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History of Reading

The Archaeology of Reading Hamlet

Posted on: December 13, 2017 Chris Geekie Leave a comment

This past summer I had the opportunity to use the Archaeology of Reading to help teach a course for a group of community college students visiting Johns Hopkins. This course was part of a national, Mellon-funded initiative to bring together community colleges with research institutions such as Hopkins in order to introduce students to high level research environments in both sciences and the humanities. I was tasked with developing a syllabus that would make use of the Archaeology of Reading as a way to engage students directly in digital humanities research.

The plan was to work with the students to analyze and transcribe an annotated copy of Hamlet currently held at Hopkins:

The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark (1676)

 

These marginalia and textual changes are found in a copy of the 1676 edition. They were made by the 18th-century English actor and theater director, John Ward.

John Ward (1704-1773)

I produced a syllabus which divided the course into three sections:

1. Reading Hamlet and learning about Early Modern England

2. Learning about digital tools and environments

3. Transcribing the annotations using the workflow developed during AOR phase 1

For the first section of the course, spent a couple of weeks going through the play, talking about the plot, analyzing the characters, and discussing our interpretations. We made use of a good critical edition of the text from Oxford Classics. This edition offers useful footnotes for explicating difficult language and passages.

The Oxford Hamlet also provides an excellent introduction to the complex printing history of the play. In reality, there are three early printed editions of Hamlet, all of which contain substantial differences between them: the “Bad” Quarto (Q1) from 1603, the “Good” Quarto (Q2) from 1604, and the First Folio (1623).

“Bad” Quarto (1603)
“Good” Quarto (originally 1604)
First Folio (1623)

The Oxford edition reproduces the text from the First Folio, while also including discussions of Q1 and providing important sections of Q2 in an appendix. As a result, not only did we discuss the play itself, but we also considered one of the central themes of scholarship dealing with marginalia, the varying interpretations and modes of reading across different periods.

From there I introduced the students to several online resources, such as Early English Books Online and the Archaeology of Reading. With EEBO, we were able to start looking at the format and layout of early editions of Shakespeare.

To acclimate them to rather alien fonts and to help prepare them for transcribing the Hamlet marginalia, I introduced my students to the AOR viewer. I asked them to practice transcribing sections of printed text from Machiavelli’s Arte of Warre (1573), which has a rather tricky font for those unaccustomed to looking at sixteenth-century books.

I then asked them to turn to Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia. We looked at one of his longer notes, found in an English translation of Castiglione’s The Courtyer (1561), which describes the ideal characteristics of a courtier. It also proved to be an interesting moment of comparison with the character of Hamlet, described by Ophelia as “the glass of fashion and the mould of form.”

After some practice in transcribing print and handwriting, I divided up the text into chunks of about 11 pages and assigned them to each of the students. I had eight students total, so this proved to be a very manageable division of labor. The marginalia themselves were also fairly straightforward:

Many of the notes—perhaps unsurprisingly for a stage manager—dealt with the entrances of characters, including where they might be positioned. In this instance, the ghost ought to be “under the stage.”

Yet modifications to the text, at least to this extent, was not something initially included in the development of the AOR transcription paradigm. Harvey and Dee, though often engaging actively with their reading material, are not particularly interested in correcting or changing the printed word to make it easier to perform. With Ward, there were several ways of “interacting” with the text:

In this example we see several novel elements:

1.a large deletion of sections of text

2. a new symbol (looks like a long line with hatching)

3. the replacement of words and phrases (“my good lord” → “good my Lord”)

4. insertion of new elements, such as punctuation (ubiquitous in Ward’s promptbook)

To capture this information, I had to slightly modify our XML schema by incorporating a new tag and including a new symbol. This work was not particularly challenging, and our programmers were able to adapt to this different schema relatively easily.

To help the students in their transcriptions, almost all of whom had never worked with any sort of machine-readable language, I produced a simple transcriber’s manual (a pale imitation of the work done by Jaap and Matt for AOR). I also created a template XML file, which contained examples of the basic elements needed to transcribe a page of the Hamlet. All the students would have to do is copy, paste, and modify in order to capture the relevant information. These files, as well as the final XML files, were uploaded to a GitHub repository, which basically follows the same format as the AOR one.

Overall the students were quite invested in the work, although it took awhile to fall into a rhythm for accurately transcribing texts printed over three hundred years ago. We used class sessions as transcription workshops, where students were able to make use of laptops provided by the library. I was able to answer any questions the students had, and being together made it easier for them to check each others work.

Eventually the students produced XML files for the entire work, which can be found here, on a separate instance of the AOR viewer.

