The Archaeology of Reading

  • What is the Archaeology of Reading?
  • Who are the Archaeologists?
  • Partner Institutions
  • Contact
  • The Books and Their Readers
  • Bookwheel Blog
  • How to use AOR
  • Downloads
  • AOR Data

Go To AOR Viewer

Category Archives: Case Studies

Case Studies, History of Reading, Scholarly dissemination

Virtual Office Hours

Posted on: March 25, 2020 Neil Weijer Leave a comment

This past week, several of the archaeologists partnered up with the Bibliographical Society of America to offer a webinar on the uses of AOR for remote teaching and research. Many thanks to Erin Schreiner for including us in the series, as well as for pulling together a wonderful list of digital resources available for use as many of us go virtual on short notice.

 

Here’s a quick index to the topics covered in the webinar:

[3:03] Earle Havens, What is AOR and how can I Start Using It? – introduces the project and its search and linking capabilities.

[17:35] Jaap Geraerts, AOR Search Strategies – offers a deeper dive into the search functions and AOR’s underlying data model.

[28:48] Neil Weijer, Teaching with AOR – walks through the exercises and types of activities available on the “Teaching with AOR” pages, and how to begin creating your own using the HTML Export capabilities in the viewer and the resources on the AOR site.

[42:50] Matt Symonds, AOR as Part of a Wider Online Research Environment – explores how the external links in the viewer can be used to pursue research topics in the broader landscape of digital early modern books, and some suggestions where to start.

The notes from our presentations, along with a subject guide to the digitized books in the AOR viewer, are available on our “Downloads” page. All of them contain links to pages in the viewer, as well as resources on our site. We hope that it helps those of you looking to incorporate virtual rare books into your syllabi for the remainder of this semester and in the future.

The series of webinars on digital resources, along with links to recordings, are available on the Bibliographical Society of America’s website.

Be safe, everyone.

Tags: IIIFOnline InstructionTeaching

About Neil Weijer

Case Studies, History of Reading

School’s In Session

Posted on: September 10, 2019 Neil Weijer Leave a comment
Notes on Juvenal’s Satires, a colored woodcut from a 1498 edition in the George Peabody Library  (Incun. 1498 J592)

As the new academic year comes rolling in, we’re ready to hit the books again. We’ve added a few new elements to the site that we hope you’ll find useful.

Our pedagogy pages are up and running. On them, you’ll find exercises aimed at a range of users and applications, from undergraduate and graduate seminars to high schoolers and autodidacts. The modules on each page can be used individually, or incorporated as a series of exercises over the course of a semester or class, and introduce key questions posed by our books and readers along with the functionalities of the viewer. Each exercise contains step by step instructions, but if you or your class is new to using the AOR viewer, you may want to consult our How to Use AOR page. If you’ve had success using them, or adapting parts of the viewer in your own coursework, we’d love to hear from you.

Olaus Magnus’s thoughts on the subject. Click the image to view the full page in the AOR Viewer

One of the things we learned over the four years of developing the project is that the questions we were asking ourselves and our colleagues on a daily basis shouldn’t be hidden from view. Nor should our solutions to them be presented as definitive. The exercises on these pages represent some of our discoveries and thoughts, with additional background readings and room for expansion. As our readers and annotators demonstrated to us time and again over the course of the project, there is no end to the learning that can be drawn from these books, but that they depend on the knowledge that is brought to them. Our “Remaining Questions” section at the bottom of the pedagogy page pulls together a selection of these puzzles that left us collectively scratching our heads.

If you’re looking for more reflections on the material on the site, all of the video from our January symposium is now live on the website. Head to the Symposium Video page to hear our archaeologists discuss different aspects of the books, viewer, and the project.

About Neil Weijer

Case Studies, History of Reading, Scholarly dissemination

John Dee’s IDs

Posted on: April 25, 2018 Neil Weijer Leave a comment
A signed note on the title page of Dee’s copy of the Baderbuchlin

Blizzard aside, it was great to take AOR on the road for this year’s Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference in New Orleans. Some great conversations emerged from discussion of Dee’s books, both in and out of the corpus. During the panel “Paging John Dee” Stephen Clucas pointed out a feature of Dee’s notes in his alchemical manuscripts that had caught my eye in the Geoffrey of Monmouth: a number of annotations bearing the initials “I.d.” Encountering these brought to mind a similar question for both of us: “why did Dee sign some annotations and not others?” and, more generally “what could this practice mean?”

