The Power to Seize Horses:
Cultures of Knowledge and Early Modern Letters Online
http://www.culturesofknowledge.org/
http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/home
That for which we celebrate early modern letters and letter-writers, and the epistolary culture which, aggregated, they created, makes them extremely difficult to study. Over the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially after the establishment of a public postal service in England (by Parliamentary statutes in 1656 and 1660), a vast, ever-increasing volume of letters was composed, dispatched, carried, and received by complex social networks of correspondents, bearers, and recipients. Letters were not only written and read, but copied, spied upon, delayed, waylaid, mislaid, enclosed, annotated, cut up and distributed, read aloud, translated and transcribed, kept as private trophies, published in books. Some found their way into collections of state papers. Some were pasted into notebooks and miscellanies. Others were stored carefully in private packets and bundles. Many perished. Over the centuries, as a result of various historical and material contingencies, many individual letters and whole collections have been deposited in public libraries and archives, though many, too, remain in private hands. But no matter what their individual material histories, most of these letters were at some point sent somewhere, and this single, simple aspect of their history makes them enormously inconvenient to scholars. A given corpus of letters is fascinating to historians and literary scholars of various kinds because it is, in various ways, dispersed; this also makes it unwieldy. The 1656 parliamentary statute by which the Postal Service was first constituted expressly forbade the practice of seizing horses for the bearing and delivery of letters; scholars studying early modern epistolary networks, corpora, and practices could use a good horse, from time to time.
The first and last task of the historian of early modern letters is to locate them. This process of discovery can look simple but is almost always complex, and, while it appears it must be the first phase of any study of a given epistolary corpus, the various difficulties associated with locating and determining the extent of such a corpus mean that the set can never be definitively bounded. The process of discovering the corpus thus begins the project, but it is usually still continuing, in some form, as the project concludes. Like Bassanio firing arrows, letters and emails are dispatched around the world, tracing the suspected paths of earlier letters. Like Bassanio firing arrows, this process is dicey. A scholar wishing to edit the letters of an early modern intellectual, intelligencer, or correspondent will generally have to accept that, the action ostensibly completed, lost argosies will one day show in the road.
These limitations and risks are incident to most textual study of early modern materials, of course, but in other areas uncertainties can be limited in various ways: a scholarly edition of a print work from the handpress period, for example, will usually rely on the collation of a range of extant copies, on the assumption that while not every variant can be accounted for, at least most significant ones can. In the study of early modern letters things are different. The corpus itself is frustratingly unstable; as Portia says in the closing moments of The Merchant of Venice:
In addition to the difficulties the scholar faces in bounding and defining the corpus, new problems often emerge in the attempt to interpret and document the contexts in which these letters were written and received, as well as the various social and geographical constraints on their transmission. The importance of a letter, perhaps containing instructions or intelligence of some kind, can sometimes only be gauged when the bearer’s identity can be established, or when a clear picture emerges of the letter’s route of transmission, or the time taken to cover the gap between dispatch and receipt. The best evidence for establishing these contextual details may lie in materials from an entirely unrelated corpus, located in a private collection halfway around the world. The scholar of early modern letters thus faces a future filled with variations on that excruciating anagnorisis: “If only I had known!”
As a result of well-known and much-lamented limitations in time and space, in material terms libraries and archives are (in the words of modern data theorists) silos; the textual holdings of a given institution or repository are discrete, kept in a particular location, and catalogued there. It is still very often the case that early modern manuscript materials are only finally discoverable by local catalogue and physical searches at relevant repositories. But if we might find a way to create a virtual shell, which would federate and coordinate the locally-available information, harvest online databases and relevant information sources, and present it all within a single, searchable framework, the process of finding and documenting surviving early modern letters, both in their relevant collections and as a whole, would become far more rational and comprehensive, and would lead to publications and further research instruments of substantially more stability. This is what the Cultures of Knowledge project at the University of Oxford now seeks to do. Its flagship union catalogue of early modern epistolary resources, Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO), was first developed by a team at the Bodleian Library, and in the first phase of this now advanced project the team worked on the cultivation of materials relating to seven correspondents and intellectuals of the seventeenth century, including two who have remained the focus of more recent development: the Bohemian scholar and educator Jan Amos Comenius, and Samuel Hartlib, possibly the most prolific intelligencer in seventeenth-century Britain.
Initially built around materials relating to Comenius, Hartlib, and a few others, the union catalogue shows what a combined resource like this can offer: standardized metadata, comprehensive searching across a range of repositories, letter abstracts, rich links to available transcriptions both online and in downloadable PDF, and a host of ancillary resources in various media, from podcasts to images. Here curious browsers can locate letters by name of sender, recipient, and subject (over 18,000 names have so far been logged); by location of dispatch or receipt (about 5,000 places mapped to date); by institution or “organization” (colleges and universities, courts, etc.); by repository (over 200 at last count); and, of course, by year (the database includes materials dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries). The glimpse that EMLO provides us of a new general catalogue of early modern epistolary manuscripts is certainly exciting.
The difficulty facing any project of this kind—its only serious challenge—is comprehensiveness, and that comprehensiveness can only be achieved, finally, by community participation. If libraries and archives do not contribute their records, this ambitious online resource will remain just another silo. The Cultures of Knowledge project is thus seeking, as it nears the end of its second phase, rapid and radical expansion through the acquisition of new records. The prognosis seems good: only within the last few months, it has pooled its records with one of the other leading databases of early modern European letters, the Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (CKCC) project—which itself provides access through its ePistolarium tool to about 20,000 letters sent and received by Dutch scholars in the seventeenth century. Cultures of Knowledge is also affiliated to the Stanford-based project Mapping the Republic of Letters, which produces “interactive visualization tools” for analyzing and interpreting the epistolary cultures of early modern Europe.
Other seventeenth-century epistolary corpora are currently in the process of being edited—for example, the letters of John Aubrey, under the curation of William Poole and Rhodri Lewis—and it seems likely that EMLO will continue to acquire horses from stables various. Another new development, this year, has been the advent of Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (or WEMLO), a “sister resource” to EMLO jointly led by early modern letters guru James Daybell and Kim McLean-Fiander (formerly of EMLO); this finding aid and editorial interface will add much-needed depth to the structural bias in the Cultures of Knowledge project toward public intellectual—thus largely if not exclusively male—correspondence in the seventeenth century. Most promising, however, is the recent announcement that the Cultures of Knowledge project has, under the leadership of its own director Professor Howard Hotson, launched a new European-funded scholarly network, “Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500-1800: A digital framework for multi-lateral collaboration on Europe’s intellectual history”—a four-year project that will enable coordination among librarians and archivists, IT experts, and scholars across Europe in order to plan the next phase of the Republic of Letters. The linguistic, administrative, technical, and human challenges are considerable, of course, but the advent of this initiative seems to promise the kind of development that Cultures of Knowledge has always implied.
For the time being, Cultures of Knowledge and its finding aid, Early Modern Letters Online, offer a tantalizing glimpse of a federated, data-rich future, in which the risky and laborious process of discovering early modern manuscript letters will shrink to the blink of an EEBO query. Already the wide range of resources available in different media—from 29 seminar papers on a range of related topics, to hundreds of new transcriptions, to a catalogue of filmed lectures, tutorials, and demonstrations—constitutes an indispensable working archive for scholars of early modern epistolary materials, dispersed as we are across the world. We can only watch with expectation as Cultures of Knowledge goes on networking the republic of letters. I for one hope the team at Oxford will seize all the horses they can find.
Andrew Zurcher
Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
44.3.68
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