Researching and Digitising Copper Printing Plates at the Bodleian Library

Chiara Betti, DPhil student on the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme

Most of us imagine libraries as repositories of books, manuscripts, and paper things. However, library collections are much more diverse than this. For example, the Bodleian Library not only preserves precious manuscripts and printed books but holds prints, paintings, printing plates and blocks, and even embroidery samples. And until the beginning of the twentieth century, you could also find marble sculptures and wax seals in the Bodleian collections.* However, libraries have sometimes struggled with the practicalities and the purpose of preserving objects such as printing surfaces, which are after all the tools used to make books, rather than books themselves. Why should libraries preserve printing plates? How can they be understood and integrated with the rest of the collections?

My doctorate focuses on the unique collection of printing plates amassed by the British antiquary Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755). The antiquary’s life mission was to preserve artefacts, manuscripts, books, and curiosities of historical relevance in the hope that future generations might learn from those objects. Thanks to contemporary accounts, we know that his London house was so crammed with objects of any sorts that he resorted to living in the attic, with the result that he could not even hear visitors knocking at his door!

Rawlinson was an extremely generous collector and often lent items from his collections. Shipping printed reproductions of those items was much more straightforward. While still an undergraduate at St John’s College, Oxford, Rawlinson commissioned his first engraved copper plate from Michael Burghers (c.1647/8–1727), an engraver for the Oxford University Press, in 1710. Rawlinson could reach a much wider audience with impressions from a single copper plate, with fewer risks of never seeing his possessions returned.

In many aspects, Rawlinson’s commitment to reproducing and documenting valuable artworks and manuscripts can be seen as an antecedent of modern digitisation campaigns of museum and library collections. Echoing his mission to “collect and preserve”, the Bodleian Library has embarked on a crucial project that will produce many dozens of super-high-resolution images of some of the library’s treasures. ARCHiOx –Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford – is a collaborative project that originated from the partnership of the Bodleian Libraries and the Madrid-based Factum Foundation. Since February 2022, the Bodleian’s Imaging Studio has been photographing items selected by the Bodleian curators and staff, starting with the Rawlinson copper plates. For a detailed description of the digitisation process, the reader is invited to refer to John Barrett’s recent blog about ARCHiOx. In brief, John and his team are creating 3D recordings that allow us to study in detail and measure the objects photographed. This imaging technique, which can capture textural details, represents a significant step forward in the study of printing plates and, in general, of the materiality of objects.

Why should we preserve and study printing equipment? Copper printing plates (and woodblocks and lithograph stones) are a repository of  information about the manual processes of creation and revision, often not acquirable from the impressions. Three examples here, images of copper plates obtained with the help of John Barrett in the Bodleian Imaging Studio, will elucidate how they help us to learn more about our print collections.

The Invidia plates: two sides to a story

From left to right: Anonymous, Tempio Fortuna Verile, 18th century. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates g.17; Anonymous, Cerchio di Antonino Callo, 18th century. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates g.21; Anonymous, Trofei di Mario, 18th century. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates g.19.
Views of Rome on three small copper plates. From left to right: Anonymous, Tempio Fortuna Verile, 18th century. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates g.17; Anonymous, Cerchio di Antonino Callo, 18th century. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates g.21; Anonymous, Trofei di Mario, 18th century. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates g.19.

The above three small plates giving views of Rome are from a series of twelve copper plates copied after much larger Italian engravings depicting the same subjects. However, these three plates have more in common than one might expect. Their reverse is etched with an old design, indicating that they were formerly part of the same larger copper plate that was then re-used and cut up to make new engravings. The other side of these plates shows a naked female figure with Medusa-like hair, a man dressed in Elizabethan fashion, and another man with a hat standing in front of a building. If we place the three plates next to one another as in a jigsaw, a new image appears. In this case, technology provides a more efficient alternative to manually aligning the plates.

