I’ve just written a report for the Cambridge Digital Library about a book that is about to go live on their website. It’s a new acquisition for the UL, with generous assistance from the Friends of the National Libraries, and a tiny but very exciting purchase. Copying it here for those who can’t wait.

“Adv.e.8.1 is a copy of A Mervaylous Discourse Upon the Lyfe, Deedes, and Behaviours of Katherine de Medicis, Queene Mother, a translation of an anonymous  European bestseller which was published in London in 1575 with a false imprint (‘At Heydelberge’). It is a diminutive octavo volume with a text block measuring 129 x 89 mms and it has been harshly trimmed, probably when it acquired its current mid-nineteenth century binding. Nonetheless, that trimming failed to excise the evidence of an extraordinarily intensive reading of the volume by the Cambridge scholar and bibliophile Gabriel Harvey (1552/3–1631). This hitherto unrecorded book from his collection offers a unique record of an English analysis of recent French history and extends our knowledge of one of the most conspicuous and fascinating early modern annotators.

Issued soon after the death of Charles IX in 1574, the Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et deportmens de Catherine de Medicis, roine mere (1575) attracted substantial attention across Europe. The Universal Short-Title Catalogue currently identifies seven French editions before 1580, along with early translations into Dutch, German, Latin and English. The text offers a blow-by-blow account of ‘the pernicious and wicked practices of the Queene’, emphasising her ruthlessness, her willingness to exploit religious divisions to increase her power, and the threat that her machinations pose to the realm of France.

The different shades of ink in the annotations may point to two or more readings, which were probably undertaken during Harvey’s time as a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge; a note on the final leaf is dated 1578. Harvey’s attention is throughout closely focused on the political principles that can be drawn out of Katherine’s life story. The indexed notes on the verso of the title-page offer a preliminary guide to the nature of his interests. He saw Catherine as an embodiment of amoral modernity, embodying precepts from ‘Machiavels pragmatical Politiques’, and ‘Aretinos licentious Ethiques’, all of which were put in the shade by ‘Her own private, and publique Experience in all ambitious, covetous, and voluptuous Practises of the world’. She was ‘In manner, thonly Curtisan Politique of France, In respect of whome, Bodin [is] but A schollar, & theorist’ (a note on H4v seems to refer to a meeting between Harvey and the political philosopher Jean Bodin). Harvey frequently proclaimed the superiority of action to contemplation, and he displays a kind of horrified admiration for Catherine’s unceasing villainy: ‘Evermore in actu: in esse: unhorsing other, & setling herself in the saddle: never owt of worke, at home, abrode; private, publique, of al sorts: fram’d to do, & undoo all thinges, at her pleasure, and for her advantage. In manner, th’only Polypragmatical of the world’. 

The copious marginal notes that follow are also darkly appreciative, relishing ‘Italian Practises’ (I3r) and acts of ‘deepe, & profounde dissimulation’ (F7r) and labelling the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants a ‘Comicotragoedia’ or tragicomedy (G4r). Harvey also deploys his standard (but often mysterious) array of marginal symbols, including astrological symbols (e.g. Mars for war) and ‘J.C.’ (‘jurisconsultus’) for legal affairs. There are several glances at English politics, as when a discussion of whether a dying king as a right to appoint his successor leads Harvey to recall how ‘King Edward VI. ordeinid by will, the Lady Jane Grey; excluding his two sisters’ (L1r). The Comte de Retz, meanwhile, is ‘the Lord [Thomas] Cromwell in another kind’ (M3v). Harvey’s determination to be up-to-date is indicated by his use, on several occasions, of the word ‘assassination’ (E6v, E7r), a word which is not elsewhere attested before 1590.

Harvey notes on the title page that he also owns a French edition of the Discourse with the annotations of his patron Sir Thomas Smith; this book is currently unlocated.Virginia F. Stern’s 1979 study Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library counts 155 works known to have belonged to him, not all of which are extant. One of the those books, an edition of Livy now in the Princeton University Library, formed the basis for a seminal article by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Reed his Livy’ (1990), which showed that early modern reading was often communal and political rather than solitary and private. In the wake of this intervention, many more scholars have examined the nature of Harvey’s reading, and 14 of his books have now been published in digital facsimiles, with full transcriptions, on the ‘Digital Bookwheel’ of the Archaeology of Reading project (https://archaeologyofreading.org/). The present volume offers a fascinating addition to the corpus and an opportunity to extend our conversations about what reading has meant in the past, and what it means today.”

to Professor Simon Franklin, of the Department of Modern and Medieval Languages, on the publication by Cambridge University Press of his book on The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850. The book explores ‘the dynamic space of visible words’ as it mutated across the long early modern period, with detailed attention to changing scripts, languages and technologies. It promises a feast for anyone interested in material texts and the intersections between words and things. (See the blogpost on Simon’s talk to the CMT in 2014, https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=3967)

For those at subscribing institutions, PDFs of the book are available on open access from Cambridge Core.

