The Archaeology of Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribing all of Harvey’s annotations is not always an easy—let alone enjoyable—task, mainly because of his obsession for detail, as a result of which some transcriptions seem to be never-ending—or at least it surely feels like that. However, precisely because of this level of detail, when transcribing one sometimes encounters particular annotations that are likely to be overlooked when studying Harvey’s annotations, especially because we, almost reflexively, tend to direct our gaze to the marginal notes, which are seen as (and often prove to be) the richest and juiciest source of information.

One of these particular annotations that attracted my attention are the words “pro se quisque,” which Harvey underlined in his copy of Livy’s history of Rome. I was intrigued by this, not so much because of the meaning of the words (“everyone for himself”), but because of the fact that Harvey underlined it with dots instead of a more or less straight line. This prompted me to add another variable to the method attribute of the underline tag, further expanding the search options.

When continuing my transcription of Livy’s history of Rome, I was surprised to see that underscored the words “pro se quisque” more often; we have just finished transcribing Livy’s history in its entirety (!!), and it turns out that he underlined this phrase twenty-five times. Most often he would just underline these three words (fifteen times), whereas ten times he underscored them as part of a slightly larger set of words. Underscoring these words by using dots, which initially attracted my attention, proved to be quite uncommon (only five times), as he normally preferred to use lines.

Interestingly, the words “pro se quisque” are not just underlined in the printed text, but also appear in five marginal notes. In the first of these notes, Harvey wrote: “Everyone [strove] for himself, with no king at this time. The people favoured their power, the Senate its authority. The basis was of the people. Yet Romulus was the master and the common people were the slaves, just like here” (p. 9).

The lack of strong leadership, and its negative repercussions for the Roman state, are echoed in other marginal notes as well: “For a nation that was the richest, most active as well as the shrewdest in the world it was not difficult to command kings and dominate the world. How many kings there are in one popularist city? Each one [strives] for himself.” Elsewhere he wrote: “The Roman offices served the use of the republic, not the grandeur of individual persons. Every one for himself, and those who cannot be Scipios abroad, want to be Petiliuses at home. And they have the nerve to taunt those by quibbling who they do not dare to rival by deserving well” (p. 689); and “A skillful move in a difficult situation. Everyone [strives] for himself, [see] above, below. Shyness in holding power and dealing with matters is for a boy, not a man” (p. 76).

It is also interesting that the underscoring of the words “pro se quisque” and the marginal notes that contain this phrase never coincide (i.e., appear on the same page): it was a running theme, a topic in which Harvey was interested and which he addressed throughout the book—sometimes in the form of underlining, sometimes in the shape of a marginal note. It certainly was always on his mind, for after “having thoroughly read the above two books . . . I have come to understand in the end, that it was pivotal to distinguish most clearly the curiae, assemblies, laws, magistrates, customs, even the rewards and punishments according to the type of Republic, and its form, each individually, and that all should be fitted in entirely, in the most suitable way.”

Harvey concluded that this had not always been the case throughout Roman history, “so that they [the Romans] were more prudent for themselves than for the Republic. For look wherever you wish in Roman history: everyone [strives] more for himself [my italics], than for the Republic; the devotion to the household is greater, than that to the fatherland; there are more rich and respected housekeepers than fair and wise politicians” (p. 63).

The lengthy note continues on the next page, and Harvey argued that if the Romans had tailored their laws and political offices more closely to the nature of the Republic, this would have contributed to the well-being and stability of the state. This certainly was an important insight, and as the marginal note continued, Harvey wrote: “And for this consideration Philip Sidney, the prominent courtier, thanked me generously, and he openly acknowledged that he had never read anything of such importance either in historical or political works. That he had observed far and wide Romans who were too much senatorial in a popularist Republic and ones who were too much popularist in a Senatorial Republic, ones who were not royalist enough in a monarchy, citizens rather than subjects. And that he had no doubts whatsoever that if they had adapted themselves to the constitution of the State, that they would have come out as the strongest nation, the most successful and powerful people in the world. And this was our most important observation about these three books. . .” (p. 64).

Here the full meaning Harvey attributed to the phrase ‘pro se quisque’ is disclosed: it denotes not only people striving for their own interests at the expense of the larger, public good, but also people acting contrary to the constitution of the Republic, disturbing its balance and harmony and creating internal turmoil.

Here the full meaning Harvey attributed to the phrase “pro se quisque” is disclosed: it denotes not only people striving for their own interests at the expense of the larger, public good, but also people acting contrary to the constitution of the Republic, disturbing its balance and harmony and creating internal turmoil. Interestingly, in only two of the other eleven books in our corpus did Harvey either mention or underscore the words “pro se quisque.” He did this in two marginal notes, one in Domenichi’s Facetie (**2[r]) and one in Guicciardini’s Detti et fatti (p. 48). In both cases, the context in which this phrase appears is different from the context (and content) of the marginal notes in Livy’s book.

Although more research could be done—e.g., Did he underline all instances of “pro se quisque” in the printed text? What was the context in which this phrase was used in the printed text? Why did he use various forms of underlining? Are other marks used to highlight this phrase?—this example neatly shows the links between various forms of readers’ interventions, in this case underlining and marginal notes. For a transcriber, that’s probably the most valuable outcome of this small case study: it shows the benefit of having tagged all of Harvey’s interventions, which, if only for a moment, lightens the burden of what sometimes can be an arduous task.

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

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

Autotechnia, Cosmopraxia, Polytechnia, Polyptaxia, Polytechnus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cosmo-critical horse.”

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

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