Since mentions of people in our individual annotations have been tagged, a quick search of AOR for “John Dee” (in quotation marks) in the person field of an annotation yielded 46 results across 16 of the 22 Dee books we have transcribed.

This search required a little cleanup, as it captured annotations that included references to Dee or his books, or Dee’s ownership inscriptions on a title page. Eliminating those revealed 28 signed annotations across  9 different books.

Title Number of Signed Notes
Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae 9
Cardano, Libelli quinque 6
Paris, Flores historiarum 4
Maternus, Astronomicon 3
Walsingham, Ypodigma Neustriae 2
Paracelsus, Baderbuchlin 1
Pantheus, Vorachadumia 1
Cicero, Opera 1
Alexander, Mathemalogium 1

 

A few observations jump out from just the data. First, some texts appear to have been signed more heavily than others, with the Geoffrey of Monmouth signed the most extensively. Good to know that I noticed these notes after being beaten over the head with them (comparatively speaking) in the Monmouth. More specifically, these appear to be Dee’s way of editorializing and, in particular, problem-solving, as he does here, in explaining a correction to Maternus.

Or here, questioning the lineage of Britain’s earliest inhabitants.

Having just diagrammed out how Brutus could have been the great grandson of Aeneas on the previous pages, I’m unsure whether Dee is excited, skeptical, or exasperated to see a “nephew” appear out of the blue.

Second, in the books with multiple signed annotations, the signed annotations appear to cluster together. Flyleaves and endpapers are consistent candidates, but within the body of the text, for example, we find a succession of signed notes in the Monmouth (fols 15-19) the Cardano (fols 56-63), along with two other signatures next to Dee’s work on tables.

However, in the Cardano, some of these readings are dated, a trend observed in other books that Dee read around 1554-55 like the Mathemalogium, which records the date (and location) of Dee’s shared reading of the text in a Harvey-like note.

By contrast, only one signed annotation in the Monmouth is dated, chronicling Dee’s discovery of a corrected manuscript that supports his (earlier) assumption about ancient place names, discussed in this earlier post.

Some cautions here about the value of data alone – the clustering of signed annotations within any particular volume may be reflective of the overall clustering of annotations. Without broader context, we might not know how representative of a certain genre, time period, or topic this type of intervention is. It isn’t possible to locate all the books in Dee’s library catalogue, and even if we could (as I’ll leave for another post) we know that these aren’t the only books that he was able to put his hand on. Because such rich records survive, and because Dee was such a distinct annotator and intellectual figure, we know enough to locate books that aren’t mentioned in the catalogue that have Dee’s annotations.

However, searching the entire corpus cast light on tendencies that I never would have encountered had I just been looking at Dee’s “historical” books (or indeed, just the Geoffrey of Monmouth). His dating of annotations, in particular, seems to have peaked at an earlier period than his notes in the Monmouth volume. It also allows us to observe Dee actively engaging in conversation with his books (clarifying material and posing questions) and, we must assume, the other readers that encountered them in his library. Even if these outputs don’t fit into neat or, for that matter, readily apparent categories, they allow us to ask questions that wouldn’t be askable of  one book, or perhaps even one note in one book. Pulled together quickly, this zoomed out view of Dee’s reading helps test initial questions like “why would Dee ‘authorize’ his own notes?” and tie them to new discoveries in the field.

This approach might also help scholars to identify practices to investigate beyond the corpus. On the same RSA panel, Jenny Rampling showed how far Dee’s notes might travel, tracing one out of the margins of an alchemical manuscript and into a printed book, via a fair copy made at the request of Dee’s traveling companion and “seer,” Edward Kelley (1555-97). If the notes in these books were Dee’s intellectual property, the Q&A session also revealed an early example of its theft: Nicholas Saunder, who made off with books from Dee’s library and tried to disguise their origin (as he has in the Pliny), appears to have written over Dee’s initials in the marginalia as well. Just as we “encounter” Dee in the margins of his books, so too did his contemporaries. What might their impressions been of him?