A digital restoration of an etching of Invidia (Envy) from the reverses of Rawl.Copperplates g.17, g.19 and g.21. No extant print made using this side of the plate has yet been identified. The etched lines are extremely shallow, measuring 0.029mm in depth.
A digital restoration of an etching of Invidia (Envy) from the reverses of Rawl.Copperplates g.17, g.19 and g.21. No extant print made using this side of the plate has yet been identified. The etched lines are extremely shallow, measuring 0.029mm in depth.

The image above was obtained by stitching together the images of the three reverses, and the results are impressive. This image can be used to run online searches to try to identify other impressions of this plate or designs from which it was copied. So far, even with these methods, I have not found any impressions, but my research continues with the hope of solving the mystery of this “puzzle plate”. The absence of impressions might even suggest that the plate was made for decorative purposes rather than printing.  It is hoped that further research will shed light on the route of this copper plate from the ‘Invidia’ design to the small views of Roman sites shown above. These tools for printmaking had an industrial history, linking one engraver and publisher to another through the re-use of materials.

The De Passe family: portraying royalty

The Rawlinson collection of plates features many famous engravers from the 17th and 18th centuries, including members of the famous Dutch family De Passe.

Willem De Passe, Portrait of King James I and Henry Prince of Wales, 1621. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates c.34.
Willem De Passe, Portrait of King James I and Henry Prince of Wales, 1621. Engraved copper plate. Rawl.Copperplates c.34.

Copper plates like the portrait of King James I and Henry Prince of Wales have an enormous historical value as not many 17th-century printing plates survive today. The engraved portraits are representations of monarchy attempting to assert its importance. The printing plates let us look behind the techniques and materials that were used to achieve this.

Digitising these objects ensures their preservation while making them accessible to a broader audience. In fact, while studying the objects in the flesh is irreplaceable and essential for the researcher, the reality is that accessing printing plates is not always straightforward. On average, printing plates are much heavier than books, and, unlike most books, their handling requires gloves (to prevent oils from our skin corroding the metal) and much care. High-resolution images enhance the possibilities for the study of these objects.

Studying mezzotint plates: seeing through time

William Faithorne the younger after John Closterman, Portrait of Madame Plowden, 1690–1725. Mezzotint on copper. Rawl.Copperplates c.43.
William Faithorne the younger after John Closterman, Portrait of Madame Plowden, 1690–1725. Mezzotint on copper. Rawl.Copperplates c.43.

A favoured method for making print portraits was the mezzotint process. Mezzotint plates rarely survive because of the limited number of impressions they can yield. The few existing examples in the Rawlinson collection confirm that the plates are too worn out to see the details of the images on them. However, the images produced by ARCHiOx slightly improve our chances of studying the way these plates were made. For instance, the plate with the portrait of Madame Plowden is hardly legible with the naked eye because it is extremely worn out and is covered with a thick layer of dirt and residual ink. Thanks to the advanced imaging provided by ARCHiOx, we can decipher the image and see that many details were etched into the plate to enhance the delicate shading provided by the mezzotint process.

Science and Humanities

Those familiar with copper plates will be aware of how challenging it is to study them, even when you have them in your hands. They are often preserved in a poor state, with residual ink in the engraved lines or evident signs of oxidisation which obscures the image. However, once printing plates have undergone a process of cleaning and conservation, the polished copper is highly reflective, making it almost impossible to photograph it. Advanced imaging techniques such as those developed by ARCHiOx  allow us to observe and study printing plates in unprecedented detail. Moreover, the presence of ink in the grooves is no longer an issue – if anything, it is an advantage as a perfectly polished surface would not be suitable for this kind of photography.

Copper plates belong to the category of “difficult objects” preserved by libraries and archives. They are not printed material, nor really 2D artworks, and often fall beyond the expertise of the curators and conservators. As a result, printing technologies are sometimes left out of  catalogues and digitisation programmes, making it difficult for a researcher to obtain information through the usual library channels. My research and the valuable work of the Bodleian Imaging Studio and the Digital Bodleian will finally close a gap, starting with the Rawlinson copper plates, just one of the collections of printing surfaces held by the Bodleian Libraries.