The interface is identical to that of AOR phase 1, although it is immediately clear that Ward’s style of annotation clearly functions much more differently than Harvey’s or Dee’s.

In addition to producing a tool for scholar’s to consult when researching early annotated editions of Hamlet, the students also stumbled across interesting elements in the text. For instance, one student found one of the earliest examples of an emendation to a particularly obscure passage in the play:

After doing some research, we discovered that Ward’s emendation (“hernshaw”) does not derive from any earlier editions of Hamlet but rather represents an attempt to clarify the ambiguous identity of “handsaw,” which is actually a bird and not a carpenter’s tool.

Another student focused on the interesting punctuation in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in Act 3:

This student ultimately gave a fascinating presentation during a symposium in August on the different uses of punctuation in this very speech. Unsurprisingly, John Ward is relying on grammatical and theatrical conventions peculiar to his own epoch. I would say that the transcription process, however slow going it might have been, actually allowed the students to get much closer to the text than we had during our close reading of the play.

In addition to reading and transcribing Hamlet, we were also treated to a series of fantastic presentations from researchers at Hopkins working on AOR. Earle Havens introduced the class to the digital humanities and the use of digital tools for visualizing history, Jaap Geraerts skyped in from across the pond to talk about the process of developing AOR’s XML schema, Mark Patton described how programmers and humanists work together to make materials accessible to everyone, and Neil Weijer gave multiple presentations on early modern England, the history of the book, and Shakespearean forgeries.

We also had the opportunity to go on several trips to visit various nearby labs and libraries to expose students to relevant and interesting research materials, as well as the many kinds of skilled professionals and scholars who work around them. We got to see some surgery performed on early modern book-binding structures in JHU’s Conservation Lab; we learned about print-making and early Shakespearean prints at the Baltimore Museum of Art; at the Evergreen Library, the students learned about the varieties of early books, including Audubon’s Birds of America in its enormous elephant folio edition. In the last week of class, we visited Washington D.C., where we went to the Library of Congress to see rare objects such as the first map containing America and Thomas Jefferson’s library. We also visited the Folger Shakespeare Library, where we were given a tour of the some of the library’s annotated Shakespeare texts. We also stopped by the ongoing exhibition on painting Shakespeare across time, an exhibit definitely worth seeing, especially since it lets you try on costumes:

The summer course turned out to be excellent research experience for the students, who were able to engage in more “traditional” methods, as well as explore and develop new types of digital scholarship. They were able to collectively explore the text of Hamlet at a high level of detail, learn about the history of the book (including the methods of early printing, typography, and printmaking), and develop an understanding of basic digital humanities tools, particularly the use of XML to help capture marginalia and textual modifications. AOR turned out to be a robust pedagogical tool. It immediately provided a platform for the easy exploration of early modern books, typography, and paloegraphy. More fundamentally, the process of producing a transcription for a new annotated book allowed students to develop new digital skills as well as hone their ability to carefully attend to the word on the page. Transcribing proved to be immensely useful in helping students both learn about the collective nature of research, as well as explore in a new way one of the most fascinating texts of English literature.

About Chris Geekie

Case Studies

Swedes, Lawyers, and Pi

Posted on: July 1, 2016 Chris Geekie Leave a comment

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.

Pi symbol

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.

Thomas Freigus, Paratitla (1583)

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:

Olaus Magnus, Historia

Pi - Olaus big

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.

Pi - Brant Titles

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.

Brant - Narrenschiff (1512)

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:

Pi - Brant title summary

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.”

Pi - Digest

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.”

Pi - Decretalium

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!

About Chris Geekie

Case Studies

Some notes on translating Harvey

Posted on: January 12, 2016 Chris Geekie Leave a comment

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:

Dioti

Or here, following a passage:

Dioti 2

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.

Dioti 3

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:

Descant 1

Descant 2

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:

Descant 3

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.

About Chris Geekie

Case Studies

On Readers and Repetition

Posted on: September 1, 2015 Chris Geekie Leave a comment

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.

Full Page

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

Repetition
“Enjoy the soverain repetition of your most excellent Notes.”

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.

No felicitie
“No felicitie, to the repetition, & the exercise of the most essential points.”

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:

Quotidie lege, lege
“Read, read daily. But also repeat, repeat, repeat daily.”

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:

Nec vane
“Do not repeat in vain, but Do This most attentively.”

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).

Hoc fac et vives
“Do This, and you will live. Do This, and you will excel.”

 

Comede Solem
“Devour the Sun and 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.

scribling
“No more scribling: but enjoy the excellent, & divine Notes, which you have allreddi written.”

