Category Archives: Special Collections

Istro-Romanian and the Hurren Bequest: Documentation of an Endangered Language

Istro-Romanian is a ‘Daco-Romance’ dialect, closely related to Romanian and spoken by 200-250 people in North-East Istria, Croatia. Their villages are separated by a mountain, Mount Učka, which explains the continued existence of two dialects, northern and southern IR. The Istro-Romanian area has shrunk since the Middle Ages, when it included the islands Krk and Rab off the Croatian Coast in the Adriatic See. The Istro-Romanians probably descend from pastoral people, who settled in Istria in the 15^th century, away from the Romanian homeland searching for new pastures for their flocks. This is the most likely hypothesis about their origins, although a movement of people in the opposite direction cannot be entirely ruled out.

Istro-Romanian and Croatian

Istro-Romanian is the only Romance language that shows extensive influence from a Slavic language, i.e. Croatian, not only in vocabulary and verbal system but also in word order which is remarkably free. For example

bovu ɨn‘trεba asiru

Ox.the asks ass.the

can be translated as ‘The ox asks the ass’ or as ‘The ass asks the ox’. The appropriate translation can only be deduced from the context, which would not be the case in Romanian or in Croatian.

The Istro-Romanian speakers don’t have a great sense of linguistic identity, to the extent that they do not have an indigenous name for their language. All speakers are bilingual in Croatian. There is hardly any written IR, although nowadays social media are used as a means of writing in the local language, all be it without a standardized grammar. IR is mainly orally transmitted and is not used in education in any way.

Given this situation, it is remarkable that so many works about the language have been published. A selection of titles, kept in the Taylorian, can be see below. These books were brought out after the Istro-Romanian seminar on 2^nd December, given by Prof Martin Maiden, professor of Romance Linguistics at Oxford who is a specialist in Romanian.

The display included several dialect atlases and a textbook.

: Flora, R. (2003) Micul atlas lingvistic al graiurilor istroromâne (MALGI). București : Editura Academiei Române.

: Flora, R. (2003) Micul atlas lingvistic al graiurilor istroromâne (MALGI). București : Editura Academiei Române.

: Sârbu, R. and Frăţilă, V. (1998). Dialectul istroromân: texte și glosar. Timişoara: Amarcord.

The Hurren Bequest

The highlight of the book display was an unpublished type-written grammar, written by Anthony Hurren, who did his DPhil at Oxford in 1972. This grammar was donated to the Taylorian as part of the Hurren bequest. It was ready to be published in 1999 but sadly, this never happened due to Hurren’s death. The book deals with phonology, grammar and lexicon of the language and contains a lovely folk tale in the southern dialect about a cat, a cock, a donkey, and a sheep who decide to travel around the world. Since there is not much written material available in IR, Hurren had to collect his language data first before he could contemplate writing a grammar. He interviewed informants from all villages in the region in the 1960s, in preparation for his Oxford DPhil thesis A linguistic description of Istro-Romanian (1972). A list of informants is provided in Appendix B in the grammar which is also based on these sound recordings.

The many hours of sound recordings provide unique Istro-Romanian language material on reel to reel tape. All is now digitised and kept in the Taylorian as part of the Hurren bequest. A transcription project is underway.

I thank Prof Maiden for his enlightening seminar on 2^nd December 2015 in the Taylorian and I am most grateful that I could have the text of his lecture on which most of this blog is based.

Johanneke Sytsema, Linguistics Librarian, Taylor Institution Library

Livres d’artistes / French Artists’ Books & the Avant Garde

On 1st March 2016, we welcomed Dr Camille Mathieu (History of Art Department, University of Manchester) back to Oxford, and to the Taylorian, where she presented the Taylor Institution Library’s livres d’artiste collection. This collection includes texts by French and foreign authors; with illustrations by well-known 20th century artists such as Braque, Kandinsky, Matisse and Picasso, as well as many others.

Charles d’Orléans. Poèmes. Illustrated by Henri Matisse (Paris: Tériade, 1950)

Guillaume Apollinaire. Si je mourais là-ba. Illustrated by Georges Braque (Paris: Louis Broder, 1962)

Dr Mathieu’s presentation was accompanied by a display, in the Taylorian’s Voltaire Room, of related items in the artists’ books collection. The following is her summary of her talk.

As far as objets d’arts go, the artist’s book is a rather hybrid form. It turns a story or a poem into an object; it lends the weight of materiality to the metaphorical weight of narrative. It is necessarily a collaborative effort: author, artist-illustrator, typesetter, printer, editor, publisher—all of these people have a hand in producing the final product. It can be presented materially—as a bound book where only one page can be opened at a time—or immaterially, as a series of leaves and pages that feed into one another.  It was its hybridity as a medium that drew Walter Strachan to the artist’s book; his impressive collection of sheets from these books was given to the Taylorian during Giles Barber’s tenure as Taylor Librarian (1970-1996).

A teacher of modern languages at Bishop’s Stortford College, Walter Strachan became interested in the genre of the artist’s book (or, in its French translation, livre d’artiste) in parallel with translations he was  executing of the works of poets who inhabited Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century – Tzara, Eluard, and Apollinaire, for example, whose texts ultimately featured in Strachan’s collection.

Tristan Tzara. juste présente. Illustrated by Sonia Delaunay (Paris: Galerie Louise Leiris, 1961)

Amassed in repeated visits to Parisian collectors, printers, and book artists and sometimes offered to the collector as gifts over several decades, the Strachan Collection is extremely diverse both in terms of the artists and the authors it represents. It contains two of the most important works for the history and development of the genre, both of whose process of publication was spearheaded and supervised by the legendary post-impressionist art dealer (his “stable” included Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh) and book editeur Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939).

The collection includes two Vollard items: (1) What is arguably the first artist’s book ever produced in the avant-garde, early twentieth-century sense of the genre that Strachan devoted his scholarship to: Verlaine’s Parallèlement, illustrated by Pierre Bonnard (1900); and (2) Balzac’s Le Chef d’Oeuvre Inconnu, illustrated by Pablo Picasso (1931).

: Paul Verlaine. Parallèment. Illustrated by Pierre Bonnard (Paris: A. Vollard, 1900)

: Honoré de Balzac. Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu Illustrated by Pablo Picasso (Paris: A. Vollard, 1931)

Each artist takes a different approach to the concept of illustrating the book. Bonnard’s work is arguably the more innovatively designed of the two, for his illustrations encircle the text, as opposed to providing separate, squared-off vignettes of illustration to the text, as is the case in Picasso’s work. The rose-colored, frenetic drawing style exhibited by Bonnard in Parallèlement lends the entire production the feeling of being illustrated with sanguine chalk—a feature frequently associated in the late-nineteenth century with the Rococo drawings of Fragonard or Watteau. This drawing style claims for the art book the purview of the luxury product.

Both Bonnard’s and Picasso’s drawings are more or less illustrative of the actual texts, providing images that generally coincide with the development of the narratives provided. In the case of the 1931 Chef d’Oeuvre Inconnu, the first artist’s book ever to be commissioned from Picasso—an artist who would go on to be prolific in the genre—the illustrations go one step further and take the power of mimesis and the pull of abstraction as their subjects; these are both underlying concepts in Balzac’s narrative as well as powerful motivators for the work of Picasso in the 1930s. For the man who had invented Cubism (along with Braque) and whose art was currently in a broadly neoclassical phase, the importance of reconciling the live model with a kind of abstracted ideal retained all of the force with which Balzac presents it. Picasso’s illustrations include both the more traditionally representative (the painter drawing his model) and abstract (the set of line-dot drawings that dominate the “introduction” he provides for the reader [not part of the Taylorian’ sheets from this book).

The successful marriage of disparate parts and influences that is represented by the genre of the artist’s book— edited, authored, illustrated, printed, etched/engraved/lithographed, and published by a litany of different people with disparate ideas—ironically finds its fullest and arguably most famous expression in this particular livre, whose text and illustrations both insist on the inability of the painter to successfully bind together the real and the ideal.

Dr. Camille Mathieu
Lecturer in Art History
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
University of Manchester

Photo credits: Nick Hearn & Clare Hills-Nova (Taylor Institution Library)

Further reading

Le livre d’artiste: a catalogue of the W.J. Strachan gift to the Taylor Institution: exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum, Ox, 1987 (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum and Taylor Institution, 1987).

W.J. Strachan. The artist and the book in France: the 20th century livre d’artiste (London: Owen, 1969)

Pierre Reversy. Le chant des morts. Illustrated by Pablo Picasso (Paris: Tériade, 1948)

Endangered Languages and language documentation

The Taylorian is known for its collections on Modern European Languages, be it East- or West-European. Apart from the main collections including German, French, Russian, Polish to mention a few, the Taylorian also houses less well known collections on minority languages, such as Welsh and Breton within the Celtic section or Occitan and Yiddish. To familiarise a wider audience with these ‘hidden treasures’ of the Taylorian, the seminar series ‘Introducing Endangered Languages’ was organised in Michaelmas Term 2015. The seminars were kindly given by Oxford specialists.

