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:

Open-access Bodleian publications on HathiTrust

Proposal for a suburban annex in ‘The Future of the Bodleian’: ‘Built of ferro-concrete, the building would be a striking, and perhaps not unsightly, feature in the Upper River landscape, and have a beauty like that of the grain-elevators at Fort William and Port Arthur on the Great Lakes in Canada.’

Bodleian Library Publishing are delighted to announce the release of 548 scans of historical publications from the Bodleian and other University of Oxford libraries on HathiTrust. HathiTrust is a partnership of university libraries to preserve digital scans of printed collections. Our release makes over 250 collection guides, catalogues, exhibition books, and histories to which the Bodleian Libraries are rights holders open-access throughout the world.

Highlights of the Bodleian collection

The Bodleian publications now available to read on HathiTrust are especially helpful for researching the manuscripts, archives, and rare books that now form the library’s special collections. While most of our catalogues are now accessed primarily in digital forms, many readers overlook introductory printed guides. You can now read The Bodleian Library: A Subject Guide to the Collections (2004) for an overview of the system, or R.W. Hunt’s introduction to the library’s intricate system of shelfmarks in the first volume of the Summary Catalogue (1953). For recreation, you might simply browse photos of the Bodleian in the early 1950s.

‘Rough sketch for a Book-store between the Bodleian and the Clarendon Building’, from ‘The Future of the Bodleian’

Bodleian history

Medieval and Byzantine manuscripts

Modern manuscripts and archives

Oriental manuscripts and rare books

Rare books

Maps

Commonwealth and African archives and manuscripts

We are grateful to everyone who made this project possible: Andrew Dunning, Samuel Fanous, Sarah Barkla, Ruth Mallalieu, Beth Gibbs, and Martin Kauffmann. We also thank our colleagues at Oxford University Press, who printed our books before the formation of Bodleian Library Publishing and supported this project.

A virtual tour of Dante 1481 in multiple copies

See recording of the online multi-library event on 4 May 2021

See the film demonstrating printing an intaglio plate on a letterpress sheet

A follow-up seminar will take place on 6 July 2021; Registration at this link.

View of intaglio illustration of the 1481 edition of Dante, from Bodleian Auct. 2Q 1.11. The illustration is upside down.
Bodleian Auct. 2Q 1.11, Canto Tertio, detail

[re-blogged from Teaching the Book]

Examining several copies of the same book, especially one printed before 1500, is an enlightening experience. The copy-census is a valuable method for the study of early printing and one which requires personal inspection of copies which may be widely distributed around the world. To do this in person is a long and expensive process. A glimpse of the knowledge gained, though, could be had in a virtual visit to eight libraries, coordinated on 4 May 2021 to look at copies of one particular publication, the 1481 edition of Dante’s Comedia with a commentary by 15th-century Florentine scholar Christoforo Landino.

Although the invention of printing seemed to promise a stream of identical copies from the press, scholars of early printing are well aware that this was not always the result. Stop-press changes and accidents in the press account for minor or sometimes major differences between copies of the same edition. The marks of ownership over several hundred years have added further copy-specific elements to the objects held in libraries today.

Springing happily from a suggestion by Tabitha Tuckett, Rare-Books Librarian at University College London, this international tour co-hosted by UCL and the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book, with support from the Italian Cultural Institute in London and the Bibliographical Society of America, expanded on a growing practice of librarians showing books online using a visualiser. In pre-pandemic times the visualiser or document camera could be used for teaching in a lecture theatre or at a distance; in times of limited international travel it is a way to communicate across institutions, and librarians have grasped the possibility of ‘face-to-face’ comparisons on camera, as at the January, 2021 seminar on Myles Coverdale’s Goostley Psalmes between the Queen’s College Oxford, Beinecke, and Bodleian Libraries.

