Author: Centre for the Study of the Book

Workshop invitation: Textual editing workshops for undergraduates and postgraduates

A collaboration between the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections and Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Cultures of Knowledge, a project based at the Faculty of History

We are looking for enthusiastic undergraduates and postgraduates from any discipline to take part in workshops in textual editing culminating in the publication of a citable transcription.

Sign up for a workshop: see below for details.

Trinity Term 2019

  • 10:00-16:30 Wednesday 8th Week, 19th June

Textual editing is the process by which a manuscript reaches its audience in print or digital form. The texts we read in printed books are dependent on the choices of editors across the years, some obscured more than others. The past few years have seen an insurgence in interest in curated media, and the advent of new means of distribution has inspired increasingly charged debates about what is chosen to be edited, by whom and for whom.

These workshops give students the opportunity to examine these questions of research practice in a space designed around the sources at the heart of them. The Bodleian Libraries’ vast collections give students direct access to important ideas free from years of mediation, and to authorial processes in their entirety, while new digital tools allow greater space to showcase the lives of ordinary people who may not feature in traditional narrative history.

Our focus is on letters of the early modern period: a unique, obsolescent medium, by which the ideas which shaped our civilisation were communicated and developed. Participants will study previously unpublished manuscripts from Bodleian collections, working with Bodleian curators and staff of Cultures of Knowledge (http://www.culturesofknowledge.org), to produce a digital transcription, which will be published on the flagship resource site of Cultures of Knowledge, Early Modern Letters Online (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), as ‘Bodleian Student Editions’.

The sessions are standalone, but participants in previous workshops have gone on to further transcription work with Bodleian collections and with research projects around the country, as well as producing the first scholarship on some of the manuscripts by incorporating material in their own research (from undergraduate to doctorate level). The first-hand experience with primary sources, and citable transcription, extremely useful for those wishing to apply for postgraduate study in areas where this is valued: one participant successfully proceeded from a BA in Biological Sciences to an MA in Early Modern Literature on the basis of having attended.

The sessions provide a hands-on introduction to the following:

  1. Special Collections handling
  2. Palaeography and transcription
  3. Metadata curation, analysis, and input into Early Modern Letters Online
  4. Research and publication ethics
  5. Digital tools for scholarship and further training available

You can read about research conducted in previous workshops here. To hear about future textual editing workshops and other events as they are advertised, please join the digital scholarship mailing list.

Participation is open to students registered for any course at the University of Oxford. If you would like to participate, please contact Francesca Barr, Special Collections Administrator, francesca.barr@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, and include:

  1. your ox.ac.uk email address
  2. your department
  3. your level and year of study
  4. particular access requirements
  5. particular dietary requirements

Please note that owing to the workshops being oversubscribed both years running, we can only confirm places on this term’s workshops. You may register your interest in subsequent workshops, and will be notified of the dates for each term before they are advertised more widely.

Seminar in Palaeography and Manuscript Studies, 2019

The Seminar in Palaeography and Manuscript Studies runs annually in the Weston Library in Hilary term (Jan-March). The 2019 Seminar aimed to showcase the research of some of the early career scholars in Oxford using the Library’s collections. Here the three speakers working on medieval manuscripts offer brief summaries of their sessions.

Daniel Sawyer, ‘Against dullness: some ways to learn from (and enjoy) “average” manuscripts’

I aimed to demonstrate the value of examining ‘dull’ or ‘mediocre’ later medieval English literary manuscripts, and to bring out what might be interesting about seemingly dull manuscripts from any place and time.

It is (I suggested) by looking at seemingly dull, normal manuscripts that we might learn the most: normal manuscripts are the crucial context for the exceptional books which excite us, and normal manuscripts also let us study normality, a neglected topic in and of itself. Broad, part-quantitative surveys of such books have much to teach us.

Bodleian MS. Laud Misc. 486
Bodleian MS. Laud Misc. 486

A broad survey is of course difficult to conduct in a short seminar, so I took as my example book Bodleian Library, MS Laud Miscellaneous 486.

MS Laud Misc. 486 contains a copy of the Prick of Conscience, the most widely-witnessed medieval English poem, and a text generally neglected: the sheer number of surviving copies impedes research, and the poem’s content is tiresome and rebarbative to most modern readers. The poem is followed by a copy of Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis by the same scribe.

The catalogue description of this manuscript would not excite us. But it contains many points of interest, which I sought to bring out in my discussion.

