The Bodleian Conveyor

Gough Map project

Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain and its Making

(Dr Keith Lilley, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast; Nick Millea, Map Library, Bodleian Library; Dr Elizabeth Solopova, English Faculty, Oxford University; Paul Vetch, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College, London – the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ programme award, April 2010 – July 2011)

This interdisciplinary project will focus on a medieval map of Britain known as the Gough Map, now kept at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This manuscript, of national and international importance, conventionally dated to c.1360, contains the earliest surviving cartographic representation of Britain in a geographically-recognizable form. Recent research has demonstrated that the map is in parts a strikingly accurate depiction of the locations of places, yet very little is known about how it was made, why, where and by whom.

The project will attempt to answer some of these questions through a linguistic and paleographic analysis of the text on the Gough map. This work will be undertaken by Dr Elizabeth Solopova, English Faculty, Oxford University. This is an innovative approach to take with medieval maps, which will test transferability of techniques developed for the study of medieval manuscript texts to the study of manuscript maps. The project will investigate such questions as how many scribes worked on the present manuscript; where they were from; what their exemplars were like; what subsequent revision was undertaken, if any; and when did it take place. This will be achieved through a paleographic analysis of the map, but also through the study of the linguistic form of its place names, which reflects the dialect of its scribes and probably also the dialect of their patrons and the map’s original users. Since very little is known of the processes that were involved in medieval map-making, the insights achieved by the project will have significance beyond its immediate scope of study, and will contribute to ongoing debates about how maps were created and disseminated.

The project involves a group of researchers from three institutions and will be directed Dr Keith Lilley, Queen’s University Belfast. The work undertaken at the Bodleian will be overseen by Nick Millea, Map Curator, Bodleian Library. The project will have a website hosted at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College, London, where the work will be overseen by Paul Vetch. The website will feature a description of the research and technical development being carried out, with updates on progress, and a blog for project comments and discussion. It will also be the basis for the project’s online interactive Gough Map. This will be an enhancement of an existing version (created in 2005 as part of a British Academy funded project directed by Dr Keith Lilley), and will provide users with a means of accessing information on all of the places and features shown by the Gough Map. The online map will publicise the findings of this new research, and help disseminate the analytical results of the study both to academic and non-academic audiences, and across a wide range of subject areas. The project has an advisory panel comprising a linguistic historian (Professor Jeremy Smith) and a cartographic historian (Dr Peter Barber), both leading experts in their respective fields.

The award from the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ programme provides funding for an exhibition and colloquium at Oxford which will be held at the end of the project. The two-day colloquium will be an academic occasion to stimulate further discussion on the ‘language’ of medieval maps and map-makers. An associated exhibition focusing on the Gough map will be aimed at a wider audience and will be part of the Bodleian’s popular advertised exhibitions.

The project will generate intellectual debate within its team and their institutions, as well as by extending this into the broader academic community and beyond through digital web-based media, the exhibition and colloquium. It will develop new ways of studying the ‘language’ of medieval maps to stimulate high quality interdisciplinary research across academic and cultural sectors.

For further information see the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ programme website
http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/sg-keith-lilley/index.php

— From Elizabeth Solopova

Title pages of early scientific books

Before every bookshop had a “science section” – even before the word “science” was used to distinguish a particular field of knowledge — how would purchasers know that the contents of a printed book related to natural history and physical phenomena? This was the subject of Neil Kenny’s paper, ‘Title-pages and the question of the scientific book, c. 1550-1650’, at the Seminar on the History of the Book in Oxford, on 22 January.

In the first third of the 16th century title pages emerged as a means of advertising books and attracting sympathetic readers. Were the title pages of scientific books distinctive? Some printers used the same elaborate floral borders on fiction as on geographical treatises, implying that any kind of visual marker might attract a reader.

But decoration could be directed at the scientific theme as well, for instance a celestial sphere on books of astronomy. Allegories of the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy) were incorporated in the border of Oronce Fine’s Demonstrations on the first six books of Euclid’s Geometry, printed by Simon de Colines in Paris, 1536.
http://www.psymon.com/incunabula/masterpieces/fine2.html

Architectural borders, leading the reader into the text, could also be suggestive of genre. A 1620 edition of Jacques Guillemeau’s work on childbirth depicts surgical tools within its architectural frame, while the idea of a solid border is reworked into an elaborate green-house in Colines’s 1536 edition of Jean Ruel’s botanical De natura stirpium.

