J. Lo's got ancestors.

Even Wikipedia will tell you “The French have traditionally been relaxed with nudity and toplessness in entertainment”. And while it’s a statement that seems more instinctual than sourced, I recently came across a rare and strange little book that has quite a lot to add to the colourful (or better yet, pale and pasty) history of topless women.

It’s a book roughly translated to “Cancer, Or Covering the Breasts” published in 1635, written by a canon of Theology from Cambrai named Jean Polman (whose only other claim to fame, a book called the Breviarium Theologicum (1650), was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books).

The “Cancer” in the title tips you off that this isn’t just your typical condemnation of female nudity. It’s a nitty gritty portrayal of nudity as disease. Polman spends the better part of the book attacking exposed breasts and nipples (“du seine et des tetins” are now two new French words in my limited vocabulary, repeated feverishly and to almost poetic proportions per paragraph). He’s blunt: from the very first paragraph he argues that cancer in women is most likely to be breast cancer, and that breast cancer is caused by exposing the breasts to the air, that the air just “clings to the udders”. And as David Kunzle writes in Fashion and Fetishism: “With aid of repeated puns on the word for cancer (chancre) and the cut-out of a dress-neck (echancrure), he equates the horrible…cancer of the flesh with…the cancer of fashionable nudity”.

In 8 sections Polman rages against nudity, beginning with the discussion of its unnaturalness (citing very selectively from Genesis), listing pagan authors (Ovid and Catullus: very selectively) and Christian authors, arguing that depictions of “the breasts and nipples” (again the repetition, like searching “wardrobe malfunction” on youtube) are always paired with mortal sin, scandal, and death. Working his way from the bosom to the head, Polman closes by arguing women should be totally covered up in general, based on the discussion of veils from 1 Corinthians II (“every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered, dishonoreth her head”).

Since the argument is directed toward women in general and as we all know, haters gonna hate no matter what century you’re in, a book like this could be just the typical hustle and flow of the religious zealot’s pen. But after doing some digging through a 19th century bibliography on “women, love, and marriage” by Jules Gay, I discovered that it’s much more than that.

The work is a reaction to the controversy that particularly touched Polman’s neighborhood, between “women of the world” who wanted to wear dresses with necklines that plunged, sometimes, as far as the navel, and local clergy in Flanders, who were scandalized by the idea. Polman reports that in 1635 the Archbishop of Arras sent a directive prohibiting their dress to bishops of his diocese. The incident was not isolated.

The women involved were wealthy and highly educated, their fashions to them was about freedom, and by 1654 they became known as Les Précieuses (the Precious ones). Among their interests: holding literary salons, writing novels and poetry, contributing to science and poilitics, and yes, occasionally voluntary nip slips. “Historically the Précieuses represented a form of feminism. In the wake of the Fronde they felt the need and the duty to react against a state of affairs and a state of mind that threatened the tenuous conquests made by their predecessors… The social and sexual subjugation of women was the first item of concern. Thus Mlle de Scudéry [a novelist and something of a patron saint to the cause]: ‘One marries in order to hate. Hence a true lover must never speak of marriage, because to be a lover is to want to be loved, and to be a husband is to want to be hated’” (Davis et. al., A History of Women in the West III p. 405-6).

Henrietta Maria bustin' out all over.

There was a whole lotta shaking going on with these women, sometimes they were royals: Anne of Austria, mother to Louis XIV was known to champion a certain low-cut fashion around court (ironically for Polman’s argument, she died of breast cancer), and Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles I of England, imported the look to the British Isles, evening appearing in all her glory in plays staged at court to the outrage of many. In Henrietta’s case, it did not help that criticisms of her free-spirited nature were elided with hatred for her Catholic upbringing – so the issue of the day was more Protestant-Catholic tension than women’s liberation. But the stakes of criticising her were still high: when William Prynne called Women-Actors “notorious whores” and “impudent prostituted Strumpets”, writing in his 1633 Historio-Mastix against “French-women Actors in a Play not long since personated”, the Queen took offense. Prynne spent a year in prison, was stripped of his degree in law, and lost both of his ears at the pillory.

Nevertheless there were other ways of gently steering public opinion and fashion away from the Queen’s approach, in the form of contemporary conduct books that were published at the time.

Michael Sparke, William Prynne’s publisher for the Histrio-Mastix, also published Richard Brathwaite’s The English Gentlewoman (1631), which from the title page (above) has a little something to say about clothes in the first panel (top left) surrounding the ideal woman:

“Comely not gaudy”. The caption for the image continues: “APPARELL…is expressed in a comely or seemely Habit; holding a vaile in her hand; poudred with teares, implying the Necessity of that Livery to be derived from the losse of her Original purity…” The book was a bestseller.

But almost the entire force of my inquiry into these women and what they were trying to do with their bodies is distorted. From the very coining of their name, The Precious Ones are fighting an uphill battle against historical record: the name is an insult, a trivialization: “because it was said they attached value to many things that had none”. Trying to look for these women as a group across political and religious boundaries yields continuously warped results. Most famously there is the Moliere play Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) which portrays the women as shallow, vain, and what’s more intellectual frauds, only interested in reducing the Greek and Latin classics to song and limerick. (No matter that many of these “games” they developed were about translating classic texts into accessible vernacular, that the education of women of lower socio-economic status was one of their aims.) Antoine Baudea de Somaize practically made a living from ridiculing them: publishing a “Grand Dictionary of Preciousness” in addition to a burlesque stage play. At their origin, there was condemnation through religious argument, and later that transformed to pure ridicule in print and on the stage. Much more work remains to untangle insult from ingenuity, gender bias from an early form of feminism – but also to determine just how much of a success or failure these sometimes topless women were in changing things – especially literacy, as more often than fashion, their pursuits were aimed at popular literature.

But for the time being there’s at least one major remnant of their influence, an icon of the Revolution that would come, Marianne, Patroness of France. Have you ever wondered why she’s leading al fresco?

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)

Fun Further Reading: Hope Mirrlees’ modernist novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, which features literary circles run by the Precious Ones.

I’ve censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet–a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/10182/uncensor

—

What is most difficult when writing on censorship is that it includes just about everything. It is rarely anything less than a catch-all term. It casts its shadow over all branches of knowledge, from astronomy to zoology, with broad human rights implications in between. It a time-tested companion of power, be it among the Catholic Church, royals, politicians, or businessmen.

At its most infamous, censorship has placed a bull’s-eye on the most important historical advances we have made: Copernicus, Kepler, or Galileo’s writings on the sun-centered universe. It has also called attention to some of the worst trespasses against individual rights: why else surpress descriptions of hard labor in the Soviet Union as depicted by the Gulag Archipelago? Or the overwhelming racism Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man? Or the horrors of working standards and hygeine in the meatpacking industry depicted in Sinclair’s The Jungle? Or presented without comment: Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?

This was evident even 500 years ago.

And no matter where ideas are suppressed the consequences ranged far beyond national boundaries and continental boundaries, then as now.

The earliest books to be burned by the Catholic Church (in 1491) were a) a legal treatise aimed at restricting the power of the Pope, and b) a work on the dignity of man, using that dignity as the basis to argue for progress in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and all fields of knowledge. Was too much power in the hands of too few a bad idea after all? You’re getting warmer. Were individuals instilled with the free agency that entitled them to the secrets of the universe? Too hot.

At its best, censorship takes on many forms that in turn give rise to many more circumventions:

During this 16th century the suppression of books became more systematic through the passing of laws. In the Catholic Church, books meant to be destroyed in their entirety were placed on Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum), or the Index of Expurgated Books, where books with only partial transgressions were meant to be edited at publication, or by readers afterward. But policing the European publishing industry in this way was full of uncertainties. One group’s hit-list could be the bestseller list of another, particularly between Catholics and Protestants, as was the case with Thomas James’s, first librarian of Oxford’s Bodleian. In 1627 he published an “Index of Books Prohibited by the Pope in Use at the Bodleian Library” – it contains not only a general catalogue of anti-papist and prohibited books, but a finding aid for all banned books that can be found in the library.

On the home front, readers charged with editing or erasing individual sections of their own books responded in many different ways, if they bothered at all. Sometimes works were fully cut or blotted out, other times crossed out and fully legible, or covered with an easily detachable strip of paper that halfheartedly warned “prohibito”. Sometimes, when pages were left blank to mark the absence of excised text, readers filled in what was missing, as they had with Petrarch’s poetry. His “Babylonian Sonnets”, critical of the decadence of the Papal Courts at Avignon and Rome (entitled “Flames from Heaven”,  “Greedy Babylon”, and “Font of Sorrow”) were banned by Pope Clement VIII in 1595.  Poems were ordered to be erased in all prior editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, but the results vary:

A copy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Petrarch at Yale.