The manuscript has a surviving gothic English binding, which is fascinating in itself and assures us of the book’s probable integrity since the fifteenth century. It is the most dense of all the medieval manuscripts in medieval bindings which I’ve been able to weigh—that is, it has the most weight per cubic centimetre.

A study of the book’s quiring reveals that it is not composed from codicologically distinct ‘booklets’, and yet there are subtler signs in the quiring which do reveal a production hesitation between its two texts.

Although both texts in the book were copied by the same scribe, I pointed out that there are quiet differences in the handwriting he deployed for each text. These broach the topic of palaeographical differences driven by linguistic difference, a topic which is less well-studied in the later medieval period than in the early Middle Ages because, paradoxically, more evidence—too much—survives.

Finally, ending at the manuscript’s beginning, I noted that a unique summary of the Prick of Conscience preserved here reveals the probable mnemonic reading of the poem in this book by one medieval reader, and hints at a moment of transition in the manuscript’s history when it might have moved between two reading communities and two reading contexts.

Karl Kinsella, ‘Plan and elevation: the architectural drawings of Richard of St. Victor’

My talk was titled ‘Plan and Elevation: Richard of St. Victor’s Architectural Drawings’ because we chose to focus on two manuscripts (MS. Bodl. 494, MS e Mus. 62) that contain the twelfth-century author Richard of Saint Victor’s commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, known as In visionem Ezechielis. Richard included some of the most detailed architectural drawings to exist at that time, making them important for how we understand the development of technical drawings, but also the language of architecture during the twelfth century.

We worked through the sequence of all fourteen drawings, showing that Richard structures the text in a way that helps his pedagogical aims. He begins with a very general drawing of the entire temple complex, showing all three atriums. He then provides much more detail on particular buildings. One elevation is in fact a section, as if Richard has removed part of the façade so that the viewer can see the interior. This is the first sectional elevation in existence and demonstrates Richard’s innovation in the genre of technical drawing.

Bodleian MS. Bodl. 494, fol. 156r

We closely examined a geometrical drawing that is, despite being the most plain in the whole work, is one of the most important. Richard uses two types of measurements to simplify his recreation of the temple. This drawing shows the reader how to translate from one type of measurement to the other. It shows that the commentary and the drawings within it are rooted in contemporary practices in geometry. This relationship between architecture and geometry continues to this day, and Richard was a forerunner of that.

Finally, we examined the language that Richard used. Richard called one of the measurements ‘planum’, when he wants to describe the topography of the temple site as if it was flat. This is the first use of the word ‘plan’ to refer to an architectural drawing, one that would not be used again for several centuries. While Richard’s work was influential within the intellectual circles of twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholarship, it did not go on to influence practices in medieval building sites.

The questions addressed topics such as the codicological status of the manuscripts, and the broader significance of the work and its intended audiences.

Bodleian printer in residence 2019-20: David Armes

David Armes
David Armes

We are pleased to announce that David Armes will be Printer in Residence at the Bodleian Bibliographical Press for one month during the coming academic year 2019-20.

David Armes is a visual artist working with print, language and geography. His work is frequently site-specific and considers how sense and experience of place can be represented, with source material including automatic writing, anonymous conversations and oral history. He works primarily with letterpress printing on paper and the final forms can vary in shape and size from large scroll installations to broadside prints to artists’ books and chapbooks. Through using what was once an industrial print process, he is interested in where the multiple meets the unique, where the ephemeral meets the archival. Recent residencies have been at Zygote Press fine art print studio (Cleveland, USA; 2018), Wells Book Arts Center (New York, USA; 2017), BBC Radio Lancashire (Blackburn, UK; 2017) and Huddersfield Art Gallery (West Yorkshire, UK; 2016)

See the Red Plate Press webpage.

David Armes, 'rights of way' (book)
David Armes, ‘rights of way’

The Printer in Residence programme draws together community and University members with an interest in printing and the book arts, to use the Bibliographical Press workshop at the Bodleian Library. During the residency in October-November 2019, David Armes will work on a new iteration of his ‘text landscape’ series, present a lecture and lead a public workshop, to be advertised on the Bodleian Libraries website.

The residency programme is supported by a private donation to the Bibliographical Press.

The ‘Slave Bible’ of 1807

from Charlotte McKillop-Mash, Bodleian Special Collections

The Museum of the Bible  in Washington DC is currently exhibiting the ‘Slave Bible’, a shockingly bowdlerised version of the New- and Old Testaments that was printed in England in 1807, the same year that the Slave Trade Act prohibited the slave trade in the British Empire.
What’s so shocking? This Bible, intended ‘For the Use of the Negro Slaves, In the British West-India Islands’ has been carefully edited to remove any mention of people freeing themselves from bondage. In just one instance, it skips directly from Genesis 45:28 to Exodus 19, so it includes the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) but “disappears” the first eighteen books of Exodus, in which the Israelites escape slavery in Egypt.