By contrast, a relative absence of iconography on classical works might suggest that the buyer was expected to know the nature of the work or to recognize the author’s name. Neil Kenny’s analysis of typography on the title pages of French scientific books showed that even on “plain” title pages, publishers were making careful choices about what words to emphasise, whether topic words in the titles, the name of the author, or the fact of a work’s translation “from the Latin”, all with a view to establishing a character and a lineage for the text and enhancing its credibility in the eyes of prospective purchasers.

Many title-pages are indicative only of a general scientific content, but the 1638 edition of Jean-François Nicéron’s La perspective curieuse shows an anamorphic cylinder, an optical curiosity for which instructions are to be found within the text.
http://www.ericconklin.com/ingeniousdevices.html

Cain in the canefields

Genesis 4:3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.

Wood E 25(10) The beginning, progress, and end of man

A curious case of a strong image from within the ballad genre highlights the strength of the visual tradition of broadside ballad printing even up to 1840, beyond the point when a wealth of new types of illustrated print had begun to appear in such publications as the Penny Magazine. The old ballad woodcuts look crude beside the wood engravings which had become standard fare in newspapers. But towards the middle of the 19th century there reappeared on some cheap printed songs an image whose earliest survival, on a ballad in Anthony Wood’s collection in the Bodleian Library, is from the 1650s [Bodleian Wood E 25(10)]. The 1650s broadside, entitled The beginning, progress, and end of man, was unusual enough in itself. It was a primitive pop-up book, in which images were transformed by turning the folds of the paper first up, then down. Adam becomes Eve, who turns into a mermaid; Cain’s offering is shown, then Abel’s, and then one brother murdering the other in a jealous rage.

It is the picture of Cain making his offering that was printed – probably from a later copy of the woodcut — two centuries later. It turns up on two ballads published in the 1830s or 1840s. One of these, Coffee and Tea, [Bodleian Harding B 25(392)] is shown here.
Did the 19th-century printer know or care about the bible iconography and the old-fashioned look of the woodcut? At this time, printers all around Britain were able to get hold of stereotyped images used in advertising and package labels. Tea, coffee, and tobacco labels might be illustrated with pictures of Chinese or Native American scenes, and these often came in handy for illustrating songs about far-off places, One song, entitled “Old King Coffee or the Ashanti War”, printed by H. Disley circa 1873, shows an American Indian on a quay, smoking his pipe as barrels are loaded onto a ship. It seems to have been taken from advertising or packaging for tobacco. The Indian with a feathered head-dress is made to stand in for the Asantehene (king of the Ashanti), Kofi Karikari.

Firth c.16(149) Old King Coffee, or the Ashantee war

Similar images would have been available to W. and T. Fordyce in the 1830s. Their choice of Cain, and this old picture, looks more deliberate when we know this. Antiquarian interest in ballads was well established even fifty years before this, and some printers deliberately marketed their broadsides as “old ballads”. Reprinting an old picture was certainly a way to give a distinctively antique look to the page.
Then again, the half-naked figure engaged in labor in an exotic agricultural setting, together with the allusion to hot drinks sweetened with sugar, suggests one reading highly relevant to the 1830s, the decade of West Indian slave emancipation, and to the 1840s, the decade of free trade in sugar. The deliberate use of the old woodcut of Cain manages to be both topical, in its suggestion of slave labour in the canefields, and traditional, linking the bawdy song Coffee and tea to the English broadside tradition.
– Alexandra Franklin

To search these and other ballads, see :Bodleian Broadside Ballads

Antiquaries 2 – the final cut

Plate 67 from Centuria II, of Itinerarium curiosum (Bodleian Library D 3.9 Art.)

William Stukeley, an 18th-century antiquarian, documented Roman remains for his publication ‘Itinerarium curiosum; or, An account of the antiquitys and remarkable curiositys in nature or art, observ’d in travels thro’ Great Brittan’ (1724). But when he thought of having this drawing engraved for publication in a later edition of this work, he made a note to the engraver to “leave out the woman”, whom he had depicted sitting in an alcove near to the Roman figure (see post “Antiquaries 1”). And so the lady vanishes ….