There have been efforts across history to preserve, at least, the names of what we have lost: I can read Sappho’s fragments as a reminder of how much we have lost of her writing, because it is recorded that Savonarola destroyed all manuscript copies of her poems in Florence, 1498. Conrad Gesner in his 1545 Bibliotheca Universalis preserved lists of books and manuscripts he knew had been destroyed in the 1527 destruction of the library at Buda in the Kingdom of Hungary when the Ottoman Turks under the lead of Suleiman the Magnificant (pictured left).

We can also produce guerilla editions to combat the books taken away, for instance Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The first edition in 1651 was so scandalous and sought-after, that to both avoid breaking the law and supply a very demanding market, later re-prints (which had been forbidden) fake the year 1651 on their title page. The penalty for being caught, as John Redmayne found out on 28 September 1670 when his printing shop was raided, was that his stock was seized and his machinery “taken downe and demolished”. Other editions under the same  guise were successfuly printed in Holland and smuggled into London. The risk was worth the profit.

Notice I am making a distinction between guerilla editions and pirated editions: this is not about intellectual property, I’m just talking in-your-face gagging, banning, tearing, burning.

The Internet is more recently premier real estate for representing various survivors across history (i.e. http://www.banned-books.org.uk/ and http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html to post only a few), and the Index on Censorship works on an international basis to publicize breaches of the freedom of expression. It’s also one of the best ways of circumventing suppression while still reaching wider audiences.

But the Internet is also more recently a target for censorship. And this brings us to now, to the United States, and a bill in the House that’s close to being passed called SOPA “Stop Online Piracy Act” (and its equivalent in the Senate, PIPA or “Protect Intellectual Property Act “). And despite the name of the Campaign to Fight it, Stop American Censorship, the damage it does will extend much further. Exponentially more than publishing, which has always been an international trade, the concentrated power over information, and business, that it would make possible is far-reaching not only in geography but in time. As an article form Ars Technica reports:

The House bill is shockingly sympathetic to a narrow subsection of business interests. For instance, buried deep in the back of the >70-page document is a requirement that the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator prepare a study for Congress. That study should analyze “notorious foreign infringers” and attempt to quantify the “significant harm inflicted by notorious foreign infringers.” (Talk about assuming your conclusions before you start.)

The report, which is specifically charged to give weight to the views of content owners, requests a set of specific policy recommendations that might “encourage foreign businesses to adopt industry norms to promote the protection of intellectual property globally.” Should the bill pass, the US government would be explicitly charged with promoting private “industry norms”—not actual laws or treaties—around the world.

The difficulty with the language of SOPA is that it uses the language of intellectual property and even parasitism (in the E-PARASITE Act) as blanket terms for powers that also extend to suppression of non-pirated material, for instance in targeting websites like MegaUpload and RapidShare. Youtube is at stake. So is Ubu Web, a repositories of poetry. Heck, this website is probably at risk as well. Rather than effectively combating piracy, SOPA singles out some intellectual property as more important than others.

I wonder whose?

For the majority of the bill’s proponents who prefer “small government” and letting the markets self-regulate, SOPA is an about-face. Why the contradiction? My money is on money – money that lobbyists are able to allocate to members of the House and the Senate. It may not be a coincidence that Lawrence Lessig’s work on Free Culture has taken a back seat to his latest book, Republic, Lost (it may also not be a coincidence that Lessig has denounced SOPA and PIPA, but channelling his energy elsewhere these days).

Republic Lost investigates systematic corruption of Government not through outright bribery (which is illegal), but through dependence on campaign funds provided by interested groups. Not quid pro quo so much as Fundraising Party pro quo. Lessig makes several points in his really excellent (and scary) book.  First, bills which come before the House are immensely well-funded. The industries (the financial and banking at the helm) which pay lobbyists to advocate for their causes determine which issues are brought to a politician’s attention. It’s not that they force out discussion of other issues, its that those other issues won’t even make it onto the radar of the session’s agenda to being with. And once they are, the same  interests which paid their way to the front of the room continue to pay lobbyists to keep congressmen informed as the issue moves through the stages of passing. You can see the cycle we’re locked into here. Secondly, it has historically been in the interest of enterprises which benefit from deregulation to push for regulations that keep them at the top. As I have mentioned in other contexts, the internet is part of the private sector. It’s a huge moneymaker that’s still unpredictable – there is much to gain by regulating its development from the top, especially for copyright holding companies of film, music, etc. whose property has been dramatically changed by the digital age.

This struggle contributes to a modern definition of “censorship” which, for all its complexity, will only ever be articulated in the old ways. The only added complexity in this case is that the boundaries have become harder to parse between protecting intellectual property and harmful policing (in ways that are difficult to predict but are not limited to ruining businesses all the way up to ruining all of the internet!). Above the cases of censorship throughout history I offered are clear cases of institutional disapproval for ideas that often relied upon belief in protecting ideas as justifications. That’s the same, misleading nature of SOPA and PIPA. There are only so many ways to shut someone up. Book burning is one, printing house raids are even faster and cleaner, and now domain blocking and/or deleting are the latest technologies in efficient suppression.

UPDATE: Via Boing Boing, Everybody Who’s Anybody Hates SOPA: Yahoo Google et al. It’s Silicon Valley v. all of the hugely wealthy Copyright holders in Hollywood, the Music Industry, etc.

Job Koelewijn‘s Mobius bookshelf

But the ‘universal’ also means access in a truer sense of the word. It is a worry that the preservation of cultural heritage is a little too confined within institutions of higher education, but this database is free and open to the public, has done well to link with digital copies of texts where possible, which really gives face to a name in a way that would appeal to anyone (an area that will only expand), and in the meantime, the opening party was widely attended: Italian, French, and German consulates were all there and yes, even the Edinburgh Renaissance Band provided the music and did it in period costume. To add to the excitement, the launch dovetails with news that the project, based at St. Andrews, has received funding to expand into the 17th century.

For anyone that couldn’t attend, but would have liked to, I’ve tried to make sense of my notes here:

The conference itself struck just the right tone for a project so ambitious: mindfulness toward the work that still needs to be done, but also a variety of examples of just how robust the current database is. The most important element of this is the adaptability of the database itself, named Cicero and developed especially for the job. Opening and closing statements by the USTC Director Andrew Pettegree and Project Manager Malcolm Walsby emphasized that Cicero sets the groundwork to create a “feedback loop” for the possibility of outside addition and refinement. And on the content side of things, while “A bibliography cannot be Wikipedia”, there is a recognition of the communal spirit needed to make this database as comprehensive as it strives to be – and an open call to contribute. The biggest problem encountered in this kind of project is maintenance: not only is the upkeep of such a database a huge undertaking, but it’s a task that fails to be recognized by those that award funding. Maybe it just doesn’t sound sexy, but in the politics of grant writing, maintenance fees just don’t win funds. But hopefully this won’t be another task we chalk up to the Big Society…

The search engine combines many angles of approach: you can browse by language, publisher, date or place of publication, as well as subject matter.  The first presentation of the day by Sandy Wilkinson (University College, Dublin), gave a sense of the potential for all of this raw data: looking at the breakdown of place and publisher, it was possible for him to separate publishing into tiers of scale. The first and largest were Italy, Germany, and France; next Spain and England; and finally he was able to mark out the boundaries of smaller scale print operations or ‘peripheral printing’ in Scotland, Portugal, and Ireland – although adding Eastern European Countries to that tier is also accurate. Separating these areas from one another allows for a further breakdown into what was being printed and whether it was in vernacular or scholarly (i.e. Latin and Greek): Wilkinson found unsurprisingly that the larger producers of Latin texts were Germany (65% of all output was in Latin; 45% for France), as opposed to only 14% of books in England and 30% in Spain, and a negligible amount for Scotland, Ireland, and Portugal. However, for a country like Scotland which had three thriving universities at the time, these numbers sometimes reflect less upon what people could read and more upon a very active international trade in books. The movement and learning of language, particularly the presence of bilingual printing in over 260 combinations identified by the database, become a much easier topic to study with introductory statistics like these to point you in the right direction.