About Neil Weijer

Case Studies, History of Reading

Digitization and its discontents

Posted on: February 9, 2018 Jaap Geraerts Leave a comment

In an earlier blog, Matt Symonds discussed some losses which are inevitably part of the process of digitization. The material aspects of books in particular – their size, weight, feel and, indeed, smell – are difficult or impossible to convey on a screen. Consider, for example, the title pages of Livy’s History of Rome and Tusser’s Husbandry as displayed in the AOR viewer. The size of the images is exactly the same, obscuring the actual differences in format (the copy of Livy’s History owned by Gabriel Harvey is a hefty folio, whereas Tusser’s Husbandry is a quarto).

In spite of the loss of some of the physical qualities of a book when transferring it to a digital environment, in most cases the pros of digitization still outweigh the cons. Above all, the increased and ready access to books (as well as to archival documents) is a major stimulus to scholarship as it overcomes all kinds of financial, spatial, and institutional hurdles.

When doing research on Catholic marriage practices in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, for example, a manuscript letter made mention of a tract written by the priest Joannes Stalenus. A quick search on google returned a digital version of Joannes Stalenus’ Dissertatio Theologo-Politica hoc tempore discvssv & scitv necessaria […] (Cologne, 1677), a book recently digitized by Google (see here). Due to the existence of this digital copy, I did not have to hunt down the book in research libraries in the UK or abroad, but could directly access it. The online availability of a digitized copy of this book was so useful because I was primarily interested in the contents of this book, and not in the physical or other aspects that are specific to this copy. In other words, a digital version of any copy would have sufficed for my purposes (as long as the quality of the digital copy is up to scratch).

As a scholar of historical reading practices, however, I’m very much interested in particular copies of books, namely those which contain reader interventions, physical remnants and traces of the ways in which people used their books in early modern Europe. This morning I wanted to call up a particularly densely annotated copy of Cicero’s Librorum philosophicorum uolumen primum […] (Strasbourg, 1541) which is part of the collections of the British Library (BL) (shelf mark 525.c.1,2.). In the spring of 2016 I stumbled upon this book when searching the holdings of the BL for books annotated by the Elizabethan polymath John Dee, but soon realized that it was not Dee who annotated this book (to my great relief, I have to admit, since transcribing this book is a gigantuous task). This is what some of the pages of the book look like:

To my surprise, I was not able to order this book through the online catalogue of the BL (although I was later assured by a librarian that this should still be possible), but was referred to its digital version – the book has recently been digitized by Google. Duly I opened the digital version of the second volume, but my initial enthusiasm vanished as a saw how sloppy a job had been done.

A number of marginal annotations which decorate this particular copy have been trimmed, instantaneously rendering this book useless for those of us who want to examine the annotations. Compare this image, for example, with the image above (a picture which I took myself some time ago).

Based on a quick inspection of the digital copy, it seems that the marginal notes in the gutter have been completely captured, whereas the marginal annotations in the outer margins often have been trimmed, as can be gleaned from the following image:

Compare this with the picture of the same opening I took:

In general, the annotations in the gutter are most difficult to capture, in particular when a book is tightly bound. That does not seem to have been the problem here, so it is a mystery why so many annotations have been trimmed. Perhaps this has something to do with the particular process of digitization employed by Google, is simply the result of a lack of interest or knowledge, or is caused by the lasting influence of the idea that only the printed text really matters. It is, after all, not so long ago that collectors and booksellers preferred to have ‘clean’ instead of ‘dirty’ books and resorted to various methods in order to restore their books to their (presumed) original and pristine state (see William H. Sherman, Used books, Ch. 8). Whatever may have caused these flaws, this particular digital version is nothing more than a pale and incomplete representation of the original object. It still is useful, but only to a very limited extent. The process of digitization always involves some loss, but digitization done badly hampers rather than furthers scholarship.

