The Archaeology of Reading

Today I’d like to look at one of the especially tricky problems in transcribing Harvey, a symbol that has appeared twice so far in our corpus. It looks something like the letter Greek pi with a wavy line above it.

The first text that contains this symbol is Thomas Freigius‘ Paratitla seu synopsis pandectarum iuris civilis (printed 1583), a summary of the Digest (also known as the Pandects), a 6th century compendium of Roman law that became the foundation for developing legal systems throughout Europe in the early modern period.

This chart, with the pi symbol on the left side, appears on a blank page before the text proper begins. It appears to be a graphical representation of the division of the Pandects according to Freigius’s own summary. Perhaps the symbol is an abbreviation for the Pandects? Harvey was trained as a lawyer, but would he have used this symbol? With just this single example, it is difficult to come to any conclusion, but if we analyze the other example, we can begin to formulate a more substantial hypothesis.

The second instance appears in Olaus Magnus‘ Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (signed 1578 by Harvey). The work deals with the history and traditions of the Swedish people, a rather fascinating topic for Europeans at the time. In a section dealing with the legal customs of Sweden, Olaus describes the fact that many legal cases were addressed on the basis of swearing and upholding oaths. Harvey leaves the following marginal note:

Transcribed, this annotation reads:

Juramentum, maximum litium expediendarum remedium. π.de jurejur.l.1.

Et omnis Controuersiae finis. Decretal.c. Etsi Christus. eod.

The annotation immediately presents some problems for translation, especially with the abbreviations which clearly reference other works. But, ignoring those abbreviations for now, these lines translate roughly to:

An oath is the greatest help in expediting lawsuits. [π. de jurejur. l. 1]

And it is the end of every dispute. Decretal. [c.] “And so Christ.” [eod.]

Due to my ignorance of early modern law, my first approach to making sense of this note was rather banal: Google. But given Google’s massive efforts to digitize early modern books, a simple search can return some incredibly useful results. For example, searching for “iuramentum maximum litium expediendarum remedium” immediately gives us a work that provides a brief summary of all the sections (or titles) of both civil and canon law.

Here we have a 1562 edition of the Titulorum omnium iuris tam civilis, quam canonici expositiones, that is, explanations for all the titles of civil and canon law. This work was composed by the German humanist Sebastian Brant, perhaps more famous for his satire Ship of Fools.

Using Brant’s legal compendium, however, I was able to figure out the various abbreviations in Harvey’s note, and ultimately confirm the meaning of the strange pi symbol. First, by searching through the volume, I found that one of the principal legal titles of civil and canon law turns out to be “De iureiurando” (“On swearing oaths”), which solves the problem of making sense of Harvey’s abbreviation “de jurejur.” The title can be found in multiple places, both in the Pandects as well as in the Decretalium (the Decretals of Gregory IX), solving as well Harvey’s abbreviation “Decretal.” In fact, in the relevant section of Brant’s discussion of the Decretalium, we find many phrases identical to the ones found in Harvey’s marginal note:

Leaving aside once more the citation abbreviations (ff.eod.l.j, c., infra eod.), there are three relevant portions of text that jump out because they also appear verbatim in Harvey’s marginal note:

Est enim Iuramentum maximum litium expediendarum remedium

omnis controversiae finis.

& si Christus.

Perhaps Harvey himself had a book such as Brant’s before him while he was annotating Olaus’ book on Swedish traditions!

If we leave behind Brant’s book and search for the title “De iureiurando” in the full texts of both the Pandects and the Decretalium (also found on Google Books), the abbreviations start to make even more sense.

In the Pandects, Book 12, Title 2, “De jurejurando,” the first paragraph includes the phrase “Est enim Iuramentum maximum litium expediendarum remedium.”

Thus the first line of this title is the phrase that both Harvey and Brant extract and cite as “l.1.”

Likewise in the Decretalium, in Book 2, Title 24, “De iureiurando” we find that chapter 26 contains the text “Homines per maiorem suum iurant, & omnis controversiae eorum, ad confirmationem finis est iuramentum.”

In reality, this passage appears in a chapter (also known as a caput) that begins “Et si Christus,” which helps us make sense of the citation “c. Et si Christus.” It is clearly a way of helping a reader find a certain section by referring to the opening words.

In order to verify this method of abbreviation, I also looked around for information on early modern legal citation strategies. I managed to find a handy reference guide from the Harvard school of law, which, among many other things, informs us about the following strategies in the early modern period:

The basic form of their citations employs the abbreviation ‘ff’ for the Digest (probably a corruption of a curiously made upper-case ‘D’)

To this is added an abbreviated form of the title, and, normally, the first word of the fragment, frequently preceded by ‘l.’, for lex.