The results obtained by ARCHiOx will transform this research. The ARCHiOx imaging not only produces high-resolution images but enables researchers to measure details on the objects’ surfaces. For instance, it is possible to measure the distance between engraved lines as well as their depth. Thanks to the generous support of SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), which allows me to conduct detailed analyses of some of the Rawlinson copper plates, we have been able to compare the accuracy of the ARCHiOx technology to that of optical 3D microscopes. For example, using the Alicona Infinite Focus 3D Profilometer at LIMA (Engineering Science, Oxford), I measured the distance between parallel lines on copper plates engraved by various artists to establish the differences in techniques and skills. The same measurements were taken on the ARCHiOx, and the results are consistent with those of the 3D profilometer.

3D image of a section of Rawl.Copperplates e.65 obtained with the Alicona Infinite Focus 3D Profilometer. The scale on the right shows the depth of the engraved lines.
3D image of a section of Rawl.Copperplates e.65 obtained with the Alicona Infinite Focus 3D Profilometer. The scale on the right shows the depth of the engraved lines.
Depth profile of the same section of Rawl.Copperplates e.65 showing the varying depth of the engraved lines.
Depth profile of the same section of Rawl.Copperplates e.65 showing the varying depth of the engraved lines.

The results so far obtained with ARCHiOx and the Engineering Department are promising. They will reshape our understanding and appreciation of print technologies as tools for researching book and art history, the history of collecting and heritage science.

With thanks for his assistance in writing this article:

John Barrett, Bodleian Library’s Senior Photographer and ARCHiOx Technical Lead for the Bodleian.

* Transfer of the seals and seal matrices to the Ashmolean: Bodleian Library, ‘Index to Rawlinson [Monastic] Matrices, [C18]’. Library Records e. 382; Bodleian Library, ‘Transfers to the Ashmolean and Other Institutions (1863)’. Library Records d. 1180. Marbles:  https://collections.ashmolean.org/collection/search/per_page/25/offset/25/sort_by/relevance/object/45098 Also see Jeremy Coote, ‘An ‘Unimportant’ Inscription: The Antiquarian and Institutional History of a ‘Muscovite’ Cup in the Rawlinson Bequest of 1755’, The Bodleian Library Record, 30 (nos 1-2 April to October), (2017), pp. 16-40

This blog was prompted by Chiara Betti’s doctoral research on the Rawlinson copper plates. Readers with an interest in Chiara’s research are encouraged to contact her at chiara.betti@postgrad.sas.ac.uk. The research is funded by the AHRC through the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership. See: https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/early-modern-copper-plates-bodleian-libraries

Shakespeare’s Sonnets: a selection curated for the Bodleian by Yale-NUS in 2022

Students from Yale-NUS selected five items to illuminate an encounter with Shakespeare’s Sonnets

A choice of 5 items following our journey through the collection of sonnets by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) at the Bodleian Library

Dedication page of the 1609 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets
The dedication in the 1609 edition
  1. Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before imprinted.At London : By G. Eld for T[homas]. T[horpe]. and are to be solde by William Aspley. 1609.
    This was the first edition, while Shakespeare was alive.
First page of the 1609 edition
First page of the 1609 edition
The 1609 edition showing sonnets 56 through 59, with parts of sonnets 55 and 60.
The 1609 edition showing sonnets 56 through 59, with parts of sonnets 55 and 60.

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The 1640 edition showing part of Sonnet 54, and Sonnet 57 and part of Sonnet 59
  1. Poems, written by W. Shakespeare Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, and are to be to be sold by Iohn Benson, dwelling in St. Dunstans Church-yard. 1640

The editor has added titles to the sonnets. This sets up your expectation of what the poem is about. We noticed that in the first edition the sonnets are just numbered, with no titles.

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Sonnet 57 printed in 2016 by Michael Hurley, Titivilus Press
Sonnet 57 printed in 2016 by Michael Hurley, Titivilus Press
  1. Sonnet 57 (2016). Michael Hurley, Titivilus Press, Memphis, Tennessee, 2016
    Black type with a coloured half border, 27 cm. height. On the verso is a reproduction of the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare, from the First Folio edition of his plays.

Before we saw the first edition, this is what we thought a Shakespeare book ‘should’ look like, with old-fashioned type and decorative borders.