Even though there is surely a margin of error in any of these percentages – through books we have lost over time, or books we simply have yet to catalogue, the numbers do provide a kind of heat map for areas of high interest to historians of printing and reading. And as Ian Maclean (All Souls, Oxford) argued, keeping these numbers close to a timeline of historical events is not only possible with the USTC, but incredibly useful. In this way you can generate a large-scale sense of the ways in which books were produced and circulated in Europe, where and when these networks of circulation became broader culture patterns, OR where and when they were ruptured. As with any rupture, crisis, war, pillaging or plundering, not only does investment in the trade decrease, but existing books are lost. Luckily, the USTC tries to document books we know to have existed through references and inventories, but which we no longer have.

Sure, you might say databases like the USTC are a far cry from the way it ‘used to be’, manually trucking from archive to archive in search of something you might need, spending meticulous time with an abacus counting printers and their stock, or possibly outsourcing all of the above out to an unassuming graduate student. But just because the nature of some aspects of research have become exponentially easier doesn’t mean the rigors of scholarship have to be any less so, or even any simpler. With resources like the USTC, it’s easier than ever to be smarter with your research, because so much of the tedium has been eliminated that you can skip to the interesting stuff.

Venice, from the Vatican Museum Hall of Maps

Angela Nuovo’s (Universita di Udine) presentation really gave a sense of what all of this data-gathering and pattern-gazing does: it gets you back into the archive more quickly. Since there is a wealth of information in the USTC, the time she might have spent tallying books, publishers, and their country of origin in 16th century Venice was instead spent finding and transcribing a new archive of letters dating around 1522 from the Gabbiano publishing firm. The letters describe the day-to-day headaches of the publishing business: Luciborgo Gabbiano despairs in his letter to Giovanni Bartolomeo that he is “working like a damned soul” and “a horse”, up at all hours of the night working to print and circulate editions of classical texts before his competitors, constantly soliciting other printers in Venice and abroad for books from there stock to add to his own bookshops. He writes to his uncle, another publisher, asking for more books to distribute, raging that the latest shipment of books were incomplete and poor copies not worth their weight in the barrels they were shipped in: “it is madness to waste time in this [kind of] book traffic”. He practically has a mental breakdown when a publisher in Lyon produces an edition of Avicenna before his own. The letters lay out the structuring of the Venetian based firm as it extends across Italy and into France, the cities with the greatest demand for books being Florence and Lyon, where there is on-site Gabbiano printing, and describes how books are shipped to Ferara, Mantua, Padua, and Bologna. They also depict the complexities of competition across these networks: because the firms were international,  local competitors might also be foreign distributors, as was the case with Gibbiano’s distribution in Lyon of books from the press of his great rivals at the Aldine Press.

More broadly, the hastily, sometimes angrily written letters make sense of, and breath life into, the large quantities of book production in Venice from the late 15th to 16th century: “Printing perfectly coincided with Italy’s most important cultural moment” of Renaissance, but also with the growth of its wealthy mercantile culture.  Such prosperity combined with the evidence in these letters makes it possible, as Nuovo argued, “to abandon the national approach to book history”, since her research shows that the Italian publishing industry was built by Germans, with whom ties were strong, and in tern the French industry was built by Italians, which extended the network of production and circulation. Despite political and economic setbacks, Venetian publishers kept these networks alive through the Italian Wars, as well as the Wars of Religion.

The final presentation by Ann Blair (Harvard) took the conference back to more of a bird’s-eye view of the project, this time looking back at the long line of similarly ambitious projects to which it is heir, and other ‘reference books and finding devices in the sixteenth century’.

Tommy James

I have posted briefly about Konrad Gesner before, but you may not be surprised that as an attempt at a Universal Library, his Bibliotheca universalis (1545) and its follow-up index the Pandectae (1548) is something of a great-great-great-great-great-great grandaddy of the USTC. In the work Gesner compiled inventories from book seller’s catalogues, cross-references within books, and inventories of libraries across Europe and from antiquity. His list (of over 12,000 entries)  was comprised only of books in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and also included manuscripts. Discrimination has changed: the USTC stays far away from manuscripts, but includes books in vernacular. But like the USTC, Gesner’s Bibliotheca addresses the destruction of books; in the “Epistola nuncupatoria” he addresses the destruction of libraries in antiquity, and more recently as with the 1527 destruction of the library at Buda, and lists titles as he can find them that have been lost.

As a cataloguing effort, the USTC also has a large family tree, from the earliest efforts of a National Union Catalogue by the Franciscan monks in 14th century Oxford, and in the early days of Oxford’s Bodleian library under the charge of its first librarian, Thomas James.The 1605 catalogue by size and subject of the fledgling library’s holdings was the first of its kind to be printed.

But here’s a little more background information I happen to have handy:

Before James was employed by Bodley or produced Oxford’s catalogue, he created a detailed catalogue of manuscripts at the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, considered the first printed union catalogue of manuscripts, the Ecloga Oxonio-Cantabrigiensis (1600). A labor of love and public service whose title page claims “Non quaero quod mihi utile est, sed quod multis” (1 Cor. 10. 24; 13.5; 1 Cor. 10. 33.) “I seek not what is good for myself, but for many”.

The first book of the Catalogue reviews the libraries of Oxford and then Cambridge by college, but the task of making sense of the nearly 3,000 codices and their contents is undertaken in the second book. Here, there is included a chronology of ecclesiastical authors found among each of the tracts, beginning with Dionysius the Areopagite in 96 A.D. to Walsingham in 1440. Next, there is an index of the tracts by faculty. Theology is the dominant subject, but Alchemy, Cosmography, Arithmetic, Music, and so on, across the gamut of topics to Medicine are included. The breadth of James’s search for manuscript also expands to include private libraries, such as those of Sir Walter Cope and Lord Lumley. The book concludes with two examples of the ways in which James’s guide could be practically applied to scholarship: collations of Cyprian’s De unitate Ecclesiae and Augustine’s De fide. The Ecloga is also obsessed with recovering lost books, in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries when the major libraries of monasteries around England were destroyed. In this way it is inspired by the earlier work of John Bale and John Leyland, who were employed by King Henry VIII to recover some of what had been lost, all recorded in The Laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande (1549). The sense of loss and push for recovery has not changed between then and now as the primary goal of any catalogue.

I have already written about the catalogues of the Bodleian (its first edition in 1605 was the first of its kind), and the ways in which books slip through the cracks without our notice at libraries, as was the case with Robert Burton’s Astrological Notebook. In other words, loss can happen not by destruction but simply by misfiling, a great danger for any catalogue as vast and as digital as the USTC, although another obstacle that is as much of a historical tradition as cataloguing itself (see my link to Burton’s notebook). There are bound to be mistakes.

Blair’s conclusions in this area were to stress the need to train researchers how to interpret the findings of digital references against their travels in the archives, as one way of fighting the constant threat of loss. Right. On.

In its entirety, it’s nice to think about the USTC as a combination resource tool with which to embark on new research, but also a critical tool by which to compare, contrast, and improve research methods in general.

Happy HalloWEEK! Appropriate to the time of year, books about Witchcraft were among the most popular when the printing press was in its infancy of invention and development (that is, before 1500, when books are known as ‘incunabula’ coming from ‘cuna’, the Latin word for cradle).

The image above comes from the first illustrated book to be printed on Witchcraft, Ulrich Molitor’s De Lamiis of 1489. The three women are witches, although granted they are a far cry from the Sanderson Sisters. There’s also some distance between this opening image and the title of the work, where the word for ‘Witch’ refers to Lamia, the mythological Queen of Libya who turned into a demon with an insatiable hunger for children. It doesn’t even come close to other outrageously entertaining depictions of that creature. This one comes from Topsell’s translation of Gesner’s Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, which includes as many fantastical creatures as it does cats, goats, and wolves:

The point of the image of the three women, iconic in its time since the book was popular enough to reach half a dozen editions before 1500, is that any woman could be a witch. None of the lore was dropped of course: witches were still identified by how many children they had devoured, how many men they had poisoned, how many thunder storms they had cooked up, and how many times they had slept with the devil, only rather than portray pure evil as a wet hot scaly mess, the power of this widely circulated book is that the face it gave to the name was, well, a few grannies sitting around a table having a cup of tea. Maybe one of them is a housewife. Each of them could be anyone.

The Latin caption opposite the image roughly translates to the question: Can witches come to parties on enchanted wolves and broomsticks? Can they eat, drink, and speak together, and recognize one another? As if the woodcut might answer: well, they can at least do the eating, drinking, and speaking, and maybe that should be enough to convince you. As Alan Kors and Edward Peters put it in Witchcraft in Europe, 400 – 1700 the images from this book are “without any identifying physical or costume features attributed to witches – that is, some of the illustrations seem to depict ordinary women doing ordinary things”.