Many of the early printed editions also give an alphabetical listing of the first word(s) of the leges (fragments) in each of the parts of the Corpus.

If the reference is to a fragment that is in the same title in which the reference occurs, eo. (for eodem titulo) will be substituted for the name of the title.

Thus, we are in a position to begin translating Brant’s abbreviations:

ff.eod.l.j

ff – the Digest/Pandects

eod. – in the same title under discussion [i.e. “De iureiurando”]

l.j – in the first fragment (where j is often used for the Roman numeral i)

Likewise, with the other phrase from the Decretalium:

c. & si Christus infra eod.

c. & si Christus – in the chapter (caput) beginning “Et si Christus”

infra eod. – later, in the same title [i.e. “De iureiurando”]

This exact same method of citation can be seen in Harvey, the only difference being that, while Brant’s compendium uses “ff” to refer to the Digest/Pandects, Harvey uses the pi symbol with the wavy line.

π.de jurejur. – in the Pandects, under the title “De iureiurando”

l.1. – fragment 1.

Decretal.c. Etsi Christus. eod. – Decretalium, in the chapter beginning “Etsi Christus,” under the same title [i.e. “De iureiurando”].

Given that we earlier hypothesized that Harvey was using this symbol to refer to the Pandects, we now have even more convincing evidence. We also have an interesting point of departure for thinking about the ways in which Harvey may have been reading a description of Swedish traditions and customs. But I’ll leave that for another time!

Happy 2016 from the Archaeology of Reading! This week we are getting back into the swing of things, and to celebrate the new year I thought I’d write another short post about the challenging (though fun) world of translating Harvey’s marginalia. Today, we’re going to look at two terms that I’ve run across several times in the Domenichi text but that also appear elsewhere in the AOR corpus: the Greek term “διότι” and the English “descant.”

1. διότι

This Greek term generally means something like “for the reason that” or “because.” It would not normally cause any problems, except for the fact that occasionally Harvey writes the word, alone, in unexpected places. For instance, in the right margin of the following passage, bracketed by a longer note:

Or here, following a passage:

Translating this marginal note as “because” didn’t seem to make much sense to me. Thankfully, a while back I was chatting with Professor Grafton, who informed me of the philosophical usage of this term, specifically in Aristotle; διότι appears frequently throughout the Aristotelian corpus as a specific kind of analysis, when someone investigating the nature of things comes to understand “the reason why” (διότι) a particular thing is the way that it is. In other words, an argument can be described as διότι if it provides an explanation for some phenomenon. (If you’d like to learn more, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good introduction to Aristotle’s method of analysis.)

Given Harvey’s education and training as a lawyer, his usage of these technical terms is unsurprising. If we look back at the first image, the word appears next to the lines where we find a specific phrase, both underlined and marked with a plus sign: “usano dire i medici, che trovata la cagione del male, è facile trovar il rimedio” (doctors are used to saying that, once the reason for pain is found, it is easy to find the remedy).

In the second example we find a similar reference to the cause or reason for something. The Italian text (once more containing underlines and a plus sign) reads: “Diogene, domandato, per qual causa l’oro sia pallido, rispose: perché ei sa che ha molti persecutori” (Diogenes, when asked the reason for which gold is pale, responded: “Because it knows it has many persecutors”).

In both cases, Harvey seems interested in the specific sort of knowledge being demonstrated through these phrases. A third case may shed further light on his interest in this phrase (though it probably won’t provide us with enough information to exclaim “διότι!”) At the beginning of his massively annotated Livy, we find the word hiding down at the bottom, following the author’s prefatory note in which he explains the genesis of his history of Rome.

In this instance, the word is qualified with “politicum, et polemicum” (political and martial). As διότι seems like it’s being used as a substantive, the meaning of the phrase is probably something like “the political and martial reasons why.” If we look at the text directly above this annotation, we find that Livy is asking his readers to attend to certain aspects of Roman history: “The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these—the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended” (translation by Benjamin Oliver Foster, online Loeb edition).

“The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these-the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended” (translation by Benjamin Oliver Foster, online Loeb edition).

It seems to me like Harvey is making a distinction concerning the sort of knowledge that Livy is offering in his history. The work will offer a “reason why” for the founding of the city of Rome and its subsequent development.