Prof. Mary Dalrymple gave an introduction to language endangerment in the first seminar and paid special attention to a critically endangered language Dusner in West Papua with only three speakers left. Some of the questions she discussed were :

How many Languages are there? What constitutes a language?

The total number of languages in the world can only be estimated at around 7000. It is difficult to be certain, and it depends on what counts as a language. E.g. is Chinese one language or are Mandarin, Cantonese and other dialects regarded as separate languages? And is Arabic one language or does Egyptian Arabic count as a separate language? Assuming Chinese is one language, than it is the most spoken language in the world with more than a billion speakers. Second comes Spanish, followed by English. Here is a list of most spoken languages from the Ethnologue.

When is a language endangered?

Interestingly, 94% of the world population speaks only 6% of the world languages, so most people speak a main stream language as their first language. This also means that 6% of the world population speaks 94% of the world languages, so each of these languages have relatively small numbers of speakers. Numbers of speakers may vary: 10.000, 1000, 100 or even just 10 first language speakers. Over 300 languages have no first language speakers at all, all speakers are bilingual and use the minority language only in certain ‘domains’ e.g. home and family, whereas the major language may be used at school, work etc. Many of these languages without first language speakers are at risk to be ‘overtaken’ by the mainstream language.

Most users of the Taylorian will have heard of European minority languages, such as Breton or Frisian, although languages like Friulian or Istro-Romanian are less well known. Most countries in Europe can be proud of having one or a few minority languages spoken within their borders. In terms of ‘language density’ however Europe is fairly ‘poor’, other regions in the world may have many more languages within one country. One of the most densely ‘languaged’ regions is South-East Asia. It is assumed that there are at least 1000 minority languages in Papua New Guinea alone, many of which have not even been documented. In the language-rich province of West-Papua in Indonesia there is a language on the brink of dying out: Dusner, an Austronesian language, only spoken by three people over 60. Fortunately, Prof. Dalrymple was just in time to meet them in April 2011. Flying out in a hurry to West-Papua after Dr Mofu had discovered Dusner, she then travelled to the idyllic village of Dusner that can only be reached by boat.

Atlas of the world’s languages in danger Moseley, Christopher & Nicolas, Alexandre. Paris: Unesco, 2010. Taylor Library Linguistics Collection P40.5.L33 ATL 2010.

Together with Dr Mofu who holds a D.Phil. from Oxford, she interviewed these last speakers to record their language. The Dusner speakers are featured below (from the project website http://dusner.clp.ox.ac.uk/). For those interested in the sound of Dusner, the website holds audio recordings of the interviews.

: Name: Emma Somesa Age: 85 Current address: Dusner Village Emma is the oldest speaker of Dusner. She speaks Dusner and Wandamen fluently, and also speaks Indonesian. We communicate with her through interpreters who speak Indonesian and Wandamen.

: Name: Enos Yoweni Age: 60 Current address: Sowiar Village, Simei Enos comes from Dusner and speaks 4 languages fluently: Kuri, Dusner, Wandamen and Indonesian. He is the head of Sowiar Village (a 3 hour walk from Dusner Village). There is no land transportation to his village.

: Name: Anna Imburi Age: 60 Current address: Yogyakarta, Central Java Anna comes from Dusner Village and speaks 3 languages fluently: Dusner, Wandamen and Indonesian. She is Emma Somesa’s niece.

These interviews were the basis of a language documentation project which resulted in the publication of the first grammar of Dusner (by Mary Dalrymple & Suriel Mofu).

Small languages like Dusner are really valuable from a linguistic point of view, since they often maintain the more complex linguistic constructions, whereas major languages will have been simplified to make them easier to acquire by adults. English is an example of a language that simplified over time. For example In Anglosaxon there were different verbal endings as in helpe, hilpst, hilpƥ, helpaƥ, helpe, helpen (present tense of helpan ‘to help’) whereas in Modern English there are only two forms in the present: help, helps.

A remarkable feature of Dusner is the number system: it is a base five system, this means that there are separate words for one, two, three, four and five but six is expressed as ‘five one’ and seven as ‘five two’. Ten is a new word, eleven is ‘ten one’ and sixteen is expressed as ‘ten five one’.

The grammar is the only one book on Dusner ever published and this is held in the Bodleian. The Taylorian holds a good collection on endangered languages more in general, the list of recommended resources can be found below.

I’m grateful to Prof. Dalrymple for letting me use her slides and for giving me permission to use the table of Dusner numbers and the two tables on numbers of speakers, both based on information from Ethnologue.

Johanneke Sytsema, Linguistics Librarian

Further Reading

Dusner

Dalrymple, Mary and Suriel Mofu (2012) Dusner. Muenchen : Lincom Europa
Closed Stack M12.F01716

Florey, Margaret J (2010) Endangered languages of Austronesia. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
Closed Stack M09.E12948

Language Endangerment
De Dominicis, Amedeo (2006). Undescribed and endangered languages : the preservation of linguistic diversity. Newcastle-upon-Tyne : Cambridge Scholars.
Closed Stack. Also online through SOLO.

Crystal, David (2014). Language Death. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Taylor Institution Library Linguistics Collection P40.5.L33 CRY 2014

Harris, K.D. (2007) When Languages Die. The extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. Oxford: OUP.
Taylor Institution Library Teaching Collection P.40.5.L33 HAR 2007

Evans, Nicholas (2010). Dying words : endangered languages and what they have to tell us. Chichester, U.K. ; Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell.
Taylor Institution Library Linguistics Collection P40.5.E53 EVA 2009.

Fishman, Joshua A. (1991). Reversing language shift : theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon : Multilingual Matters.
Taylor Institution Library Linguistics Collection ALN.8000.A.45

Fishman, Joshua A (2001). Can threatened languages be saved? : reversing language shift, revisited : a 21st century perspective. Clevedon : Multilingual Matters.
Bodleian Library Lower Gladstone Link Open Shelves (UBHU) M01.F01417.

Gordon, Raymond G. (2005). Ethnologue : languages of the world. Dallas, SIL International.
Closed Stack M05.D01883.

Miyaoka, Osahito, Osamu Sakiyama and Michael E. Krauss (2007) The vanishing languages of the Pacific rim. Oxford : Oxford University.
Taylor Institution Library Linguistics Collection P381.P3 VAN 2007

Nettle, Daniel & Suzanne Romaine (2000) Vanishing Voices: the extinction of the world’s languages.Oxford: OUP.
Taylor Institution Library Teaching Collection P40.5.L33 NET 2000

Thomason, Sarah Grey & Verónica María (2015)Endangered languages : an introduction
Taylor Institution Library Teaching Collection P40.5.E53 THO 2015

Tsunoda, Tasaku (2006). Language endangerment and language revitalization : an introduction. Berlin : Mouton de Gruyter.
Taylor Institution Library Teaching Collection P40.5 L28 TSU 2004

Atlases

Wurm, S. A.& Theo Baumann (1996). Atlas of the world’s languages in danger of disappearing. Paris : Unesco ; Canberra : Pacific Linguistics.
Bodleian Library Weston RBMSS Open Shelves G1.B1.53 Maps.

Moseley, Christopher & R.E. Asher (1994). Atlas of the world’s languages. London : Routledge.
Taylor Institution Library (Graduate Studies Room) L.ATL.B.AA.4
(See also the online interactive version http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php)

Moseley, Christopher & Alexandre Nicolas (2010) Atlas of the world’s languages in danger. 3rd ed. Paris : United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Taylor Institution Library Linguistics Collection P40.5.L33 ATL 2010

Moseley, Christopher (2012). The UNESCO atlas of the world’s languages in danger : context and process. Cambridge : World Oral Literature Project.
Closed Stack

Personal accounts
Everett, Daniel Leonard (2009). Don’t sleep, there are snakes : life and language in the Amazonian jungle. London : Profile.
Closed Stack M09.G01855

Abley, Mark (2005).Spoken here : travels among threatened languages. London : Arrow Books.
Taylor Institution Library Teaching Collection P40.5.L33 ABL 2005

Drysdale, Helena.(2002). Mother tongues : travels through tribal Europe. London : Picador.
Closed Stack M02.G02997

Web Resources

Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/bibliography/index.php

Ethnologue http://www.ethnologue.com/

The Endangered Languages Project. A project to support language preservation and documentation around the world by the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity.The catalogue contains information on 3228 languages. Includes interactive map. http://www.endangeredlanguages.com

SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) http://www.sil.org/about/endangered-languages (includes interactive map and list of publications)

Sorbian : an endangered language

On 28^th October, the world leading expert on Sorbian Dr Gerald Stone, fellow of Hertford College, gave an inspiring lecture in the seminar series ‘Introducing Endangered Languages’ which is being organised by the Taylor Institution Library.