This and the other Sonnets printed in 2016 are part of a collection formed by the Bodleian inviting Shakespeare’s Sonnets from printers around the world.

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Sonnet 61 fully linocut by Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley, Oxford, in 2016
  1. Sonnet 61 (2016). Linocut by Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley, 2016

This combines image and the text, all printed from linocut. The words of the sonnet are incorporated into a beautiful image.

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  1. Sonnet 110 (2016). Pixel Press, Stoke Newington, London, 2016. A moveable. The words of the dedication and a closed eye are seen at first, but when you move the tab, the eye opens and the words of the sonnet appear in windows.
Sonnet 110 by Pixel Press, Stoke Newington, London

“It’s cool!”

Blinking eye moveable in Sonnet 110 from Pixel Press, Stoke Newington
Blinking eye moveable in Sonnet 110 from Pixel Press, Stoke Newington. gif by Adam Koszary

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As part of our visit we printed our own ‘Four Sonnets’ at the Bodleian Bibliographical Press

The Yale-NUS edition of Four Sonnets, 2022. Printed at the Bodleian Bibliographical Press
The Yale-NUS course ‘Manuscripts, the Printing Press, and the Preservation of Knowledge,’ 2022

Bodleian CSB Seminars, Hilary Term 2022

Bodleian logo and Centre for the Study of the Book banner with background image of Douce Woodblocks b.1

Seminar in the History of the Book

Hilary Term, Fridays, 2:15 pm
Registration required: https://forms.office.com/r/FSXrV1W98u
YOU MUST BE REGISTERED 24 HOURS BEFORE THE SEMINAR TO RECEIVE A LINK TO ATTEND ONLINE
In-person seminars, if offered, will meet in the Lecture Theatre, Weston Library.

21 Jan.  (Week 1) [ONLINE ONLY] Mercedes García-Arenal (Madrid, CCHS-CSIC), ‘The European Quran: the role of the Muslim Holy Book in writing European cultural history’
28 Jan. (Week 2) [ONLINE ONLY] Renae Satterley (London, Middle Temple), ‘On Robert Ashley (1565-1641)’s use of collections in Oxford in the 17th century’
4 Feb. (Week 3) [ONLINE ONLY]  Laura Cleaver (London, UCL), ‘Henry White (1822-1900): Collector of Second-Rate Manuscripts?’
11 Feb. (Week 4) [ONLINE ONLY] Riccardo Olocco (Bolzano), ‘The trade in type in Venice in the early decades of printing’
18 Feb. (Week 5) [ONLINE ONLY] Brian Cummings (York), ‘Bibliophobia’
25 Feb. (Week 6) Katarzyna Kapitan, ‘The Virtual Library of Thormodus Torfæus, reconstructed from Danish and Icelandic collections’
4 Mar. (Week 7) [IN PERSON ONLY] Lisa Barber, ‘The Goldsmiths’ Register and other record books of various London Livery Companies’
11 Mar. (Week 8) Alexandra Franklin and Andrew Honey, ‘Bodleian Materials for the teaching of Book History’

The Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting, 2022

Bodleian Library, Douce Woodblocks d.1, detail
Bodleian Library, Douce Woodblocks d.1, detail

The Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting

Deadline: 18 March 2022
Download the entry form (Word)

The Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book offers a prize to an undergraduate or postgraduate student of the University of Oxford for a collection of books or other printed materials.

Age, size and monetary value of the collection will not be relevant criteria; the aim is to champion collecting that reflects a passionate interest in the material. See posts by previous entrants and winners of the Prize.

The prize will be of two parts: a payment of £600 to the winner, and an allowance of £300 for a book to be purchased for the Bodleian Library’s collections, selected by the winner in co-operation with the Bodleian’s Curator of Rare Books.

See further details here: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/csb/prizes

Students are also welcome to join the Oxford Bibliographical Society which presents talks and library visits, in person and online:  https://www.oxbibsoc.org.uk/become-a-member

and the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles.