The idea here will be familiar to anyone who has watched the Lifetime Movie Network: that solemn, time-old truth that the only monster is the ‘monster within’, that evil comes in pretty, normie, and many other unremarkable- or whiskey-bottle-shaped packages, and that this is the scariest plot-twist of them all… The work on the left of witches at a satanic meeting is dramatic, but only a small part of a much larger context of persecution. And that context is a little more than a public service announcement against hocus pocus: treatises on witchcraft like De Lamiis really were used to identify potential witches – pretty much any woman – and prosecute them brutally.

In fact, treatises like this one on witchcraft are the earliest forms of popular reading to field discussion on the legality and efficacy of torture: Molitor here actually does not believe that torture methods produce accurate confessions, however he does believe that accused witches should be executed. The more comprehensive, and more widely circulated Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of the Witches” published in 1484) remained the definitive guide to identifying, interrogating, torturing, and killing witches for at least 200 years. It takes the form of a Q&A, includes dialogue meant to be used verbatim during the trial by the judge, and it is fully complacent with torture, from the first day of questioning:

“But if neither threats nor such promises will induce her to confess the truth, then the officers must proceed with the sentence, and she must by examined, not in any new or exquisite manner, but in the usual way, lightly or heavily according as the nature of her crimes demands. And while she is being questioned about each several point, let her be often and frequently exposed to torture, beginning with the more gentle of them; for the Judge should not be too hasty to proceed to the graver kind. And while this is being done, let the Notary write all down, how she is tortured and what questions are asked and how she answers.

And note that, if she confesses under torture, she should then be taken to another place and questioned anew, so that she does not confess only under the stress of torture.

The next step of the Judge should be that, if after being fittingly tortured she refuses to confess the truth, he should have other engines of torture brought before her, and tell her that she will have to endure these if she does not confess. If then she is not induced by terror to confess, the torture must be continued on the second or third day, but not repeated at that present time unless there should be some fresh indication of its probable success.” (Source)

There are already a few feminist and socialist perspectives on the consequences of this view toward witches – I have cited this before, but “Burning Women” is a favorite one-off zine on the subject – so I will only recap the argument here, that witch-hunting 1. Forces women into a silent, domestic norm by honing in on and burning out those landholding or profession holding (i.e. midwives) deviations. 2. Criminalizes poverty, since many persecuted are from the poorer classes and 3. Dis-unites (often working class) communities through a culture of fear-mongering, informing against one another, certain torture, death, etc. True, these are huge issues of which the literature of witchcraft plays only a part, but the reasons for the argument are sound, judging even from a skim-through of the Malleus: it has some pretty heavy-handed accounts of the trials of thunderstorms blamed on property-holding widows, miscarriages blamed on midwives, poor old women blamed for famine. The the book includes scripts for different ways of finding and questioning witnesses and suspects, and a particularly fun discussion of “Whether Mortal Enemies Many Be Admitted as Witnesses” (the first sentence says “they can’t”, the rest of the section gives reasons when they can). In the literature surrounding witchcraft, the odds are stacked against the vulnerable, and most especially women. The majority of criminal proceedings described in the book take place in little salt-of-the earth villages, casting in vivid relief the idea that witch-hunting reached every nook and cranny of literate and illiterate Britain and Continental Europe. Everyone was impacted in some way, if not only with anxiety. Even Johannes Kepler had to take time off from writing his most influential work (his commentary on Copernican astronomy) in 1620 to defend his mother when she was tried as a witch. According to William Monter in “Witch Trials in Continental Europe”, Between 1450-1750, 80,000 people were tried and 35,000 executed. I haven’t even made it over to North America, but you might say, They are the 66(6)%.

There is also a lesson in media studies here: the literature of witchcraft produced was pretty much uniform in the aspersions it cast upon the poor, old, and female. Especially shorter works for wider audiences largely follow suit with the Malleus Maleficarum. The language reads kinda like this: Where you are not in favor of waterboarding suspected terrorists, you are against freedom, safety, America; where you are not in favor of tortured confessions from suspected witches, you are against freedom, safety, God and His Church. It’s hard to contradict that line of reasoning.

But there was resistance by some scholars. The “most thorough challenge to orthodox witchcraft doctrine” was written by Johannes Weyer in 1563 but would double in size with additions and updates by 1583: De praestigiis daemonum…(“praestigiis” here can mean “description”, but also “illusion”). Weyer was Dutch and trained as a Doctor in Paris and Orleans, but became hooked by the subject while studying under Agrippa – Cornelia Agrippa, the famous philosopher who also successfully defended and acquitted witches at trial in 1519 with much publicity.  What most interested Weyer was not the occult, but an early understanding of psychology: what towns and Inquisitors and raving villagers with pitchforks called witchcraft, Weyer diagnosed as depression. Their problem was not Satan, but melancholy. From that argument Weyer went on to discuss and theorize the psychology of the persecutors themselves, how people could come to believe in “witches’ sabbaths”, and react so hysterically and with such brutality, all of which also includes a consideration of hallucinogenics. Finally, he calls in his book for legal reform that would bar capital punishment of supposed witches and tend towards medical treatment. His book was banned by the Catholic Church, and came under heavy attack by other scholars – but it was also popular to the extent of reaching over 12 editions and multiple translations. In addition, the work distinguishes Weyer in as the founder of psychiatry. Garrison & Morton’s A Medical Bibliography (4917) cite him as as “the first clinical and the first descriptive psychiatrist to leave succeeding generations a heritage which was accepted….He reduced the clinical problems of psychopathology to simple terms of everyday life and everyday, human, inner experiences”.

It was only a hundred years after the Malleus Maleficarum and was published that the first work in English to deny the reality of witches was printed in London: Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (William Brome, 1584).

Scot’s preface to the reader pleads to their sanity:  “To you that are wise & discreet few words may suffice for such a one judgeth not at the first sight, nor reprooveth by heresay, but patiently heareth and thereby increaseth in understanding”. Don’t just a hag by her cover. But, unfortunately, opposed to understanding is the hysteria caused by fear: “the name of a witch is so odious, and her power so feared among the common people, that if the honestest body living chance to be arraigned thereupon, she shall hardly escape condemnation.” In other words, once someone was suspect, neither they nor anybody else could argue against the charge: suspicion alone was powerful enough to condemn.

We recently acquired a copy, which I had to catalogue. The work is so thorough in its dissection of the issue that it is also considered the major source for early attitudes toward, and rituals of, witchcraft, citing no less than 212 authors as well as examples from the courts of law in England.

It’s comprehensive to the point that Scot includes some of the first in-depth descriptions of magician acts (in the sense of David Copperfield: Illusionist) – with tips for tricks to make it look as though you’ve stabbed yourself, teach-your-self juggling, and this illustration of how to fake decapitation:

You might say he includes information on rabbits-out-of-a-hat to cast a ridiculous light over the entire enterprise of witch-hunting. But at the same time as he tells you how to throw fake knives, Scot keeps the real knives in his argument. It’s almost purely class based: he singles out “witchmongers” who seek “to pursue the poor, to accuse the simple, and to kill the innocent”, pointing out how unreasonable it is to accuse vulnerable persons of having “power which only appertaineth to God”. The first four books list the procedures of identifying witches and using torture to procure confession, found in the Malleus Malificarum as well as Jean Bodin’s work. Bodin, a famous French lawyer and influential legal scholar, had championed a even more brutal approaches toward eliminating the threat of Witchcraft in the 1580s than anyone.

The Discoverie was hotly contested by the likes of George Gifford and Henry Perkins, and even Meric Casaubon later wrote against Scot. Copies of this first edition are rare, however, because King James I, allgedly (it is not proven) demanded them to be burnt upon his accession to the throne in 1603. Again, to keep the accounts uniform. James himself was a high-profile believer in witchcraft, having written his own search-and-destroy guide to rooting out magic, the Demonologie in 1597.  While the book was somewhat well received on the continent and appeared in Dutch editions of 1609 and 1637, it was not printed in England again until 1651. A pretty heavy media blackout for a work of very humane dissent.

From this perspective, the subject fits nicely alongside more recent historical research in the style of History is a Weapon. Everything about these books screams to be dragged and dropped into the present: we’ve got extensive documentation and a monopoly on information, be it on the part of the Monarchy (as with James I), or the Church (The Pope, The Inquisition especially); and we have an argument built solely on the politics of fear and scape-goating, appeals to religious ‘values’ couched in terms that threaten them to their very core.It’s rife with modern resonance.