You are warmly invited to join a CMT/Cambridge Bibliographical Society visit to the ‘Souvenirs of Italy’ exhibition at Audley End. 

Our party will meet at Audley End on Friday 5th July at 10, and will proceed to the library to see the exhibition, followed by a visit to the Howard Sitting Room to see the grand tour portrait. The tour, which will end at around 11.30, will be led by the exhibition organisers, Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts, with the curator of collections at Audley End, Peter Moore.

Places are strictly limited; to sign up, please email Liam Sims (ls457@cam.ac.uk).

For more information about the exhibition, see https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?cat=4

Co-organised by Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/audley-end-house-and-gardens/things-to-do/

From 1st April until 31st October, an exhibition entitled Souvenirs of Italy: an English Family Abroad will be on display in the Library at Audley End. Created in a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and English Heritage, the exhibition focuses on the European travels of former owner of Audley End and later 2nd Lord Braybrooke, Richard Neville.

The exhibition invites visitors to discover how Richard’s experiences abroad left a lasting personal and cultural legacy at Audley End through a showcase of personal possessions, letters, books and manuscripts – many of which have never been on public display before.

Thursday 25 April, 5 pm, GR06/7, Faculty of English

Tom Mole (Centre for the History of the Book, Edinburgh)

‘Thinking Through the Material: Byron at Work’

In this paper, I examine some of Byron’s manuscripts (especially those for Childe Harold Canto Three and Don Juan Cantos One and Two) in order to think about how he made use of the affordances and limitations of the manuscript page in the process of composing works that he intended for print.  In particular, I will suggest, he ‘thought through’ the material process of writing in ways that he knew would be effaced by the publication of his works. 

This seminar will be held in association with the 18th Century/Romantic Literature seminar.

Thursday 16 May, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Felix Waldmann (Cambridge, History)

‘Prolegomena to a revised edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government‘.

My paper discusses the editorial history of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) and a prospectus for a new critical edition of the work, superseding Peter Laslett’s monumental Cambridge University Press edition of 1960. The paper examines how scholarship in the last six decades has questioned or overturned a number of Laslett’s editorial and interpretative suppositions, including the significance of the so-called ‘Christ’s College’ association copy, the influence of Thomas Hobbes on Locke’s political thought, and the possible co-authorship by Locke of James Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681). 

All welcome

I’ve just finished reading Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari (2017), an engrossing attempt to speak about the experience of growing up in poverty and to think about the gulf that separates the middle classes from the ‘underclass’. Along the way I found this impassioned defence of public libraries, attacking the fashion for blending libraries with community centres, and thus removing that crucial element of the library experience–silence:

“Admittedly, many of us don’t use libraries any more, but for those who do, it’s impossible to overstate how indispensable the service is. Particularly in communities characterised by poor education, low opportunity and high levels of stress, the library is an engine room of social mobility where people go to complete college and job applications, get help filling out forms to access benefits and bursaries as well as accessing the internet and books to learn new skills or find information. People who enter a library are actively trying to better themselves in some way and often lack the basic resources or skills to reach their goals. When you are in a public library, you are in the presence of people who are attempting to take a massive stride forward in their often chaotic and stressful lives. Aside from this more obvious function, the library performs a much simpler one–one which any librarian worth their salt will guard jealously. As well as not costing any money, the library is one of the few places in a deprived community that is quiet enough to hear yourself think.

To get a sense of how difficult it is to concentrate when there are things going on around you, pick up your smart phone and start thumbing through a selection of ring tones, while continuing to read this page–I’ll wait. Now imagine you are already pretty stressed, perhaps because you have no money, or because debt collectors and council tax are breathing down your neck. Now throw in the fact you are maybe not the best reader. Maybe you are a single mum, with a learning disability like dyslexia, or you might be battling with a drink problem. Maybe you’re looking to get back into education and have a limited amount of time for activities that require concentration? Maybe you are a young man, recently released from prison, perhaps on a tag, who has been given an apprenticeship in a barbers or a local deli but have no experience? Throw a little ADHD in the mix and an underlying psychological issue, which is exacerbated by stress, and suddenly the simple act of entering a library becomes an immense act of personal courage.