Tracking Incunables between Venice and Oxford

1574 die xii mensis septembris. Philippi [Basadone] d Francisci q. v. H. D. Philippi liber quem emit apud S. Marcum ad horologium pro solidis quadringentis paruorum — Inscription on Livy, Historiae Romanae decades, publ. Venice 1481, Bodleian Auct. Q inf. 2.21: 1574 die xii mensis septembris. Philippi d Francisci q. v. H. D. Philippi liber quem emit apud S. Marcum ad horologium pro solidis quadringentis paruorum

Dr. Cristina Dondi of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) presented to the Seminar on the History of the Book at All Souls College a wealth of evidence on the provenance of copies of early printed Venetian books held at the Bodleian Library, together with an argument about their place in the wider history of the book trade.

Drawing on a sample of over 1400 books printed at Venice in the fifteenth century, Dr. Dondi called for book historians to engage with economic history, remarking that many economic histories of the book trade had been written without reference to the book itself.

Giving a detailed account of the formation of the Bodleian’s exceptional collection of incunabula over several centuries, she argued that provenance research should orient itself away from the history of collections as such, favouring instead a broader history of the book trade and of the demand for particular categories of books. Individual copies of some of the earliest printed books, produced in Europe’s greatest centre of print production, bore ‘stratified evidence of their history’ – in the form of bindings, decorations and manuscript annotations.

Her presentation moved from close reading of the marks of ownership of individual copies to tabulating the evidence as a whole, substituting ‘precise numbers for impressions and generalisations’. Books could be read as ‘archaeological specimens’ that bore witness to the distribution of books across Europe, and to the knowledges contained within them.

For example, provenance could reveal patterns in the degree of interest in books of laws, science or philosophy in various parts of Europe. Lastly, and in questions, Dr. Dondi called for copy-specific data to be added to bibliographic catalogues such as the multinational Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC), furthering the history of the book in its widest sense. — Giles Bergel

Antiquaries 1

An opening from a volume of Gough Maps probably collected by William Stukeley (1687-1765) — An opening from a volume in the Gough collection probably collected by William Stukeley (1687-1765)

This picture shows one opening from a volume of collected drawings of antiquities around Britain. The volume was probably compiled by William Stukeley (1687-1765) and then made its way into the collection of Richard Gough (1735-1809). Gough, who took an interest in Anglo-Saxon as well as Roman antiquity, left to the Bodleian Library a large collection of early books, notes and drawings of archaeological and antiquarian interest, a hoard that will be celebrated on Gough Day, 20 March 2009, with a viewing of some of the treasures. See: Gough Day

Skeletons and sheets in the cupboard

Leviathan; from All Souls College Library At the Seminar on the History of the Book on Friday February 20th, Dr. Noel Malcolm untangled the bibliographical mysteries of the three ‘1651’ editions of Hobbes’s Leviathan.

In working toward a critical edition of Leviathan, Dr. Malcolm wished to identify which of three versions with a London 1651 imprint are actually Hobbesian editions. The three versions are identified by their title page ornaments: ‘Head’ which is the true 1651 edition; ‘Bear’ which some had suspected to be a Dutch pirate edition of the 1670s; and ‘Ornaments’, long supposed to have been printed in London in the 1670s or 80s. But was Hobbes involved in the production of the second and third issues?

By collating dated ownership inscriptions and sale prices, Dr. Malcolm was able to create a picture of the appearance of each version on the market: the ‘Head’ through the 1650s, the ‘Bear’ in the late 1670s and early 1680s, and the ‘Ornaments’ rather later than expected, through the early years of the 18th century.

A fascinating tale of subterfuge emerged around the ‘Bear’ edition, involving the London printer John Redmayne and the Stationers’ Company. In September 1670 Redmayne’s printing house was raided by the Master of the Company and two sample leaves of the Leviathan seized; three days later the Court of the Stationers’ Company was told that Redmayne’s premises were to be raided again in order to seize the remaining sheets of this new edition. A few days later this pre-announced raid took place and Redmayne duly yielded up another 38 sheets. Had this action supressed Redmayne’s intended edition?