But it’s important to excavate all of this from the places modern usage of ‘witch hunts’ have already taken us: it’s a political word, a defensive word, even a cursory lexis nexis search shows Herman Cain using the word every other minute to refer to recent allegations of sexual harassment, it is used to describe the War on Terror, it is used to describe a Baptist University in Georgia that is systematically firing its LGBT employees, it is sometimes even used to detract from forms of protest, like Occupy Wall Street.  Sometimes usage highlights similarity and other times it obscures difference – I will let  you decide which of the above examples fits where.

Parsing history from usage in these instances can be powerful, as History is a Weapon reminds us, the Motto of the Ministry of Information in George Orwell’s 1984 reads:

Who controls the past
controls the future;
who controls the present
controls the past.

UPDATE: The Washington Post Wonkblog has reported  (with maps!) an essay by scholars at George Mason University concluding that the ability of a government to benefit from tax revenue actually correlates to a decline in witch-hunting in 17th century France:

We find that regions with higher taxes were less likely to try witches and that the rise of the fiscal state across much of France during the mid-seventeenth century can account for much of the subsequent decline in witch-trials. These results are robust across a range of different econometric specifications and our findings are supported by additional historical and qualitative evidence.

There findings are consistent with this post, and even strengthen the economic argument that has been made about the persecution of witches as one means of criminalizing poverty. There is no need to play the blame game when the village is running smoothly. There is no need for a well-oiled governing machine to basically eliminate the lower, unemployable echelons of its populations, or attempt to squeeze more money out of them. As Scot says of witches: “There is no way in the world for these poor women to escape the inquisitors hands, and so consequently burning, but to gild their hands with money, whereby oftentimes they take pity upon them…they reap such profit, as a number of these seely women pay them yearly pensions to the end they may not be punished again.”

In the old-world style where Church and State are very closely aligned (especially in France), a rich government means a rich Church, eventually a surplus of alms and pity for the down-and-out members of a community. Furthermore, higher taxes allow for better funded legal administration and codification. That makes it a little harder to permit the un-rigorous criteria of witch trials that relied on anonymous tip-offs by suspicious neighbors, confession by torture, and the standard of guilty until proven innocent (the Malleus Maleficarum lists little ‘tests’ a judge can use on suspects to prove themselves).

The other day I successfully bid at auction on this seemingly unwanted book, Rowland Vaughan’s Most Approved and Long Experienced Water-Workes (London: George Eld., 1610) not only because it has the distinction of being the first book in English about Crop Irrigation, but because when I turned to the last page of the work I found this:

It seemed odd to me that at the end of a practical treatise on a uniquely boring area of husbandry there would be a blank promissory note, that is, a note that in theory enables the reader to lend money to the author alone, without interest and to be paid back within five years. Not your average happily-ever-after or colophon – moreover as the note passes without explicit mention at the beginning or end of the book, and references to the book (STC 24603) lists that the note does not occur in every copy. Why would Vaughan take up the space to ask you to lend him money, confident that the space is worth taking up, and confident that he can pay you back?

In times like this it helps to start reading the book, I guess. The first 20 or so pages contain various poems about what an all-around great guy the author is. The first, by Vaughan’s cousin John Davies (“A Panegyricke”) didn’t answer my question about the promissory note, but did change my opinion on how entertaining water works could be, and how good Vaughan is in the “royall TRENCH”

This puts the Leaze in Sleaze.

The poem continues to compare Vaughan to King David, King Arthur, God himself, and a variety of pagan deities; in the next poem, Robert Corbet turns the trench into a hive, and Vaughan into that time-honored workaholic, the bee. Each poem paraphrases the story of Vaughan’s discovery of the new technology (told by the author himself later in the book). Once upon a time, he noticed the greener grass on the one section of his property that well-watered because of a molehill that let water flow freely into the small valley below which it created. He spent the next 20 years trying to copy from his observation. The book, these opening poems promise, will include a detailed description of this as well as instructions as to the the season and length of time to “drowne the Grounds”, the type of trenches to be dug depending on the terrain, and other handy tips, including how to keep moles out of the waterworks. And Vaughan delivers.

The exuberant praise for Vaughan and his irrigation system is no less exuberant than the author’s own introduction to the Earl of Pembroke, which takes up half of the volume, and here is where the promissory note is given the full force of its impact. It’s not just water works Vaughan needs to borrow money to fund, but instead he wants to build an entirely new society based upon his advances in crop irrigation, a new social order that will eliminate unemployment and rejuvenate his local economy: he wants to “raise a golden world…in the Golden-Vale of Herefordshire” (check out the side-note below “The richest Country breeds the idlest (therefore the poorest) people)”

In the Herefordshire of the early 17th century there are many in need, by Vaughan’s count there are five hundred out of a job within a mile and a half from his house in all directions. The poverty stems from unemployment, or an employment cycle that lasts three months and entails so much traveling that it results in a loss of income rather than a gain, the equivalent of paying cheap rent so far out of Central London that your travel fair in pounds per annum & hours lost to the commute leaves you exhausted, and what’s more, prevents you from saving any money at all. “There is not one amongst ten that hath five shillings to buy a Bale of Flaxe” to weave into linen, without several days worth of travel and wasted time.

In controlling the flow of water, Vaughan controls his crop yield as well as the mill that grinds it into profitable corn, such that he can build offices and rooms to house all of his workers and “meckanicals”. Building from this model, “Two thousand imploide in the under-business of the Common-wealth” will be made possible when corn from the Mill is used both to feed laborers but also in trade for other goods to employ other tradesman: leather for tanners and shoemakers, flax and pelts for clothiers and glovers, etc. Each trade will have one master in charge of its administration, and as many apprentices as that master sees fit. “A famous preacher shall be maintained” to teach children and give sermons. There will be a Church but no seminaries or monasteries, an almshouse for the elderly and infirm.

The promissory note is all but mentioned explicitly, as Vaughan has no problem asking for money from his readers, particularly those from the upper tiers of society, the rich to pay for the poor (they are probably even more than the 99%). “I cannot see how mony can be wanting, I have so many honourable friends…yet I thank God they cannot say I want honorable friends, such as the Lord Bishops,  your Lordships with others, which may lend me money (if please you and them) I will not for a million anger any of you, to make a motion to borrow money: if lendings come in out of your honourable dispositions…its a better course (tenne to one)  then to take money to usury…”

As an added enticement, Vaughan will keep at his own expense “a dining-roome to entertaine a world of worthy benevolent Contributors: The Table perpetually furnished to intertaine forty of those Contributers dayly in expectancy”. The room will be “wainscoted, and fairly hang’d with Arras” and it will have venison pasties and as many other meats as possible whenever they are available. If only Kickstarter campaigns promised that!

The word Utopia is never mentioned, even though it might be coming to your mind as it does to mine. But the work is distinctly unscholarly and estranged from the genre: “I have not observed a precise scholler-like Decorum: for Mars his University…affoords no rules of speaking in Print”, Vaughan writes: he was formerly a soldier, and the University of Mars the god of war seems to me as something like getting a Ph.D at the School of Hard Knocks. The only references made are to the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He doesn’t imagine a chance to start over on a far off island, but instead borders Wales and answers to Parliament, and he doesn’t engage with More, Campanella, or even Bacon, he just wants a job and lots of meat for him and his neighbors. It’s not a Utopia because of being a “nowhere”, as the etymology of that word leads us, it’s in his own back yard.

The way he accomplishes this vision through local poets, a vibrant letter to the equivalent of his local representatives (nobles who had a say in Parliament) , and serious innovation: it is a shame this list of accomplishments, as well as the material addition of the promissory note to make good on his ideas, falls far afield of the usual templates of Early English Literature. It is a grass-roots stab at social policy, more than political philosophy, with a very reasonable approach to jump-starting local growth with liquid assets: give jobs and salaries to those who will immediately put that money into their subsistence. Unlike the usual praise and flattery confined to the limits of dedicatory addresses, Vaughan gives his readers the chance to actually make good on their support for his new social order with a peculiar boldness that I have not found in other treatises on husbandry, Utopia, or any other book of the period. The ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) lists a book published over a hundred years later in 1791 that includes a promissory note, only this note is to fund the publication itself, not a comprehensive view of society.

Has this entry become relevant to contemporary politics yet? Is cataloguing this book political? Is it possible that thinking critically about obscure texts from the distant past has something to say to us now? That history’s bidding is more than a return to more bookishness? I hope so, but I also thought it would be cool to write about this so something more substantial would come up when you google “Rowland Vaughan” or “Crop Irrigation”.