… Then we have the senior citizen, largely forgotten in the beard-stroking dither of progressive politics. Perhaps a widow who lives alone, or a disabled man who uses a wheelchair and can only access a certain number of buildings in the area. The library is one of the only places they’ll be allowed to stop for more than five minutes without being expected to spend money. And let’s not forget, there’s a reason why people in areas like this need to get out of their homes every now and then: paper-thin walls that mean you can hear your neighbours flushing toilets, boiling kettles, having sex, arguing, doing DIY, cutting their grass, revving their cars–at every hour of the day. This is not to mention the less-than-serene sounds of a stressful community, and all the challenging, often frightening, behaviour it fuels; couples engaged in aggressive disputes, drunken young people shouting in the streets, strangers coming and going all day and night. Not to mention the regular sound of police cars, ambulances and fire engines.

The library is one of many dwindling resources, like the community centre, that act as safety valves. A library provides a safe and supportive environment where vulnerable people can educate themselves or mentally regroup. But increasingly, they will arrive at the library to find children running around, or people taking part in discussions or courses, or Mother/Toddler groups. These activities are equally essential–but they should be going on in a community centre. Libraries have become busy, often quite noisy places, which seriously defeats their intended purpose.”

I’m still basking in the glow of William Noel’s wonderfully engaging 2019 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography, on the theme of ‘The Medieval Manuscript and its Digital Image’. Arguing that images of medieval manuscripts are in their way as artificial as the ‘photograph’ of the Sombrero Galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Probe, Noel emphasized the value for repositories of treating their images as open-source data, thickly documented in the metadata so that they can be used and abused by the networked community in innumerable ways. While scholars need to know when, where and by whom an image was produced, as part of their ongoing investigation into a manuscript, the maker of tea-towels just needs an appealing image, and in Noel’s view both should be able to get their pictures without punitive fees. (In the questions after the second lecture, he said that academics need to complain more about the costs of reproducing images, and suggested that if more of them did so, the costs would soon come down or evaporate).

Noel’s concluding lecture was a survey of the ways in which digital tools can be used to understand the physical structure of books, with a shout-out to ‘VisColl’, which allows you to take manuscripts apart and see how they would have looked to their producers. Much of the lecture was taken up with a whistlestop tour through the different sizes of paper that were used in the production of late medieval manuscripts (imperial, royal, median, chancery and their variants), with an introduction to a gizmo called the ‘Needham calculator’ that Noel has invented to turn page measurements into a statement of book format and paper-size (taken together, these constitute what he calls the ‘flavour’ of the manuscript). Noel concluded with the hypothesis that the metal engravings of the period were specifically designed to fit onto particular sizes of paper, but that a tradition also developed in which (like the one shown in Georg Gärtner’s 1618 painting of St John the Evangelist) prints came with lavish margins, which tend not to survive today. All in all it was a fascinating recovery of the rules of a game that have been lost to us, achieved by combining cutting-edge digital technologies with a deep investment in the materials of textual production.

Just posted by a colleague on Twitter, this account by Ursula le Guin of the book as a fabulously reliable object (something like a faithful dog?) that will continue to be valued when all of our gizmos are buried in the ground.

In the latest London Review of Books, Charles Nicholl reviews Christopher Celenza’s 2017 book Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. Along the way he quotes a passage that we missed in our edited collection on the eating of words. Petrarch is writing to Boccaccio about his immersion in the classics:

“I have read Virgil, Horace, Boethius and Cicero. I read them not once but a thousand times; I did not run by them, but lay down beside them. I brooded over them with every effort of my intelligence. I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I imbibed as a boy what I would ruminate on as an older man. I have ingested those things in such an intimate way that they have become fixed not only in my memory but in my marrow.”

It’s a powerful statement that makes it seems as though the hungry poet has swallowed ancient literature whole, absorbing it into every fibre of his being–going against the grain of recent scholarly accounts of reading that emphasise its necessary selectiveness. But Nicholl goes on to point out that Petrarch was a manuscript hunter who got his classical literature in tantalising fragments, and who published his own writings as fragmenta. And when it comes to the Canzoniere, Petrarch’s ‘mesmeric sequence of 366 sonnets, songs, madrigals, ballads and sestine’, Nicholl recommends restraint, commenting drily that ‘one a day in a leap year is the recommended dosage’.

Thursday 7 February, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

DANIEL MARGÓCSY (HPS, Cambridge)
‘Reading Machiavelli in 1943’

Thursday 7 March, 5pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

VICTORIA MOUL (King’s College London)
‘Post-medieval (’neo’-) Latin verse in English manuscript sources, c. 1550-1720’

All welcome