The Sorbs or ‘Wenden’ as they are called in German, are a Slavic nation that have always lived in Central Europe. Nowadays the Sorbs live in the area around Bautzen/Budissin and Cottbuss in Germany, close to the Polish and the Czech border. In former times, the Sorbian area streched to the rivers Elbe and Saale in the west. When Martin Luther preached in Wittenberg in the early 16^th century he would have had Sorbian speakers among his German speaking congregation.

Sorbian is divided in two dialects, known as Upper-Sorbian (around Bautzen) and Lower- Sorbian (north of Cottbuss). Interestingly, the difference between the two Sorbian dialects is very much based on religious differences between Protestants and Catholics who lived in fairly closed communities in separate villages. Since intermarriage did not happen much, the villages kept their religious identity and traditions and therefore their dialects for a long time. Although there are morphological and phonological differences in addition to lexical differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian, they are still regarded as one language. The future of Sorbian seems best guaranteed in Catholic villages, mainly in Upper Sorbia, where children speak Sorbian, whereas in Protestant villages that are mainly in the north, there is hardly anyone below the age of 50 still speaking the language. The Sorbischer Sprachatlas (Sorbian language atlas) gives a detailed overview of the Sorbian dialects and the parishes in which the dialects are spoken. Just across the Polish border, no Sorbian or related dialect is spoken at all due to political circumstances after WWII when Poles from east Poland settled in the area.

H.Fasske et.al. Sorbischer Sprachatlas or Serbski rěčny atlas,Taylor Slavonic Library.

The number of Sorbian speakers is estimated at over 6000 for Lower Sorbian and 15,000 for Upper Sorbian. The number of Sorbian speakers diminished greatly during the Nazi era, Sorbs being displaced or worse. The socialist government of the GDR took the opposite view and protected the Sorbs, enabled Sorbian schools and subsidised the publishing house Domowina, which still exists. Nowadays, the lack of economic prospects in the region is a threat for the future of Sorbian, and many young people seek employment further west.

Bilingualism in Lusatia

All Sorbian speakers are bilingual, and like to see this reflected in street name signs. In the GDR era when Sorbian was supported by the state, both languages were represented in the same font size, whereas nowadays, the German names are presented bigger than the Sorbian names. As the joke goes, this is because Germans are short-sighted….

Sorbian traditions

Sorbians have lived in the area for centuries and maintained their traditions. A well known tradition is the Easter riding or ‘Osterreiten’. At Easter, the Catholic men from one village ride in procession to the next village to announce the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. Men from this village then pay a visit in return. All ride on black horses, each procession can encompass up to 400 riders in black hats.

Sorbian in print

The Sorbian exhibition in the Voltaire Room shows some of the early history of Sorbian in print: Vocabularium latino-serbicum (Bautzen, 1721) of Jurij Hawštyn Swětlik ) and the first Upper Sorbian grammar, Jakub Xaver Ticin’s Principia linguae wendicae quam aliqui wandalicam vocant, first published in Prague in 1679.

: Principia linguae wendicae

: Vocabularium latino-serbicum

The Taylorian also holds a rare copy of the hymnbook by August Hersen who translated hymns by Graf Nikolaus von Zinzendorf into Sorbian in 1750. This copy Hłós teje njewjesty Jezusoweje…was donated to the Taylorian by Dr Stone in 1973.

The first Bible in Sorbian was printed in 1728 in Bautzen. Dr Stone kindly lent his copy of this leather bound bible for the exhibition.

I thank Dr Stone for supplying the captions for the exhibition, for his time spent in preparing the exhibition and telling me about the Sorbs. Without his contributions, I could not have written this blog. His latest book will be published in December this year.

Johanneke Sytsema

Linguistics Librarian

Society for Italian Studies’ Biennial Conference

Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference

Oxford, Taylor Institution,
25-28 September 2015

Before the rush of new students and returning students, the Taylor Institution opened its doors to 200-plus delegates, over three days, for the Biennial Conference of the Society for Italian Studies, 2015. (Link here to the SIS-Biennial-Conference-Programme.)

2015 has been an auspicious year for big anniversaries in Italian culture, including: 750 years since the birth of Dante Alighieri, 500 since the death of Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, 30 since Italo Calvino’s death, and 100 since Italy revoked the Triple Alliance (with Germany and Austria-Hungary) and entered World War I on the side of the Triple Entente (France, Great Britain and Russia). We also lie on the eve of the anniversary of the first edition of Ariosto’s epochal epic, the Orlando Furioso. The conference programme, together with the display of items from the Taylor Institution Library’s Special Collections as well as the Sackler Library’s Wind Room, reflected the ongoing cultural impact of these figures and events. (Link here to the SIS-2015-Display-List.)

Throughout 2015, Dante’s 750th birthday has been celebrated by popes and politicians, with readings, concerts and conferences and, thanks in part to the 1939 deposit of the Moore Collection by The Queen’s College with the Taylorian, a number of early print editions of Dante’s Commedia were on view.

: Mapping the Inferno, 1: Antonio Manetti, Dialogo [. . .] circa al sito, forma, et misure dello Inferno di Dante Alighieri (Florence: Giunta, 1506)

: Mapping the Inferno, 2: Dante, Commedia (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1515)

Each item shown was intriguing for different reasons, not least for allowing us to focus on the material culture and circulation of Dante’s texts during the transition from manuscript to print. An interest in these questions, the so-called ‘material turn’ in some branches of research, was also evident in a number of SIS conference panels considering the content and afterlives of Dante’s texts.

: Dante, Commedia (Venice: Bartolomeo de Zanni da Portese, 1507)

: Dante, Commedia (Venice: Iacob del Burgofranco, 1529)

: Dante, Commedia (Venice: Giovambattista & Melchior Sessa, 1564)

Striking images from various editions of Dante’s Commedia were on display, such as in a 1507 Venetian edition, which included illustrations based on Botticelli’s treatment of the poem. One Commedia shown (Venice, 1529), bore images of classical poets in parallel with Italy’s Tre Corone, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

The display of this 1529 edition, with its Tre Corone array, of was of broader relevance in a year which, as well as marking a significant anniversary of Dante’s birth, saw the publication of the new Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, presented in a special ‘unroundtable’ conference session by its editors, Rhiannon Daniels and Guyda Armstrong. This session served not only to present a complex and fascinating author, but also to consider the role of medieval and early modern specialists in the wider scope of Italian and modern language departments, in the humanities, and in the public sphere, picking up discussions in other venues such as the recent International Medieval Congresses at Leeds and Kalamazoo.

Petrarch, Trionfi (Milan: Ioanne Angelo Scinzenzeler, 1512)

Not to be left out, Petrarch will also shortly be receiving his own Companion volume in the Cambridge series, so that the three big guns of the medieval canon will, at last, be equally well-served in terms of introductory criticism. Students of medieval Italian (Oxford Italianists taking Paper VI) have never had it so good!

During his sadly curtailed life-time, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) produced a body of work that remains a staple of undergraduate curricula, of graduate and professional research agendas (turning up in a SIS conference panel on experimental narratives), and (in the original Italian and in translations into numerous languages) of bookshop shelves around the world. In Calvino’s fiction, non-fiction, lectures, screen-plays, essays, and articles exist strands with always at least half an eye on Italian literary and narrative traditions, from fairytales to ‘classics’ of literature. This interest is reflected in Calvino’s edition of his oft-proclaimed favourite text, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, of which a 1555 and 1570 edition were shown. In addition, a vinyl recording curated by Calvino was displayed alongside the first critical edition of the 1516 edition of the text (by Oxford scholar Marco Dorigatti).

: Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1555)

: Orlando Furioso di messer Ludovico Ariosto. Ed by Italo Calvino (Fonit Cetra, 1967): Cover of LP box set

The Furioso, its editions and afterlives also had a marked presence in a variety of panels over the course of the SIS conference. The 1570 edition of Ariosto’s text on dislay was of particular interest not so much for what had been included, but for what one reader had attempted to delete.

: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1570)o

Lines describing discordant and unseemly behaviour among friars (Canto 27.37) have been struck through in an act of censorious literary disagreement. This somewhat drastic intervention again brings the material fates of the texts we study into sharp relief.

As well as celebrating the lives and works of figures like Dante, Calvino, and Ariosto, recent years have also marked more sombre recollections relating to the beginning of the Great War, declared on 28 July 1914, and joined by Italy, after the collapse of its Triple Alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, on 23 May 1915.

: Views of the Futurism and Fascism Display Case

While these remembrances have largely focused on loss and sacrifice, the Italian Futurists thought World War I was great in a rather different sense, celebrating warfare as ‘the world’s only hygiene’, to use F.T. Marinetti’s phrase in his Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). A copy of this text was included among a visually striking display of his works, along with texts by his contemporaries and co-conspirators. (See also the Taylorian’s blog posting Futurism, Fascism and the Art of War.)

Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo (1909)

This Manifesto was one of several texts featuring in the final SIS keynote, by Robert Gordon, exploring the developing role of chance and luck in ‘modernist’ Italian works.