For a description of the ambitious – perhaps too ambitious – 1481 edition and the drawings by Botticelli which seem to be the source of the illustrations, see this blogpost by Gervase Rosser, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, The first printed and illustrated edition of Dante’s Comedy

The edition is now the subject of a collaborative copy-census research project co-ordinated by Cristina Dondi, Professor of Early European Book Heritage, University of Oxford, via the Printing Revolution project

The event included short talks on Dante (Professor John Took, UCL and Dr. Alessandro Scafi, Warburg Institute), Botticelli’s illustrations (Professor Gervase Rosser, University of Oxford), on surviving copies (Professor Cristina Dondi, University of Oxford and Secretary of CERL) and on the context of the book’s production (Dr. Tabitha Tuckett, UCL).

Library curators from several institutions gave their time and expertise to this exciting tour which revealed the complexity of the original printing project and the rich history of collecting this edition over the succeeding centuries. A recording of the online event is hoped for. Libraries taking part in the 4 May virtual tour:

·      Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, UK (co-organiser)

·      Library Services, University College London, UK (co-organiser)

·      Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Italy

·      Biblioteca Vallicelliana di Roma, Italy

·      The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA

·      The British Library, UK

·      John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, UK

·      Trinity College, Cambridge, UK

The Bodleian’s copy, which is available in digital facsimile online, includes three printed illustrations; the illustrations to Canto 2 and Canto 3 are each printed from the same intaglio plate, but in Canto 3 this has been printed upside down. A film made at the Bodleian’s Bibliographical Press workshop demonstrates how the printing of an intaglio illustration on a letterpress page might have been done by fifteenth-century printers.

Where did you get that hat?

from Alexandra Franklin (Bodleian) & Giles Bergel (Engineering)

re-blogged and updated from the Bodleian Ballads blog, 2012

2021: Updating the discovery of detachable woodblock hats in Bodleian broadside ballads, we’ve had a printing block made with the detachable hat, and a matching hat for the woman pictured on the same ballad sheet, ‘Unconstant Phillis’.

Newly-made printing blocks from a 17th-century ballad in the Bodleian Libraries, 4o Rawl. 566(121), showing a man and woman with hats
Newly-made printing blocks reproduced from images on a 17th-century broadside ballad in the Bodleian Libraries, 4o Rawl. 566(121)

The idea of applying image-matching software to the illustrations within the broadside ballad collection occurred to Giles Bergel in 2011. Under a John Fell Foundation-funded pilot project in that year Dr Bergel, in partnership with the Bodleian Library, asked Professor Andrew Zisserman of the Visual Geometry Group at Oxford to test their pioneering technology on a sample of broadside ballads.

The hat — in “Unconstant Phillis”

The hat — in “The Noble Gallant”

The first step was to obtain high-quality images. A sample of 800 ballads dating from the seventeenth century was chosen: this was the period when ballads were most typically illustrated, with a combination of commissioned and stock images. Photography, carried-out by the Bodleian’s Imaging Services studio, was funded with a grant from the John Fell Fund. High-quality colour images (600 DPI, 24-bit) were the result: these are now mounted within the current Ballads database and replace some of the older, lower-quality bitonal images which the Bodleian is hoping to fully replace.
Relja Arandjelovic at the Visual Geometry Group processed the new images and built a test site to demonstrate the image matching. The results were impressive: the pilot proved that software can match woodcut images on multiple printings, in varying conditions. The software, still under development, will be migrated to a new Bodleian Broadside Ballads interface under the current JISC-funded project.

What does “image match” offer to researchers?

Researchers working with ballads quickly notice that the same or similar woodblock-printed illustrations appear on multiple broadsides. The same hand-holding couple appears time and again on ballads of love; the same ships decorate songs of naval battles; the same cityscape appears, surprisingly, in ballads about London and Troy. And sometimes the same illustrations appeared in early modern English books and pamphlets, too. (See A guide to English illustrated books, 1536-1603, by Ruth Samson Luborsky and Elizabeth Ingram).

The repetition of generic illustrations in this way is often derided as evidence of ballads’ lowly status, but (as well as providing evidence for popular iconography), for early-modern bibliographic detectives, the re-use of woodblocks provides evidence for the date of a ballad’s printing: deterioration of  a woodblock might be a way to establish a timeline of broadsides that share the same illustration.