Saturday drop-in printing at the Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford


The replica press in the Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford

Ink + type + paper = print

Drop-in, no need to book; come along and print a keepsake.
Saturday 6 November 2021, 11am-1 pm
Saturday 18 December 2021, 11am-1 pm
Saturday 8 January 2022, 11am-1 pm

@TheBroadPress

Printing matters: Inspiration at the Bodleian Bibliographical Press

View of the Radcliffe Camera from the window of the Bodleian Bibliographical Press

What inspires your printing?

The Bodleian Libraries are home to a letterpress workshop for teaching and experiments, and a place for drop-in printing throughout the year at the printing press in the public foyer of the Weston Library. These activities are integrated with teaching at the University of Oxford, outreach to higher education, schools, and the public, and with the library’s continuing interest in creativity in the book arts.

Art

Ana Paula Cordeiro (left) and Merve Emre in conversation

Inspiration comes from extraordinary works,  like artist Ana Paula Cordeiro’s book, Body of Evidence, made at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. A copy is now in the Bodleian Library! In July 2021 an online event and recorded conversation between Cordeiro and Merve Emre linked the Bodleian Bibliographical Press with the CBA.

Nature

Inspiration also comes from the world around us.

Artist printmaker Graeme Hughes etched a plane-tree leaf onto the wood of a plane tree, and printed this on the Baskin Albion Press.

In September 2021, Bodleian Visiting Fellow Georgina Montgomery, historian of science, led a walk-and-talk in Wytham Woods, culminating in a collaborative poster of an ash-tree leaf. See the film explaining how Montgomery’s work led her to Oxford’s research woodland, Wytham Woods.

Collaborative poster of an ash-tree leaf made at Wytham Woods
Collaborative poster of an ash-tree leaf made at Wytham Woods

This print by a visitor to the workshop is directly from a slab of wood.

Impression from a slab of tree trunk.

And see the film of making intaglio plates from a leaf

 

Copper plates in the Bodleian Libraries

Rawl. copper plates g.310
Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Copperplates g.310

The Bodleian Libraries hold several collections of copper plates dating from the 17th to 19th centuries, amounting to approximately 2000 individual pieces of copper. A brief overview and the available handlists can be found in the LibGuide to printing surfaces.

The majority of these plates were made for book illustrations connected with published scholarship in the sciences, or antiquarian studies. These include the plates to:
Robert Morison, Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis (1680-1699)
Martin Lister, Historiae Conchyliorum (1685-1692)
Edward Lhyd, Lithophylacii Britannici (1699)
Richard Gough, Sepulchral Monuments (1786)

Plates made for a number of other 17th and 18th-century publications survive in the collection of Richard Rawlinson (d. 1755).

Another category of plates are those that were commissioned by Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755) to portray his own collections of other objects, including medieval manuscripts. The Rawlinson collection of copper plates, amounting to some 750 in all and including these commissioned plates, the collected book illustrations and other picture plates, is currently the subject of a doctoral study by Chiara Betti.

Finally, copper plates made for packaging and ephemeral print are held in the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, under the headings “Copper Plates for Paper Bags” and “Copper Plates for Bookplates”.

The Morison copper plates

Morison Sect. 15 Tab 7, 'Mosses'
Morison Sect. 15 Tab 7, ‘Mosses’

Morison was Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford. The publishing history of his great work has been studied by Scott Mandelbrote. [‘The publication and illustration of Robert Morison’s Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 78 (2015), 349-379.] Over 290 folio-sized plates were preserved for a projected reprint but were then set aside for some centuries before finding use, allegedly, as the counterweight to a lift in the science library.

One of the Morison copper plates with a plant specimen and a proof print.

A project and seminar in 2019 examined the Morison plates by placing these alongside related material surviving in several Oxford institutions, including plant specimens from the Herbarium, proofs of the plates in the Sherardian Library, and prints at the Ashmolean Museum and at the Oxford University Press made by the same engravers, including Michael Burghers, who worked on the plates for the lavishly illustrated, and ruinously expensive, Morison book.