Indeed, the exhibition provided a visual counterpart to all three keynotes. Zygmnut Barański’s address ‘On Dante’s Trail’, was very concerned with the use of archival materials in relation to ‘historically inflected research’ on Dante; Lina Bolzoni’s talk focused on the perils and pleasures of reading and the importance of texts by great authors to the construction of the self in early modern Italy; and the aforementioned Futurist and modern publications on show reflected the heart of Robert Gordon’s discussion.

David Bowe, Victoria Maltby Junior Research Fellow, Somerville College,

Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

Further reading

For items on view, link here to the SIS-2015-Display-List.

The Ariège Collection

: Giles and Lisa Barber at their home in Lescure (Ariège)

When Giles Barber retired from his post as Taylor Librarian in 1996, he moved with his wife Lisa to Charlbury and they shortly also acquired a holiday house in the far south-west of France, in the département of the Ariège. La Mandro, in the commune of Lescure, very soon became their main residence, and they immersed themselves in local life, became involved in a whole variety of activities – and they collected books. Their large collection of books on the Ariège and nearby areas of France has now been donated to the Bodleian by Lisa Barber, who writes:

We loved this area of France and anything published about the Ariège was of interest: its geographical situation in the central Pyrenees bordering Catalonia, life in the past in this region, the architecture of its many old churches, travellers’ descriptions, the painters who had worked in the region, and works both by and about its writers.

Included in this collection are a number of books on and in Occitan, and in particular on the Gascon language, spoken in Lescure in former days and still by a few of the older generation. In the collection one can find the three studies by Jean-Pierre Laurent (2002) (by profession an anaesthetist) on the dialects of Massat, the Séronais, and Aulus.

Three dialect studies by Jean-Pierre Laurent (2002)

His information was carefully collected over many years from local people of an older generation (This and all further references are to be found in the bibliography at the end of this blog). Christian Duthil (2009) wrote on the language of the Ariège, while the dialect of Toulouse is studied by Jean Séguy (1978). Place-names of the area can be explicated by reference to two books by Bénédicte and Jean-Jacques Fénié (1992, 1997).

Abbé Grégoire, Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française. 1794 (Reprinted 1995)

Modern interest in these languages aims to preserve them but of great consequence was the effort to suppress them and the collection includes a reprint of a 1794 work by the Abbé Grégoire (1995) on the necessity of suppressing the dialect and ensuring that French became the standard language of communication. The Abbé’s efforts were not entirely successful and the anthologies of Gascon literature and folklore by Gaston Guillaume (1941) and Joan-Francés Bladèr (1966) contain some of the literary texts composed in the languages of the region.

There is also a fairly rare first edition of Belina, poema de tres cantas by Miqueu Camelat (1962).

: Miqueu Camelat Belina, poema de tres cantas, Sorgas – Institut d’estudis occitans, 1962

: Miqueu Camelat Belina, poema de tres cantas, Sorgas – Institut d’estudis occitans, 1962

Local history was one of our prime interests and our collection includes studies (of varying academic levels) of many small communes of the Ariège as well as of the larger and better-known towns. Paul Pédoya collected together all his own memories and that of others of his village of Montseron (2005), while Georges Olive wrote up the traditions of one area of the town of Saint-Girons: the Baléjou (1993). Christiane Miramont studied and wrote about the mills along the Lens valley (2005), the glass-blowers of the Volvestre (2003), and the somewhat turbulent life of Bruno de Ruade (1999).

Saint-Girons-les-Eaux (Ariège) : sources thermales Audinac; grande source chaude. Saint-Girons: 1948

Saint-Girons is the nearest town to Lescure and Giles himself wrote a book (2004), which maps out much of the history of the town through a study of its street-names. These range from the medieval Rue du Bourg to streets named after heroes and heroines of the Resistance. We picked up many other books about Saint-Girons, including the optimistic Saint-Girons-les-Eaux (1948), the record of a doomed attempt to turn Saint-Girons into a spa town. The hopes for this scheme were based on an idea to reroute the natural mineral waters of nearby Audinac which had been studied by Michel Dubuc in his work of 1882, of which we found a 1997 re-edition. An abandoned incomplete building at the end of a side street in Saint-Girons bears witness to the disappointed hopes of the promoters of the scheme.

Picture of the rotunda in Saint-Girons in Giles Barber’s book: Giles Barber Les Rues de Saint-Girons: les noms des rues et des édifices de la ville à travers les âges, leurs origines, ainsi que ceux des quartiers, hameaux et lieux-dits avoisinants 2004

A photo of this building, a rotunda, appears in Giles’s book along with an account of the failed project.

Saint-Lizier, next-door to Saint-Girons, boasts two cathedrals, one now a museum that was the see from the Middle Ages until the Revolution, and the present one, a beautiful medieval former parish church with wall-paintings and a lovely cloister. The collection includes a number of works on Saint-Lizier and one might pick out two more unusual books: the account by Pierre Assémat (a lawyer of Pamiers) of the confraternity, membership of which was obtained by going on pilgrimage to Compostella (2007) and Ortet’s history (2004) of how the Palais des Évêques of Saint-Lizier was turned in the nineteenth century into an “asile d’aliénés” (in modern parlance a psychiatric hospital but more akin to the English “lunatic asylum”).

Photograph of the bell-tower of Noguès in Lescure from Lisa Barber’s ‘Notre Dame du Clocher et le Clocher de Noguès à Lescure (Ariège)’, Mémoires de la Société archéologique du Midi de la France, LXVII (2007), 135-44

About our own commune of Lescure we acquired from Richard de Meritens de Villeneuve, the author, the collected biographies of all those escurois who fought in the First World War (2006). Looking further back into the history of Lescure, I researched and wrote up the history of a church in Lescure (2007) and an offprint of this is included in the collections (as are others of my researches into medieval funeral slabs in the area).

Another English inhabitant of the Ariège, Scott Goodall, has been instrumental in setting up the commemorative annual four-day climb up and over the Pyrenees into Spain, in honour and remembrance of those who escaped that way from German and Vichy France during the Second World War, and both the English and the French versions of his book about this have joined the collection (2005).

Saint-Lizier, Saint-Girons, and Lescure are all in the western area of the Ariège called the Couserans, quite distinct from the eastern part which was the Comté de Foix, the difference felt by all local people and visible in such works here as J. de Lahondès (2001). Foix is still the préfecture (the rough equivalent of the county town) and houses the departmental archives, fully and competently described and listed by the current archivist, Claudine Pailhès, in her guide to the archives of Ariège published in1989. She has used these archives and other sources to write and publish a number of excellent books on the region (see bibliography below).

In this eastern area of the Ariège are found the Cathar sites of Montaillou and Montségur and one cannot live long in the area without hearing about these medieval heretics and the Albigensian crusade. Nowadays the places and buildings associated with them have been turned into tourist attractions. As much nonsense as good scholarship has been written about them. Our collection contains several books on the Cathars and also the careful study of the other side of the picture edited by Laurent Albaret (2001).

: Les Inquisiteurs : Portraits de défenseurs de la foi en Languedoc (XIIIe – XIVe siècles), (edited by Laurent Albaret Toulouse : Privat, 2001

: Les Cathares Vic-en-Bigorre Cedex : MSM, 2000. (One of the books in the Ariège collection about the Cathars

: Copy of Chronique sur Rennes-le-Château : Marie d’Etienne, le trésor oublié (1998)by Germain Blanc-Delmas, dedicated to Lisa and Giles Barber by the author

Another book to look at an unusual side to matters is the often hilarious account (1998) by Germain Blanc-Delmas of his childhood in Rennes-le-Château, where his father was Mayor. Long before either the Da Vinci Code or the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, stories woven around the abbé Bérenger Saunière and his imagined discovery of a treasure beneath the stones of the present village led to incursions of illicit treasure seekers, who would hire a holiday house for a season and proceed to dig up the floors and tunnel out from there.Blanc-Delmas with a group of other young lads happily sabotaged these efforts and devised tricks and frights for the night-time diggers, while his father battled to stop the streets of the village from collapsing due to the subsidence caused by the tunnels.

Catherine Bahoum and Monique Garcia, Le Mystère du guide foudroyé – une aventure de Sherlock Holmes, Collection « Plume de Pin », Pau, 2002

Looking westwards along the Pyrenees, one finds the stirring account of Hugues-Alexandre Roy (1870) and several books by or about Count Henry Russell, that eccentric explorer of the mountains. This area also inspired a new Sherlock Holmes story by Catherine Bahoum and Monique Garcia (2002).

One may be surprised to find in the collection books on hydro-electricity, the explanation being that Aristide Bergès, “le père de la houille blanche” was born and brought up in Lorp (the next town to Saint-Lizier) where his family had a paper-mill. The Livre d’Or du centenaire d’Aristide Bergès (1933) contains two extra photographs interleaved and is a copy from the family. Their mill is now a museum of paper and printing, named after its famous son. Giles took part in its activities and also researched the splendid funeral monument to Bergès in Toulouse. An offprint of his article is included in the collection.