But there are other questions to be answered, sometimes questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask, which could be answered by selection portions of woodcut printed images: like, ‘Where DID you get that hat?’

Irish Gothic and Beyond

Elisa Cozzi, The Queen’s College, Oxford
DPhil student in English Language and Literature
shortlisted for the Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting, 2021

Figure 1: Frontispiece and title page of Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey. Personal copy.
Figure 1: Frontispiece and title page of Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey. Personal copy.

Irish gothic novels were among the first examples of the genre and greatly influenced later authors who played a key role in the development of the novel as a literary form, including Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. Unlike Ann Radcliffe’s popular gothic romances, set in a vague medieval past in faraway southern Italy or France,  Irish gothic novels such as Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of The Abbey (1796) and Clermont (1798), Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), and Charles Maturin’s The Milesian Chief (1812) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) share Irish settings, characters, and themes. They deal, directly or indirectly, with Irish history and politics and were influential in the development of Irish literary nationalism.

Roche’s The Children of the Abbey, once among the top bestsellers of the Romantic Age, has had a lasting impact on my studies. While researching material for my undergraduate dissertation I purchased a mid-nineteenth century illustrated edition of The Children of the Abbey from an independent Irish bookshop (John’s Bookshop in Athlone, Co. Westmeath). Printed by William Lane and A.K. Newman’s infamous London-based Minerva Press, which specialised in gothic novels and became the most prolific popular press of the age, my copy is a small one-volume edition, measuring 3x5x1.5 inches and bound in rib grain book-cloth with faint remnants of gilt ornaments on the spine. Although it is undated, the title page of the volume is signed “Elizabeth Jessop, 1859” in faded black ink, while the front free endpaper displays a handwritten place name, “Doory Hall, Co. Longford”.

Figure 2: Indication of “Doory Hall, Co. Longford”
Figure 2: Indication of “Doory Hall, Co. Longford”

Intrigued by these allusive traces of past readers, I discovered that the Jessops were an Anglo-Irish family of the landed gentry, with their seat in Doory Hall, near Longford. I also found (in Burke’s Peerage) that Frederick Thomas Jessop, Esq. had a child called Elizabeth, born between 1839 and the early 1840s.[1] Thus, she would have been around fifteen or twenty years old when she put her signature in this copy in 1859: the perfect age to enjoy what was, by then, a good gothic classic. I find it fascinating that although the Jessops’ extensive library was sold upon the family’s demise, and their big house fell into ruin in the 1920s, a few of their books, like my own copy, survived to tell the forgotten tale of their past owners. This exciting discovery initiated me to the study of the book as material culture and inspired me to research the history of the Minerva Press and its gothic output. During my postgraduate course at Oxford I turned this research into a paper on Bibliography and Book History and included a bibliographical analysis of my own copy of The Children of the Abbey.

Figure 3: During my MSt at Oxford in 2018-19, I took part in the "Practical Printing Workshops" at the Bodleian Library, where I typeset this frontispiece from the first edition of Roche's The Children of the Abbey.
Figure 3: During my MSt at Oxford in 2018-19, I took part in the “Practical Printing Workshops” at the Bodleian Library, where I typeset this frontispiece from the first edition of Roche’s The Children of the Abbey.

Although technically belonging to the genre of the ‘national tale’, Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl contains strong gothic elements and themes, including a ruined castle on a cliff, a sensitive female protagonist, an ancient crime, and a nocturnal, blood-chilling plot twist. What most struck me upon a first reading was the presence of constant comparisons between Ireland and Italy throughout the novel. Irish places, traditions, landscapes, literature, and art are continually juxtaposed with their Italian equivalents. While the evocation of Italy and things Italian in gothic novels was mainstream, as Italy had been shaped as ‘quintessentially gothic’ since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), I soon realised that, in the Irish context, the Irish-Italian comparisons served a political purpose. In the early 1800s, when The Wild Irish Girl was published, both Ireland and Italy were grappling with foreign domination, fighting to gain independence from England and Austria, respectively. Thus, by bringing Italy and Ireland together, the radical Owenson (one of the founders of Irish cultural nationalism) framed Italy as a compelling mirror-image of Ireland, the epitome of a ‘nation’ oppressed by foreign powers, a politically subversive ‘double’ of Ireland. After all, ‘doublings’ and ‘mirrorings’ are classic features of gothic narratives.