Optical 3D profile of engraved line
Optical 3D profilometry of an engraved line, by the Laboratory for In-situ Microscopy, University of Oxford

A John Fell grant to the Bodleian Libraries supported Optical 3D profilometry of some sections of the plates, taken by the Laboratory for In-situ Microscopy and Analysis (LIMA), in the Department of Engineering Science. Four days were allocated for the profilometry scanning in January 2019. Examinations were carried out on small portions [c. 4 cm sq, up to 10 cm. sq] of each of the plates. Profilometry enabled close examination of the depth of the engraving marks. Measurements enabled comparison of marks at different parts of the plates. The measurements showed the consistent depth of the lines, the profile of engraved lines (shown in the image) and also demonstrated the raised surface, as expected, of plates from which corrosion had not been cleaned.

The Lister copper plates

Bodleian Library, Lister Copperplates 162 (plate 350), the bear claw clam
Bodleian Library, Lister Copperplates 858 (plate 787 ), Conus Marmoreus

The Lister copper plates of shells and molluscs, from drawings by Martin Lister’s daughters, are the subject of a publication by Anna Marie Roos. [Martin Lister and his remarkable daughters: the art of science in the seventeenth century (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2018)] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2011.0053

Many of the illustrations for Lister’s work depict just one specimen. Many plates in the book therefore bear the assembled imprints of several small pieces of copper.

The Rawlinson copper plates

Rawl. copper plates e.39
Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Copperplates e.39

During his life, Richard Rawlinson built a collection of 752 printing plates. He commissioned at least one-fourth of them to illustrate his vast collections, while the rest of the plates came from auction sales. The copper plates show a wide range of subjects: portraits, facsimiles of documents, topographical views, coins, medals, and seals.

From the early 1720s, Richard Rawlinson used his engravings as a means to facilitate and spread the knowledge of his collections. Besides commissioning original engravings, the voracious collector attended many auctions of books, art, and copper plates. Thanks to Rawlinson’s meticulously annotated sales catalogues, it has been possible to study the provenance of about 80 of his second-hand copper plates.

The Rawlinson printing plates are now the focus of Chiara Betti’s doctoral project. Her research takes a multidisciplinary approach that brings together book history, printmaking, engineering, and history of collecting. Chiara’s research will shed light on the history and provenance of the Rawlinson plates and their manufacture and use in publications both before and after the antiquary’s death.

The Gough copper plates

Bodleian Library, Gough Copperplates d.102

Among the plates of Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments (1786, 1796) are several images engraved from drawings by the young William Blake. The plates themselves are signed by James Basire but, as argued by Mark Crosby, [‘William Blake in Westminster Abbey, 1774-1777,’ Bodleian Library Record 22:2, October 2009] ‘it was common practice for a master to sign the work of his apprentices,’ and Blake was apprenticed to Basire from 1772.

The John Johnson Collection

As a collection dedicated to printed ephemera and the history of printing, the John Johnson Collection in the Bodleian Library holds a few dozen copper plates which were used to print packaging and for personal printed items such as bookplates and calling-cards. These are probably the most recent in date of the copper plates preserved in Bodleian collections.

John Johnson Collection, Copper plates for paper bags

Chiara Betti and Alexandra Franklin

Medieval cookbooks: a student collection

Guest blog by George Haggett (Music, Magdalen College).
University of Oxford students are invited to enter essays about their own book collections for the Colin Franklin Prize. Entries are accepted in Week 6 of Hilary Term. See the prizes webpage for details.

Galangal and Garbage: Medieval Cookbooks Through Time

In 1780, antiquarian Samuel Pegge returned a ‘very curious’ scroll to the curator of the British Museum, containing some 229 recipes (see Figure 1). They were compiled circa 1390 by Richard II’s cooks, and Pegge would go on to publish them as The Forme of Cury: the oldest known cookbook in the English language.

British Library MS 5016, a c.1420 copy of The Forme of Cury.
British Library MS 5016, a c.1420 copy of The Forme of Cury.

