CSB Events – Page 3 – The Bodleian Conveyor

The scholarly book market before and after the Thirty Years War: Seminar on the History of the Book

Ian Maclean’s presentation to the History of the Book seminar on 8 November 2013 developed the themes of his 2012 book, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion:
The Learned Book in the Age of Confessions, 1560–1630, with an examination of the changes evident over the next hundred years after 1650 in the marketing and sales of learned books, taking law books as an example.

This paper addressed the question: what would scholars of learned Latin texts in 1600 and 1750 have perceived as radical differences in the material conditions of publishing (getting published, getting distributed, getting hold of published materials from the recent and more distant past, building their own libraries) and financing all this?

The paper took the case of two very extensive thesauruses of legal humanism, from the 1720s and the 1750s. The first was the Thesaurus Juris Romani, (4 vols, Leiden, Johannes vander Linden, 1725-6, fol.), containing 77 items of republished material mainly from France and Spain. It was edited by Everhard Otto (1685-1756), Professor of Law at Utrecht, mainly from the library of Cornelius van Bynkershoek (1673-1743), President of the Supreme Court of Holland. Later editions appeared in 1733-5 and 1741-4. The second thesaurus was the Novus Thesaurus Juris Civilis et Canonici, (7 volumes, The Hague, Pieter de Hondt, 1751-53, fol.) This consisted in 105 items, also principally from France and Spain, mainly from the Library of the editor, Gerard Meerman (1722-1771), Pensionary of Rotterdam.

Before 1650, the Frankfurt Book Fair was the best vehicle for achieving a sale throughout Europe. After 1650, the United Provinces took over the role of international publishing, and achieved this by exploiting the organs of the Republic of Letters (scholarly journals such as the Acta Eruditorum and the Journal des Savants), by using the subscription method of achieving sales, and by engaging in an impressively wide network of bookshops throughout Europe. The constituency of readers of the two Thesauruses show that in the middle of the 18th century, publishers depended on purchasers who were not themselves in the field, and whose motives for purchasing were often driven by prestige and vanity. The evidence of the subscription lists of the two Thesauruses suggests however that sales outside the Netherlands and Germany were sparse. We may contrast this state of affairs with that which obtained before the Thirty Years War, when there seems to have been almost unlimited optimism about the commercial viability of legal tomes in other countries of Europe.

Discussion at the seminar centred on the costs of publishing and the luxuriousness of the editions described and considered individuals named in the lists of subscribers, and their potential motives.

Marks in books: laying breadcrumbs in provenance research

Bodleian Tanner 942(2) title page — William Dowsing’s annotations on the title page of Bodleian Tanner 942(2) (and a library note of another copy)

I’ve been looking at the neat handwritten annotation at the top of a page in the Bodleian Library’s copy at Tanner 942(2) of A moste sure and strong defence of the baptisme of children, published in 1551, guided by Dunstan Roberts (Cambridge) in the latest of the master classes convened at the library by Will Poole.

The annotation is by William Dowsing (1596-1668) of Suffolk, noting his purchase of this short book in November, 1627. At the end of the pamphlet, he notes the dates that he read this work, over two days in the following February.

A tidy mind is a wonderful thing. Was this useful in Dowsing’s later role as ‘Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition’, carrying out the ordinances of Parliament in 1643 and 1644? Dowsing’s collection included several books of the 16th-century Reformation, which he seems to have pored over, refining his sense of Puritan outrage at any idolatry or beliefs unsupported by scripture, annotating with chapter and verse where the earlier authors were sloppy in their references.

Roberts presented Dowsing as a case of the long historical tail of the Henrician reformation. In the process, he pointed to several bibliographical puzzles and possibilities.

One was the tantalizing detail in which Dowsing recorded not only the date of purchase, but the date and duration of his reading of books. How the history of reading would benefit if all readers were so systematic!

A puzzle was the fate of Dowsing’s collection of pamphlets. His systematic re-numbering of the pages in his own collected volumes laid a trail of clues to his collecting and arrangement of books that are now broken up and dispersed.