The Wild Irish Girl alerted me to a previously unappreciated wealth of Irish-Italian literary connections in the Romantic period, and has directly inspired my doctoral thesis topic. In the case of Irish gothic novels especially, Ireland and Italy are often brought together and personified in overtly political romance plots. A good example is Charles Robert Maturin’s The Milesian Chief, which tells the story of an Irish-Italian girl called Armida Fitzalban who, although promised to an Englishman, travels to Ireland and falls in love with the Irish Connal O’Morven, the descendant of a dispossessed Gaelic prince, and fights alongside him in a rebellion against the English. A similar politicised Irish-Italian plot is at the centre of Bianca: A Tale of Erin and Italy (1852), another forgotten gothic tale by Maturin’s son Edward. These avenues of research brought me to my current doctoral project, which looks at the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in 1798-1848, with a particular focus on the literary production of Irish exiles and expatriates in the Italian peninsula.

No Irish gothic collection would be complete without the Victorian classics Carmilla (1872) and Uncle Silas (1864) by Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The last notable Irish-Italian novel in my collection is a second edition of Luttrell of Arran (1863) by Charles Lever (1806-1872). My 1866 edition is enriched by 44 illustrations by H.K. Brown and has an emerald binding embossed with Celtic patterns. Partly set in Italy and containing humorous-gothic tropes, Luttrell was written in Trieste (about an hour away from my hometown) where Lever, predating James Joyce, spent the last years of his life.

Despite their critical neglect, the enduring appeal of Irish gothic classics is reflected in contemporary publications. For example, Sarah Perry’s Melmoth (2018) reimagines Maturin’s masterpiece in a feminist key, while Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Deathless Girls (2019) tells the untold story of Dracula’s three vampire brides.

[1] John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Colburn, 1847): 649.

In Search of the Heroic City: Cartagena de Indias, 1821–2021 – Winner, the Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting, 2021

The Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting 2021
The following is an abridgement of the winning essay, which can be found here.

Yvette Siegert, Merton College, Oxford
DPhil student Medieval & Modern Languages

In order to consult the historical archives in Cartagena, Colombia, you have no choice but to visit the Palace of the Inquisition. You climb a grand colonial staircase, past displays of religious iconography and authentic torture devices, to the only air-conditioned room in the building. There you meet with Don Aníbal, the archivist, who invites you to sit in front of a blinking computer screen and describe what you are looking for. Birth certificates, newspaper folios, fin-de-siècle magazines, city plans, or revolutionary pamphlets – it makes no difference: Don Aníbal can coax almost any resource out of the cumbersome digital database that only he can decipher.

The problem lies in procuring the desired item itself, since it may no longer be available. One of the obstacles to preserving materials in Cartagena is the intense year-round tropical heat and humidity. Onsite documents have suffered the effects of dampness or flooding; various irreplaceable volumes have disintegrated owing to disorder or neglect. Digitisation efforts have not been able to keep up, and many documents of national interest are stored in far-off Bogotá, the capital of Colombia.

My aim as a collector parallels my research aims as a D.Phil student: to understand how Cartagena managed to survive its century-long stagnation since Independence and become a central inspiration for important works of Spanish American political thought and cultural production.

The reason my collection keeps expanding – one extra suitcase per visit – is owing to my desire to develop my D.Phil thesis into a cultural history of the city, one that will not only trace its broader intellectual and literary currents but also incorporate details of its astonishing contradictions and inequalities, while capturing its vibrant whimsy, resilience, and creativity. This book collection is a loving act of resistance against forgetting the history of a city that is not only essential to my intellectual growth but also, I’ve discovered, a part of my family heritage.