Tired of my thesis and needing something to do with my hands, I saw in Cury an opportunity to combine my dual obsessions with cooking and Middle English.  Medieval readers ‘ruminated’ on and ‘regurgitated’ scripture. Our epicurean way of describing texts is more than metaphor: it draws meaning from food’s ephemeral qualities. An art form that you swallow, food is either digested or decomposes, and communicating flavour is possible only by analogy, contingent on visceral likes and dislikes and deep cultural impulses. I will never taste the Middle Ages. But through these books I see the dazzlingly generative potential of recipes, both to provoke centuries-long discourses, and to bring hands to utensils and conjure up tangible, nourishing food.

I bought a cheap paperback reprint of The Forme of Cury from open-access project ForgottenBooks.org. This is my ‘dirty’ copy of Cury. In Arial typeface throughout and stained by stock and spices, its marginalia are my scribbled translations, timings, temperatures, and substitutions for obscure herbs.

Samuel Pegge, The Forme of Cury: a Roll of Ancient English Cookery Compiled by Simon Pegge (Forgotten Books, 2008).
Samuel Pegge, The Forme of Cury: a Roll of Ancient English Cookery Compiled by Simon Pegge (Forgotten Books, 2008).

I will focus here on editions of sources from Northern France and England in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries; cultures in which upper-class milieus moved liberally, sharing texts and fashions. New-world foods like potatoes, tomatoes, and corn are absent, but other ingredients and influences that travelled with merchants, crusaders, and pilgrims (attested to by many Mediterranean, Asian, and North African sources beyond the scope of this collection) are palpable. Food’s religious significance manifests in the observance of feasting and fasting, and in broader ethics of the body. Medical ideas of the humours influence the preparation of meats, roasted or boiled according to how ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ the animal was. When something so supremely carnal as food is at issue, questions of health, spirituality, and sensuality are never far from the table.

A stain on British Library MS 5016.
A stain on British Library MS 5016.

One of my earliest sources is The Viandier of Taillevent, a thirteenth-century cookbook in side-by-side Old French and Modern English translated by Terence Scully, with appended modernised recipes by D. Eleanor Scully. It is associated with Guillaume Tirel, cook to Charles V and Charles VI of France, although some of its manuscript copies predate his lifetime. But while those manuscripts don’t tell us about authorship, they make up for in what they reveal about their readers: ‘dusted with powders, splattered with sauces, burnt or smudged’, they seem to have been used by literate cooks. They would have been highly skilled, too. Among the Viandier’s suggested centrepieces are involve inflated swan skins, a tower of mutton bones, and ‘Hedgehogs and Spanish Farts’ (stuffed sheep stomachs). This edition’s striking cover art is fittingly anachronistic dress and cutlery, but fails to acknowledge D. Eleanor Scully’s co-editorial labour.

D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully, The Viandier of Taillevent: an Edition of all Extant Manuscripts (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988).
D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully, The Viandier of Taillevent: an Edition of all Extant Manuscripts (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988).

Lots of medieval sources themselves had hybrid functions. Take John Crophill’s Commonplace Book (Harley MS 1735, pre-1485), which offers alongside its 69 recipes texts on alchemy, divination, and a medical treatise called ‘The Doom of Urine’. Another example is the late-fourteenth-century housekeeping treatise Le Ménagier de Paris. Written by an elderly husband for the instruction of his teenage wife. Its recipes are accompanied by moral tales (including ‘the woman who laid an egg’) and guides to gardening and falconry, and feminist economic historian Eileen Power translated most of it into modern English in 1928. Ménagier’s recipes share much with Taillevent, including a method of retaining the water after boiling peas, a delicacy known in Wigan chip shops today as ‘Pey Wet’.

Thrillingly, the previous owner of my copy of Thomas Austin’s 1888 edition Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books left three loose leaves inside the cover: an 1803 screed cryptically signed ‘Coquinarius’ and two photographs of medieval manuscripts. Based on its historiated ‘T’s, I have tentatively identified the first as two recipes from Harley MS 4016: ‘Blanch Porrey’ (a leek-based sauce for eel) and the evocatively titled ‘Garbage’ (chicken giblets, heads, and feet steeped in spiced broth). (see: Austin 1964, 90; 72.)

Photograph One and British Library, MS Harley 4016.

Photograph One and British Library, MS Harley 4016.