About Chris Geekie

Case Studies, History of Reading

Poets, popes, and polemics; or, methods for dating marginalia

Posted on: July 15, 2015 Chris Geekie Leave a comment

One of the more fascinating aspects of working with the tangle of marginalia found in Domenichi’s Facetie, motti, et burle is the constant reminder that Harvey returned to and annotated the same book over a long period of time (1580–1608). Apart from clear visible differences in the quality of the handwriting and ink, there are other clues that help to date certain notes.

For instance, one might simply find the year written on the page, usually indicating when Harvey bought or finished the book. In the books that we are working with at the moment, several contain the date 1580:

Livy
Livy, Romanae historiae principis, decades tres […], 1555
Machiavelli
Machiavelli, The Arte of Warre [tr. Peter Whitehorn], 1573

Guicciardini
Lodovico Guicciardini, Detti et fatti piacevoli et gravi, 1571

Beyond this rather simple recording of the year, there are other methods for narrowing down the period of various marginalia. Since our job as transcribers requires tagging the names of people or books that we come across, I frequently end up digging through online catalogues trying to make sense of obscure names and book titles. As a result, I often find publication dates, which help determine a terminus post quem for particular comments.

For example, on a blank page found at the end of the Domenichi text — in reality, facing the page of the Guiccardini text marked 1580 —, Harvey twice quotes the epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso.

Tasso 1
Nel mondo mutabile, e leggiero, Costansa è spesso il variar pensiero. Canto 5. del Tasso.
Tasso 2
Eccoti, il Domator d’ogni gagliardo: come dice Tasso del bravo Rinaldo. Chi fu, ch’ardi cotanto, e tanto fece?

This poem was first published in its entirety in Italy in 1581, providing us with a rather solid chronological anchor. And given the uniformity between these notes and the surrounding annotations, it seems likely that the entire page was written by Harvey at the same time.

Using a similar approach to dating the various books referenced by Harvey, it becomes immediately clear that he returned to this same text with pen in hand much later than 1580–81. Earlier in the Domenchi, we find the following written in the head margin of a page:

Greene 1
Gascoignes Steele Glasse. Greenes Quipp for an Upstart Courtier.

And then further down:

Greene 2
The parts of the Connicatching Art. New tricks of cousenage.

Much like the vast majority of marginalia in this book, these comments have nothing to do with the printed text. Instead, both of these notes point to Robert Greene, a writer with whom Harvey quarreled in 1592 following the publication of the former’s Quip for an Upstart Courtier. That book, which contained an attack on the Harvey family, appeared in print for the first time in 1592, leading to Harvey himself publishing a response later that year, Four Letters and Certain Sonnets. The references to “Cousenage” and “Connicatching” allude to a series of pamphlets written by Greene between 1591 and 1592.

The other work mentioned, George Gascoigne’s The Steel Glas, was published in 1576 – which doesn’t really help us make sense of the chronology. But if we look at Harvey’s Four Letters, we find that Gascoigne is mentioned several times when Harvey begins belittling Greene:

“I once bemoaned the decayed and blasted estate of Master Gascoigne, who wanted not some commendable parts of conceit and endeavour, but unhappy Master Gascoigne, how lordly happy in comparison of most unhappy Master Greene?”

One wonders whether Harvey was making notes of the polemic as it was going on. Is he simply responding to contemporary events? Is he preparing remarks for his own publications? Unfortunately, any hypothesis immediately becomes much more complicated when we move across the head margin to a note on the facing page, also written with a very similar quality of ink and writing instrument.

Madd world
Its a madd world mie Masters. The title of a new booke.

This “new book” is Thomas Middleton’s play A Mad World, My Masters, first printed in 1608. Clearly these notes could not have been written earlier, but what does this date mean for the references to Greene? Or is the title of Middleton’s play an anomaly?

Moving forward, on the next page we find Harvey commenting about a peculiar open letter written to the pope by an anonymous Bolognese baker, and still with the same quality of handwriting and ink that appears on the previous page:

Baker of Bologna 1
The Baker of Bononie, & owr Martin Marr-Prelate, two good od fellows, made it a pollicie, to iest at reverend Fathers, & all solemne Ceremonies.

And on the facing page:

Baker of Bologna 2
Litera cuiusdam Pistoris Bononiensis ad Papam. Fideliter versa ex Italico Exemplari, impresso Florentiae.

This second marginal note is actually a verbatim transcription of the title page of a book printed only once in Latin in England in 1607, meaning that, as with the references to Tasso, we have a stable chronological anchor. Yet now, within the space of four pages, we find references to a polemic from 1592 and two books printed for the first time in 1607 and 1608.