How can modern scholars find, and share, these small traces that can add up to a picture of larger lost libraries? The series convener of the master classes on printed books with manuscript contents, Will Poole, has reconstructed the library of Francis Lodwick from lists in the Sloane manuscripts at the British Library and from clues in Bodleian and British Library books, such as marginal annotations and shelfmarks (The Library, 7th Series, vii(2006), p.377-418). The Hans Sloane printed books project has followed Sloane’s distinctive marks to identify his own printed books inside and outside the British Library. http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/prbooks/sloaneprintedbooksproject/sloaneprinted.html

The American Library Association rules for descriptive cataloguing of rare books specify that provenance information for copies held by a library should be included in catalogue records for those copies. We also know that librarians and scholars have been keeping independent records of this sort of information for years, as in this example from a card catalogue compiled by the late D.M. Rogers at the Bodleian, recording coats of arms, autographs, and notes and sometimes reproducing these.

This kind of information might be useful only as threads to knit together collections long since scattered. What methods will help scholars to find information on a book they are looking at, and what will enable their contribution to a collective effort to increase the knowledge held in libraries about the history of the books and manuscripts in their care?

The database of Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI) hosted by CERL, gathers provenance information for incunabula. http://www.cerl.org/resources/mei/main.

David Pearson’s list of English book owners in the 17th century is a PDF file available on the Bibliographical Society website simply organized alphabetically by name of owner, with links to images showing autographs and other distinctive marks. http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/content/english-book-owners-seventeenth-century

Can researchers be empowered to contribute information as they find it in libraries around the world? On LibraryThing, Legacy Libraries (http://www.librarything.com/groups/iseedeadpeoplesbooks) enables collective efforts to build a virtual library catalogue by adding records of editions that were owned by an individual.

The CERL web portal offers a question board, for those who are confronted with an unknown bookplate or signature. http://www.cerl.org/resources/provenance/can_you_help.

How well do any of these methods enable a researcher a) to learn what is known, about a book or an owner; b) to find out what is still unknown; c) to estimate the costs and benefits – (Is It Worth It?) – of pursuing an anonymous annotator or of reconstructing a lost library?

And in what format can this help be provided? When is the information best conveyed by standard vocabularies and thesauri, integrated with authoritative bio-bibliographical information? Or on the other hand by visual databases of distinctive marks shared among researchers labouring in the same vineyard? Online folders of snapshots already enable libraries to organize evidence into groups (bookplates, inscriptions) for visual identification and matching, as here from the Bodleian Libraries CSB: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxford_csb/ and the much more extensive Penn Provenance Project image stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/58558794@N07/.

A controlled vocabulary in a prescribed format, or a gallery of graven images: what would William Dowsing say?

Orietta Da Rold, Codicology and localization in medieval english manuscripts

Detail of Bodleian MS. Laud misc. 108, fol. 208r, showing a hole in the vellum. — Detail of Bodleian MS. Laud misc. 108, fol. 208r

A continuing theme of presentations at symposia and master classes in recent years (see: The Gathered Text) has been that to learn certain things about a book we need to look at the structure. Whether these are printed books from the hand-press period, or manuscript books, researchers are interested in getting to know the structure of the codex as a way of learning where, when, and why the book was made, as opposed to where, when and why the text was written.
Orietta Da Rold presented Bodleian MS. Laud misc. 108 as an example for her discussion of how codicological features could assist with issues of the localization of English medieval manuscripts. Bodleian MS. Laud misc. 108 is a manuscript containing saints’ lives, scriptural narratives, and poems including Havelok the Dane and the romance of King Horn. In the class, as an example of the questions and answers provided by close examination of quiring, Da Rold looked at the sequence of the parchmentleaves and pointed to the features that could provide clues to the materials and procedures used to create the book: not only the sequence of hands writing the texts and numbering the leaves, but imperfections of leaves that might indicate the nature and the size of the skins used, the method of folding the parchment sheet to make quires, the removal of leaves from quires, and the size of the quires, most of which contain twelve leaves. It was the last point which generated most discussion and questions, concerning the timing and reasons for a movement in England from quires with a usual number of 8 leaves, to gatherings of 12 leaves. With a very useful table of the quires of MS. Laud misc. 108, indicating the scribal hands, signature marks, the skin and hair side of each leaf and the gatherings of the leaves in each quire, Da Rold inspired the class to understand more about the tools and working practices of the makers of books in order to better identify practices that might be distinctive to a locality or to a moment of change in the history of the book.
Da Rold ended by referring to Robert Darnton’s ‘communications circuit’, the model illustrated on p. 68 of his 1982 article, What is the history of books? Daedalus 111(3), asking how this would be qualified for the history of manuscript book production, possibly yielding a model in the form of a ‘web’ of manuscript production.