Some items came into the collection thanks to my friendship with Ibeth, the first person I ever met in Cartagena. Ibeth – we share a name – manages Librería Los Mártires, a famous makeshift bookstall in the archway of the clock tower in the heart of the city. During my fieldwork, I’d visit her on most days and stay for a cup of hot tinto under the breezy arches.  Ibeth  introduced me to Ruby Rumié’s Tejiendo Calle/Weaving Streets, an artbook from a ground-breaking exhibition, at Nohra Haime Gallery, that portrayed fifty of Cartagena’s famous Afro-Colombian palenqueras, or street vendors, who are depicted in brochures and guidebooks in familiar costumes bearing the colours of the Colombian flag.  This exhibition called urgent attention to the women’s exploitation in a gentrifying city where they are icons of its largest economy.

My favourite workplace in Cartagena is a bookshop named Ábaco, where the shop-sellers let customers sit for hours with a book and a glass of coffee (or cocktail). There I obtained Ortíz Cassiani’s account of the Cartagena railway, a rare work of scholarship that shows how the ‘devil train’ modernised the city and connected it to the interior metropolitan centre.

One of the most unusual items in my collection is the recent full-length comic Lezo, about the blind, one-legged hero who miraculously staved off an invasion by Sir Edward Vernon, who was so confident of a victorious plunder that he had celebratory commemorative coins minted in England ahead of his sea voyage. This book, crowd-sourced and self-published in Spain, calls attention to a nearly-forgotten hero of Spanish America.

Collecting books about Cartagena is part of an attempt to resist the erasure of the city’s past while remaining hopeful about the prospect of peace in Colombia. That optimism is sustained by the friendships that make my collection possible.

Books mentioned in this extract:

Rumié, Ruby. Tejiendo Calle/Weaving Streets. Cartagena de Indias: Villegas, 2018.

Ortíz Cassiani, Javier. Un diablo al que le llaman tren. Bogotá: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018.

Miranda, Ángel et al. Lezo, Parte I: La toma de Bocachica, illus. Guillermo Mogorrón. Madrid: Espadas de Fin del Mundo, 2020.

I am grateful to the Socity for Latin American Studies, the Clarendon Fund, and Merton College, Oxford, for research funds that made it possible to carry out my 2019 fieldwork in Colombia and acquire several items for this collection. – Yvette Siegert

Award of the Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting, 2021

Yvette Siegert; photo credit: Cyril Closset
Yvette Siegert. Photo credit: Cyril Closset

The winner of the Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting, 2021, is announced. This competition is open each year to current undergraduate or postgraduate students of the University of Oxford.

This year’s prize has been awarded to Yvette Siegert, Merton College, Oxford, D.Phil Medieval & Modern Languages, for her collection, ‘In Search of the Heroic City: Cartagena de Indias, 1821–2021’

Siegert’s collection is inspired by a fascination with Cartagena, as she writes, ‘“the Heroic City” … a fortressed city that withstood invasion for centuries and was part of the first province in New Granada to declare independence from Spain (in 1811) … My aim as a collector parallels my research aims as a D.Phil student: to understand how Cartagena survived a century-long stagnation since Independence and became a central inspiration for important works of Spanish American political thought and cultural production.’

Her winning essay describes encounters with books and documents in and of Cartagena, evoking the story of this port city in documentary and architectural survivals, from the historical archives kept in the Palace of the Inquisition to Librería Los Mártires, the makeshift bookstall managed by Ibeth (Yvette’s namesake, in translation) in the archway of the clock tower at the heart of the city.

As well as the £600 prize to the winner, £300 is given to the Bodleian Libraries for purchase of a book, in consultation with the winning student book collector.

In 2021, a strong field of entries was considered by the judges. Several entrants have been invited to contribute versions of their essays to The Conveyor blog, and will be featured here.

This year, in awarding the prize, we also mark the passing of the bibliophile and collector for whom it is named. Colin Franklin (1923-2020) was a distinguished author, book collector and bookseller who over many decades encouraged numerous young book collectors at the University. The prize is funded by Anthony Davis in his memory.