic, sometimes digressing even into mini-bibliographies such as his memorable litany of thaumaturgy, which is barely connected to the presumed “anchor text” of the printed page on which it appears:
After the Introduction on Magic in Albertus Magnus’s De Mirabilibus Mundi, Roger Bacon’s De mirabili potestate artis et naturae, Pomponazzi’s De incantationibus, with Agrippa’s aptly titled De occulta philosophia and De inceritudine et vanitate scientarium. No collection of Thaumaturgy is more propitious than the De vita Apollonii Tyanei: with Gandini’s Stratagemata and the Polytechnics, Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. With Giovanni Battista Porta’s Phytognomonica, Albertus on physiognomy, and the De Secretis of Cardano and Wecker (fol. 34r).
See “Guicciardini, Lodovico.” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online (Oxford University Press, online edn., Sept. 2016) http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T035507; Deanna Shemek, “The Collector’s Cabinet: Lodovico Domenichi’s Gallery of Women,” in Pamela Benson and Victoria Kirkham (eds.), Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 239-62. AOR Bookwheel Blog Entries: Chris Geekie, “Harvey’s Joke Books;” “On Readers and Repetition.”
Harvey’s Livy is rightly famous, not only for the exhaustive Elizabethan rereading of it, but also for the Jardine/Grafton re-reading (i.e., “How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy”), which is, in turn, essential reading for any student of the Archaeology of Reading project (thus, no attempt at a rendition here). The imprint itself was produced by Johann Hervagius, the immediate successor of Erasmus’s favorite Basel printer Johann Froben, whose printer’s mark on the title page of Harvey’s Livy is the thrice-headed Hermes Trismegistus bearing, in deference to his former master, Froben’s justly famous device of the caduceus. This attribute of Mercury as both messenger god and the god of commerce lent inspiration to the formulation of Erasmus’s slightly arch commendation of the younger printer and his new “rebranding” strategy: “if your three-headed Hermes is propitious…I hope that god will show you a short and easy way to Plutopolis. That is the place to which most people in these days are running as fast as they can, but not all with like success.” In the same letter of August 1531, Erasmus singled out the late Froben for his singular dedication to the “noble enterprise” of printing: “Nothing bound me to him more closely than his life-long determination, at any cost of money and of labor, to promote general learning by the publication of the most approved authors.”
Harvey’s luxuriously printed copy of Livy is just such a book, sparing little “cost of money and of labor,” and it is perhaps a further coincidence that Erasmus’s letter was addressed to Hervagius from Freiburg im Breisgau, for that is also where the Swiss scholar, Henricus Glareanus, famously lectured on Roman history and produced an influential chronological table of ancient history that was frequently reprinted with Livy’s text, as in the case of Harvey’s copy. In yet another parallel, though one surely unknown to Harvey, Glareanus himself took to the habit of not only carefully annotating his own copy of the chronology in manuscript, but also allowing his students on numerous occasions to copy out these marginalia into their own printed copies of the tables.
While Harvey himself did not annotate his Glareanus chronology as heavily as he did Livy’s text, it is certain that Glareanus’ presence nonetheless inspired him to write out a separate apparatus of his own: a chronological “catalogue of famous men in Roman history, copied in sequence,” which fills the ample and convenient white space afforded by a much-indented table of imperial weights and measures in the front matter of the Hervagius edition (fol. 4r) and also reminds the latter-day reader that not all of Harvey’s manuscript annotations are necessarily anchored to the printed words they surround. This is clear because Harvey says as much in his marginalia, on multiple occasions praising Glareanus’s precise glosses and rigorous readings of Livy and, in this way, parroting his own sky-high self-expectation as one of the most rigorous readers in history: “The Livian expositions of Glareanus and Velcurio should be skimmed one by one, at least after reading each one of the individual books, in case one accidentally missed out on something worthy of particular notice. For some things here are rich in meaning and precise; and most are of at least some significance.” He continues, “No commentator before Velcurio was more learned than Glareanus, nor was there any more accurate chronologer and geographer before Funcius and Mercator” (fols. 431r, 432v).
Despite this high praise, the Swiss scholar proved less important to Harvey on what was, arguably, his single most important engagement with any text in his library: his personal service as a “professional reader” to Philip Sidney on the eve of Sidney’s much-anticipated embassy to the court of the newly anointed Holy Roman Emperor in Prague:
The courtier Philip Sidney and I had privately discussed these three books of Livy, scrutinizing them so far as we could from all points of view, applying a political analysis, just before his embassy to the emperor Rudolf II. He went to offer him congratulations in the queen’s name just after he had been made emperor. Our consideration was chiefly directed at the forms of states, the conditions of persons, and the qualities of actions. We paid little attention to the annotations of Glareanus and others (fol. 55r).