2. descant

This word initially gave me some trouble, and I found it several times throughout the Domenichi text:

The form looks Latin, though if this were the case, it wouldn’t make much sense sitting on its own. After some time scratching my head, I realized that it’s an English term used primarily in the realm of music. The first definition provided by the OED reads: “The technique of writing or improvising music in parts, originally according to fixed rules in note-against-note style. Later more generally: the addition of a melodious accompaniment to an existing melody or harmonized tune.”

“The technique of writing or improvising music in parts, originally according to fixed rules in note-against-note style. Later more generally: the addition of a melodious accompaniment to an existing melody or harmonized tune.”

In this semantic domain, we can find an example in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, in a witty exchange between Lucetta and Julia: “You are too flat / And mar the concord with too harsh a descant.”

The word also has a more figurative usage when referring to someone’s ability to discourse at length on a subject. However Harvey seems to be using a combination of the two; that is, his “descant” appears to refer to a sort of witty improvisation on a given subject matter. In both of the cases above, someone receives an insult before turning the phrase back on their interlocutor.

These moments of quick wit under pressure seem particularly interesting to Harvey, and indeed the word “descant” appears elsewhere as a quality desirable in the ideal courtier. In a long annotation moving across two pages (and perpendicular to the text!) we find:

Harvey starts off by saying, “He shall never be good at an extemporall descant, that hath not all Heywood, and Martial ad unguem.” The Latin phrase literally means “to the fingernail,” though translates into something like “by heart.” Thus the ideal courtier should memorize the epigrams of John Heywood and Martial first and foremost; after that, the pithy aphorisms of Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch; then, a book known as the Mensa Philosophica, an early modern work which has a collection of jokes suitable for the dinner table; finally, two Italian texts, the current book (Domenichi’s) and the fourth section of Stefano Guazzo‘s The civil conversation, a book of manners which also has a large collection of jokes. As a kind of addendum, Harvey also mentions the “most clever exchanges and rounded logic of Seneca’s Tragedies.”

I’m not sure that memorizing these works today would provide the same sort of urbane wit that Harvey was looking for. It certainly is an interesting list though.

The complexity and density of the marginalia found throughout the Domenichi/Guicciardini volume makes it difficult to describe—let alone categorize—Harvey’s peculiar manner of annotation. As I mentioned in an earlier post, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in responding to the printed text. Originally, I referred to Harvey’s practice in this instance as that of writing a “manual,” ideally for the training of a gentleman of the court. I still feel that this is the case; that is, I feel that Harvey intended for his annotations to be not only read but also used by his reader as an aid to becoming a more virtuous person.

One indication that the text is intended to be used can be found in the frequent repetition of names, book titles, and concepts in the form of digestible phrases, almost always in Latin. Harvey himself explains the pragmatic scope of this repetition in one of the few marginal notes that contains some degree of reflection on the activity of annotating.

This entire page contains marginalia calling on the reader in English to embrace repetition. Immediately in the top margin we find:

Farther down the page in the middle of the text, Harvey reminds his reader that happiness is not necessarily the goal of such activity. Instead, repetition is an essential form of exercise.

Exercise, practice, habit, self-improvement—these are crucial elements in Harvey’s manual, and the words themselves return frequently. And in case the reader hasn’t yet learned this message by heart, the remaining Latin phrases on this page offer further exhortations. In the bottom margin, we find:

The usage of the imperative mood offers further evidence of the practical nature of these marginalia. Here and elsewhere, the verbs cease to describe the world and begin to tell the reader what to do. Indeed, in the left margin of this same page, Harvey orders his reader to engage actively with the text:

Repetition in itself is not necessarily a useful activity; for it to be most effective, one must be “present”—that is, reading and repeating with with one’s full attention. This note also includes a phrase that will appear occasionally throughout the volume: Hoc age (Do this).

Unlike in other instances of the word “hoc,” here Harvey capitalizes the letter h, lending a more abstract sense to the meaning of “this.” Rather than directing his reader towards a specific act, Harvey seeks a specific behavior and attitude: Do This—not in vain, but with as much presence as possible; Do This—and live well; Do This—and devour the sun.

As a result of this insistence on reading, rereading, and contemplating marginalia as a means to practical ends, Harvey seems to have produced a sui generis form of writing. For lack of a better word, I have been calling it a manual, but the descriptive power of this label will always be partial. Much work still remains to be done on the form of the notes as a whole, which also involves making sense of the time periods in which certain marginalia were written. I mentioned in my last post that we can approximate dates ranging from 1580 to 1608. In fact, Harvey seems to have spent so much time on this project that he even had to remind himself to stop “scribbling” and simply enjoy the work that he had already produced.