Annotated books from Joseph Scaliger’s (1540-1609) library in the Bodleian

Copy of Scaliger's 1579 edition of Manilius, with annotations and mark-up for the printing of the new edition. — Copy of Scaliger’s 1579 edition of Manilius, with annotations and mark-up for the printing of the new edition.

The second in this year’s series of classes, convened by Will Poole, on annotated books in Bodleian Library collections was led by Kasper van Ommen (University of Leiden, and Humfrey Wanley Fellow at the Bodleian Library). He examined annotated books from Joseph Scaliger’s library, showing examples that had come into Bodleian collections by a variety of routes; as gifts from Scaliger himself to Henry Savile [Savile Ee 1(5)] or by descent of owners after Scaliger’s library, by the terms of his will, was divided and the ‘books in foreign tongues’ given to University of Leiden Library, establishing an early collection of Middle Eastern and Asian-language books there; then Scaliger’s friends including Daniel Heinsius, Van der Myle and Baudius had the pick of the learned books in Latin and Greek; and the remainder of his library was sold at auction. By these means, particularly through the later sale of the books of Daniel Heinsius’s son Nicholas, many of Scaliger’s books bearing his annotations were dispersed and some came into the hands of English scholars and collectors. Some 27 books from Scaliger’s library or sent as dedication copies by him are in the Bodleian now.

Introducing the history of Scaliger’s library, Van Ommen pointed out that he was a ‘star professor’ of the late 16^th century, and that his gifts of his own works to respected friends reflected both his productivity and his self-regard. This backfired with his presentation of the Cyclometrica to Henry Savile of Merton College, Oxford, who was not impressed with Scaliger’s claim to have squared the circle (a controversy in which John Wallis, a later Savilian Professor of Geometry, was similarly engaged with Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17^th century).

Carrying the theme of discovering printed books that are unique by virtue of manuscript additions or annotations, the class examined a volume annotated by Scaliger, the 1579 edition of his own publication of Manilius’s Astronomicon, marked by him for the second (authorized) edition, and also marked in red crayon by the printers in Leiden as a copy-text for the 1600 publication. [Bodleian Library Auct. S 6.12] The volume also has added index entries as seen in the second image here.

The class discussed parallels between the Leiden and Oxford; did Thomas Bodley, a diplomat based in The Hague from 1588 to 1597, regard Leiden’s library as a model for the Bodleian, which he later founded as an ‘Ark to save learning from the deluge’ – an echo of the Arca Scaligeri, the cabinet made to hold Scaliger’s Oriental books when they came to the Leiden library? Each provided early catalogues of scholarly books, the Nomenclator of Leiden in 1595 and Thomas James’s 1605 Catalogus librorum bibliothecæ publicæ.

One indication of Bodley’s connection with (and admiration of) scholarship at Leiden may perhaps be seen in a letter transcribed in the newly launched resource from the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, The Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley, 1585-1597;
http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/cell/Bodley/transcript.php?fname=xml//1589//DCB_0802.xml. This was prepared under the direction of former Humfrey Wanley Fellow, Robyn Adams.

Added ms. index in Bodleian Auct. S 6.12.

David Pearson, ‘Patterns of book ownership in 17th-century England’

At the second History of the Book Seminar this term, David Pearson (Director of Culture, Heritage and Libraries, City of London) considered research questions on private libraries and traffic in book ownership, and reviewed the state of research on ‘The English Private Library in the 17^th century’, since his publication in The Library in December 2012. He compared the current state of knowledge of provenance with the situation of bibliography 100 years ago; libraries are gradually becoming better at recording the provenance of early printed books, but a comprehensive coverage is some way off.

The efforts libraries are making to record provenance information is driven by, and further supports, research which has shown the value of such enquiries: Owen Gingerich’s census of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus; Anthony West’s survey of copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays; and research that focuses on annotations as a subject in their own right (the theme of the masterclasses convened by Will Poole this term at the Bodleian Library).

Among online projects on this theme are:

CERL – Material Evidence in Incunabula

The British Armorial Bindings database hosted at the University of Toronto

Legacy Libraries, on LibraryThing

Annotated Books Online, presenting digitized copies of annotated books and transcriptions of some of the annotations shows what might be done to make the annotations more useful to scholars.

