There’s much online buzzing this evening about the purported discovery (on eBay!) of Shakespeare’s dictionary–a copy of Baret’s An Alvearie, or Quadruple Dictionarie, first published in 1580, supposedly annotated by the playwright. I haven’t had time to read the lavish publication in which two intrepid antiquarian booksellers, George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, justify their claim. So I don’t know quite what has led them to the extraordinary conclusion that they have uncovered a literary goldmine. But I have spent an hour ogling the high-quality digital images that they have generously supplied on the project’s beautifully-produced website. On the basis of a brief look, I’m happy to report that we can all go to bed at the usual time. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Shakespeare was the annotator of the volume.

The dictionary is certainly thickly annotated–as are many dictionaries of the period. One of the main jobs that the annotations do is to make up for missing entries in the text, supplying English headings or lemmas where they are lacking, and sometimes offering translations, particularly into French. This reader wants to improve their book–as many early modern readers did. And this reader wants to be able to speak French, copying down sometimes quite obscure idioms and phrases in order to get the trick of the language. So the book will be useful for those who want to study the process of language-acquisition in the sixteenth century. And it will delight those, like me, who love to work with annotated books. Beyond that, it may prove to be something of a damp squib.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, SR-24 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

24 April — Mark Towsey (History, Liverpool)

1 May — Peter Mandler (History, Cambridge)

‘Good Reading for the Million: The Advent of the Mass-Market Non-Fiction Paperback’

15 May — Laura Moretti (AMES, Cambridge)

‘Broadsides in Early Modern Japan: The Osaka Publisher Shioya Kihei and his ‘Kobanzuke”

29 May — Hildegard Diemberger and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

‘Palm-leaf, paper, Digital Dharma; Exploring the Materiality of Tibetan Buddhist Texts and their Transformations’

All welcome.

For more information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk) or Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk)

The illuminated manuscript collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum will be available to view in greater detail than ever before thanks to an £87,582 from Arts Council England. The Digital Layers online archive will explore stunning images of illuminated manuscripts using layer and zooming techniques inspired by internet mapping tools to show their historical, cultural and scientific secrets.

The Fitzwilliam Museum and the colleges of the University of Cambridge have one of the largest, finest and most historically important selection of illuminated manuscripts in existence. Fragile and sensitive to light, temperature and humidity, the manuscripts can only be displayed for short periods of time under special conditions to protect their delicate materials and pigments.

However, illuminated manuscripts are the most representative and best-preserved examples of medieval and Renaissance painting, doubling as portable galleries of artistic traditions through the centuries. The manuscripts collections are also one of the most popular at the Fitzwilliam, with exhibitions such as the Cambridge Illuminations in 2005 drawing record numbers of visitors.

The tools created for the Digital Layers project will be inspired in part by commonly used internet mapping and visualisation resources such as Google Earth and the WorldWide Telescope project (http://www.worldwidetelescope.org). They will explore the different layers of the manuscripts uploaded online, allowing the viewer to examine its creation, from original sketches hidden beneath the illuminations, to the type of pigments, inks, and paint binders used. These different layers will also reveal secrets about artists and patrons: where and when the manuscripts were made, how did highly-skilled professionals collaborate on their production, and how did owners use them over time and across countries.

All of this incredible detail and information has been made possible by two research projects being run by the Fitzwilliam; the Cambridge Illuminations and MINIARE.

University of Cambridge, 23 May

‘You wouldn’t want to appear at a fashionable party with a book that looked like this…’ This insight into Victorian etiquette was offered today in a talk given by Jim Secord (historian of science and a member of the CMT’s advisory committee) at the Cambridge ‘Things’ seminar. Secord’s aim was to consider the relationship between the physical presentation of books and the reading experience in the nineteenth century. Of particular interest was the development of the publisher’s cloth binding in the period, and how this related to the rise of a middle-class reading public that wanted quality and durability without the need for personalised rebinding. By thinking about the cloth of books in relation to fashionable clothing, Secord hoped to ‘get back to the reading experience and what it actually meant’ at a time when new technologies were transforming the business of making books.

Following Secord, Kristina Lundblad‘s paper began by demonstrating how much we do in fact judge a book by its cover, and how much we now rely on the fact that books are differentiated by their  covers. She displayed a striking slide showing what happens when you put the words ‘Pippi Longstocking/Astrid Lindgren’ or ‘The Gift of Death/Jacques Derrida’ on a particular illustrated front-cover, in place of the original words ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/Stieg Larsson’. Pan back in time to the early nineteenth-century and the physical forms of books were mostly very anonymous. Since their bindings were often paid for by the consumer, there was no need for them to advertise the book’s contents or to catch the eye. Only when publishers started to take over the job of binding did this situation begin to change. In England, titles appeared on covers from the 1840s; by the 1850s custom-made images might be embossed along with the author’s name and the title. By the end of the century, the covers of the book were a design space to be filled with all manner of colourful images, and each book was an individualised thing–all thanks to the marvels of mass-production.

I recently caught up with my colleague Simon Jarvis’s essay ‘Why Rhyme Pleases‘, which sets out to redeem the sound-effects of poetry from centuries of denigration. Borrowing terms from Protestant attacks on Catholic devotion, critics have long written rhyme off as a superficial jingling, a ‘trifling and artificial ornament’, a trinket or fetish. Manly, heroic poets (the archetype here being Milton, who rejected rhyme as ‘the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre’) should have nothing to do with it. So ran the received wisdom, although most poets carried on regardless, at least until the advent of modernism.