About Jaap Geraerts

Case Studies, History of Reading

Dee’s Mistakes

Posted on: January 30, 2018 Neil Weijer Leave a comment

How did John Dee make sense of what he was reading? We at AOR have the luxury of examining Dee’s annotations with the apparatus of stable critical editions, the extensive reserves of research libraries, and the even more capacious Google search box at the ready. While Dee enjoyed none of these things, the annotations in his books hint at the breadth of information he brought to the works that he read, and remind us that no one activity dominated his reading. We also get a better sense of how comprehending a book even at the most basic level, could require specialist knowledge in the sixteenth century.

The gloss in Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares (Letters to Friends), for example, mostly consists of copying out names, places, and even particular words and turns of phrase from the text, while correcting mistakes in it. I was surprised at how many of Dee’s critical comments could only be explained through recourse to footnotes in my modern edition. Some of the typos and omissions could be caught by an educated Latin speaker, but others, like the breaks between letters, show recourse to other versions of the text, perhaps in the form of printed or handwritten commentaries that circulated alongside other editions of Cicero.

In other words, his two-volume, deluxe collection of Cicero’s works couldn’t be met with the same implicit trust (or perhaps willing acknowledgment of my own ignorance) that I brought to the indices and appendices of the Loeb Cicero, trying to keep up with what Dee was putting down.

Aside from being a humbling experience, transcribing these glosses raises an important question in addition to that of Dee’s own comprehension. As a scholarly resource, our transcriptions should allow a modern reader to understand Dee’s annotations, and that can mean tagging more detailed information about people and locations into the transcriptions and translations. But what if those tags might not agree with Dee’s own identifications? In other words, If Dee doesn’t agree with the (modern) text, are we allowed to disagree with him?

Historians of reading can afford to be more flexible than textual critics in how we treat variant or “multiple” readings without needing to label them “misreadings” or “mistakes.” Even so, these departures put us in a place where no clear or convincing explanation can be drawn that doesn’t pass through Dee’s own mind. Fortunately for us, Dee’s marginalia across several books offer evidence of his own approach to the same editorial problem.

Dee’s library, like his reading, was vast and varied, containing the most current reference sources of the time – printed bibliographies and anthologies like the Cicero volume – as well as “ancient” manuscripts in their original languages. He thus had a fairly sophisticated understanding of how mistakes might be made, and (in keeping with his contemporaries) we find this on full display in his use of ancient etymologies. Historical and antiquarian writing of Dee’s time was full of telling toponyms that revealed the ancient history of places or peoples, if only their true meaning could be extracted from the corruption of time and translation.

This technique had been practiced by historians for centuries, and as a result Britain’s ancient history was a minefield of mythical associations. The prevailing narrative, first set in writing by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the early twelfth century, was hotly debated in and around Dee’s own time. It linked the island’s name to Brutus the Trojan, a great grandson of Aeneas who had led a band of Trojan exiles from Greece through the Mediterranean and France before defeating the island’s former (gigantic) inhabitants. Brutus then named the island Britain and built its first city, a New Troy that would eventually be renamed London in memory of another legendary king, Lud.

While Geoffrey’s inaccurate or all-too-convenient descriptions of places had aroused suspicion (or derision) among historians since Geoffrey’s time, in his printed copy (Christ Church Oxford Wb.5.12), Dee treads this well-worn ground and shows himself to be a master of the name game.

His notes in the early chapters of the Historia locate the would-be Britons near the Acheron river in eastern Greece and as they move through the Mediterranean, Dee comments upon the probability of the account (both in general and in his specific copy) by investigating not only changes in language, but the havoc that their recitation and orthography might wreak upon unsuspecting generations of copyists and translators. Here, Dee explains how Tragecia, a small island near Corfu the nonexistent island of Lergetia (or in some copies Leros which, though extant, was in the wrong direction), after one copyist mishears “Targetia” and a second confuses the Greek character tau for a lambda.

Simple enough, provided that you come to your sixteenth-century book with a working knowledge of manuscript copying practices! We also see Dee taking into account the distance between locations here and in the pages that follow, constructing plausible alternatives where necessary.

For Dee, it was possible (perhaps even routine) to learn from a source and critique it at the same time. “Getting it right” involved accounting for and explaining a certain amount of error.  His point, and one well taken by those studying the ways early readers approached their books, it is that there can be quite a lot to learn from mistakes.