Pearson’s own list of English Book Owners in the 17^th century http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/content/english-book-owners-seventeenth-century, ‘a preliminary exercise towards creating something more like a proper directory of owners, the task in hand being to work through and convert each brief listing into a full entry that would summarise what we know about these libraries, where there are surviving books, and where to find more information.’

Pearson concluded with some speculation on some significant private libraries of the 17th century whose contents are not yet fully known;

William Chark, graduate and fellow of Peterhouse in the 1560s; has a short entry in DNB as a religious controversialist. We know of ca.140 printed books scattered in libraries around the world and he also owned some significant manuscripts, including a Greek codex of the NT and several manuscripts subsequently in the Cotton Library

Nearly all the books have a distinctive code in the back — perhaps a bookseller’s code, connected with the way the library was dispersed after his death in 1617. There is some extant correspondence of his with Abraham Ortelius in the Netherlands, with references to obtaining and swapping books. His was clearly a significant private library of its time but not one that has ever been documented or investigated

Augustine Lindsell, Bishop of Peterborough in 1633, and of Hereford in 1634, the year he died. His will includes a number of specific book bequests, one or two of which can be traced today, but a letter written just after his death, implying that his books are coming to London to be sold, says that Lindsell himself valued his library at £880 worth of printed books and £500 worth of manuscripts – which is a sizable collection.

Gilbert Wimberley, d.1654 – prebendary of Wells and Westminster; his goods were seized in 1643, when he is said (by Walker) to have lost a library valued at £1000 – lot of books. Not in DNB; what do we know about him. He came from a gentry family in Lincolnshire, BA TCC 1616, fellow 1618, livings in Suffolk and London, sequestered 1643, imprisoned. His was one of a number of libraries which were destroyed or dispersed during the Civil War.

Finally, Pearson commented on the possible scale of big libraries in grand houses by the end of the 17^th century: the library at Lauderdale’s Ham House, built in the 1670s, is one of the rare survivals of an actual library room from that time, but this is a relatively modest space, size-wise – there is only room for a few thousand books. And we have secondary evidence of some big collections in private houses during the decades after the Restoration – how were they housed?

— John Evelyn describes the library of the 1^st Earl of Essex in his house at Cashiobury as “very nobly furnished, and all the books richly bound”

— Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey, reputedly had 30,000 books and has been described as “perhaps the first peer who devoted time and money to the formation of a great library”

Disputationes Metaphysicae

Jean-Pascal Pouzet (Limoges) Describing codicological structures in western medieval manuscripts (Seminar in Palaeography and Manuscript Studies, 21 October 2013)

More than an introduction to the structure of manuscripts, Jean-Pascal Pouzet presented a series of suggestions with regard to the layers of evidence to be examined to determine the structure of the text block currently present in any manuscript volume, and the nature, or possibly the changing nature, of portions of the manuscript through time from its creation to the present day. In effect he asked the class to view codicology as the philology of the material text and to take the study of codicology as one that precedes, as well as needing to work in parallel with, understanding of the palaeographical, art historical, and textual studies that also derive from the manuscript evidence.

Taking his motto from M.R. James, ‘See books for yourselves,’ Pouzet displayed in the class the manuscripts MS Bodley 801, MS Digby 177, MS Douce 137 and MS e Musaeo 62 to demonstrate in each case the different ways that fascicles and booklets had been joined to produce different types of collections within these volumes.

Pouzet emphasized the importance of exact terminology in describing codicological and textual units, and in particular attempted to refine the concepts of the booklet and the fascicle.

‘Fascicle’ he distinguished as a unit which is materially marked out and possibly intellectually self-contained, but designed to exist within a particular collection rather than independently. The ‘booklet’ is something Pouzet, developing the term as used by Pamela Robinson, Ralph Hanna, Eric Kwakkel [whose Lowe Lectures will be heard at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in Trinity Term 2014] and Alexandra Gillespie, identified as a physically and intellectually self-contained unit. It is then the movement of these parts through time, from their creation to later movements into and out of collections, changing the structural forms of manuscript books, that defines the type of collection, that is, the way the manuscript book was formed and a suggestion of the cultural intention behind the formation.

(From my own point of view, this discussion is reminiscent of similar attention that is given in the cataloguing of printed materials to describing and distinguishing the following aspects: the intellectual work; the matrix from which letters and images are printed; and the composite item which constitutes the edition; not to mention the individual item as held in a library; see a related discussion deriving from counting the catalogue records of broadside ballads.)

Warren Boutcher; Gabriel Naudé on manuscript and print (Seminar on the History of the Book)

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, consideration of books from the early modern period has tended to set up a fairly strict dichotomy between “manuscript culture” and “print culture”. This dichotomy can be seen both in treatments of the intellectual history of the period, and also in the way in which materials from the period are housed and retrieved, with manuscripts stored in archives and looked after by archivists, and printed books housed in special collections rooms and looked after by librarians. There is also a tendency to view the early modern period as the story of the triumph of “print culture” over “manuscript culture”.

At the sixth session in the 2011 series of the Oxford Seminar on the History of the Book, Dr. Warren Boutcher of Queen Mary, University of London, spoke on the subject of “Cultural changes in book-collecting in the late Renaissance: Naudé on manuscript and print”. The session aimed to show that, while there were distinct differences between the two cultures, the relationship between them during the early modern period was in fact more complex than this traditionally accepted dichotomy would tend to suggest, and that in order to gain a complete understanding of scholarship in the late Renaissance, it is necessary to consider script, print, and orality together.

Much of the session was devoted to considering the collections belonging to the Dukes of Urbino, with particular reference to the collection of manuscripts established in the 15^th century by Federico III da Montefeltro and the collection of chiefly printed books established between 1582 and 1621 by his successor Francesco Maria II della Rovere. This latter collection was begun in 1582, when Francesco Maria II managed to acquire an expurgated copy of Gesner’s banned Bibliotheca universalis. Francesco Maria then began to collect works listed in Gesner, and by 1584 his household accounts are showing a regular expenditure on printed books, constituting about 4% of his total annual expenditure. It is only fair to note, however, that Francesco Maria was also spending regular and significant sums on manuscript material. It is perhaps not surprising that a collection which took Gesner, who lists printed and manuscript material together, as its starting point, should continue to accrue both printed and manuscript materials. The first attempt completely to segregate a printed from a manuscript collection (both the old library of Federico, and the new library contained both printed and manuscript books) was not made until 1631, on the death of Francesco Maria. Under the terms of Francesco Maria’s will, his collection of manuscripts was left to the town of Urbino, and his collection of printed books to the Order of the Minims, while the archival material in the collection followed Francesco Maria’s daughter to Florence, where it still remains. Within 30 years of Francesco Maria’s death, however, the papacy had managed to appropriate both the collection of manuscripts and the collection of printed books, and both were transferred to Rome. The manuscripts are currently in the Vatican Library, and the printed books in the Biblioteca Alessandrina.

The period during which Francesco Maria was collecting was a time of great activity in terms of book-collecting, and also saw the foundation of the Escorial Library in Madrid and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was also a time of great interest in the principles of book-collecting and of managing and providing access to collections of books. An important expression of this interest is Gabriel Naudé’s “Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque” of 1627. Naudé advocates a shift away from collecting books for their material features, such as lavish bindings or illustrations, and promotes the idea of the working scholarly library, with easy access to, and retrieval of, up-to-date information for the scholarly community as its primary objective. He recommends that manuscripts should be housed close to the printed collection, if not necessarily integrated with it, and that they should be freely available to be copied. Any potentially inflammatory material should be stored high up, with no spine labels, so that access to it could be strictly controlled by the librarian.

There is therefore a distinction made between the library of lavish, luxurious commodities, designed to glorify its owner through a display of his wealth, and the working, scholarly library, aimed at the efficient retrieval of relevant information and designed to glorify its owner through a display of his erudition in the judicious selection of relevant materials. With reference to the example of the ducal libraries in Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro’s library was seen as an example of the “prestige” library, and Francesco Maria della Rovere’s collection as an example of the working, scholarly library, which operated very much on the principles advocated by Naudé. This distinction also seems to have been observed in practice; Francesco Maria, as well as developing his own collection, continued to add to the manuscript collection of his predecessor Federico, keeping it up to date with carefully selected and commissioned items. These items, however, were required to have some connection to the ducal family. There are also examples of manuscripts being transferred from Federico’s collection to Francesco Maria’s, so that they could be worked on by scholars.

The final discussion considered issues such as different levels of censorship, and also looked at other examples of similar book collections of the period.

