The Archaeology of Reading

In late November 2016 the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe hosted and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute co-sponsored at Johns Hopkins University campus-wide rollout of AOR, drawing a large group of faculty, graduate students, librarians, and members of the AOR team, in particular several interesting questions from the audience on infrastructure and DH sustainability fielded by the Sheridan Libraries’ Digital Research and Curation Center staff.

The panel started off with a wonderful retrospective from Tony Grafton on the history of obsessive-compulsive early modern readership and, more specifically, the history-behind-the-history of their often cited essay “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy.” A large projection screen returned the gathered crowd to Princeton over 25 years ago and a wonderful, smiling photograph of Lisa Jardine accompanied by Tony’s warm recollections of their many long hours together pouring over Harvey’s notes in Livy’s history of Rome in the rare book reading room at the Firestone Library…and some particularly loud and heated debates about what Harvey was getting at, which they both enjoyed immensely. (There was no mention of librarians shushing anyone on those several occasions, but one can imagine.) Tony also recalled an essential conversation they had together with his Princeton colleague, Robert Darnton, on whether marginalia could ever really be considered a representation of the history of reading. Out of that fruitful discussion was born the organizing principle of the “bookwheel” that stands at the heart of AOR, and indeed forms the logo and the name of this blog on the AOR website. It is the idea that marginalia not only richly preserve the reading experience of a learned annotator through his immediate responses to printed texts; but, perhaps just as importantly, that they also present scholars with direct evidence of how someone like Harvey deployed the fuller resources of his personal library in the process. Harvey’s marginalia preserve, metaphorically speaking, the motions of a bookwheel filled with a multiplicity of essential books in the history of scholarship, ancient and early modern.

Harvey’s ready engagement with the contents of his uniquely formed, well-stocked library of hundreds of volumes was indeed “Studied for Action” as he “drew out all the garrisons” from his bookshelves (a phrase Harvey underlined in his copy of Machiavelli’s Arte of Warre) in order to turn his reading into tools to affect the world in his own moment: as an aspiring courtier, and as a “professional reader” advising, for example, Sir Philip Sidney on his forthcoming embassy to Prague by reading together from his annotated copy of Livy. Harvey’s compulsive, marginal cross-referencing between different books at his disposal—at times seeming to mark them simultaneously in reference to one another—has become an more frequent theme of our work since the AOR Viewer went live a few months ago, allowing us to search and track this activity systematically within individual books, and across all the books, in the AOR corpus. It will be fascinating to see the extent to which John Dee did the same in the nearly two-dozen annotated books from his library that will form the work of AOR Phase 2.

Earle Havens was up next with his own rendition of “The Archaeology of the Archaeology of Reading,” beginning with a Seneca’s old metaphorical saw about hard-reading scholars as busy bees: “We ought not only to write, nor only read…it must be gone back and forth from this to that in turns, so that whatever is collected by reading, the stylus may render in form. We should imitate the bees, as they say, which wander and pluck suitable flowers to make honey (Epistulae Morales, 84).

There were in fact many milestones of precisely this same kind of selective wandering through books, of learned readers plucking out purple passages, and making intellectual honey: from the “polyhistors” of Greco-Roman antiquity (Stobaeus, Aulus Gellius, Solinus), and medieval encyclopedists and compilers of florilegia (Isidore of Seville, Vincent de Beauvais, Thomas of Ireland), to the essential Renaissance hunter-gatherers and organizers of loci communes (Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon…their pedagogical tracts prescribing organized programs of reading were printed and reprinted as De ratione studii anthologies throughout the middle decades of the 16th century). Attention then turned to the idiosyncratic process of building up a digital corpus with the full advantage of an AOR dream team comprised of Tony, Lisa, and all our colleagues at JHU, Princeton, and UCL, and to the nuts-and-bolts of pulling all that talent together to make DH honey. This is one way of thinking of the AOR Viewer: as a kind of composite tertium quid comprised of the best gathered thoughts and efforts of a diverse and committed research team.

Once the old-timers wrapped up their reflections, the panel concluded with a firework display of marginalia from JHU Research Assistant—and long-suffering transcriber of the vertiginous marginalia in Harvey’s Domenichi and Guicciardini volumes—Chris Geekie. Chris carried the show from life and archaeology in the margins to the realm of imaginative literature, taking as his case study the myriad ways in which Harvey invoked the French agent provocateur of many aspiring Renaissance wits, François Rabelais. Taking as his starting point the broad view, both modern and early modern, that Rabelais was an irreverent, potentially atheist, author, Chris asked whether that notion held up in Harvey’s repeated references to Rabelais across his marginalia, and further afield in Harvey’s printed polemics.