Just a little 32-page curiosity for your Tuesday: the Alphabetum Ibericum sive Georgianium (Rome; Propaganda Fide, 1629. BM STC Georgian. CLC R673.), aka the first printed book in Georgian. The text begins with the thirty-six letters of the Iberian or Georgian alphabet, presented in four columns – formation, name (in both alphabets) and force.  Some letters have additional italic comments to the side, referring to and giving the same phoneme in other languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Greek, entailing the use of type in 5 completely different alphabets on a single page.  The second section explains the numerous ligatures when Georgian letters are combined.   Finally, the book practices what it preaches and vice versa with settings of The Lord’s Prayer, Hail  Mary, Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, Corporal Works of Mercy, The Seven Sacraments, The Ten Commandments, concluding with the Canticle of the Virgin Mary.

It’s also the first work to be published by the Propaganda Fide Press, or Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, (an offshoot of Tipografia Vaticana) founded as a Counter-Reformatory tactic to aid the spread of Catholicism among missionaries. Incidentally, it was the first western press to cast and print in Middle and Far Eastern languages, making it also the first to work on a truly international scale.

Before it was an official department of Vatican in 1622 by Pope Gregory XIII, it was merely a collection of cardinals charged with fulfilling the practical needs of various missions in America, Africa, and the East. Printing was first and foremost among these needs – but you’ll notice on the title page above that this first work was not issued until 1629. That’s due to a good seven years of hiccups made possible by the deaths of Gregory XIII and after Gregory XV. Nevertheless, in 1626 King Teimuraz I of a depressed and cut-off Georgia sent Nicephorus Irbach as his ambassador to Rome to visit the Pope Urban VIII, and Irbach was enlisted to instruct monks in his native language. His arrival coincided with the foundation of the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome (1627), dedicated exclusively to the uses of the Propaganda Fide. The jurisdiction of “Propaganda” was at that time any non-Catholic country – so they had their work cut out for them – and Urbaniana was from the beginning a powerhouse of language instruction for the future missionaries of the 17th century (a purpose it fulfills to this day). Irbach oversaw the casting of the first Georgian type, and according to an essay on Georgian language and literature funded by NATO, this short grammar and prayer book was the first of three printed that year:

1. “Iberian or Georgian-Alphabet with Prayers”, Rome, 1629 (Alphabetum Ibericum, sive georgianum, cum Oratione Dominicali. Romae, Typis Sac. Congr. de Propag. Fide, MDCXXIX).

2. “Georgian and Italian Dictionary”, Rome, 1629 (Dittionario Georgiano e Italiano, composto da Stefano Paolini con l’aiuto del M.R.PD. Niceforo Irbachi Georgiano, Monaco di S. Basilio… In Roma, Nella Stampa della Sagra Congr. de Propag. Fide, (I)DCXXIX).

3. “Litaniae Beatae Mariae Virginis Lauretanae (Prayer of Virgin Mary of Laureto, translated from the Latin into Georgian by Nicephorus Irbach). Rome, 1629.

In a lapsed follow-up, the first Georgian grammar was not printed until ’43 by the same press. Books were not printed in Georgia until 1709, at Tbilisi, and there was scarcely a study of National history or literature in Europe until the 1790s. Wouldn’t it be neat and really difficult to draw a timeline mapping national languages, when they were typecast, in what print frequencies, and represented by what genres, from literature to scholarship?

Sure, Goldschmidt published works and lectures are still useful today: The First Cambridge Press in its European Setting,The Printed Book of the Renaissance, Gothic and Renaissance Bookbindings, and his favorite, Mediaeval Texts and their First Appearance in Print. But he accomplished this during rockstar hours, aka all night, never waking up before 11:30 save for auctions at Sotheby’s (he found it extremely difficult to be on time), & spending most of his late afternoons lunching at Brown’s Hotel (waiters put screens around his table if he was in a bad mood), and staying up all night with his friends and his research. He lived on black coffee. He smoked a minimum of 40 cigarettes while handling the incunabula, fine bindings, and other treasures among the early printed books and manuscripts he specialized in. Once, when trying to determine the provenance of a book up for auction, a colleague merely sniffed the pages. The scent of tobacco that saturated the book meant it had surely belonged to E.P. Goldschmidt, and he favored a peculiar Turkish blend.

Goldschmidt did whatever he wanted probably because he was raised to feel he could: the scion of a major Dutch banking family, connected with most of the major banking families throughout Europe, he was reputed to be the richest undergraduate at Cambridge while there from 1905-9. I write all this by way of saying: if you win the E. P. Goldschmidt fellowship at Rare Book School, you have a great responsibility to yourself and E. P. to infuse your study of books with some high class badassery.

Although his interest in old books dates from his time at Trinity College (upon graduation he privately issued a catalogue of his favorite books to his friends), his first major step into the book trade was in 1917. One day while passing the firm Gilhofer & Ranschburg in his native Vienna, he noticed in their window books on display he had specifically requested, for sale. He went inside to complain. If you are not satisfied with our level customer service, he was told, you are more than welcome to try and run the business yourself. As the story goes, he did, becoming co-owner that year.

In 1923 he moved to 45 Old Bond Street, London to set up E.P. Goldschmidt & Co. Ltd. Not forgetting his roots, the price-code he kept for his stock was the same as Gilhofer & Ranschburg: REPUTAZION. And his reputation remained intact: “There has been no shrewder dealer in the business in our time”, John Carter (of ABCs of Book Collecting fame) wrote in his personal note on the death of his friend. Not only that, but

There have been scholars before now who have dabbled in bookselling. There have been, and are, booksellers who are also scholars. But I do not recall, in the long and honourable history of the book trade, any man since Giovanni Aurispa…. who, being by nature, aptitude, and avocation a scholar, embraced the antiquarian trade as his means of livelihood and used it as a platform from which to deploy his scholarship. (John Carter ‘E.P. Goldschmidt: A Personal Note’, Antiquarian Bookman, 10 April 1954)

More important than the book-length publications put out by Cambridge University Press, however, what made Goldschmidt a great scholar-bookseller were the catalogues of stock he produced. In our reference collection, we happen to have a few, the earliest of which (9) I have decided post on .pdf form here to make my point as to its sheer readability and usefulness as a work of entertainment AND reference.

Some people chain-smoke in front of a typewriter long enough to write On the Road, and others produce scholarship on no less than thousands of books, paying attention (in many instances) for the first time to works of major historical significance. For instance in no. 86 Goldschmidt presents a 3 page description of “AN UNRECORDED AMERICANUM OF 1506″: Johannes Glogoviensis’s Introductorium compendiosum in Tractatum Spere Materialis (Cracow: Haller, 1506). The book is a wealth of information about 367 different books, ranging from incunabula to Americana, medicine, botany, and to books of art and reference. It includes fold-out plates of relevant images: maps of the New World, and an Anatomical fugitive sheet. It seems a shame that this kind of work slips from notice so easily in comparison to other books who entered this world in a similar form of many-typed slips, but there’s the politics of the canon for you. Although the large scale on which it remains unnoticed by scholars, librarians, and other booksellers, is a little harder for me to understand. Of course, there is the age-old dilemma of space. As A. N. L. Munby wrote:

Current booksellers’ catalogues present a grave problem. space forbids that they should all be retained, yet it is a sad wrench to part with them. No ephemeral literature approaches them in fascination. … Only when a mountainous accumulation of catalogues demands drastic action can I bring myself to throw a proportion of them away. Then, perhaps once in three years, there is a gigantic sorting; some are earmarked for permanent retention as works of reference; the rest are reluctantly destroyed after certain material such as plates of bindings and manuscripts has been cut out and transferred to a growing series of folio scrap books, ‘cutting up books to make other books’ as an unsympathetic friend once described it.

The excerpt is quoted in Henry Woodhuysen’s chapter on Catalogues in Out of Print and into Profit (pp 123 – 156). Woodhuysen goes on to give an appraisal, based on his own extensive collection and research, of what catalogues in the book trade have to offer (the only longer treatment of the subject I have found is David Pearson’s Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook): “Catalogues add value to books, by placing them in context with books of a similar or related kind, their status is enhanced, new subjects for collection are suggested and a spirit of competiton between collectors is promoted.” He charts the ways in which catalogues have shaped interests and scholarship: collections offered of Alexander Pope and other minor poets and plays literally opened up the 18th century for scholars, and single-author catalogues that emphasized manuscript materials, for better and for worse, made the literary establishment’s obsession with the author (and consequently his/her ‘death’) possible. Maggs Bros. in particular issued once-unconventional catalogues that by this point will seem old hat: the first aeronautics catalogue in 1920, alchemy in 1921, Judaica and Hebraica in 1922, and association and presentation copies in 1923 among others. In a more clear-cut sales pitch, they issued in 1924 and again in 1941 a catalogue of incunabula of which “there was no copy in libraries of the United States”. Catalogues sometims included scholarly essays and introductions by famous scholars and writers, or were laid out by some of the major designers of the day: for instance Goldschmidt’s catalogue 106, the year before his death, was the work of Jan Tschichold – whose genius you otherwise may recognize from Penguin and Pelican books of the same era.