I’ll end with one more perplexing observation. Several pages after the reference to Greene’s polemical “Upstart Courtier,” Harvey again mentions his rival’s pamphlets on the art of “Conny-Catching.” Yet he seems anything but upset with his former adversary. In fact, he puts Greene on the same level as one of his other favorite writers of courtly life and merry-making, Pietro Aretino.

Greene 3
The first, second, & third part of Connicatching; merrie Stories of odd feats, shifts, and Coosenages: like the Courtesan practises, & impostures, in Aretins Dialoghi Capricciosi. For pranks, shifts, & suttleties of the world in esse; no where more, then in those Dialogues of Aretin; the Apologie for Herodote; the Connicatching Art; & the finest Jests.

It’s unclear exactly how these things all fit together, and I am happy to leave the question to much more knowledgeable and perceptive scholars.

About Chris Geekie

Case Studies

On neologisms and horses

Posted on: April 14, 2015 Chris Geekie Leave a comment

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

polytechnia

polytechnus

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.

ahquando

“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:

eueriepragmatician

“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:

entelechia1

“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.

battuta

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.

cavallocosmocritico

“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.

maloesse

“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.

About Chris Geekie

Case Studies, History of Reading

Harvey’s joke books

Posted on: March 18, 2015 Chris Geekie Leave a comment

Greetings, I’m one of the transcribers working on Harvey’s annotations for the Archaeology of Reading project, and I’ll also be contributing to the blog as I go along. I thought I’d start with an introduction to the text that I’m currently working on: a single volume comprising two sixteenth-century Italian joke books bound together and currently residing in the Folger Library:

Domenichi, Lodovico. Facetie, motti, et burle di diversi signori et persone private (Venice, 1571)

Guicciardini, Lodovico. Detti et fatti piacevoli et gravi (Venice, 1571)

A significant chunk of the Domenichi text is missing (the first 320 pages), but here’s the title page for the Guicciardini inserted right into the middle of the volume.

small_title

You can probably see why Harvey’s use of this book is so interesting: he seems to be completely allergic to blank space.

Even with just this title page, several interesting aspects of Harvey’s practice are noticeable. Differences in ink, position, and content within the annotations suggest that he came back to the book at several points and for different reasons. These layers provide some interesting clues to the way Harvey was making use of the book as an object. For instance, we see him dating and signing the page, a practice he follows in most of his other books:

date gh

underline

He also underlines some of the text, as well as intervening to offer some orthographical corrections (note the semicolon after “Guicciardini”).

We also see Harvey’s use of different languages. Though the majority of marginalia on this page are in Latin, there is a smattering of French in the left margin:

languages

The content of this margin is also a good example of the peculiar character of Harvey’s annotations: they don’t always seem to fit together in an immediately recognizable fashion. Here we see Harvey commenting on the qualities of the professional secretary in Latin, while in French he seems to be talking about the goal of Olympic combat, which ought to be virtue and not gold or silver. An immediate connection between these two annotations might be made through the reference to Vertu/Virtutis, but it’s always difficult to make sense of Harvey’s choice of content, language, and position within the book as a whole.

In reality, the majority of the marginalia throughout this volume rarely has to do with the printed text. Instead, Harvey seems to have used the blank space in these books to write a sort of manual or guide for the practical gentleman. “Manual” might be too strong a word, as there does not appear to be larger cohesive structure, but rather a vast sea of aphorisms, citations, and other remarks—all in various languages.

englishmarginalia

latinmarginalia

morningsun

This is not to say that there aren’t any larger conceptual patterns, and in later posts, I’ll point out some of those recurring elements.

Yet, despite the overwhelming amount of material in the margins seemingly unrelated to the text, Harvey does actually respond to what he’s reading. For example, after a joke he might leave a note about his reaction.

response

The majority of these “responses” tend to follow the end of the story or joke and are typically in Italian or Latin.

dextre

savio

gelosia

In rare moments, however, Harvey seems to have been particularly fond of a joke, and his response seems a bit more personal. I’ll end with a joke that pleased Harvey so much that he wrote a comment in English.

One day, while the Archbishop of Toledo was standing at his window, he heard a peasant repeatedly beating a donkey. Moved by compassion, the archbishop began to shout from the window, “Stop, stop, or you’ll kill him, you tactless peasant!” The peasant responded, “Forgive me, m’lord, I didn’t know my donkey had relatives at court.”

[My Asse confuted.]

(It might be a bit tricky at first, but those are two s’s and an e!)

About Chris Geekie

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