Photograph Two, probably from Cury (‘ffor to make’).
Photograph Two, probably from Cury (‘ffor to make’).

I identified the second based on each recipe beginning, ‘ffor to make’, which Cury does in its second section. The recipes include extravagant dishes, like swan in an aromatic sauce thickened with rice-flour. In his foreword to Cury, Pegge makes clear that this ‘horrid and barbarous’ medieval food is not to his taste.

Anne Neville and Terry Neville. 'Medieval Cookery'. 1:12-scale print of The Forme of Cury. Weston-Super-Mare: Dateman Books, 2009.
Anne Neville and Terry Neville. ‘Medieval Cookery’. 1:12-scale print of The Forme of Cury. Weston-Super-Mare: Dateman Books, 2009.

My third version of Cury was also never intended for culinary use. Measuring three-by-three centimetres, it contains dozens of Cury’s recipes in Middle English, reproduced in 1:12-scale by Dateman books, who furnish the shelves of period-specific dollhouses. It serves as an important reminder that medieval life, so alien to Pegge in 1780, is still a curio in late-capitalist hobby culture, part of a wider constellation of conservative tweeness (Dateman also do Gilbert and Sullivan scores and a new mini-newspaper for each royal baby).

We are served historical sources and consume them. Whether in the handwriting of some scribe or via many editorial hands, texts have always been ‘cooked up’ in some way. Chopped and changed, blended, and taken with a pinch of salt, all writing is a concoction, and we receive it according to our appetites.

Textiles in Libraries: Context and Conservation

A binding with a gold and blue textile cover is displayed in an open purple box. There is damage to the covering of the spine which reveals the sewing supports underneath. The title of the project 'Textiles in Libraries: Context and Conservation' is overlaid.
Textiles in Libraries: Context and Conservation

The Bodleian’s Conservation and Collection Care team, in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Book, is embarking on a year of discovery in the field of Textiles in Libraries. The scope of this project is wide, from embroidered bindings to endbands, including textiles found between the pages, covering or wrapped around the binding, as well as the more unexpected places they can be found in library collections from tapestries to t-shirts.

As part of this project, the Library will be hosting a series of free online talks running from November 2021 to February 2022, bringing together conservators, curators and book artists to explore this topic further. Our speakers will highlight the many ways textiles are found in books and library collections, share case studies of collaborative conservation projects, examine what textile bindings can tell us about historic craft practices, and share examples of textiles used in contemporary book arts.

These talks will coincide with an exhibition held in Blackwell Hall of the Weston Library from November 2021, ‘The Needles Art’, which will show-case a selection of embroidered bindings from the Bodleian’s collections.

View the full programme and book tickets to the live talks here.

All talks will be recorded and publicly available to watch after the event.

Script/Print/Code: the information revolution in one afternoon

Bodleian Library, Douce Woodblocks d.1, detail
Bodleian Library, Douce Woodblocks d.1, detail

On Monday 11 October 2021 in the Bodleian’s Weston Library for Special Collections there will be a race between The Oxford Scribes , the Bodleian Bibliographical Press, and the Centre for Digital Scholarship.

This webpage, script-print-code.info, tells the story.

This is a chance to compare script, print, and electronic text encoding side-by-side, in real time. The text will be written in manuscript, printed in movable type, and encoded by three teams, starting at 1pm.

In this blogpost we’ll report on the progress and the thoughts of the scribes, printers and encoders as they work through the same text, a portion of Psalm 107 (‘… They that go down to the sea in ships …’), to create a published version, in one or many copies.

Onlookers are welcome in Blackwell Hall, the main public foyer of the Weston Library on Broad Street, Oxford.

The event is in honour of the start of the Lyell Lectures 2021, The Genesis, Life, and Afterlife of the Gutenberg Bible, which will be given by Paul S. Needham, beginning on 11 October 2021. Details in the event listing include links to watch the livestream of these lectures. The lectures will be recorded and will be available a short time after the conclusion of the series, at https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/the-lyell-lectures

A webpage showing many digitized copies of the Gutenberg Bible, for comparison, is available here.

Here is the webpage for this event: