My research at the Bodleian focused on printed books held in the Savilian Library, a collection of works on mathematics, astronomy, geometry and applied sciences collected by the early Savilian Professors, including Henry Savile, Christopher Wren and John Wallis. I was especially interested in annotations inscribed in the collection’s books for information they provide into the scholarly practices of early modern mathematical reading. Some features of this reading observed in the Savilian books include summarizing an author’s argument, correcting errors, following along with mathematical proofs, and redrawing and/ or modifying diagrams while reading. Because the Savilian collection contains the printed books shared by a community of early modern mathematicians, the annotations in the books provide information as to how a scholarly community shared practices amongst its members and how these practices changed over time.
For more on Renee’s research and time at the Bodleian Libraries, watch this video.
For news on Visiting Scholars at the Bodleian, click here.
On Monday 14 June, Dr. Alexandra Franklin calmly peeled back layers of a ‘human head’ in the Pitt Rivers lecture room. The ‘head’ in question was an instructive illustration from Bartisch’s rare Opthalmodouleia, a sixteenth century treatise on diseases of the eye from the Bodleian Libraries’ special collections. As she pulled back layers of paper under the document camera, Franklin challenged her audience to imagine the challenge of describing and digitizing the page. These were the questions at the centre of Franklin’s presentation, which was part of a weeklong Digital Humanities training program.
Running from 14 – 18 July, the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School is an annual weeklong program exploring the history and future of the digital humanities. In addition to interaction with the University’s experts through lectures, demonstrations, and workshops, participants interact with the Bodleian Libraries’ extensive collection. Not despite but because of the program’s focus on the digital humanities, the chance to interface with the material collection was an important one.
As we increasingly move towards the digitization of physical collections, the material objects themselves shape the way we think about the process of description and digitization. Franklin demonstrated this on Monday afternoon in her discussion of eight unusual objects from the Bodleian’s collection.
Each of the objects posed a unique challenge. How, Franklin asked, do we catalogue a religious manuscript illumination that has been nearly effaced by devotional rubbing? What is the effect of describing it simply as ‘damaged’? Or: How do we photograph a page onto which a miniature has been sewn? Franklin posed these questions and more as she invited participants to examine the objects below.
Bodleian, Wood 106. The first foure bookes of Virgil’s Æneis, tr. into Engl. heroicall verse by R. Stanyhurst. With other poëticll deuises thereto annexed, 1583. The covers are made from a 12th c. manuscript of the Aeneid.
Bodleian, Alm. g 1686.1. Calendarium Londinense, or, Raven’s almanac, with the ‘ass’s skin’ treated pages for writing with a stylus. 1678.
Bodleian, MS. Rawl. liturg. e. 8, fol. 6v. Introductory full-page miniature for a 15th century Hours of the Virgin (Matins). Annunciation. Virgin (rubbed) and Archangel Gabriel holding scroll. This image would have been rubbed by pious readers.
Bodleian, Douce B subt. 305. A page from Bartisch’s text on diseases of the eye. G. Bartisch: Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst. Dresden, Mathes Stöckel, 1583.
Bodleian, Gough Missals 177. Hore beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie ritum: M.D. xxxiiii. 1534. A coloured xylographic print has been sewn to the page.
Bodleian, MS. Ashmole 6. A 15th century vade mecum (‘go with me’), or girdle book. These portable books were often worn by medieval monks and aristocrats.
Bodleian, Harding B 41. A scrapbook of printed clippings and manuscript verse made by a young lady, Mary Marshall, in 1805.
Bodleian Library Broxb. 97.40. A frisket made from a recycled manuscript leaf. Friskets were used to mask off areas when printing in order to select certain characters or images for color printing.
On Friday 20 June, Dr. Marie-Claude Felton stood in front of a type case, composing stick in hand. She was selecting metal type to complete a line that read ‘Oxford, Printed at the Bodleian Printing Office by the Author.’ The ‘Bodleian Printing Office,’ officially known as the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop, houses several hand-printing presses, in a temporary home at the Story Museum on Pembroke Street.
Dr. Felton at the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop
What brought Dr. Felton to the printing press on a Friday afternoon? She was there to compose and print a handbill memorializing her recent lecture at the Bodleian. For a historian of publishing practices, this opportunity to work with antique printing technologies was perfectly suited.
Self-Publishing, past and present
Dr. Marie-Claude Felton, one of the Bodleian’s two 2013-4 Royal Bank of Canada Fellows, recently published a book, Maitres de Leurs Ouvrages, focusing on self-publishing in late-eighteenth-century Paris. Her research at the Bodleian expands on this, focusing on self-publishing in Paris, Leipzig, and London –the three main European publishing centres – between 1750 and 1850.
Dr. Felton gave an overview of her past and current research at the Convocation House on 3 June in a lecture titled ‘Masters of Their Own Work.’ She began with an observation about the current state of publishing:
With the growing online book market, especially with the advent of digital publishing and the popular e-readers, one of the more dramatic changes to impact publishing today has been the ability of a growing number of authors to bypass traditional publishers to produce and sell their own books. In fact, for a few years now, self-publishing has been producing more books each year than traditional publishing. This phenomenon naturally raises a number of questions regarding, among other things, the place and role of authors, and the relevance of the booksellers and publishers as cultural mediators and promoters of literature.
These questions, suggested Dr. Felton are not new ones. In her talk, she defined self-publishing before answering the crucial questions ‘who, what, and how?’ Self-publishing was not confined to any one subject or type of author, she said. Interestingly, authors who self-published often sold the books from their homes, which resulted in more direct interaction with their readers. Divided as the artistic enterprise of writing and the professional pursuit of publishing and selling may seem to us now, Dr. Felton suggests that the two were not irreconcilable – that, in fact, many authors fused the two in a variety of ways in the eighteenth century.
Fresh off this lecture, and still immersed in her current research, Dr. Felton tried her hand at ‘self-publishing.’ With the assistance of Dr. Paul Nash, the printing tutor at the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop, she composed, set, and printed the sheet below.
A proof with several errorsThe finished product
As you can see, the first draft is rarely the final draft. Indeed, early proofs almost always contain errors. While some are due to mistakes on the part of the compositor, others result when letters are mistakenly returned to the wrong tray. This often occurs with letters that have similar shapes, which might explain the confusions between h, n, and u, seen here.
With a range of types and presses – including Albion, Columbia, Vandercook, and others– the Hand-Printing Workshop hosts classes as well as open workshops from 2 – 5 pm on Fridays. Click here for schedules and further information.
The Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop, temporarily at the Story Museum
‘Book collecting is a growing addiction for me,’ writes Sophie Ridley, the first winner of the Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize. Funded by Anthony Davis, the award is offered in honour of author, bibliophile, and book collector Colin Franklin, who shared his love for collecting with Oxford’s students, fostering a new generation of collectors. Sophie’s entry was chosen on the basis of the ‘interest, originality, thoughtfulness and creativity’ of her collection and her persistence as a collector.
Sophie Ridley, winner of the 2013-14 Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize
Sophie began collecting books at age 16, hunting through the book corners of charity shops. Sophie writes of the joy of finding a 1911 copy of the Edwardian ‘Girl’s Own Annual’: ‘It had nothing to do with hairdressing, it was the time travelling that excited.’ Though she began with no particular criteria for collection, her interests soon focused, and she began to collect craft-themed books. Her collection currently has two major themes: ‘The first is the collecting of advice and expertise in lost craft skills. The other, the social history of radical change in attitude towards the crafts, spurred by the Arts and Crafts Movement.’
Sophie has donated several books with the balance of the prize. Those already received are:
Donald Gair and Ian D. Stewart, Courses in Handiwork (London: The Grant Educational Co., 1932), and
Handicraft in the School, vol. I (London, Gresham Publishing Co; Printed at the Villafield Press, Glasgow, by Blackie & Son, undated)
The next Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize contest will be announced in October, 2014. Undergraduates or graduate students of the University of Oxford in good standing are eligible.