Almost as long as there has been a book trade there have been sales catalogues. Konrad Gesner drew from the sales catalogues of the major publishing houses – Aldus (reproduced in Renouard’s bibliography), Froben, etc. during the compilation of the first universal short title catalogue, his Bibliotheca Universalis (1545). And as Woodhuysen can add, “Printed catalogues containing second hand books, imported from the Continent, for sale in England have survived from the 1630s; by the beginning of the next century they were quite common and from about 1730 they started to list books with their prices.” Richard Sharpe has also written an essay on the relative uselessness of these catalogues as printed by the Sheldonian Theatre in the late 17th century under John Fell – he has scrupulously compiled a bibliography of these from the archives, including those of Anthony Wood and John Bagford. The modern catalogue is often meticulously researched (e.g. our Catalogue 59) and sometimes plays a role in determining those works of reference that are used beyond the trade: the secret-seeming language of ‘Adams’, ‘Renouard’, ‘ESTC’ required of a pre-1600 continental book, an Aldine, or an early English Book, are standards of reference that come from our practice of checking stock against documented complete copies – they are practices which scholars and institutions use as well.

Catalogues are hard to collect, and to catalogue: they’re issued inconsistently but in huge numbers by a fluctuating dramatis personae of firms, sometimes in varying formats and without very much information about the time of their publication, there is no standard of appearance, contents, or design. The few collections that exist are incomplete, the Munby Collection at Cambridge, the British Library and Oxford have selections on one side of the ocean, and the Groiler Club and the Folger have a few on the other. Most institutions don’t have the space or the time. The smartest and most exciting answer to this problem has come form Yale’s Lillian Goldman Law Library: we were very excited when the librarian there, Mike Widener, e-mailed us one day to ask if he could copy and paste our descriptions with their appropriate books on the library’s online catalogue. It would be nice to see other institutions follow suit. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing my very best impersonation of E. P. Goldschmidt and maybe one day will have my cataloguing work reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement, too.

As networks of catalogues of the book trade across the centuries are able to tell us all about the economics that propel what we value as cultural heritage, when we begin to value it that way, why, and when that changes, there is a sense that we have a lot to lose in overlooking this strange category of ephemeral scholarship. The main reason for neglect must relate to the bottom-line: as they are meant to sell books, they have been grouped with like categories of sales advertisements. Unfortunately, L.L. Bean catalogues, each object usually entails hours of synthesizing information from bibliographies, works of history and scholarship, books and essays, even personal accounts, past and present. But as it is through these catalogues that the secret history of many an intellectual trend can be traced, hopefully more attention will be paid to them in the future.

Anyone collect catalogues? Or have any neat stories about the books you’ve found in catalogues? Goldschmidt famously said that his favorite client would sent orders by postcard upon receipt of his catalogue in some faraway corner of the world. Agree or disagree?

[L]iteracy remains an elusive target: some 793 million adults lack minimum literacy skills which means that about one in six adults is still not literate; 67.4 million children are out-of-school and many more attend irregularly or drop out.

via mike_smiths_flickr

This weekend in a stroke of sheer gift-giving genius I was taken to Hay-on-Wye for my birthday, a little village in Wales with forty-odd secondhand bookshops, roughly translating to a bookshop per 36 residents, hundreds of thousands of books and hours of intensive rummaging.

How does a town become a town of books? The case of Hay follows a distinct blueprint: in 1961 Richard Booth opened up a bookshop in his hometown, stocking it with the contents of entire libraries that had closed in the United States (unfortunately & terrifyingly I’ve not been successful in finding more about this – search results cover only current library shut-downs). There was enough stock to fill many bookshops over, and that’s just what happened, and Booth insisted on placing locals in charge of each. His idea for a “town of books” was, first and foremost, about rejuvenating the local economy by means other than a Tesco and a strip mall.

And the book town model caught on, because Booth traveled around to remake other little towns in Hay’s image, from the 1980s and most recently in Esquelbecq, France (2010). Although the success of the model is inconsistent (you’ll notice that many of the towns on the above wiki-list have fallen out of practice), the International Organization of Book Towns (I.O.B.) is still running strong, and has held meetings every other year since 1998 in order to

1. raise public awareness of book towns and stimulate interest by giving information via internet and by organising a International Book Town Festival every second year;
2. enhance the quality of book towns by exchanging knowledge, skills and know-how between the book towns and their individual book sellers and other businesses;
3. strengthen the rural economy by making propaganda for the existing book towns and by offering a medium (e-commerce) to the book sellers, by which they can offer their books to an universal public, also or specially in the quiet season (“winter economy”);
4. undertake other activities which can serve the interests of book towns and strengthen independent businesses in book towns, e.g. stimulating the use of information technology;
5. help in these ways maintaining regional and national cultural heritage and to stimulate the international public to get acquainted with it.

Booth's Autobiography

But Hay’s distinction as the “first” (in the west, saving Jinbocho, Japan) is not the only reason why it thrives as a book town, although if there is a branch of tourist psychology, it must have a lot to say on everyone’s obsession with things that are ‘first’ and/or ‘ largest’ and how they re-enforce success. The main factor here is the cult around the eccentric personality of Richard Booth himself. Folks who grew up in Hay will tell you, he’s a nice man who can throw a great, town-wide party, but beyond that he’s got precisely the flair for publicity that allows a venture like a ‘book town’ to thrive.

There is no better example than in 1977, when the town of books became a kingdom and Booth declared Hay on Wye’s independence. With Booth as King, April Ashley (the first transgender male to female in the UK) as Queen, what started out as a glorified tongue-in-cheek gained recognition on the BBC and the world over. It wasn’t legally a kingdom, but that technicality didn’t matter: there were still passports to be acquired and a web presence where you can buy your very own titles of nobility. To this day in the castle bookshop there are postcards with Booth’s face pasted onto Holbein’s Henry VIII. From the website:

In a world increasingly ruled by impenetrable bureaucracy, and self-interested big business organizations, the Kingdom of Hay was created as an alternative to embrace the good humoured common sense of ordinary intelligent people, which of course ought to be the basis of good government everywhere, always !

Today with government sleaze never far from the headlines, the issues raised in the King of Hay’s Declaration of Independence more than twenty years ago are probably more crucial than ever. But the spirit of the Kingdom of Hay has never been one of despondency. The original Declaration in 1977, presided over by the well-known figure of April Ashley, was celebrated with fireworks and a party for the whole town. And when the King, resplendent in his royal robes with crown, orb and scepter made from an old ball-cock and copper piping, was afterwards asked whether he was serious, his reply was:

“Of course not – but it’s more serious than real politics..!”

The next significant event to add to the fame of the Independent Kingdom of Books was the foundation in 1988 of its annual literary festival. Although Booth wasn’t very involved, the festival was clearly built on the reputation of the town of books – drawing writers and celebrities from all over. During this time the local population swells several times over, and while there we heard tell of hotels being booked up to seven years in advance during the festival time, and even camping areas charging more than what you’d expect. “A Woodstock of the mind”, as it is called, to the max.

Even the experience of wandering around Hay outside of  festival time is overwhelming, with so many book shops. The majority of them are of general interest, which tends to bleed them one into the other, a continuous experience of the pure pleasure of browsing that really gets your hands dirty with books. In the area surrounding the castle there are “honesty” book shops, shelved under awnings with cobwebs as curtains and if you see a book you want, just leave the 50p it is likely to cost inside the black box, thanks.

By far the biggest timewarp for me was walking into Addyman Books and managing to stagger out two hours later without realizing it: their second floor in particular was full of odd old books, and they were the only book store I noticed that had a specific section for ‘Books on Books’ – usually all of that action happens  somewhere along the ‘Antiques & Collectives’ shelves. The image below shows off the interior of the shop, taken from a Church:

The gem I found from here was the Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography by Richard Garnett, once Keeper of the British Museum and published in 1899 (more to follow on this in a separate post on old-school Bibliography and Library Science – including Garnett’s essays on what the telegraph and the camera can do for libraries).