Livre d’Or du centenaire d’Aristide Bergès (1833-1904), Lancey, 1933

Auguste Déjean Les Indésirables, drame social pathétique en vers, en 6 actes, 10 tableaux et une apothéose, Saint-Girons : Imprimerie Vergé-Doumenc, 1925

We of course collected a number of books on local printing and publishing: a work by Louis Lafont de Sentenac (1899 reprinted 1998) and a work by Pierre Fournié (1980) as well as some of the works themselves, for instance a work by Auguste Déjean (1925) entitled Les Indésirables, drame social pathétique en vers, en 6 actes, 10 tableaux et une apothéose. One would love to find reviews of this production in the local press of the time (if indeed it was produced). Of our modern time, one finds in the collection a complete run of the very local annual periodical Vent du port, based on the area of Salau and its high pass between the Ariège and Catalonia, the scene of an annual joint gathering, the Pujada al port de Salau.

: Gaston Caster Les Routes de Cocagne : Le siècle d’or du Pastel, 1450-1561, Privat, 1998

We collected a number of books on Toulouse, on its history, its architecture, its artists, and also a book by Gilles Caster (1998) detailing the main source of Toulouse’s great wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: woad, whose southern French name is pastel. It was the trade in pastel that provided the riches used to build the splendid hôtels which are still the architectural glory of the centre of modern Toulouse.

The plant and animal life of the area feature also in the collection, with for instance John and Mavis Midgley’s preliminary account of the herbarium of Adrien Faure de Fiches (2013) (a fuller publication is in hand and will follow), and various items on transhumance (the seasonal migration of people and livestock between summer and winter pastures) such as the work by Jean-Louis Loubet (2010).

The collection is very wide-ranging, and one cannot list everything here. For anyone with an interest of any kind in this area of southern France, it is well worth exploring further.

Bibliography

Les Inquisiteurs : Portraits de défenseurs de la foi en Languedoc (XIIIe – XIVe siècles), ed. Laurent Albaret, Toulouse : Privat, 2001.

Livre d’Or du centenaire d’Aristide Bergès (1833-1904), Lancey, 1933.
Saint-Girons-les-Eaux 1948.

Assémat, Pierre, Sur le chemin de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle : les pèlerins confrères de Saint-Lizier, 1533-1710 : la quête du salut, préface de Mgr Marcel Perrier, évêque de Pamiers, 2007.

Bahoum, Catherine and Monique Garcia, Le Mystère du guide foudroyé – une aventure de Sherlock Holmes, Collection « Plume de Pin », Pau, 2002.

Barber, Giles Les Rues de Saint-Girons: les noms des rues et des édifices de la ville à travers les âges, leurs origines, ainsi que ceux des quartiers, hameaux et lieux-dits avoisinants 2004.

Barber, Lisa ‘Notre Dame du Clocher et le Clocher de Noguès à Lescure (Ariège)’, Mémoires de la Société archéologique du Midi de la France, LXVII (2007), 135-44.

Bladèr, Joan-Francés, Contes de Gasconha, prumera causida, Saint-Etienne : Lo libre occitan, 1966.

Blanc-Delmas, Germain Chronique sur Rennes-le-Château : Marie d’Etienne, le trésor oublié, Toulouse : Envolée, 1998.

Camelat, Miqueu Belina, poema de tres cantas, Sorgas – Institut d’estudis occitans, 1962.

Caster, Gilles, Les Routes de Cocagne : Le siècle d’or du Pastel, 1450-1561, Privat, 1998.

Lahondès, J. de, Les Eglises des pays de Foix et de Couserans, Lacour ré-édition, 2001.

Meritens de Villeneuve, Richard de, Lescure et ses poilus, des bancs de l’école à la croix de bois, Alliance, 2006.

Déjean, Auguste Les Indésirables, drame social pathétique en vers, en 6 actes, 10 tableaux et une apothéose, Saint-Girons : Imprimerie Vergé-Doumenc, 1925.

Dubuc, Michel Les eaux minérales d’Audinac (Ariège) 1882.

Duthil, Christian L’Almanac patoues de l’Ariejo : un almanach en occitan. Foix : Cercle occitan Peire Lagarde, 2009.

Fénié, Bénédicte and Jean-Jacques Toponymie gasconne, Editions Sud-Ouest, 1992.

Fénié, Bénédicte and Jean-Jacques Toponymie occitane. Editions Sud-Ouest, 1997.Fournié, Pierre L’Imprimerie toulousaine au XVe siècle, Toulouse, 1980.

Goodall, Scott Le chemin de la liberté : histoire et randonnée dans le Couserans.

Goodall, Scott The Freedom Trail, following one of the hardest wartime escape routes across the central Pyrenees into Northern Spain, Inchmere, 2005.

Gouy-Gilbert, Cécile & Jean-François Parent, De la houille blanche à la microélectronique : réflexions sur le patrimoine industriel de l’Isère, Lancey, s.d. (vers 2000).

Grégoire, Abbé Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française. 1794 (Reprinted 1995)Guillaume, Gaston Anthologie de la littérature et du folk-lore gascons, no 3 : Florilège des poètes gascons (des troubadours aux temps modernes). Bordeaux : Delmas, 1941.

Lafont de Sentenac, Louis Les Débuts de l’imprimerie dans le comté de Foix, Lacour ré-édition, 1998 ( of the Foix 1899 edition).

Laurent, Jean-Pierre Le Dialecte de la vallée de Massat : grammaire, dictionnaire et méthode d’apprentissage, 2^e edn, 2002.

Laurent, Jean-Pierre Le Dialecte gascon d’Aulus, Grammaire et dictionnaire, suivi de Histoire chronologique des vallées du Garbet et d’Ustou, 2002.

Laurent, Jean-Pierre Les dialectes du Séronais – La Bastide-de-Sérou, Castelnau-Durban, le Mas-d’Azil. Grammaire et dictionnaire, suivi de : Le Séronais, histoire exemplaire d’un pays occitan, 2002.

Loubet, Jean-Louis Un site remarquable dans le Haut-Couserans : Goutets. Contribution à une connaissance du milieu montagnard et de son organisation pastorale, Nîmes : Lacour, 2010.

Midgley, John and Mavis L’herbier d’Adrien Faure de Fiches (2013).

Miramont, Christiane Au fil de l’eau, au fil du temps : les moulins de la vallée du Lens (Ariège – Haute-Garonne), 2005.

Miramont, Christiane Bruno de Ruade, évêque de Couserans, 1999.

Miramont, Christiane Le commerce du verre soufflé dans le Volvestre Ariégeois aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles : les gentilshommes-verriers et les paysans porteurs de verres, 2003.

Olive, Georges Si le Baléjou m’était conté : chronique d’une famille et d’un quartier en Couserans. 1993.

Ortet, André Un asile d’aliénés – Saint-Lizier 1811-1969, Cazavet, 2004.

Pailhès, Claudine L’Ariège des comtes et des cathares, Editions Milan, 1992.

Pailhès, Claudine Du Carlit au Crabère : Terres et hommes de frontière, Foix : Conseil général de l’Ariège, 2000.

Pailhès, Claudine Guide des Archives de l’Ariège, 1989.

Pailhès, Claudine Histoire de Foix et de la haute Ariège, Toulouse : Privat, 1996.

Pailhès, Claudine D’or et de Sang : Le XVIe siècle Ariégeois, (catalogue d’une exposition), Archives départementales, Foix, 1992.

Pédoya, Paul Autrefois Montseron : la vie – les travaux – les fêtes – l’artisanat, l’histoire – les coutumes – les traditions, 2005.

Roy, Hugues-Alexandre Les Contrebandiers du Val d’Aran, aventures d’un commis-voyageur en Espagne 1870, new. ed. 1998.

Séguy, Jean Le Français parlé à Toulouse, 3^rd edn, Privat, 1978.

Jean Cocteau in Oxford

Jean Cocteau, by Juliet Pannett (Photo credit: James Legg)

On Tuesday, 12 June 1956, Jean Cocteau wrote in his diary: ‘Je rentre de la cérémonie – très émouvante.’ The occasion was the conferment on the multi-faceted poet (‘omnis Minervae poeta’) of an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford. As the Public Orator had proclaimed, ‘praesento vobis Parisiacae urbanitatis specimen, Ioannem Cocteau, poetam Francogallorum Academiae adscriptum paremque dignitatem apud Belgas adeptum, ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Litteris.’ Cocteau was proud of his membership of the French and Belgian Academies and of his honorary degrees, and he was particularly attached to what he habitually referred to as his ‘honoris causa’ from Oxford.

Cocteau’s sketch of himself with his Oxford degree (Photo credit: David Thomas)

In 2014 the Library acquired a volume of Cocteau’s verse, a copy of his Poésie 1916-1923.

: Jean Cocteau Poésie 1916-1923 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947): Cover and title page (Photo credit: James Legg)

Unremarkable in itself, it is simply a late printing (1947) of a work first published in 1925. What distinguishes it, however, is the fact that on the half-title Cocteau has written a dedication, ‘à Jean Seznec / amicalement / Jean Cocteau / 1956’. And he has pencilled underneath one of his typical drawings of a poet’s head crowned with a wreath of laurel leaves.