About Neil Weijer

Case Studies, History of Reading

Dee and his books

Posted on: July 31, 2017 Finn Schulze-Feldmann Leave a comment

Summer or not, we are slaving away at the CELL office in order to transcribe all the annotations contained in the books which are part of our Dee corpus! This blog post, by Finn Schulze-Feldmann, one of the three research assistants involved in phase 2 of AOR, reflects on Dee’s different annotation styles.

—

When transcribing John Dee’s marginal notes, one comes across many different styles of how to annotate a book. We all know some who consider books to be so sacred that their immaculacy shall not be tainted under any circumstances, and others who quite willingly leave their individual imprint on a book, scribbling their thoughts on the margin and highlighting passages in all the colours of the rainbow. If Dee had had different colour options available too, he would most certainly used them. His copy of Cicero’s Pro Publio Quinctio is at first sight slightly overwhelming to say the least. There are plenty of comments in the margins, heavy underscoring and various different drawings and symbols. Hardly any pages are left untouched. Thanks to these annotations we are able to gather some understanding of how a scholar as prolific as Dee worked.

This is, of course, not to say that Dee subjected all his books to such excessive treatment. Quite the opposite! His copy of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria could serve as an example in any modern-day handbook on how to read, highlight and annotate texts. Measured and never in a way that the reader could not grasp them immediately, the annotations are a guide through the text – and a delight for those transcribing them. They reference other works of Cicero, number lists mentioned in the text and provide brief summaries. Thus, to navigate through the text is made an easy task.

And then there is a third kind of annotations. Scattered through all his books, there are some that might be of interest not so much for their scholarly purposes, but rather they allows us to get closer to John Dee the person, or shall I say, the artist? Dee used not only to annotate books, but also to draw in books. Admittedly, the majority of his drawings mark names in genealogical trees as kings or queens. But there are also the odd ones that are a bit more playful. One of my personal favourites is a face that is seemingly randomly drawn in a margin of Dee’s copy of Matthew Paris’s Flores historiarum.

Their entertaining effect aside, the different ways in which Dee annotated his books do pose questions regarding their purpose and use. Would anyone but Dee be able to make sense of his densely annotated Cicero volumes? They seem to contain different layers of annotations. Those in a neat hand would still help a modern-day reader to find their way around the text. Others such as notes confirming or rejecting what is written and references to other works bear valuable insight in Dee’s intellectual engagement with the text. Especially the Cicero mentioned above appears to be a book he had read over and over again, each time with another focus. A rich repository for generations of researchers to come, none of Dee’s contemporary, I suspect, would have benefited much from these. As the printed text itself is at times even obscured by the marginalia, this volume seems dedicated to private study alone. In contrast, it would not be much of a surprise if the well-measured and neatly written notes in the Quintilian were indeed intended to be read by others. They are instructive and insightful. That Dee had allowed himself a little digression by drawing random faces and crowns, readers both today and in the past may smilingly excuse.

About Finn Schulze-Feldmann

Case Studies

Diaspora / rhyme

Posted on: July 29, 2016 Kristof Smeyers Leave a comment

For the past few days, I have gone down the rabbit hole of worldwide library catalogues in order to actualise the status quaestionis of Gabriel Harvey’s library. The last cohesive attempt dates back to Virginia Stern’s book Gabriel Harvey: his life, marginalia and library from 1979. But books are nomadic objects. Like so many early modern collections, Harvey’s books have not stayed together, and since 1979 have either moved to different shelves, some surfacing from the private depths of the bibliophile world, while others were last seen in auction catalogues before disappearing entirely.

What further complicates this task is that we can really only make educated guesses as to how many books Harvey’s library consisted of. Rough estimates range from a few hundred to well over a thousand. The corpus that I have reassembled so far (of course standing on the shoulders of Stern and others) consists of roughly 160 books of which I am confident what shelf they are currently on. They will provide a wider context for the AOR corpus.