The AOR viewer’s search feature reveals that Harvey hardly held one stable opinion of Rabelais, and that his tone vis-à-vis Rabelais morphed according to the context of the particular texts and contexts to which he responded pen in hand. Sometimes he praised Rabelais as a supreme wit, at others he emerges as a dangerous author for readers who lack a cautious mind. Interestingly, Rabelais’s name almost always appears in the AOR marginalia in conjunction with other major contemporary authors—Pietro Aretino, Guillaume Du Bartas, and Philip Sidney—suggesting a more nuanced view of the French author than just as arch-literatus or arch-irreligious. He could also be just one star in a larger constellation of Renaissance literati whose works collectively represented to a reader like Harvey a sequence of rich literary tropes, forms, and topoi.

Another convention was shot through with holes by Chris’s Harvey/Rabelais investigation through the AOR viewer: the scholarly distinction often made between Harvey’s apparently distinct public opinions—which he shared with full-throated ease in his public “quarrel” in print with the University Wit Thomas Nashe—and the personal, and presumably less performative, thoughts he was supposed to relegate to the margins of the books in his private library. At key points of overlap between Harvey’s marginalia and his printed polemics, Chris found this public/private distinction also to fall apart. A passage in Harvey’s Pierces Supererogation or, A New Praise of the Olde Asse (1593) unleashed a stream of ad hominem venom on Nashe, reducing him to “the bawewawe of Schollars, the tutt of Gentlemen, the tee-heegh of Gentlewomen, the phy of Citizens, the blurt of Courtiers, the poogh of good Letters, the faph of good manners, & the whoop-hooe of good boyes in London streetes.” Distinct echoes of this bizarre, Rabelaisian wordplay appears just as loudly in the middle of one of Harvey’s highly annotated pages of Lodovico Domenchi’s Italian joke book in the AOR corpus:

Clearly there is much more going on in Harvey’s two spheres of writing than has been generally realized, or realizable absent our new capacity to search thoroughly through his marginalia in a digital format. Even just a quick search for a literary persona like Rabelais in the AOR viewer, allied with additional research beyond the digital corpus, can reveal traditional public/private and print/manuscript binaries to be latter-day interpretive square pegs ill-fitted to history’s many round holes.

As you might have noticed, this week our site was updated to version 2 as AOR has gone live! This update does not only include some cosmetic changes to our site, such as the button which takes you straight to the AOR viewer, but also comprises several documents, such as a short biography of Harvey, bibliographical entries of each of the books available in our corpus, a piece on the history of reading, a note on the technical infrastructure of the project, and the user documentation.

In order to celebrate the launch of AOR, our senior programmer Mark Patton has gathered some fun facts about the project:

The AOR project was a lot of fun and also a lot of work. Here are a few facts concerning the work we did and the data we produced.

1) 13 books
2) 5,877 page images taking up 511 GB of storage space
3) 5 transcribers and checkers
4) 2,686 XML transcriptions making up 226,948 lines
5) 4,577 commits by transcribers to GitHub repository holding XML transcriptions
6) 940 commits by programmers to source code GitHub repository
7) 43,324 lines of Java code
8) 3,095 marginalia in L. Domenichi, Facetie (1571) & L. Guicciardini, Detti et Fatti (1571) made up of 36,332 words
9) 26,106 underlines in T. Livius, Romanae historiae principis (1555) of 84,326 words
10) 718 words written in the margins of T. Livius, Romanae historiae principis (1555) page 430v, the most densely annotated page in our corpus (in terms of word count)!
11) The most mentioned book in the marginalia is De Civitate Dei at 23 times.
12) The most mentioned location in the marginalia is Rome at 41 times.
13) The most mentioned person in the marginalia is Julius Caesar at 153 times.

Here’s the first blog post of our great new research assistant, Kristof Smeyers! Since arriving at CELL, Kristof has been working on Frontinus’ Strategemes and the latest addition to the AOR corpus, Tusser’s Fiue hundred pointes of good husbandrie, which has been recently acquired by Princeton University Libraries. Steve Ferguson, one of the driving forces behind AoR, has been so kind to supply us with high-res digital images of this great book, which for several decades has been part of a private collection.

Kristof’s blog heralds a period of more regular updates on the AOR site, including more in-depth information on the bookwheel viewer we have been working on, so stay tuned!

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Historians have always had a knack for comparing their work ethos with that of other disciplines. Often it would be the wider world’s forcing these comparisons on them, but just as often they themselves would reach for far-fetched metaphors to mold their scholarly selves. Especially since the second half of the nineteenth century, when history professionalized, they have compared themselves (or are compared) to a variety of personae: historians are treasure hunters, miners, detectives, judges, but also gardeners, janitors, or even taxidermists.