For Harvey, reading Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, the greatest of the ancient histories of Rome, which traces its rise from mythical origins to the reigns of Julius and Augustus Caesar, also achieved the very purpose of history itself: to remember forever the accomplishments of great men (Harvey’s called his front-matter index his “golden list of the most famous Romans” [celeberrimorum Romanorum aureus catalogus]).
The ultimate achievement of books of history, and of his own marginalia recorded within them, was to catalogue and “imprint” the bravery of these men of action indelibly, even “strikingly,” in an “art of remembering”—language that is unmistakably redolent of the physical action of a printing press. “Bravery” also appears as one of the single most frequently used words in all of Harvey’s marginalia, both in the works of Livy and across the entire Archaeology of Reading Harvey corpus: “These, then, are the most select of already famous men, from the superior history of the Roman Republic, in particular the bravest [praesertim suorum omnium fortissimo] and wisest of them all. Hardly any other memory list deserves a deeper imprint, so great is the importance of those brilliant names. In them is strikingly represented the art of remembering all Roman history” (fol. 4r). See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129:1 (1990): 30-78; Jardine, “‘Studied for Action’ Revisited,’” in Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing (eds), For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, 2 vols. (Boston: Brill, 2016), 2:997-1017; Anthony Grafton and Urs Leu (eds.), Henricus Glareanus’s (1488-1563) Chronologia of the Ancient World: A Facsimile Edition of a Heavily Annotated Copy Held in Princeton University Library (Boston: Brill, 2014). The original letter from Erasmus to Hervagios is printed in the front matter of Erasmus’s Epistularum floridarum liber unus (Basel: Hervagios, 1531), 3. Jaap Geraerts, AOR Bookwheel Blog Entry, “Pro Se Quisque.”
Harvey read the ancients and the moderns side by side, as did Machiavelli before him, something that is clear throughout the Elizabethan reader’s annotations in this well-worn copy of The arte of warre. The translator of the Arte della guerra, one of the earliest major works of latter-day military theory to appear in the English vernacular, may indeed have worked from an army tent, having served as a professional soldier to the Holy Roman Empire in its wars with the Ottomans for nearly a decade. Whitehorne’s literary efforts will also have drawn some inspiration during his earlier travels c. 1550 through Italy with his countryman and fellow translator of modern Italian works, Sir Thomas Hoby (the translator of Harvey’s annotated Castiglione, also in the Archaeology of Reading corpus), in search of ancient Roman antiquities. This coincidence of interests conspired to present to the English-speaking world the first translation of Machiavelli on modern warfare, which he published in 1560 with his own update of Machiavelli, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray, which includes the latest innovations in artillery, field communications, siege machinery, and fortification (Harvey annotated both these 1573 titles, though they are not bound together; his annotated Certain Waies is held in the library of the UK Ministry of Defence). The publication history of this edition of the Machiavelli is not entirely clear, though its dedication to Elizabeth I is as thoroughly patriotic as its contents are pragmatic. Whitehorne’s works were reprinted in multiple editions, and both tracts proved influential in the history of English military theory. The charming suite of fourteen illustrations of military formations at the end of Harvey’s Machiavelli is purely, and imaginatively, comprised of everyday type from the printer’s shop.
Unlike Machiavelli, Whitehorne did not detest the novelty of gunpowder in the execution of war. It was an original point of honor that Harvey’s long, loving, and effusive note on the verso of the title page seems alive to, but ultimately willing to concede. Harvey begins in English, commending to “euery publique, or priuate Actor in [the] world” the arts of defense, riding, and navigation, though it is an absolute requirement for him that “purposeth to sturr in greater actions” to master war above all else, together with the “brauest new Inuentions of Pyrotechny, Fortification, & such like.” His exposition then switches suddenly into Latin at the moment he turns to Caesar’s precedence (“Nothing to me is singular or distinguished, without the War of Caesar”), before granting, diplomatically, that a vigilant dedication to technological innovation had grown to become a thing of absolute necessity. “Pyrotechnics and Fortifications” become, respectively, the activities of “Vulcan and Daedalus….He who imitates, in the one [i.e. pyrotechnics], Vulcan or Prometheus, in the other [fortifications], Daedalus, or Archimedes, most dextrously will he be able to achieve what he wishes, and most efficiently.” See David Lawrence, The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603–1645 (Boston: Brill, 2009), 36-38. Gervase Phillips, “Whitehorne, Thomas,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Jan 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.