Geographical context also applies here, as there are traces of Harvey’s library in more than twenty libraries across the world—usual suspects like the British Library and the Oxford and Cambridge college libraries but also, for example, the National Libraries of Wales and Australia, and various institutions across the United States, most predominantly the Folger Shakespeare Library and Princeton University Library. An additional complication is that catalogues of smaller libraries and collections, such as the Rosenbach Library and the collection of the Saffron Walden Museum, are often not electronically available. The diaspora of Harvey’s library is absolute: a catalogue of his books can only be provisional—we never know how many books are still unfound.

One such book that has recently become available and that already has been written about in our previous blog posts is Harvey’s copy of Thomas Tusser’s Fiue hundred pointes of good husbandrie, now residing at Princeton. In our corpus of thirteen it is not so obvious, but when zooming out to the (known) spectrum of Harvey’s whole library, Fiue hundred pointes becomes more evidently peculiar. In a collection of mostly political, historical and legal works, a practical calendar for countryside living – in rhyme! – seems out of place. Tusser’s Hundreth pointes was a popular book from the moment it was published in 1557. It was reprinted so often that the London-based publisher Richard Tottel decided to expand the book into a larger volume, Fiue hundred pointes, with the addition of hundreth good poyntes of huswifery. Harvey’s copy is a reprint from 1580, the year Tusser died.

It stands out in Harvey’s library because of its subject, but also because of its genre: Fiue hundred pointes is a long poem that offers minute advice on how to live the pastoral life in accentual anapaestic, and predominantly in a-b-a-b rhyme. It’s a plain and sometimes grating style, but it is an easy meter to remember. Such rhymes were efficient instructional texts. Tusser’s farming manual was still being used as a teaching text in the eighteenth century, and some of its adages survive today: for example, “A fool and his money are soon parted” or “What a greater crime than loss of time.” Harvey gladly contributed in the margins of his copy quotations he picked up; for example, somewhere in the first pages he adds: “Dulcis odor lucre, etiam ex lotio” (“Profit smells sweet, even from urine”).

Blog Kristof 2 - image 1

Harvey’s marginalia don’t mention Tusser’s stylistic or literal qualities. But in some of his first few annotations, Harvey does give this book a place in his library. He draws parallels between Tusser and the works of Xenophon, Hesiod and Virgil before recommending Fiue hundreth pointes as both useful for the economist and pleasant for the philosopher. Throughout his marginalia he refers to the classics, and continues to reference points of specific economic and political interest. Harvey’s marginalia make Tusser’s book seem less outlandish in the corpus.

***

Harvey may not expand on Tusser’s rhyme, but his relationship with verse is well known. “Harvey is not unknown to the lover of poetry . . .” so begins the lemma in a nineteenth-century literary dictionary, “he is the Hobynol whose poem is prefixed to the Faery Queen, who introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney: and, besides his intimacy with the literary characters of his times, he was a Doctor of Laws, an erudite scholar, and distinguished as a poet.”

Harvey’s poetry in Latin shows his love of wordplay, puns, and ironic wit. It is showcased in his Gratulationum Valdinensium (1578), a series of poems dedicated to Elizabeth I. But, as one contemporary succinctly put it, Harvey was “more potent in his venom than in his honey.” His vitriolic pen worked considerably better than his other pens, as illustrated in his Three proper and familiar letters (1580). His love for the classical dactylic hexameter made his verse look and sound like that of a poetaster: dogmatic and a little awkward. How different was his approach to English verse! His unpublished experiments with English hexameters show a much more flexible approach: “to reform our English verse and to beautify the same with brave devices . . . lie hid in shameful obscurity,” he wrote to Spenser.

Others were less infatuated with Harvey’s verse: “He introduced hexameter verses into our language and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practiced till it was found sufficiently ridiculous. His style was infected with his pedantic taste; and the hard outline of his satirical humour betrays the scholastic cynic, not the airy and fluent wit.” Even in 2016 that reputation persists. Edmund Gosse’s essay on Thomas Nashe accepts for truth Nashe’s accusations: “Gabriel Harvey is a personage who fills an odious place in the literary history of the last years of Elizabeth . . . wholly without taste, and he concentrated into vinegar a temper which must always have had a tendency to be sour.”