But an older, seemingly more natural and spontaneous comparison is the one between history and archaeology. Historians and archaeologists have always been considered scientific siblings. And it’s that family I am now part of. My name is Kristof Smeyers and I’m a cultural historian, and since March one of the archaeologists of early modern reading.

This is not the first historian’s mask I have worn. A few years ago, I was a miner in the underground tunnels of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, delving for fossilized treasure: seventeenth-century star maps, early nineteenth-century political caricatures and pamphlets, tiny anatomical sketches, and massive books of old English cartography. Deep underground, I realized for the first time that books are not just carriers of text (and context), but also objects. Books are history of course; but books shape history too, and have a history of their own.

Archaeologists work with objects. With such materiality comes a sensation. Objects can radiate, have an attraction. The books I have been working on in the AOR project so far, Gabriel Harvey’s annotated copies of Frontinus’s Strategems of warre and Thomas Tusser’s Pointes of good husbandrie, though not physically gathering dust on my desk, reveal themselves to me foremost as material (and visual) objects and intrigue me. The Dutch historian J. Huizinga coined the term “historical sensation” for exactly such an experience: a “direct” link with a past and, implicitly linked to that directness, with an authentic, unvarnished truth.

Harvey’s annotations are sensational because they not only reveal reading practices but also show a man interested in both the daily and the sublime. His light annotations in Tusser’s month-by-month manual for the ideal farmer consist mostly of surreptitious underlinings and marginalia that paraphrase such examples of farmer’s wisdom as “What a greater crime, than loss of time” or “‘Sweet April showers do bring May flowers.” Occasionally, when Tusser expands on another husbandly duty, such as tending to the herbs in the garden, Harvey underlines and objects: “rather Houswifery, then Husbandry.”

Ideas of manliness are more explicitly annotated throughout Frontinus, in which Harvey draws his Mars symbol for war and violence frequently. Here it’s the sublime that captures Harvey’s attention, the beauty and the brutality of war and strategy.

These marginalia objectify the book and open a portal to history: the handwritten references to the classics, the pedantic corrections Harvey added to the printed text (commas, hyphens, apostrophes, and missing words), the way in which he underlined with the same vigor the clubbing of cowardly soldiers (“souldiours crienge”) by Marcus Cato and the clubbing of moles in the garden—for the historian, these annotations are sensational because, for a moment, they cut through the crust of time. They can do so because of their anecdotic nature.

But the Archaeology of Reading project aims to systematically illustrate an early modern culture of reading. In this case the historical sensation can prove to be more of a hindrance than a stimulus. The temptation to delve into the context rather than focus on the transcription can be very persuasive. The sensations of history can tug rather hard at my sleeve. When Harvey mentions a mysterious “Monsieur René” underneath the words “caste men into a deade sleepe” and “wine infected” in the Strategems, I give in and soon find myself in the company of Renato Bianco, the perfumer of Catherine de’ Medici who set up an apothecary in the shadow of the Notre Dame. Also known as René le Florentin, “maître gantier parfumeur,” he introduced a fashion for perfumed gloves to Paris. But his successful career was haunted by rumors. Stories of secret passageways into Catherine’s bedchambers, of a shady laboratory in the back of his apothecary, even of murder, and . . . of the poisoned gloves of the Queen of Navarre.

Harvey’s marginalia are a sprawling, captivating world of references, cross-references, and associations. His library is a habitat of intellectual and material culture. One can browse through his annotations and get lost in time. But historians are not only archaeologists, they must also be curators. That’s why the corpus of the project is a choice: a selection from Harvey’s library, and soon a similar selection from the library of John Dee. Such a systematic approach is a necessity, but it is one I have to remind myself of quite regularly in order to avoid what Huizinga called “the drunkenness of the moment”—a profound intimacy between object and subject that takes you to a place where the sensation of a historical object overwhelms you.

What transcribing Harvey has made me realize, is that such a direct link with the past that allows us to touch history, in the end, doesn’t have to be physical. The AOR bookwheel shows that the marginalia have a strong material—and sensational!—value even when digitized.

It’s that tension between material and digital culture, but also between archaeological method and historical sensation, that makes transcribing Harvey’s marginalia so exciting for me.

My name is Matt Symonds and I’m one of the researchers on the Archaeology of Reading team. I’m a historian specializing in early modern print culture and was recently interviewed by an MA student here at UCL on the topic of digitizing books. Here’s my executive summary: It’s great! It’s not so great.