I came across this text thanks to an enlightening Religion News Service (RNS) article on the exhibit, which is a collaboration between the Museum of the Bible, Fisk (a historically black university in Tennessee) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The ‘Slave Bible’ was published by the Society for the Conversion and Religious Education of Negro Slaves, an organisation founded by Bishop Beilby Porteus who was, difficult as it is to believe, a passionate abolitionist. Porteus (1731-1809), an interesting and contradictory figure, was the son of a Virginia tobacco planter (presumably a slave owner?) but was born and raised in England. He was ordained at the age of 26 and rose up the Anglican ranks, becoming chaplain to the king in 1769, bishop of Chester in 1776 and bishop of London in 1787. Porteus criticised the Church’s position on slavery, preached and campaigned against the slave trade, and voted numerous times to ban it. He also, perhaps most ironically, made strong stands for doctrinal purity and theological rigour. Even as he campaigned, however, his Conversion Society was printing and distributing this deeply impure Bible, a publication which can be considered as, at best, politically expedient. [DNB (subscription required) ]  [Wikipedia ]
I was particularly intrigued when I read that “the rare artifact is just one of three known across the world. The other two are housed at universities in Great Britain.” What are the chances, I thought, that Oxford is one of those universities? I asked Jo Maddocks, from the Bodleian’s Rare Books Department, and was thrilled to discover that not only is there a copy here in Oxford, but it has been digitised so it is freely available for teaching.
This eye-opening and disturbing book deserves to be more widely known and I am grateful that the Museum of the Bible has highlighted it.

Portraying a Black African scholar at Oxford in the 1870s — and reimagining those portrayals today

from Pamela Roberts

Images from the Bodleian Library collections: left, John Johnson Collection Minstrels 3 (18d); right, John Johnson Collection Minstrels 3 (2); with a caricature image of Christian Cole in the centre, MS. Eng. a. 2033, fol. 3.
Images from the Bodleian Library collections: left, John Johnson Collection Minstrels 3 (18d); right, John Johnson Collection Minstrels 3 (2); with a caricature image of Christian Cole in the centre, MS. Eng. a. 2033, fol. 3.

‘This is the only image of Cole’. That’s the caveat I append to the caricature image of Christian Frederick Cole, the University of Oxford’s first Black African Scholar in 1873, when I use the image (above, centre) to illustrate a lecture or write an article about him.

Last year the picture was widely used in media promotion of the unveiling of a memorial plaque to Cole, at University College, to honour him and his achievements. Every time I saw a press piece about the plaque with the image of Cole as a ‘minstrel’ adjacent to it, I cringed. Then I started to wonder, why is this caricature, along with other caricature images, the only portrayal of Cole? Who produced it, and for what purpose?

Progressing from these questions and thinking more broadly, I considered Cole’s presence in Oxford, fifty years after the introduction of photography in 1839. Is there a photograph or portrait of him? I considered why Cole’s achievements were portrayed publicly in the form of parody when his contemporaries were commemorated through portraits or statues.

My initial thoughts, reflections and questions about Cole’s imagery developed into a detailed study delving through archives and photographic catalogues of cartoons, caricatures and 19th-century portraits. One collection I looked at was the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, held at the Bodleian Libraries. This is one of the largest and most important collections of printed ephemera in the world, and reflects types of ephemera produced from all periods, especially from the 19th century to the Second World War. I looked at the section on ‘Minstrels’ as the caricature of Cole has a strong resemblance to ‘negro minstrels’ popular at the time. The collection provided a fascinating source of contextual and background information.

This research forms the foundation for the Re-Imagining Cole symposium  which takes place on Saturday 20th October at the Weston Library, from 10.00am – 4.00pm. The symposium will examine the background, context and depictions of previously unseen caricatures of Cole, exploring why Cole and his historic achievements were only portrayed in the form of parodies. The symposium will also examine the broader issues of race and representation in caricatures and portrait art. Finally, the symposium will pose the question, ‘Should Cole’s image be re-imagined?’ A display of items connected with Cole will be shown on the day.