Only a very select group of Elizabethan poets risked trying their hand at imitating the classical meter in the vernacular. Harvey’s fellow experimenters—Spenser, Ascham, Sidney, and Thomas Watson—conversed at large about the rules for an English hexameter system, but Harvey was less enthusiastic. He refused to comply with rules and committed only to the idea that the length of a syllable in verse should correspond to its actual pronunciation. But he did not divulge how English sounds were to be measured.

Instead, Harvey seems to have leant towards the applied rules of classical Latin. In letters to his fellow experimenters he compares the idea of rules for verse to an applied custom and “natural” law. Here spoke Harvey the lawyer. He realized the potential of the vernacular to rival, and break free from, the “absolutist” rules of Greek and Latin verse. He maintained his relaxed approach to English hexameter. To create a natural, quantified verse in English, he “dare give no Precepts, nor set downe any Certaine General Arte.”

***

Harvey may not have filled the margins of Fiue hundreth pointes with remarks on its style and verse, but he was always attracted to the stylistic aspects of the texts he read. The AoR-team has spent a long time on a marginal annotation in Harvey’s copy of Frontinus’ Strategemes of warre (1539), that serves as a showcase of Harvey’s wit and love of puns (many thanks to Arnoud Visser for helping us out!).

Blog Kristof 2 - image 2

It is the epitaph of a sturnus, a starling. At the same time it is a warning to those to whom trust and hope come easily: “nocuit sperare columbis” is translated liberally as “Hopeful pigeons get hurt”! In a book about cunning war stratagems, this annotation is not out of place, but it is clearly very carefully crafted. It is also not so straightforward. The Latin is a little off and unlike Harvey’s usual language. It is bursting with puns and obscure references, and therefore a prime example of the horrors of translating a proud humanist’s Latin. The first line, for example, “Sturnus ego, haud ulli volucrum Virtute secundus,” is a play on “Turnus ego, haud ulli veterum virtute secundus,” a line from a speech by Aeneas’s greatest enemy, Turnus, given to him by Virgil in book XI of the Aeneid. Other seemingly odd phrases are yet to be traced back to the sources Harvey used for inspiration.

The Sturnus epitaph shows how Harvey approached language: with craftsmanship. He says as much in his correspondence with his fellow experimenters with the English hexameter. Literary and lyrical endeavor for Harvey is a craft rather than an art or a “pastime for educated gentlemen”; the writer is an artisan, a “smith of words,” rather than an artist. For Harvey, in the end, writing is as much a craft as working the fields.

About Kristof Smeyers

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

Harvey reading verse

Posted on: June 17, 2016 Jaap Geraerts Leave a comment

As mentioned earlier, the latest edition to the Harvey corpus is Thomas Tusser’s Fiue hundred pointes of good husbandrie (London, 1580), recently acquired by Princeton University Library. The book is different from the other books in the corpus in terms of its topic —husbandry, the management or political economy of the household— but also in its literary style. For, unlike the other books in the corpus, Tusser’s book is written in verse. This blog will assess whether or not this fact exerted any influence on Harvey’s reading strategies.

First, let us see whether a fairly straightforward statistical analysis reveals any divergent reading patterns by comparing Tusser’s book to the other books in the corpus. In the following graph I calculated the average number of marginal annotations (divided into the four main types: marginal notes, underline, mark, and symbol) per digital image.

Blog Harvey & Verse 1

The figures show that Harvey annotated Tusser’s book fairly heavily—it is the sixth most densely annotated book in the corpus. It seems, though, that nothing out of the ordinary was going on. Harvey didn’t use a particular type of annotation more often than in other books, for example. The only thing that caught my eye is the fairly (but not extremely) high average number of underscores. The underline tag captures every word or sequence of words of the printed text that is underlined (as long as a set of words is underscored uninterruptedly), as a result of which the average number of underscores can be “inflated” when a reader underscored a lot of single words. Moreover, although working with the average number of underlines per digital image reduces the possibility of generating misleading statistics as the result of books being different in length (i.e., the number of pages), the different size of the book can still distort the statistics (e.g., a page of the Livy contains more words, and hence possibly more underlines, than a book in octavo format). We therefore should not take the statistics at face value: they can be misleading, as they have been influenced by various factors, including the size of the book and our transcription practices.