When I first started graduate work, at the University of Cambridge in 2001, Early English Books Online was a thing of strange joy. Look! I can download all the books I want instead of trudging along to the UL all the way from my tiny flat on the wrong side of Fenners. I can download them VERY VERY SLOWLY. So slowly, I can go to the UL and sit in the tearoom drinking the teak-brown tea they serve there until my books appear, pop in to the Rare Books room, read my books, trudge home, and still the damn thing will be chuntering away in the background.

These days, what with roughly 10TB of storage sitting on my desk and UCL’s direct pipe straight into the heart of the Internet, I could spend all day like a latter day John Dee, downloading the perfect humanist library onto my hard drive.

And yet I don’t. I still sit in rare books rooms and archives and private collections and look and touch.

Books are far more than transmission mechanisms for Great Thoughts and Important Writing. They’re pieces of technology, a technology we’re so familiar with we’ve generally stopped thinking of it as technology. Here are some of the things we can tell about a book just by picking it up and handling it: the quality of its construction, which will tell us something about the prestige of the book, its length, where we are in the book, how much we’ve read and how far there’s left to go. And if we’re looking at specifically early modern books – well then, the binding, the paper, the stitching will tell us so much about provenance, the book’s own history.

Now, most book digitization programs are photographs of pages plugged into a web page. The greatest success of these projects has been to revolutionize many aspects of early modern research, particularly in terms of access to books. Not all scholars live near major research collections. Not all students are even allowed into major research collections. (Not all scholars or students are linked to universities able or willing to subscribe to the more commercially minded of these projects either, but that’s a topic for another day.) One of my favorite projects is the Universal Short Title Catalogue: if the book you’re looking for has been digitized, they’ll have a link as well as the usual bibliographic data. That’s just extraordinary.

But, but, but.

It’s long been a commonplace of bibliographical scholarship that each copy of a book is unique. The market knows it too. A rare books dealer recently told me that digitization has radically altered, “disrupted” even, his business. Libraries no longer have to buy just because they need a copy of a book – any copy would do – to fill a gap in their collections. So his business has changed. He now sells the unique attributes of his books, the paper, the binding, the stitching, and, yes, the marginalia.

The default digitization project remains just a picture of a page. (Sometimes with pictures of bindings too! That we should all be as good as the Folger Shakespeare Library in this regard.) Some digitizations try to offer a simulacrum of the experience of reading a book by employing a “page-turner” graphic effect. Personally I find these beyond irritating, but many don’t and feel instead that it reminds them of the materiality of the book. I’d like somehow to be more than reminded of it: I want the materiality of the book to be integral to the digitization. The frustrating thing is, I don’t know the how to that somehow—yet. But I am certain that it’s these sorts of questions that are going to drive all our digitization projects from here on in.

This is the first of many blogs to be written by members of the Archaeology of Reading (AOR) project. The blogs will deal with various aspects of the project, such as the scholarly and technical questions we face on a daily basis, and aims to offer a look behind the curtains. So stay tuned for regular updates!

One of the first questions that needed answering at the start of the project was how to capture all the annotations made by Harvey, a prolific annotator. Indeed, Harvey, can be considered some sort of a prodigy when it comes to annotating, as he not only wrote comments in the margins of the pages but also made use of an elaborate system consisting of symbols and non-verbal marks.

In order to get an idea and an overview of Harvey’s “annotation system,” in February 2014 some members of the team, including Earle Havens, Matt Symonds, and Jaap Geraerts, traveled to the Princeton University Library, which owns a number of Harvey’s books that have been digitized and incorporated into this project. In snowy Princeton, where we received a warm welcome from the rare books librarian and our project collaborator, Stephen Ferguson, we spent a happy week examining Harvey annotations and inventorying the interventions he had made in the texts.

A little bit in advance of the official start of the project, we started thinking about the best way to capture Harvey’s annotations in XML, a machine-readable mark-up language that allows us to engage with the transcriptions we are making of all the annotations in each of Harvey’s books. The development of the XML schema, as it is called, was very much an incremental process and led to frantic drafting on the blackboard in the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) office in London.

This project is a collaborative effort on the part of rare book librarians and curators, historians of early modern Europe, and IT-specialists, and after a couple of discussions with the team members from Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the schema was deemed to be ready, and we could actually start with the transcriptions! Harvey, however, continues to amaze us, and from time to time new marks are ‘discovered’, making it necessary to update the XML schema. For example, James Everest, our former research assistant at CELL, who’s now busy finishing his PhD, encountered a mark that looks like this:

Our trusted Dictonario di Abbreviature Latine ed Italiane taught us that this mark means “est” or “id est,” hence it was christened “est_mark” and included in the schema. Harvey thus continues to challenge the schema, and we will keep you posted about new discoveries!