Jean Cocteau Poésie 1916-1923 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947): Half title page, with Cocteau’s sketch and dedication to Jean Seznec (Photo credit: James Legg)

Cocteau’s letter to Seznec (Photo credit: James Legg)

Envelope adddressed to Seznec in Cocteau's hand (Photo credit: James Legg)

Cocteau’s letter (and envelope) to Seznec (Photo credit: James Legg)

Loosely inserted in the volume is an autograph letter, in its original envelope addressed to Professor Seznec, who was Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford from 1950 to 1972. The letter adds to the rich documentation surrounding Cocteau’s honorary degree.

The story begins at the end of December 1955 when an Oxford University student, Michael Smithies, called on Cocteau at his house in Milly-la-Forêt. ‘Il m’a semblé,’ Cocteau wrote in his diary, ‘que Smithies venait tâter le terrain pour un voyage à Oxford où je serais nommé docteur honoris causa.’ The following March, Cocteau received a letter from Dr Enid Starkie, the indefatigable and irrepressible Reader in French at Somerville, inviting him to give a lecture at Oxford and suggesting that she might be able to persuade the University to confer on him an honorary degree.

Enid Starkie, by Patrick George (Oil on canvas, 66 x 54 cm) Collection: Somerville College, Oxford (Image: Public Catalogue Foundation/BBC Your Paintings)

Cocteau was enthusiastic. Enid had promised nothing but Cocteau’s eyes were firmly fixed on the ‘honoris causa’ and he began to suggest that without the doctorate there could be no lecture. Enid duly set to work and handbagged her way through any resistance that might have been shown by the university authorities. ‘I won, in the end,’ she said later to Cocteau’s biographer, Francis Steegmuller, ‘but don’t ask too closely how it was done … I could only use my influence and my prestige to get him the doctorate. That is what got it for him.’ Cocteau was delighted. ‘J’aimerais faire à Oxford quelque chose d’exceptionnel,’ he wrote in an undated letter in the Taylorian’s collection of manuscripts, but he added, somewhat surprisingly, ‘ce petit voyage d’Oxford m’effraye’. His lecture, on ‘La Poésie ou l’invisibilité’, began to take shape (it would be published later in the year as Le Discours d’Oxford) and on 23 May he sent Enid a sketch of himself in cap and gown, with measurements. The following day he wrote to Professor Seznec the Library’s newly acquired letter, giving details of his arrival in Oxford with ‘l’amie et le fils adoptif’, that is, his patron, Madame Alec (Francine) Weisweiller, and Edouard Dermit, who were to accompany him. Cocteau hopes to meet Seznec that first evening to discuss the programme of his stay in Oxford and the letter concludes: ‘Il est inutile de vous dire avec quelle joie j’accepte votre invitation.’

A colourful report in the issue of Picture Post for 30 June 1956 describes Cocteau fizzling through the foyer of the Randolph Hotel ‘like an elderly Puck, wrapped around in a leaf-green cloak’ and being met ‘in a cloudburst of French by a brilliant little lady wearing scarlet slacks, beret and duffle coat’. Enid had a hard day on that Monday, 11 June. A Board meeting in the afternoon was followed by W. H. Auden’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry, a post she had with characteristic energy fought for him to get, then a party for Auden in New College, and, finally, a party for Cocteau given in her ground-floor flat at 41 St Giles’. Cocteau recorded the latter event as: ‘Visite chez Enid Starkie, en kimono et saoule’!

The special meeting of Convocation (the other honorand that day was the geographer Jules Blache, Rector of the University of Aix-en-Provence) took place on Tuesday, 12 June. Enid met Cocteau that morning dressed in her beloved approximation of a French sailor’s outfit, much to Cocteau’s amusement, if not consternation: ‘Enid est charmante, éprise de la France et du français qu’elle enseigne. Mais elle boit … Quelle n’était pas notre stupeur, le matin de mon discours, de la voir arriver en matelot français, avec le béret à pompom, la vareuse, le pantalon à pont et le barda sur l’épaule.’ Lunch was held in New College and, after the ceremony, there was a garden party at the Maison Française. Other lunches and dinners were to follow, with Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin and others, and a visit paid to the Ashmolean.

Cocteau delivered his lecture in the Taylorian on Thursday, 14 June at 5 p.m. He was introduced by Professor Seznec, and Enid, Cocteau noted with obvious relief, was now ‘en robe et toque de docteur’! The lecture was received with what Cocteau describes as ‘un tonnerre d’applaudisse-ments’, an expression of affection, warmth and enthusiasm, which, Maurice Bowra assured him, had not been the case with either Gide or Mauriac. Cocteau’s one complaint was that students appeared to have been deliberately kept at arm’s length. ‘De ce voyage,’ he says. ‘me reste une amertume, celle d’avoir été séparé des élèves par les maîtres’, but what could he do, when he was pushed around like a pawn on a chess board? Enid, he thinks, must have kept them at bay on the pretext that they would tire him. In any case, exhausted, he retired to London to the relative calm of Claridge’s Hotel.

Mixed emotions, then, but, in spite of being made fun of when back in Paris (‘On ne songe qu’à me ridiculiser, à plaisanter mon costume’), he retained an affection for Oxford and for his honorary doctorate.

Jean Cocteau on Oxford: MS.8o.F.129 (Photo credit: David Thomas)

In a scribbled note added to the manuscript of an address he gave to a student audience, a few years later, which the Taylorian also has in its collection, he wrote, in answer to a questioner in the audience who had asked if he was proud of any of the honours which had been bestowed on him in his life: ‘Oui, un seul – c’est d’être docteur Honoris Causa à l’université d’Oxford’.

David Thomas
Former French and Italian Literature and Language Librarian, Taylor Institution Library (1971-2004)

Further reading
Jean Cocteau Le discours d’Oxford (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) Shelfmark: L/N.3028.A.1
Jean Cocteau Le passé défini: journal 8 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1983-2013) Shelfmark: L/N.3432.A.1 – L/N.3432.A.8. Vol 5 covers the years 1956-1957 Shelfmark: L/N.3432.A.5
Jean Cocteau Poésie 1916-1923 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) Shelfmark: Arch.8o.F.1947(3)
Joanna Richardson Enid Starkie (London: John Murray, 1973) Shelfmark: TAY.2.D.STA
Francis Steegmuller Jean Cocteau (London: Macmillan, 1970) Shelfmark: L/N.3720.A.2

A Manuscript of Magna Carta at the Taylor Institution Library

In this year of Magna Carta, in which new discoveries are being announced with some regularity (such as the discovery of an early copy at Kent County Council Archives, and Winston Churchill’s plan to give away a copy held at Lincoln Cathedral), we are pleased to announce that the Taylor Institution Library also has a copy of Magna Carta!

Image 1: Magna Charta (Oxford, Taylor Institution Library, MS. 8° E 1) Late 17th-century binding, Oxford, 8.6 x 6.5 cm. (Photo credit: Sjoerd Levelt)

Its existence was first noted, shortly after acquisition, in a letter in Notes and Queries of October 1878, written by Dr Heinrich Krebs, Librarian of the Taylor Institution Library. In his letter, Krebs posed a question regarding a recently acquired manuscript which, judging from his wording, was an unusual addition to the collection:

‘Can any of your readers aid me in ascertaining the genuine character and probable date of a very curious and ancient Latin manuscript on vellum concerning the “Magna Charta,” which has been recently acquired for the Taylorian Library at Oxford? It is of the smallest size (only 3 inches by 2 ½), and contains 214 leaves, three empty ones not included. … Owing to its many abbreviations and minute characters this manuscript is by no means easy to read, and it would require collation with a printed text, if such could be found, to become fully intelligible.’

Krebs seems to have been more comfortable with printed books than manuscripts, and the manuscript quite evidently fell outside his expertise. Help was forthcoming, however, in a somewhat dismissive reply, published one month later, by a regular contributor to Notes and Queries:

‘The collection of law tracts beginning with Magna Charta, such as that described by your correspondent, is not of uncommon occurrence either in manuscript or print. It has been often printed from Pynson’s time downwards. Good perfect copies, as is the case with most of the old law books, may often be had for a small price.’

Dr Fiona Whelan helped me identify the author, who signed with the initials J. C. J., as Rev. John Cohen Jackson (c. 1827-95), schoolmaster, editor of the Astronomical Register, and avid book collector (who regularly offered his manuscripts for sale, too). Richard Pynson, to whom Jackson referred, was one of the earliest printers of English books and known particularly as a printer of legal statutes; the reference, then, was meant to say that there was really nothing special about the Taylorian’s manuscript, that the text had been around in print for as long as English laws had been printed, and good copies were so common in manuscript form that it really was not worth much. The tiny fourteenth-century manuscript was not going to add anything to our knowledge of thirteenth-century English law.