Detail of Harding B 41, showing the inscription by Mary Marshall
The latest treasure to emerge from the great Harding collection is a little home-made pamphlet of just a dozen leaves, containing 77 popular songs gleaned from cheap printed sources. From the inscription on the cover, it seems to have been made by a Mary Marshall in 180[5?]. Nick Allred, Balliol-Bodley Scholar 2013-14, talked about this item in a presentation this week, and we all examined the contents, which include engraved illustrated broadsides of the kind published by C. Sheppard in the 1790s; lyrics clipped out of chapbooks like The Ladies Evening Companion; and songs in manuscript, transcribed by Miss Marshall.
Nick examined and noted every item in the scrapbook and even managed to find out what Mary Marshall was reading, when she took scissors to page to make her own songbook; an astounding feat, considering the number of chapbook songsters published and the fact that library catalogues don’t list the titles of songs within these books. Nick had to examine as many as possible of this type of book, with titles such as Brave Lord Nelson’s Garland, to find lyrics and typography that matched the songs clipped out by Mary Marshall. Luckily there are a great number of these songsters in the Harding Collection, and two of these yielded editions of songs identical to those that Mary Marshall used.
In this video Nick Allred talks about how the scrapbook might tell us more about one user of books in the early 19th century.
The dramatic events of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) inspired a deluge of English printing from news sheets to long histories, and of course ballads. In a recent article for the Historical Journal I explore a number of English ballads written in the immediate aftermath of the siege, and show how contemporary commonplace images of the ‘Turk’ allowed these ballads to draw analogies between these events and English politics. My study situates these ballads within the wider milieu of pamphlet news, political polemic, and ballad publication. The Bodleian image matching tool offers a new resource for scholars seeking to contextualise the relationship between the text of a ballad and its visual illustrations by finding other examples where the same woodcut was used.
The Christian conquest ([1683]) is a black-letter Vienna ballad printed for the noted ballad partnership J. Wright, J. Clark, W. Thackery, and T. Passinger. The ballad is printed, typically for its style, in landscape orientation, with four columns of text and three garish woodcuts. Though The Christian Conquest survives only in the Roxburghe Collection in the British Library, digitised by EBBA, I had previously encountered one of the woodcuts from this ballad in the earlier black-letter ballad The Scotch Rebellion (J. Conyers, [1679]), which survives as Bodleian Douce 2(192a).
Using the ImageMatch tool I was able to identify a further use of this illustration in Bodleian Wood E25(132), a copy of News from Ostend (F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clark, [1674-1678])
ImageMatch is particularly good for comparing details of images side by side. Though The Scotch Rebellion is a notably less good quality impression, close comparison of these two woodcut images from the 1670s show wear on the block, notably a chip in frame top left (see highlight above), indicating that they may be images taken from the same woodcut block. Using the tool to compare these images to the illustration from The Christian Conquest, shows a very close match to News from Ostend, and these impressions were almost certainly taken from the same block.
The Christian Conquest also shares an image of two mounted figures which appears in Bodleian Wood E25(98), The Matchless Murder (J. Conyers, [1682]).
Again chip marks in the lower right of the frame and other details of the impression indicate that this impression is probably taken from the same block as the image from The Christian Conquest.
So what does all this tell us? News from Ostend is particularly interesting as the involvement of J. Wright and J. Clark provide a continuity to the partnership that produced The Christian Conquest. Further, though News from Ostend is essentially a love ballad, in the form of a letter from a soldier, while The Christian Conquest revels in the news of Vienna’s rescue, they both share a topical interest in military affairs on the continent. Ballad specialists such as Wright, Clark and their associates, would have owned a range of woodcuts suited to illustrating common sub-genres such as military, drinking, or love songs, and these could easily overlap. Thus though The Matchless Murder specifically describes a deadly assault by pistol wielding horsemen, a woodcut of armed horsemen was also general enough to be used in a military ballad such as The Christian Conquest.
The illustrations in The Christian Conquest relate to its military theme rather than specifically to the topic of Vienna or the Turks. The significance of these images lies in the generic form in which this ballad takes – evident in the words as well as the illustration – and the reuse of images by established ballad specialist ballad publishers, rather than their visual details.
Anders Ingram is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway. This post draws on his recent article ‘The Ottoman Siege of Vienna (1683), English Ballads and the Exclusion Crisis’, The Historical Journal (2014), 57, pp 53-80 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X13000484).
Search for more ImageMatch results in the Broadside Ballads Online site, from the Bodleian Libraries.