Melanchthon’s declamations, or university lectures, at Wittenberg constituted a performative element of his broader commitment to humanist curricular reform within higher education. Taking place at regular intervals as part of a student’s total immersion in Latin and Greek rhetoric and grammar, logic and dialectic, the declamations also frequently touched upon fundamental components of reformed Lutheran theology, in addition to decidedly nontheological matters such as Melanchthon’s often quoted exposition of the life and works of Erasmus. Erasmus was ubiquitous in the schoolrooms and universities of the early modern period, and Melanchthon famously harnessed and revised his educational works in the service of advancing Protestant evangelical teaching. The German Lutheran was paid the highest compliment through the customary inclusion of both men’s educational tracts in pedagogical anthologies printed throughout the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Harvey’s copy is preserved in a handsome, finely tooled early German binding on wooden boards, which bear the unmistakable portrait of the author in blind stamp.
Melanchthon’s Selectarum declamationum is an excellent example of a book that Harvey annotated only lightly and selectively, distinguishing, in a particular sort of way, a small array of topics that were of most interest to him from among many that he otherwise left untouched. Some of these are evident only when one examines evidence of Harvey’s customarily aggressive underlining of the original printed text, which yields in his Melanchthon repeated attention to the gout [podagra] (fols. 338r-38v, 383r)—a topic to which Harvey dedicates full-blown, discursive marginalia in his annotated copy of Olaus Magnus’s 1555 Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (fol. 286v), also part of the Archaeology of Reading corpus. Of greatest fascination to Harvey in Melanchthon are the lectures on astronomy (fols. 173v-79r) and mathematics (fols. 184r-90v), however, and his concern for the heavens is clearly echoed in more extensive notes preserved among the endpapers of this book.
An early title-page annotation reveals that the volume was acquired from one “Pinello” in France (“Emi à D. Pinello Gallo”), perhaps a reference to the legendary Italian collector of the second half of the sixteenth century, Gian Vincenzo Pinello; though this remains a speculation, forbidden books by Protestant authors were known to have been purged from his famous Paduan library before the compilation of an extant inventory of 1604. See Marcella Grendler, “Book Collecting in Counter-Reformation Italy: The Library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601),” Journal of Library History 16:1 (Winter 1981): 143-51. On Melanchthon see Sachiko Kusukawa (ed.), Melanchthon: Orations on Philosophy and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
This Swedish historian and geographer was brother to the Archbishop of Uppsala and, upon his brother’s death was appointed by Pius III to succeed him as archbishop-in-exile in Rome in the face of the Lutheran Reformation in Scandinavia. Olaus spent the rest of his life in Italy, serving as a representative at the Council of Trent in its first years and publishing biographies of the mother and daughter saints of Sweden, Saints Bridget and Catherine of Vadstena, among others. He is best known, however, for his encyclopedic knowledge of Nordic geography, natural history, trade, politics, ethnography, and folklore, particularly of his native Scandinavia and the Baltic. Despite its girth and great expense, Olaus’s massive twenty-two book history of the northern peoples of Europe was a bestseller throughout the middle decades of the sixteenth century, emerging in Latin, German, and Italian from the printing centers of Rome, Venice, Basel, Strasburg, Antwerp, and (nearly a century later) in further translations into English and Dutch.
Harvey’s annotated copy happens to be the editio princeps of this work, illustrated throughout with original, sumptuously executed woodcut engravings. He was also effusive with praise for its textual and visual contents, marking it as “useful as it is replete with the inquiry of the greatest and largest variety of things; it is illustrated not only with external examples, but also with distinct pictures of domestic matters; thus it is full of delightful, pleasant, and incredible things, easily imbuing the mind of the reader with enjoyment.” Curiously, Harvey also noted in his marginalia that the imprint was specifically “secured by the privilege of Pope Julius III.” Another extensive annotation on the final page of the volume responds to the printed contents in a far more immediate context, exploring the mythical origins of and practical remedies for the gout—a condition from which even the highest in the land suffered from at the time. A man ever mindful of his times, and aware of the gouty condition of several of the most prominent men in the land, he speculates: “Can it be that Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the Great Seal, and William Cecil, the English treasurer, are without this remedy? Two most prudent and delightful men” (fol. 286v). See Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus: Romæ 1555 [Description of the northern peoples: Rome 1555], ed. Peter Foote; Trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens; 2nd srs., vols. 182, 187-88 (3 vols.; London: Hakluyt Society, 1996-98). Amanda Brunton, AOR Bookwheel Blog Entry, “A Look at the Lightly Annotated Books.”