MS. 8° E 1 (Oxford, Taylor Institution Library), fol. 14r.

Not entirely surprisingly, the Taylor Institution Library Magna Carta led a mostly dormant existence. There are, however, some reasons that make this little book worth a re-examination. These reasons are, as Jackson suggested, not to be found in the medieval Latin text, which is an unremarkable collection of English laws, including an abbreviated version of Magna Carta as confirmed by King Edward I, but in what happened with the manuscript in the late seventeenth century, around the same time that it received its current binding. On the final leaves, which had remained empty up to this point, a reader made some notes about the contents of the book. Interestingly, the notes focus exclusively on two of its texts: the Magna Carta, and its companion document, the Charter of the Forest. The author of the notes clearly had an interest in legal matters, as well as probably some training; the notes constitute a brief discussion of the version of Magna Carta contained in the manuscript, copied directly from Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes, the principal seventeenth-century commentary on English common law. (‘This statute of Magna Carta is but a confirmation or restitution of the Common Law as in the statute called Confirmatio Chartarum anno 25 E.1. … [It] has been confirmed above thirty times and commanded to be put in execution’.)

MS. 8° E 1 (Oxford, Taylor Institution Library), fols. 213r-214v, added notes

According to a note on a front flyleaf in the current binding, in 1705 the manuscript was owned by James Mickleton. James Mickleton the Younger (1688-1719) was a member of a family of lawyers, and he inherited the collection of manuscripts first established by his grandfather, Christopher Mickleton (1612-1669). James would go on to greatly expand the collection, but he died under suspicious circumstances, in 1719, drowned in the Thames, leaving behind significant debts. His books were sold off and eventually came into the hands of Col. William Wasey (d.1817). His son, George Wasey, advised by Sir Henry Ellis of the British Museum, presented the entire collection to the Bishop of Durham, Shute Barrington, who subsequently divided the collection between Bishop Cosin’s Library in Durham and the Inner Temple Library in London. It appears, however, that George Wasey did not part, at this point, with the Magna Carta manuscript; instead, he wrote his name below James Mickleton’s, and kept it for himself.

MS. 8° E 1 (Oxford, Taylor Institution Library), front board and flyleaf, ownership marks

This little book, then, and the collection from which it stems, are witnesses to an interest in historical manuscripts by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century lawyers (an interest also exemplified by Sir John Selden, whose bequest was the largest single gift to the Bodleian Library in the seventeenth century); and an interest in Magna Carta among a more general readership in the nineteenth century. Entirely ignoring all the other contents of the manuscript (such as the Statute of Winchester, the Statute of the Exchequer, and the Statute of Wards and Reliefs), these readers were interested in only one text – and it’s the same text that keeps us all busy in this year of celebration.

MS. 8° E 1Oxford (Taylor Institution Library), fol. 175r, Charter of Wards and Relief

Sjoerd Levelt, former Library Assistant, Taylor Institution Library (2014-2015)

Futurism, Fascism, and the Art of War

Futurism, Fascism, and the Art of War
by Michael Subialka
An Avant-Garde Book Display and Lecture at the Taylor Institution Library, 29 April 2015
Sponsored by the Somerville College History Society, the Jesus College J.R. Green Society, and the Taylor Institution Library[i]

1 Futurist Books in the Taylor Institution Library (Photo Credit: Oliver Johnston-Watt)

Just over a hundred years ago (26 April 1915), Italy signed a secret treaty, the Patto di Londra (the London Pact, also called the Treaty of London). This backroom deal committed the young Italian nation to switch alliances and declare war on its former ‘friends’, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany – a major shift since Italy had been allied with these central powers since 1882. The result was that, more than half a year after the Great War began and following months of high-stakes diplomatic bargaining, Italy entered the fray alongside a group of new allies from the Triple Entente, including Britain, France, and Russia. This about-face in foreign policy might seem surprising, but it was rooted in longstanding Italian nationalist sentiments brought to a boiling point by a deliberate campaign of popular cultural provocation. While many contributed to this campaign, none did so in a more brazen and non-traditional way than the Italian Futurists.

In a book display and lecture held on 29 April 2015 at the Taylor Institution, we had a chance to unearth the library’s collection of rare, original Futurist materials. These works of innovative written and visual form offer an unusual insight into the cultural politics of an avant-garde artistic movement dedicated to fostering renewal but also violence, struggle, and war.

‘There is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece. […]/ We wish to glorify war— the sole cleanser of the world […].’[ii]

: 2.1 Display of Futurist books (Photo Credit: Oliver Johnston-Watt)

: 2.2 Display of Futurist books (Photo Credit: Lydia Pryce-Jones)

: 3 Display of Futurist manifestos, books and other sources on the Futurist movement (Photo Credit: Oliver Johnston-Watt)

Understanding the Futurists use of art to pursue their political activism requires thinking more about the movement itself. The Futurists were a group of radical innovators in multiple artistic media, but they all shared an association with one key figure, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). He was a French-trained former Symbolist who, in 1909, determined to launch art in a new direction. ‘With this aim in mind,’ he wrote in one manifesto (the preferred genre of the movement), ‘we have taken upon ourselves the propaganda of courage against cowardice of epidemic proportions, the creation of an artificial optimism against a chronic pessimism.’[iii] His idea was to transform Italian society – its culture, its politics, and its national character – renewing it for the modern world. He and his Futurist collaborators envisioned a new Italy that would be industrialized, technologically-enhanced, and internationally aggressive.

These aims make it clear that the Futurists fit squarely in the category that one prominent historian, Emilio Gentile, has dubbed ‘modernist nationalism.’[iv] The Futurists sought to unify a love of modern technology (automobiles, airplanes, electric power plants, bombs…) with a project of national spiritual revival. The result was an aesthetic of energy, dynamism, movement, multiplicity, and an obsession with war. This project was realised not just in writing but across media, from the theatre, visual arts, and film to unexpected areas like fashion design.

: 4.1 FT Marinetti and Giacomo Balla, The Anti-Neutral Suit, 1914 (facsimile)

: 4.2 FT Marinetti and Giacomo Balla, The Anti-Neutral Suit, 1914 (facsimile)

: 4.3 FT Marinetti and Giacomo Balla, The Anti-Neutral Suit, 1914 (facsimile)

: 4.4 FT Marinetti and Giacomo Balla, The Anti-Neutral Suit, 1914 (facsimile)

The Futurists’ nationalism encompassed two main military projects: war against Austria-Hungary and colonial expansion in Africa. The former was a project shared widely by a group called the Irredentists. Italian irredentismo was the belief, prominent from the time of the unification movement (the Risorgimento of the 1850s and 60s), that certain lands were truly ‘Italian’ (ethnically, linguistically, culturally) but had never been integrated into the nation. Reclaiming these territories required launching a war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire: ‘And even when classical irredentism seemed exhausted and dormant among the Italian people, we Futurists took steps to stimulate and reinforce that national sentiment, supported by those just aspirations that are generally recognized today.’[v]

5 Display of Futurist original editions, including Marinetti’s Distruzione, 1911 (Photo Credit: Nicola Gardini)

The second project, African colonialism, was likewise rooted in late 19^thcentury aspirations. Under the government of Francesco Crispi, Italy had established a colonial presence in East Africa (Eritrea) and fought a (failed) war to conquer Ethiopia. In the early 20^th century, the Futurists were obsessed with the continuation of these projects. As early as 1909, Marinetti wrote, in French, a shocking novel set in an exoticised, Oriental Africa, Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist). In it, he imagines an Arab warlord who subdues four armies of black Africans, becoming ‘master of Africa’. The book’s overt racial stereotyping is shocking now, but what was shocking to its contemporary French audience were the prolonged, explicit depictions of violent rage (think Homer) together with pornographic descriptions of nude bodies, sex, and rape (think De Sade).

: 6 The Taylor Institution’s original edition of Mafarka le Futuriste, 1910 (Photo Credit: Oliver Johnston-Watt)

: 7 Title page of the 1910 Italian translation (Photo Credit: Oliver Johnston-Watt)

: 8 The Taylor Institution’s original edition of Bruno Corra’s I matrimoni gialli (Yellow Marriages), 1928 (Photo Credit: Oliver Johnston-Watt)

The book was banned in France, but the Futurists’ fantasy of African conquest (and their exoticised racial stereotyping) remained a consistent element of the movement.

This fantasy took on renewed life in their support of the effort to oust the Ottoman Empire from Libya. In 1911 and 1912, Italy fought and won a colonial war with this aim, and the Futurists were actively involved. Marinetti was a correspondent from the front lines, and his new style of poetry, the parole in libertà (free-word poems), was well-suited to the fervid recreations of Italian bellicosity that enchanted him from this colonial campaign.