To redeem rhyme, Jarvis turns to Alexander Pope, supposedly a poet of neoclassical order and balance, but in his view an intoxicatingly musical writer whose rich sound-world now goes largely unappreciated. A key exhibit here is The Rape of the Lock, which captures the bewitching materiality of the modern world in its bewitchments of sound:

“That Pope’s style was habitually and routinely by everyone described as ‘polished’—this itself testifies to a felt link between the intensively worked-over surface of his verse and the gleaming cabinets, tables, canes and snuff-boxes evoked in The Rape of the Lock.”

At the end of the essay, Jarvis piles up all the qualities that Pope’s contemporaries ascribed to his writing: “its sweetness, its variety, its gay finery, its embroidery, its vivacity, its colouring, its glitterings, its flourish, its debauch, its embellishment, its enflure, its tunableness, its suavity, its easiness, its spirit, its elevation, its glare, its dazzle, its fluency, its musicality, its melodiousness”. He makes a compelling case for thinking that we have lost something vital to the appreciation of poetry–a feel for its surfaces, its textures, its elusive ways of being in the world–and that without this we may be condemned to miss the point.

It’s World Book Day today, and for some strange reason a storage company has conducted a survey into the books in British homes. According to their findings, the average home has 138 books, and more than half of them are unread.

The implication is that we are hoarding. According to the Telegraph‘s report, ‘two thirds of those who took part said they kept books because they were emotionally attached to them, while over one in four said they hated throwing anything away’. As numerous television programmes have taught us in recent years, this kind of irrational activity needs to be stopped. Time to call in the professional declutterer, who will rid you of our inner turmoil and your surplus stuff at the same time. If you remain emotionally attached to the books, the storage firm may be able to help (first month for just £1!)

Perhaps we like the unread books, though. They are a space of possibility, a spur to dreaming. The cookery books are full of meals we might cook, one day, the travel guides of places we might stay, when we have some time and money to spare. The novels are journeys not taken, yet. Our need for the hidden realms that lie beneath the covers is beautifully captured in Angela Leighton’s poem ‘BOOK’, from her new collection ‘The Messages‘ (Shoestring Press):

BOOK

A fan of leaves, a touching brief,
a dream-hold, bolt-hole,
an answeringness like calls in sleep,

and buff or gloss, matt or shine,
accommodating hands and eyes,
you’ll touch its brainwaves shut in lines–

the moveless picture of a moving sea–
and look to hear and mean to feel
in the swim of it how to drown for real.

Anyone who has spent time wandering around the churches of Venice will have imbibed the name of Cima da Conegliano (c.1459-c.1517), whose saints and madonnas pose against a background of bright cerulean skies and breathtaking landscapes, dominated by distant hill towns to which the eye wanders as if yearning to pay them a visit. This summer an exhibition in Cima’s home town will be setting the artist in the context of his place and time, and looking across the range of artistic production in sixteenth-century Conegliano and its environs. Among the pictures on display is this one by Domenico Capriolo of a studious young man with a book–the book itself beautifully rendered, a learned folio with text and commentary, decorated letters and rubrications. You can’t read the words, but you can’t help wondering what that chubby finger is pointing out.

To live in the modern world is to be a slave to form-filling. Our births and deaths require official certification, and in the interim we receive regular reminders that we are merely a number in an endless sequence of numbers. The documents and papers that assert our identity render us anonymous, reminding us of the terms of a mass society in which we are interchangeable and insignificant.

Simon Franklin’s paper at the History of Material Texts seminar last night traced the prehistory of bureaucracy by surveying the development of printed blank forms in Russia. Printed forms have become increasingly interesting to historians of the book in recent years, largely as a way of questioning the centrality of ‘the book’ in print culture. Single-sheet blanks were produced in large numbers from the very inception of print in the West, and they played an important part in making print commercially viable–no printing house could have made a living out of the works of Aristotle.

Looking at Russian forms complicates this story, however, since Russia was one of the many places where printing completely failed to enter into an alliance with market capitalism. The idea of ‘the printing press as an agent of change’ (to use Elizabeth Eisenstein’s celebrated formulation) becomes problematic in relation to a culture in which printing remained a state monopoly and where almost the only printed books were religious titles intended for use in church. Franklin’s research in Saint Petersburg has yielded a fine haul of forms of all kinds–passports, travel permits, grants of land and title–and has suggested that there was a decisive turn to print in the early eighteenth century, probably thanks to the Europeanizing project of Peter the Great. Even after this (comparatively late) move, there were frequent failures in the distribution of forms, so that people continued to produce manuscript copies with the attendant risks of forgery and malpractice. It takes a lot of effort to create a bureaucracy.

It’s easy to get absorbed in the material features of the forms themselves–the combination of printed text, decoration, handwritten names and numbers, stamps and seals… They are fascinating, I suppose, because the bureaucratic bustle, the proliferation of elements and agents, aspires to a finally unattainable ideal, a fantasy of authentication. In this sense the blank form seems to epitomise the anxieties about truth and lying that have always dogged the printed word.