The event will include art historians, artists and academic featuring Dr Temi Odumosu (Malmö University), Dr Robin Darwall-Smith (University College, University of Oxford), Robert Taylor (photographer of ‘Portraits of Achievement’), Colin Harris (cataloguer of the Shrimpton Caricatures collection, from which the caricatures of Cole are taken) and Pamela Roberts (Founder and Director Black Oxford Untold Stories).
The event has also been supported by the Art Fund and the Social History Society. Tickets for the event are £5.00 (£3.00 students, unwaged) and can be booked at:
https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/whatson/whats-on/upcoming-events/2018/october/reimagining-cole

Pamela Roberts at work.
Pamela Roberts at work.

How the Bodleian Library collected playbooks: evidence from Library Records

Tara Lyons (Illinois State University) Sassoon Visiting Fellowship, Bodleian Libraries

Through an examination of the Bodleian’s archive of its own history, the Library Records collection, Tara Lyons has been investigating the earliest arrival of playbooks on the Bodleian’s shelves after the opening of the library in 1602.

The records of books claimed by the library from the Stationers’ Company under the agreement of 1610 , and the binding of books now in the library, combined with clues from printed library catalogues and the lists of locations of books (the order in which they were found on the shelves), helped Dr Lyons to build a picture of the sequence in which some individual plays were received early in the Bodleian’s history, and how they were treated once they were part of the Library’s collections.

In addition to scanning lists of books in the Library Records, Dr Lyons adopted the methods used by librarians in 1905 to identify the Bodleian’s original copy of the first folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.[1] In that case the bibliographical detectives took clues from the printed waste that was used in the binding of the book, including fragments of a 15th-century edition of Cicero.

The result in 1906 was a notable re-purchase of a book which in the 17th century had been allowed to leave the library, but by the 20th century was regarded as a treasure.

Dr Lyons’ research promises to amend an impression that playbooks in English found no home in the Bodleian in the decades after its founding in 1602, at a period when English literature was not recognized as a subject of academic study.[2]

[1] The original Bodleian copy of the first folio of Shakespeare (The Turbutt Shakespeare) [by F. Madan, G.M.R. Turbutt, and S. Gibson]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905

[2] Reliquiæ Bodleianæ: or Some genuine remains of sir Thomas Bodley [ed. by T. Hearne.]p. 278.

Christian Frederick Cole, the first Black African scholar at Oxford, depicted in a set of 19th-century cartoons

Bodleian G.A. Oxon. 4o 417, fol. 980 (detail): Christian Frederick Cole
Christian Frederick Cole (1852-1885) depicted in one of the Oxford cartoons from 1879.

What images do we have of Black students at Oxford? The picture above is one of the images made of Christian Frederick Cole, the first Black African scholar at Oxford, in 1879. Last year Pamela Roberts, founder and director of Black Oxford Untold Stories, unveiled the first Black Oxford plaque at University College to honour Christian Frederick Cole. Pamela questioned why the achievements of Cole’s contemporaries were commemorated through portraits or statues, while the only images of Cole are in a series of caricatures. The symposium “Re-Imagining Cole”, at the Bodleian’s Weston Library on 20 October 2018, will explore these rediscovered images of Cole, held at the Library, and will examine the background and context of the images. The symposium will pose the question, should Cole’s image be reimagined?

Colin Harris writes about the series of ‘Shrimpton caricatures’, in the Bodleian collection, in which the depictions of Christian Frederick Cole appear:

The Oxford firm Thomas Shrimpton & Son published and sold photographic reproductions of commissioned or submitted original caricatures from their premises at 23-4 Broad St., from 1868-1901, their shop window display seemingly being their only advertising strategy, there being no evidence of them ever having produced a catalogue or list.

The subject matter includes many aspects of University life, notably University and religious personalities, and the trials and tribulations of undergraduate life, as well as sports and pastimes. Other subjects frequently covered are religion, politics, ‘town and gown’ confrontations, and women (the campaign for women to become full members of the University was going on at this time, and women first became full members in 1920).

The caricatures were essentially produced for undergraduates and mainly by undergraduates; many display learned quotations from classical authors and contemporary poets.  In all there are 1214 images. The Bodleian holds what appear to be the only two known complete sets.

Bodleian G.A. Oxon 4o 414
Bodleian G.A. Oxon 4o 414

Ekaterina Shatalova, winner of the 2017-18 Colin Franklin Prize for book-collecting

Ekaterina Shatalova_winner 2018 Colin Franklin PrizeThe 2017-18 Colin Franklin Prize for book-collecting has been awarded to Ekaterina Shatalova (Keble College), for her collection of works by and about Edward Lear (1812-1888), the poet and illustrator famous for limericks in A Book of Nonsense, and for poems recounting the nautical adventures of The Owl and the Pussycat and the Jumblies (‘who went to sea in a sieve’).  Writing about her collection, Shatalova recalls first encountering the nonsense poetry of Lear and other English writers in a Russian translation. Her research at the University of Oxford is on the subject of nonsense poetry, and the special challenges of translating the mixture of verbal and visual forms in this genre. As part of the Prize, Shatalova has consulted with librarians on the purchase of a book for the Bodleian’s Rare Books collection. The next competition for the Colin Franklin Prize will be announced in October, 2018.