In the following graph we break down the number of instances of underscoring in the printed text further and show the average number of words per underline tag.

Blog Harvey & Verse 2

As the graph shows, Harvey seems to have been remarkably constant in his underscoring practices across the corpus. Whereas the total number of instances he underscored one or more words in the printed text varies greatly per book (from 48 in Buchanan’s Maria regina Scotorum to a whopping 26,088 in Livy’s History of Rome), the average number of words he captured by underscoring part of the printed text actually is quite similar (the only exception being Freigius’s Paratitla). These statistics thus seem to indicate that Harvey did not interact with the printed text of Tusser’s Husbandrie in a different way. Of course we could supplement this analysis with a more thorough linguistic scrutiny of the data, for example, focusing on the classes of words that are underscored. This falls outside the scope of this blog, so I just mention the possibility here.

We should complement our research with a more qualitative analysis of the AOR data set, though. In my opinion, statistics can be extremely useful in laying bare patterns that would have been difficult to discern with the more traditional scholarly methods usually associated with analog research environments. However, digital environments allow us to fruitfully combine quantitative and qualitative analyses. In this particular case, let us have a look at whether the marginal notes contain comments on, for example, the literary style of the book, or whether he frequently used particular symbols, such as Mercury, which Harvey used to mark passages in the printed text about eloquence (and also trickery).

To start with the Mercury symbol, here’s an overview of the appearance of this symbol throughout the AOR corpus.

Blog Harvey & Verse 3

This path of inquiry clearly is a dead end, for the Mercury symbol does not appear once in Tusser’s Husbandrie. Moving on, neither did a simple search for “verse” yield a lot of results. In Tusser’s Husbandrie, Harvey did not mention this word in his marginal notes and only underscored the word “verse” twice: one time in the index at the end of the book, when referring to “Staints Barnards verses,” and the other time as part of the words “everie verse,” in the preface to the reader. In the other books in our corpus, Harvey did mention the word “verse.” For example, in Domenichi’s Facetei he wrote, “How many verses are there. A 100,” and in Guicciardini’s Fatti et detti, “Hos ergo versiculos feci: tulit alter honores” (I wrote these little verses, and another man received the honors). In Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, Harvey underscored “foolish in verses” in a sentence that describes the foolishness of some men in particular activities.

A search for style/stile yields more results. In Tusser’s Husbandrie, next to the header “The description of an enuious and naughtie neighbour,” Harvey wrote: “This, & the next, two notable sonets, aswel for stile, as matter.” (Interestingly, both sonnets are marked with red chalk, possibly another way of engaging with this book.)

Blog Harvey & Verse 4

When examining Harvey’s other marginal annotations in Tusser’s Husbandrie, it quickly becomes apparent that many of them were written in the upper margin and summarized the content of a page or section, the marginal notes basically functioning as headers. Moreover, the notes comment on the content of the printed text, not on its literary style.

Although we should take into account the facts that the data can be interrogated in many more ways and that our corpus is limited and does not include all books annotated by Harvey (including the book Chaucer’s The woorkes of our antient and lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, edited by Thomas Speght), on the basis of some limited quantitative and qualitative analyses of Tusser’s Husbandrie, we can tentatively conclude that Harvey was mainly interested in the practical knowledge contained in this book rather than in its literary qualities. In this sense, he did not treat Tusser’s Husbandrie any differently from the other books in our corpus.

About Jaap Geraerts

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

Posts navigation

1 2 Next →

Archives

Categories

  • Case Studies
  • History of Reading
  • Scholarly dissemination
  • Technical Development
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • Virtual Office Hours
  • School’s In Session
  • Looking Back, Looking Forward
  • The Updated AOR Viewer is Now Live
  • Down to the Detail of Dee’s Greek Marginalia
  • What is the Archaeology of Reading (AOR)?
  • Who Are the Archeologists?
  • Partner Institutions
  • Contact
  • AOR Corpus
  • Bookwheel Blog
  • Help Documents
  • Downloads
  • Dissemination
  • Go To AOR Viewer
  • The Sheridan Libraries - Johns Hopkins University
  • Centre for Editing Lives and Letters - UCL
  • Princeton University Library
  • The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Facebook Twitter Pinterest