The sweetest bookshops were those that went with a theme: there is one dedicated entirely to poetry, and one entirely to the ecosystem of true crime and murder mystery books.

My personal favorite was the specialist in all things natural and/or agrarian – C. Arden Books, and although sorely tempted by every volume in his extensive selection on Beekeeping (past and present – including my favorite early modern book, Butler’s Feminine Monarchie of Bees), I left instead with the best friend of the indecisive browser – an excellent bibliography on British Bee Books (1500 – 1976) for less than half price. The poor girl’s equivalent of having it all.

Some other “new acquisitions” which will probably form the basis of more detailed posts in the future. I tended toward the weird and ephemeral, for sake of light packing and also it seemed to me that searching through stacks of press photographs and playbills is one of the more unique pleasures the town had to offer, rather than surplus copies of Twilight (although I was very happy to see that as well, haters gonna hate be damned):

Volume 1, Issue No. 5 of ANARCHY Magazine (more zine than mag), published in London, with an essay on the subject by Boris Badinoff and Hioshi Ozeki, and including essays by Michael Bakunin, and Marcus Graham with illustrations throughout.

Found in a box of BBC Press Photos at the Castle Bookshop.

The back of the image, nb "Cher is so thin, when she stands sideways she is a missing person".

Other headshots I found and promptly sent to the appropriate friends included Bette Midler and Charlotte Rae as Miss Cackle from the hit movie The Worst Witch.

An intra-office circular from 1939 by the paper, print, and publishing company E. S. & A. Robinson Ltd.

Each article covers things like the use of half-tone blocks, spotting lithographs, how to sell bags efficiently, and other advertising strategies. Here is a description of Grotesque typeface, in a feature on the use of sans serif fonts.

Vol 1. No. 4 is wrapped in light brown paper, and explains why.

So.

Anyone wanna start a book town with me someday?

The phrase I hear a lot to describe books like this is that it “ticks all of the boxes”: Incunable, well margined, annotated, with contemporary binding (quarter leather over wooden boards, with an interesting/weird blind stamp of a dragon in a rhombus), a great big old bookplate from the Elector of Bavaria’s library, rubricated throughout, and a very pretty first spread with an illuminated initial and a strange but sweet drawing of a Moor’s head at the foot of the page (if anyone can tell me more about these I’d love to know).

And the contents of the book have their own claims to infamy: Antonio Roselli of Arezzo, Italy (1381 – 1466) was a prominent lawyer and mediator during the second half of the Council of Constance, which addressed threats to Papal authority caused by break-away groups in Avignon and Pisa, initially posed by the Great Schism. Roselli’s detailed exposition of the extent of Papal primacy here, was very much part of his work as adviser to Martin V, who was elected Pope at Constance, and his successor Pope Eugenius IV. In line with Jean Gerson, Roselli maintains the primacy of Papal authority while at the same time arguing for a moderate conciliar approach: that in extraordinary circumstances, the power of the Pope could be circumscribed by that of a general council. This theory of limited Papal supremacy accepted at Constance fell out of favour from Eugenius onward, until it was totally condemned by the first Lateran Council. The shift towards what later generations would call Ultramontanism is clear by 1491, when Roselli’s tract enjoyed the distinction of becoming the first book condemned by the Church along with Pico della Mirandola’s 900 Theses. Niccolo Franco, Bishop of Treviso, condemned all copies to be burned at St. Mark’s, the principal Church of Venice where he was Papal legate.

But as far as incunables go, I found on ISTC that loads of libraries have copies of the book. The last time it was up for auction it was the Friedlaender copy (it went for $15,000) and it had a Spanish provenance which resulted in very nice illumination– nicer than what is here. It’s especially available in Germany– this copy had the DVPLVM stamp of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (where the Elector of Bavaria’s library was accessioned), and no wonder it was eventually de-accessioned– they have four other copies at the moment, and during wartime the library had to cut back, especially before the entirety of its contents were shipped out of town to prevent damage.

There’s the bookplate – designed by Rafael Sadeler for Emperoer Maximillian I around 1623. You may recognize it from the smaller variation which Maxmillian pasted into the books pillaged from the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg and sent as a gift to Pope Gregory XV during the Thirty Years War.

But while I was spending my first moments with the book, what I call ‘the socializing process’ (like they do with dogs at kennels) wherein I basically prod and leaf and sniff around without really reading anything, I noticed that the top quarter of the bookplate wasn’t pasted down. So I turned it over without any resistance or damage and blamo:

Was that the Hartmann Schedel? Of Nuremberg Chronicle fame? Luckily in our reference collection (which I am in the process of cataloguing on LibraryThing) we have a copy of Adrian Wilson’s Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle and it includes several samples of Schedel’s rounded handwriting. The Ex libris as well as the annotations throughout were a perfect match. Wilson writes a nice section on Schedel’s extensive and important library in the introduction:

It was his grandson, Melchior, the last of the family, who in 1552 sold Hartmann Schedel’s remarkable library to Johann Jakob Fugger of Augsburg…He was later actually bankrupted by his passion for books, and was forced to sell his ample library to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in 1571. It is because of this that Schedel’s books are today among the most precious collections of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. About 370 manuscripts and some 600 printed works, the latter in 389 individual bindings, are preserved there.

[...]With a particular passion he collected the writings of the Italian Renaissance and of German Humanism. Richard Stauber, in Die Schedelsche Bibliothek, showed that a considerable part of the Italian texts came from his cousin Hermann’s library. [...] His interest in new printed books is documented by several book orders carefully glued into his incunabula or manuscripts. Friends of his, travelling to Venice or Florence, were kept busy purchasing for him the latest available books. The earliest trustworthy source for prices of incunabula is his list of the costs of books printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz in Rome. There is a letter from Koberger in one of the volumes and in another an order sent to Koberger at the Frankfurt Fair. Into his volumes he not only inscribed page numbers, but entered remarks, short biographies of the authors and painted his coat of arms. He also repaired the bindings and glues in designs, miniatures, block prints, copper-plate en-gravings and other pictures. The most splendid example of his bibliomania is the hand-colored copy of his own Liber Chronicarum into which are inserted many extra pages including nine broadsides, all rarities, among them a copy of the Chronicle’s advertisement. (p 25-26).

And the Catholic Encyclopedia as well notes that Schedel’s library contains many books which have survived no where else: “Schedel’s activity in tracing out, collecting and copying MSS produced results of much value even to-day. Many an important monument has been preserved only in his copy” ( XIII p. 525). So how could such a significant provenance, that significantly had marked up the book (every page, and an additional 3 pp in the back)?

Even the auctioneers didn’t notice – and if you’re curious any incunabula up for auction in the EU needs an export license, just in case, so in theory this book should have been very carefully inspected.

I don’t think it’s anything more than an oversight, but one which happens to impact what is otherwise considered one of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek’s most important special collections, and probably a reserve price. But it’s not a huge stretch of the imagination that things slip through the cracks from time to time.

Schedel’s case relates in a strange way to what I spoke about in my last post, and more recently Sarah Werner’s latest post on ‘the serendipity of the unexpected’.

Something that lurks deep at the heart of digitization debates is, I think, the idea that if we phase out books (not necessarily ‘rare’ books or special collections), we phase out many people. And you don’t have to look far to see how this is happening, how many public libraries are currently in deep trouble – how many jobs are at stake. But here, the example of Schedel’s book or Robert Burton’s library (which I have talked about at greater length) are strange because they focus on moments of human failure to argue for continued human attention.

Speculatively this book could have been a casualty of war, but more concretely it was a casualty of day to day administration. It’s the kind of error only human intervention can fix – not something we can detect with computers. Only an actual human with the actual book in their hand can do it. I needed to really socialize with this book before I noticed that detail, the implications of which add a lengthy and vivid historical context the book, a real wonder and awe factor, a name to a face, which otherwise would have been lacking (and in practical cataloging terms, this added an entire paragraph extra to my description…). It’s mistakes like these that add a kind of vitality into the role of cataloguers or more fundamentally, readers.

It’s also about what can be hidden from us if we are not looking carefully at books even before we think about digitization!  It gives a historical lineage to the anxieties over what is potentially lost from digital editions. As long as books have been made, they’ve been read, misread, misrepresented, burned, drowned, forgotten, rediscovered, shelved, ad hoc and ad nauseum. Libraries play a necessary, and occasionally notorious, role in preserving our cultural heritage, and we’ve always needed to be mindful of a margin of error involved in any ambitious task of collection. By pointing out moments where big mistakes are made, our weaknesses really do become points of advocacy for paying more attention to our books – and preserving them as books to pay attention to.