About the Colin Franklin Prize: The prize is offered in honour of Colin Franklin, the distinguished author, book collector and bookseller who has over many decades encouraged numerous young book collectors at the University. It is funded by Anthony Davis. The prize follows the tradition of similar prizes awarded at Cambridge and London and at universities in the United States and Canada. It is intended to encourage book collecting by undergraduates and graduate students of the University by recognising a collection formed by a student at the university. The prize is announced each year in October. For information see:  www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/csb/prizes

Invisible women: Yolande Bonhomme, 16th-century publisher

Francesca Galligan, Bodleian Rare Books

There were many women printing in the 16th century. But for a variety of reasons, it can be hard to find their work in library catalogues.

Yolande Bonhomme is a good example of this.

She came from a printing family: her father Pasquier Bonhomme was a celebrated Parisian printer, and her husband Thielmann Kerver also ran a printing business in Paris. Bonhomme took over Kerver’s business when he died in 1522, as was permitted by the Guild system in 16th-century Paris. Reports of her output vary, from 200 editions (Beatrice Beech, based on Renouard) to 136 (Axel Erdmann), before her own death in 1557.

While Kerver printed widely, with various editions of classical authors, Bonhomme focused on liturgical and devotional books.

She continued to use her husband’s device on the title-pages and at the colophons of her books, referring to herself most often simply as “vidua” – the widow – of Thielmann Kerver.

Because she does not usually name herself, it is her husband’s name that is sometimes picked out in library catalogues, and Bonhomme is found only with a bit more work.  The Bodleian’s online catalogue SOLO gives this entry for the book below:

Hore deipare virginis marie secūdū vsum Romanū.
Hours
1523 | Par. T. Keruer | (8⁰)

Bodleian Vet. E1 f.205
Bodleian Vet. E1 f.205

 

Additional reading: Beatrice Beech, ‘Yolande Bonhomme: a Renaissance printer’, Medieval prosopography 6.2, 1985; Axel Erdmann, My gracious silence: women in the mirror of 16th century printing in Western Europe, 1999.

Printer-in-Residence 2018: Emily Martin

Emily Martin portrait
Emily Martin

Update: a view of Emily Martin’s publication, Order of Appearance / Disorder of Disappearance,  while printer in residence at the Bodleian Libraries is in this blogpost by Robert Bolick: https://books-on-books.com/2018/11/22/bookmarking-book-art-emily-martin/

The book evokes the Shakespearean holdings at the Bodleian and expresses the theme of Martin’s residency, movable books and how they allow us to read in multiple ways.

The Bodleian Libraries are pleased to announce that Emily Martin will take up a one-month residency at the Bodleian Bibliographical Press in autumn 2018. Martin, who teaches at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, will bring her exceptional talents to the Bodleian’s working presses housed in the Old Bodleian Library and in the Weston Library beginning on 29 October 2018. As Printer-in-Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, she will creatively engage with Bodleian collections especially around her interest in moveable books and optical toys.

On 21 November, Emily Martin will deliver a public lecture, ‘Visual Metre and Rhythm: the Function of Movable Devices in Books‘. Movable devices, sometimes referred to as novelties, in books are not new. From anatomical lift flap books, to astrolabes and other volvelles in the early modern science texts, from carousel and pop-up children’s books to contemporary artists’ books. These devices allow for the ultimate means of emphasis within the pages of a book.

Lecture Theatre, Weston Library, 5:15 pm

Details and free registration

Emily Martin, 'King Leer' puppet

‘King Leer’ puppet, by Emily Martin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bodleian’s Bibliographical Press is housed in a workshop located in the Old Bodleian Library. Five iron hand-presses, one modern proofing press (‘Western’) and a complement of type make up the materials that have been used since the mid-20th century to teach typesetting and printing to generations of Oxford students, and members of the public, as part of the Bodleian’s contribution to learning about the material history of the book. These presses, and a replica wooden press in the Weston Library for Special Collections, also enable outreach to the public and schools, through demonstrations and courses. Information about the Bibliographical Press workshop is available here: www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/csb/bibpress