: 10 A free-word poem, Bombardment d’Andrinople, 1913-14 (Photo Credit: UCLA, Charles E. Young Research Library)

: 9 The Taylor Institution’s original edition of Marinetti’s La bataille de Tripoli (The Battle of Tripoli), 1912 (Photo Credit: Oliver Johnston-Watt)

It is thus not as surprising as it might at first seem that the Futurists ultimately aligned themselves with Mussolini and the Fascist movement in the period following World War I. In 1919, Marinetti spoke alongside Mussolini at a gathering in Milan that marked the foundation of the Fasci di Combattimento. In 1929, he became a member of the newly-founded Accademia d’Italia – a complete about-face for the former radical who had espoused a hatred of professors and the ‘mummified’ past. This alignment with Fascism was well-suited to the political programme of the Futurist movement – its colonial, nationalist/patriotic, and interventionist tendencies.

11 The Taylor Institution’s original edition of L’Italia fascista in cammino, 1932 (Photo Credit: Michael Subialka)

Both a radical avant-garde movement transforming art and an unsettling mix of proto-Fascist and Fascist nationalist ideologies, the Futurists may intrigue us precisely because of the problematic way that they move between artistic innovation and political extremism. It is this mix of forces that Walter Benjamin has famously analysed as typical of both the Futurists and fascism more broadly, their ‘aestheticization of politics.’[vi]

Michael Subialka
Powys Roberts Fellow in European Literature
St Hugh’s College, Oxford
10 May 2015

[i] The book display was curated by Oliver Johnston-Watt (Somerville College) and Joel Nelson (Jesus College) and co-ordinated by Clare Hills-Nova (Italian Literature and Language Librarian, Taylor Institution, Bodleian Libraries). Dr Oren Margolis (Somerville College) provided logistical support and the idea for the event. Dr Michael Subialka lectured on ‘Futurism, Fascism, and the Art of War’.
[ii] FT Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Critical Writings, ed. and trans. Günter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 14.
[iii] FT Marinetti, “Electric War: A Futurist-Visionary Hypothesis,” in Critical Writings, 225.
[iv] Emilio Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,” trans. Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994): 55-87; 60.
[v] FT Marinetti, “The Meaning of War for Futurism,” in Critical Writings, 240.
[vi] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version,” in Selected Writings III, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002): 101-33; 122.

(Poster design: Lydia Pryce-Jones)

Martin Luther at the Taylor Institution Library

Ornate title page of a Luther Sermon

Martin Luther was one of the most important figures in the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th century. His famous 95 theses, (possibly) posted on the gates of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg almost 500 years ago, were “trending” all over Europe within a few weeks of their original publication. In fact, he was a master of the communications technology of his day, quite possibly inventing the pamphlet as a means of communicating beyond scholarly circles, and using his prolific writing and the public support it generated to enormous effect. Small wonder then, that undergraduates studying his work today value the opportunity to see and touch the printed material that fuelled the Reformation.

The Taylor Institution Library is fortunate to have a large collection of Luther pamphlets and other publications. These were acquired in the 1870s on the recommendation of Friedrich Max Müller, the second Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford. Many of them came from Heidelberg University, which at the time was disposing of duplicates. Because of this history, we are able to offer them as teaching copies, and, with supervision, undergraduates are allowed to turn the pages, feel the paper, and as a result, gain a sense of how contemporary audiences encountered Luther’s writings.

Two groups of undergraduates recently had this experience at the Taylorian, guided by their academic supervisors, who have kindly allowed me to use my notes as the basis of this blog. The first group, from the History Faculty, had already studied the texts on display in translation. They noted the differences in the quality of the paper and print between volumes, the elaborateness of some title pages compared with the sparseness of others.

Plain title page of a Luther Sermon

Unbound short pamphlets were not widespread until Luther made the form his own. Printers flocked to Wittenberg, which soon became a centre of printing, in large part due to the flow of content from Luther. Some specialised in printing his hymns, others in Bibles, while still others printed his pamphlets.

Another area of interest for this group was the network of buyers, sellers and producers of pirated copies which meant that Luther’s ideas spread so quickly across Europe. The average number of copies of a pamphlet printed at that time was about 1000. An initial print run of one of Luther’s pamphlets would be about 4000, and would be sold out in days. This was a money spinner to rival that of the printing of indulgences, which had been a steady income until Luther challenged the practice. However, as the selling of the pamphlets was illegal, it was often printers’ wives who were the undercover sales people.

The second group, students of German from the Modern Languages Faculty, looked at the same texts, but with a different focus. First of all they studied the title pages. Some of them were fairly plain, but others had allegorical meaning relating to the text inside, and their meaning would have been “read” by contemporaries along with the text.

Allegorical title page showing the vine (Christ) providing a protective shelter over the idyllic society beneath, where lions and bears are living alongside rabbits, deer and lambs. Luther’s text calls on Christian nobility to take responsibility for building a Christian society.

One of the texts, Widder die hymelischen propheten: von den Bildern vnd Sacrament [1525] was written by Luther in response to the destruction of images in churches, which had been orchestrated by a former follower, Karlstadt. In it, Luther highlights the importance of images as an educational tool for those who are unable to read, and also points at the illustrations in his own publications, which were used by those bent on destroying images. Luther considered that hypocrisy. Luther himself valued images greatly, and used them in many publications. He was close friends with Cranach, a court artist, and this association with secular authority gave the publications prestige.

Images in Luther’s Passion of Christ, which were designed in Lucas Cranach’s workshop. Cranach was the leading artist of the Reformation

The group also considered the sheer quantity of Protestant writings. Luther wrote by far the most of all the reformers, but he was not alone in writing, and Catholics who resisted the reformation were unable to compete. They were partly hampered by writing in Latin, which was not accessible to such a wide audience. There was also a danger that in responding to a particular challenge from the reformers, they would have to give at least an outline of the reformers’ ideas, which could give them further publicity.

Finally, the undergraduates looked at a Luther Bible. They studied the title page, to see whether it gave any clues as to the nature of the Bible. They noted the handwriting on the facing page, which gives a list of births, showing that the Bible was being used as a family bible in the 17^th Century. They noted that the book was printed in Lübeck.

Title page of 1533 Luther Bible 1

This is in fact Luther’s Bible printed in Low German, and it predates Luther’s Saxon German Bible by a few months. It was prepared by Bugenhagen, sometimes called the second apostle of the North, who helped Luther with the translations for the Saxon German version, and then translated the whole thing to Low German, beating Luther to publication by a couple of months. This Bible is particularly important because its place of publication is a Hansa town, with all the trading and travel links that implies. This Bible travelled around the Baltic, and was influential in many translations into neighbouring languages.

All the undergraduates were extremely enthusiastic about this opportunity to encounter the texts as they would have been seen by contemporary audiences, and felt it had added a new dimension to their studies.

Getting to interact with archival material is, in my opinion, essential to any form of study to do with the sixteenth century, however cursory or superficial, and I felt that our visit at the Taylorian was a turning point in my Special Subject this term. Whilst online resources are invaluable for studying Lutheran texts, much is lost in online scans, and I feel that it’s a real privilege to have access to original texts, something which really makes it worthwhile to study somewhere like Oxford. (Max Long, undergraduate student.)

Several students discovered new things about the library – they were unaware that we had rare books, or that it was possible for undergraduates to request to see them. The seminar leaders were enthusiastic about being able to use the library’s collections to engage their students, and are actively looking for other opportunities to run similar sessions in the future.

As a librarian, I was delighted to see such enjoyment and enthusiasm being generated by our collections. It is a privilege to be able to offer that experience, and a reminder that we are far more than a museum of treasures. It was also a privilege to be able to be present at these seminars, and I would like to thank Dr Madeleine Brook of the Modern Languages Faculty, and DPhil Candidate Edmund Wareham of the History Faculty for making them possible, and for allowing them to become the subject of this blog.

Emma Huber, Subject Consultant for German, Taylor Institution Library

Texts viewed by the undergraduates:

Martin Luther, Ain Sermon geprediget zu Leiptzigk auff dem schloss am tag Petri vnnd Pauli im xix. Jar (Augsburg, 1519)

Martin Luther, Ein Sermon von dem elichen Stand vorendert vñ corrigiret (Strasbourg, 1519)

Martin Luther, An den Cristlichen Adel deütscher Nation: von des Christlichen standes besseru[n]g (Augsburg, 1520)

Martin Luther, De captivitate babylonica ecclesiae (Wittenberg, 1520)

Martin Luther, Von der Freyheyt eynisz Christen Menschen (Wittenberg, 1520)

Lucas Cranach, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Passional Christi vnnd Antichristi (Erfurt, 1521)

Martin Luther, Widder die hymelischen propheten : von den Bildern vnd Sacrament [etc.] (Wittenberg, 1525)

Martin Luther, Wider die hymelischen propheten von den Bildern vnd Sacrament (Nuremberg, 1525)

Martin Luther, Wider die mordischen vnd reubischen Rotten der Pawren (Nuremberg, 1525)

De Biblie: vth der vthleggine Doctoris Martini Luthers yn dyth düdesche vlitich vthgesettet, mit sundergen vnderrichtingen, als men seen mach (Lübeck, 1533-4)

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