Close examination of the type, ornaments, and skeletons (fixed type such as running headers) used in the ‘Bear’ edition showed that there were two distinct sets of sheets, printed with different type and therefore almost certainly in different printing houses. Distinctive spelling and punctuation on one set of these pages strongly points to their Dutch origin. As reconstructed by Dr. Malcolm, the printing of early sheets of the ‘Bear’ had gone smoothly in the London printing house of John Redmayne until the time the intended raid was announced; then there had been a mad scramble to print more sheets, at the expense of careful proofreading. In spite of his apparent cooperation with the authorities, Redmayne evidently made use of the warning he gained from Stationers Company colleagues to cache some sheets off the premises. Finally the remaining quires were printed, also using the first ‘Head’ edition as a model, in the Netherlands. The ‘Bear’ ornament itself, along with a head-piece used in the first quire, were identified as belonging to Christoffel Cunradus, a printer in Amsterdam. The London sheets were combined with sheets printed in the Netherlands to create a new edition for surreptitious sale.

After painstaking work , Dr. Malcolm has been able to identify the type used in the ‘Ornaments’ edition as that of the London printer John Darby. It is a typeface that was not in use before the late 1690s, thus dating the third edition to the late 1690s, and no later than 1702 – long after the death of Hobbes in 1679!

Detailed examination of textual editing and ‘corrections’ made between the three editions support Dr Malcolm’s thesis that Hobbes was involved in the first ‘Head’ edition; made a few significant textual changes via his original publisher, Andrew Crooke, that appeared in the ‘Bear’ edition; but had no involvement in changes seen in the last edition (still dated ‘1651’), the ‘Ornaments’ edition. — Julie Blyth, All Souls College

1-penny survey of English history

At the Seminar on the history of the book, Giles Bergel told us about the Wandering Jew’s Chronicle, a broadside ballad first published in 1634 and updated in at least 14 subsequent editions up to the 19th century. As these were turbulent times for England and the monarchy, the use of an unbroken portrait gallery of monarchs to illustrate most of the versions suggests a royalist theme, and the “Whiggish”, triumphalist view of English history.

Visual representations of history are a fascinating subject in themselves, and Bergel also showed the first use in print of a stemma, much used by historians of texts, in an 1827 publication, Carl Johan Schlyter’s Corpus iuris Sueo-Gotorum antiqui.

Resting books

On a visit to Leiden University Library’s Special Collections reading room, I was happy to see these comfortable- looking bookrests. At the Bodleian our bookrests are all angular grey foam. Also noted, the view from the window of the Leiden reading room …

Benjamin Tabart Harlequinades

veroni1

The Library has recently acquired an album of 89 coloured prints dating from the early 1820s. It may have been issued by William Darton Jr. (1781-1854) and his firm at Holborn Hill during the mid-1820s as a sample album to show potential customers examples of his work. It contains a small number of sheets originally issued in 1800 by William Darton Sr. (1755-1819); 11 harlequinades in unfolded sheets with the imprint of B. Tabart & Co., and some sheets bearing Darton Jr’s imprint with dates ranging from 1821 to 1824. This mix of imprints suggests that Darton Jr. inherited some of his father’s old stock upon his death, including some of Benjamin Tabart’s publications which William Sr. possibly acquired in 1811 when financial difficulties may have forced Tabart to sell off some of his stock.

The harlequinades are especially interesting as very few examples survive generally, and four of the eleven Tabart examples in this album are currently untraced elsewhere. There are certainly difficulties locating harlequinades in library and museum catalogues around the world as they can be treated equally as toys, books, ephemera or prints, but as some titles were not located by Marjory Moon in her bibliography of Tabart’s Juvenile Library it seems likely that some of the Bodleian copies may be unique survivals. It is also possible that these eleven titles represent Tabart’s entire output of harlequinades, but that is pure speculation.

Blue Beard. Sold by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Robinson Crusoe. Sold by B. Tabart & Co. June 1. 1809.
Veroni or the novice of St. Marks. Published by B. Tabart & Co, June 1. 1809.
Mother Goose. Published by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st 1809.
Hop o’ my thumb. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 1st. 1810..
Black Beard the pirate. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st. 1809.
Parnell’s hermit. Published, by Tabart & Co., Jany. 31st. 1810.
Exile, as performed at the royal theatres. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Robin Hood. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Polish tyrant. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., Aug. 1st. 1809.
A tale of mystery. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 25th, 1810.
Shelfmark: Vet. A6 c.118

The entire album will be available online in Summer 2009 as part of the John Johnson Collection’s Electronic Ephemera Project. Full records for the harlequinades are available now via OLIS.