A fellow son of Saffron Walden and known for his own precocity at Cambridge, Smith was an elder patron to the much younger Harvey just as he had begun to flourish intellectually upon his matriculation to Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1566. Sir Thomas appears to have provided considerable guidance in personal and epistolary exchanges, and it was probably as Harvey contemplated Smith’s own life and career that the young scholar sought particular advice about the study of law (Smith was Regius Professor of Civil Law and made a study of the subject on a scholarly grand tour to France and northern Italy decades earlier). Smith also maintained a lifelong interest in language (much as Harvey did) and linguistics, making a name for himself through his advocacy of Erasmus’s reformed method for pronouncing ancient Greek during the early 1540s, and which also extended to the English language, culminating in the first Paris editions of his works on Greek and English, including the present De recta & emendata Linguae Anglicae scriptione (1568).
Adopting the form of a philosophical dialogue, Smith makes a forceful argument for the reform of the Latin-based alphabet in order to accommodate phonetic English, thereby promoting a native, vernacular English linguistic (and thus also literary) tradition. Harvey records this particular copy as an ex dono of 1569 from Smith’s nephew and secretary (“amici mei singularis”), John Wood, following its original presentation from the author himself to Wood (“ex ipso Auctoris dono”). Upon receipt, Harvey made of this a tertium quid, adding the further reflective and handsomely written note: “Most dear are the gifts that the giver makes precious.” See Sir Thomas Smith, Literary and Linguistic Works, ed. Bror Danielsson, Stockholm Studies in English, vols. 12, 50, 56. 3 vols. (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1963-83); E. J. Dobson, English Pronunciation, 1500-1700 (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:46-52; and Ian Archer, “Smith, Sir Thomas,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Jan 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.
The former court musician Thomas Tusser’s agricultural harvests were, perhaps ironically, far more successful in print than in the good earth. His treatise on farming went through over twenty editions from its first appearance in 1557, most of them Elizabethan (thus making it an all-time bestseller in the already storied history of Elizabethan verse), up through the initial decades of the 17th century. Its several iterations and expansions, reflected in the densely and variously worded title of Harvey’s particular edition, basically follow the rhythms of the seasons in serviceable and memorable georgic verse. The text offers up practical knowledge and advice of “husbandrie,” coupled with the domestic arts of household “huswifery,” providing invaluable insights into early modern country life set within the context of a modest farmstead (thus Harvey’s condescending characterization in the book’s end matter of Tusser as a pastoral poet fitted “for common life, and vulgar discourse”).
The handsome black letter of this imprint belonged to the embattled stationer Henry Denham, whose name appears often in the livery records of the Court of the Stationers for many, many infractions and fines—the telltale sign of a true entrepreneur ready to push the boundaries of what was permissible in this highly regulated commercial trade. The Worshipful Company of Stationers eventually made a virtue of Denham’s energy and intrigue, appointing him an official “searcher” and “renter warden” around the time he printed his 1580 Tusser, and “under-warden” of the Company years later (though he was fined again for using indecent speech to an upper warden in 1584). There is one other fairly random association worth mentioning, which is nonetheless particularly revelatory of the litigious and unscrupulous nature of the Elizabethan printing trade. Despite formally petitioning against crown grants of special printing privileges, Denham seems perfectly happy to have been assigned William Seres’s royal privilege of printing psalters and other liturgical books, and to take possession of all Seres’s “presses, letters, stock, and copies” of books for an annual rent. This furniture from Seres’s shop would very likely have included the original press on which Seres had printed Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Covrtyer decades earlier in 1561, which also bears Harvey’s extensive annotations and forms part of the Archaeology of Reading corpus.
Multiple evidences of provenance are preserved in Harvey’s Tusser, two of which merit particular note. The first is that of the bibliomane Richard Heber (1774-1833), whose collection of early English verse and drama was the stuff of legend even in his own lifetime, filling over a dozen volumes of sales catalogues at the end of his life. The loss of the book to the anonymity of the auction houses caused Virginia Stern to cite the location of the volume as unknown in her Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 238. Fate would conspire otherwise, however; Princeton University Library was the successful bidder in the December 2015 auction of Robert S. Pirie’s tremendous private collection of early English books, where Harvey’s Tusser had resided for many decades, making possible its last-minute inclusion (and the first comprehensive transcription of Harvey’s dense marginalia) within the Archaeology of Reading corpus. See Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135-68. Andrew McRae, “Tusser, Thomas;” and Patricia Brewerton, “Denham, Henry,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Jan 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com. AOR Bookwheel Blog Entries: Kristof Smeyers, “Sensation in the Margins” & “Diaspora/Rhyme;” Jaap Geraerts, “Harvey Reading Verse.”