Today I’d like to share one of the many complex—and often maddening—aspects of working with Harvey’s marginalia: his neologisms.

His annotations throughout the Domenichi text (which I shared in my last post) frequently contain technical words, mainly borrowed—or entirely invented retrospectively—from Greek. I say “technical” because these words seem to serve Harvey as a means of reducing a particular philosophical concept to a single term. For instance:

Autotechnia, Cosmopraxia, Polytechnia, Polyptaxia, Polytechnus.

Almost all of these specific examples exist in Ancient Greek literature, although they are quite rare (for example, take the entry for polytechnia in the Liddell & Scott Lexicon, which attests to only four uses in total). However, the component parts of these words are not particularly complicated, for instance: poly → ‘many’; technia → ‘skillfulness in an art.’ The problem comes from translating them into English, especially in the context of Harvey’s more compact aphorisms.

“Ah, when Enteleches, Euschemon, Eudaemon?” One might consider translating these terms as “actual, refined, blessed.” Anyone who knows a bit of Greek will probably immediately jump to correct me, “Yes, but it could also mean . . .”

These terms are typically associated with the practical man. Indeed, immediately following this list of three characteristics Harvey writes, in English:

“Everie pragmatician castes about for life, and scoures the coast to the purpose.” This phrase serves as a reminder that the practical person must always be on the lookout for useful things (phrases, activities, models) that contribute to one leading a fuller life. The implication seems to be that success as a pragmatician might lead to becoming Enteleches, Euschemon, and Eudaemon.

A key term that returns frequently in conjunction with practical activity is, in fact, enteleches, which also appears in the more properly philosophical form of entelechia. This word might be familiar to anyone who has studied ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle, where entelechia means something like “actualization”—as in the actualization or realization of something that exists potentially. We could translate this term as “actualization” in Harvey’s marginalia, but things become a bit trickier once we see his other, more fanciful, uses:

“Sola est aetherea Theurgia, quae velocissimas alas addit aethereae Entelechia.” → “Divine Theurgy alone is that which gives quickest wings to divine Entelechia.”

The meaning of this phrase is not immediately clear, which makes translating it into English rather challenging. And if Entelechia is a practical activity, what are we to make of this term Theurgia, which might be referring to magical ritual? How does “divine-working” fit with “practical actualization”?

One question you might be asking yourself: Does Harvey only use these peculiar terms in Latin? In almost all cases, the answer seems to be yes. However, I have come across one peculiar instance where Harvey’s technical vocabulary makes an appearance in Italian, when he is responding to a specific joke in the book itself. As we saw in my last post, Harvey’s responses to the text are almost always brief, and not particularly interesting. Occasionally, however, something seems to strike his fancy enough to evoke a comment.

Here’s a translation and transcription of this joke, which is rather offensive:

Un cavallo infuriatio, il quale traheva di calci, havea quasi gittato in terra un gentilhuomo. Quivi era una donna, che attigneva dell’acqua, la quale le disse; Gentil’huomo, voi siete bello: non habbiate paura d’una donna brutta. Rispose il cavaliere; Bella giovane, il mio cavallo ha questa usanza, che quando e’ vede qualche bagascia, fa le pazzie, si che poco mancò, che non mi habbia gettato in terra. Egli non ha punto paura delle donne da bene, ma ben conosce al fiuto le dishoneste puttane: & ciò è di sua natura. Detto questo se n’andò via ratto.

[An enraged horse was bucking and almost threw a gentleman to the ground. Nearby was a woman drawing some water, who said, “Good sir, you’re handsome, you shouldn’t fear an ugly woman.” The knight responded, “Fair young lady, my horse has this tendency, that when he sees a tramp he loses his mind, and here he almost threw me to the ground. He’s not at all afraid of decent women, but he has an excellent nose for recognizing dishonest harlots, and that is his nature.” Having said this, he left at once.]

The editor of the book remarks that the knight’s response is a motto discortese, that is, a merely “discourteous” quip. I suppose we can’t ask too much from 16th century editors. The interesting part is Harvey’s comment.

“Cosmo-critical horse.”

In reality, the word cosmocriticus is an invention of Harvey’s, and it means something like “a critic of the world.” Elsewhere in the book, we find Harvey setting up this idea in opposition to another term, logocriticus.

“I prefer to be a critic of the world than a critic of words.” Here Harvey is contrasting the man of action (i.e. the pragmatician) with the man of words. Strange that we should then find the embodiment of the critic of the world in the form of a horse.