John Wallis and the idea of a universal library

A cryptographic manuscript book by John Wallis (1616-1703) shows text mark-up at work in the early modern period. The symbols Wallis identified in this code include pairs of symbols that ‘signify that what is between is to be deleted’, and one symbol to delete that which is before it. The work by Wallis, who had decrypted letters during the Civil Wars, was a book of deciphered letters, intended to teach the skill to another generation.

Louisiane Ferlier’s master class on October 14 examined books donated by Wallis to the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries. Cryptographer, mathematician, founding member of the Royal Society and controversialist, he was the Savilian Professor of Geometry from 1649 until his death, and was elected Keeper of the University Archives in 1657.
His donations to the Savilian Library (kept privately within the Bodleian) and to the Bodleian itself were the subject of Dr Ferlier’s discussion, as she examined the means and possible motives of his presentation of printed books, pamphlets and manuscript books. Manuscript publication of books of letters intercepted in cipher, which Wallis had deciphered during the Civil Wars, he presented in order, he wrote, to teach others how to decrypt codes. Other materials seemed particularly aimed to strengthen the Bodleian’s holdings of material intended to show the truth of Protestant religion.
see: Cultures of Knowledge calendar and edition of Wallis’s correspondence and The Wallis Project, an investigation of his works on grammar, on logic and on music theory.

The 18th-century Gothick: Symposium, 7 August 2013, Oxford

A one-day symposium exploring the Gothic Revival in eighteenth-century Britain. Organized by Oliver Cox (Oxford) and Peter Lindfield (University of Kassel)
Call for papers poster [PDF]
Registration will open in July [see webpage]

This symposium corresponds with co-organiser Peter Lindfield’s tenure of the Dunscombe Colt visiting fellowship at the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book. Supported by the Bodleian Library, the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Georgian Group, this fellowship will facilitate a thorough examination of Oxford’s MSS concerned with eighteenth-century Gothic Revival architecture and related historical perspectives.

Peter Lindfield writes,

Receiving the inaugural Dunscombe Colt research fellowship for the study of eighteenth-century British architecture is a tremendous privilege. I conducted research at the University of Oxford whilst completing my PhD (Art History, University of St Andrews), so I know the quality and breadth of treasures awaiting me.

My research centres upon the artistic, architectural and historiographical manifestations of the Gothic aesthetic in Britain c.1700–1840. Co-running a symposium on the eighteenth-century Gothic Revival at Oxford ties in perfectly with the theme of my fellowship. It also capitalises upon Oxford’s place within the history of the Gothic Revival, the University’s colleges being major patrons of collegiate Gothic. The symposium also marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Georgian Group’s Gothick symposium held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. I look forward, along with my co-organiser, Oliver Cox (University College Oxford), to welcoming scholars of the eighteenth-century Gothick Revival to Oxford on the 7th August 2013.

The merry bells of England. Broadside ballad printed c. 1845 by J.Paul and Co. [Bodleian Library Harding B 11(2407)]

The Cadiz pirates

Portrait of Elizabeth I (1533–1603) by Wilhelm Sonmans — Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
by Wilhelm Sonmans
(c) Bodleian Libraries; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Dr Anders Ingram (National University of Ireland, Hakluyt Edition Project) used copies of the second edition of Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations (1598-1600) to explore the nature of censorship in Elizabethan England. At issue was the passage describing the Cadiz Expedition of 1596, led by the Earl of Essex and Lord Howard, during which English and Dutch troops sacked the Spanish city.

But the failure to capture the Spanish treasure fleet, and the conduct of the leaders, including the distribution of the booty, led to royal suppression of Essex’s own account of his actions. Two years later, Hakluyt included in his Navigations a “brief description” written by the doctor who travelled on the Ark Royal. The pages containing this episode were later excised from many copies of the work, and a new title page was produced omitting mention of the Cadiz expedition. Examining the physical evidence in three copies of Hakluyt’s Navigations from Bodleian collections, Dr Ingram showed that these represented different variants, and called into question the reason for the removal of these leaves: was this censorship, or action by the publishers in advance of the appearance of Hakluyt’s second volume, printed in 1599, which had found a sponsor in Robert Cecil, one of the examiners of the costs of the expedition during the controversy?

The copies examined contained: (1) The edition intact with the Cadiz episode as originally printed and a title page dated 1598; (2) The Cadiz leaves intact, but with a new title page dated 1599; (3) The leaves containing the description of the Cadiz episode replaced with a later (c. 1720) reprint, in different type and differently set.