Call for Papers
Digital Catalogue of Illuminated MSS. Conference
http://www.sas.ac.uk/ies/DigCIM.htm
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts
digital catalogue of illuminated mss. conference
Category Archives: book history
while you were sleeping
2
I am about to deliver my paper at SHARP 2004, dear reader, but you are probably asleep right now so I won’t ask you to send me good vibes. Lyon, France is fun, but hot. I cannot seem to stop sweating. My French has held up remarkably well, thankfully.
The keyboards are not QWERTY, so typing is a challenge. I cannot find the necessary keys to create HTML tags, for example.
More later!
research update: 18th-c bibles
Edit: Added more info later in the day. I saw Wilco perform last night, and they were great! A small club, and I was right next to the stage. An English band called Clearlake opened, and while they were a little rough around the edges in their performance, I think I’ll probably check out some of their recordings. Nels Cline, the avant garde jazz guitarist touring with Wilco, used everything from a metal spring to (I think) a film canister to get sounds out of his guitar, plus he had about 20 effects pedals around him. Great stuff.
I spent today at the oldest public library in the English speaking world: Chetham’s Library. I examined about a half dozen Bibles from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They contain a variety of marginalia, but nothing that compares to what I found in Bradburn’s diary. What I’m after is the ways in which people used their Bibles, and in addition to sermons and essays on how best to read the scriptures, we have marks written on pages by readers. The sample size, so far, is way too small to come to any definite conclusions, however. I’m still trying to decide how best to construct the comparisons; I’d like to determine how unusual or common Bradburn’s practice was. Suggestions are welcome.
Here are some research issues I’m dealing with:
- I could be wrong, but I think libraries with special collections are not so likely to have Bibles with a great deal of marginalia. Rare books may have been purchased because they do not have all the marks of reading that scholars like me are interested in. Books with a great deal of writing in them could have been considered less valuable when the purchases were made, unless the book belonged to someone famous. Then the marginalia would make the book more valuable. I’m looking for Bibles belonging to ordinary folks, although I certainly wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to examine, say, Jonathan Swift’s Bible.
- Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can’t be sure who put them there. Libraries often, but not always, know who owned a particular book before they bought it (i.e. the book’s provenance), but we can’t be sure if that person is the one who wrote in it.
- Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can’t be sure that they were put there in the eighteenth century. They may have been added in the nineteenth century, which will provide information about reading practices in that century, but not in the one I’m interested in.
- I am sure that eighteenth-century marginalia is sitting on the pages of Bibles published in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but how to find those Bibles? I know of one example that I intend to examine, but library catalogues usually record the date of publication, not the dates of marginalia. I have to say, though, that Chetham’s Library’s online catalogue has excellent, detailed bibliographical notes on their rare books, and I was able to determine when, according to the archivists, the marginalia in particular books were created.
- Finally, marginalia require interpretation before they will yield information about reading practices. For example, what do all those crosses in Bradburn’s Bible mean? Were they texts of sermons he heard? Or were they, as I am hypothesizing, texts of sermons he preached? These questions are only the tip of the iceberg.
Chetham’s has on display one of only 5 seventeenth-century handpresses in England. There are only 70 in the world. I didn’t realize they were so rare. Perhaps once new presses were developed, there was no reason to preserve the old ones. Of course, the fact that they were made out of wood, rather than the iron of later presses, probably didn’t help their longevity, much.
In keeping with the day’s early modern theme, I took a break for lunch and had oysters on the half shell at Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, which dates from the 16th or 17th century (or 18th) depending on whom you ask.
Tomorrow I finish at the Methodist Archives (for this year), and then I’m off to the British Library in London. I’m meeting a colleague whose speciality is the Renaissance, and we’re gonna party like it’s 1688! (1688…anyone?…anyone?…Bueller?)
research update: bradburn’s bible
I was lucky enough to see the legendary Patti Smith and her band perform on Friday night, and they were absolutely amazing. If that’s not enough, Television was the opening act. In other news, yesterday I sustained a small wound to my forehead, and pride, when I walked smack into a pole on the sidewalk. I was walking along when I noticed a poster for an upcoming performance by a band I saw a long time ago, and as I was looking over my shoulder and thinking when that was … WHAM! stars…pain…blood. Today I’m nursing a swollen eye, but it’s not black, thankfully.
My research is going well at the Methodist Archives here in Manchester, if a bit slowly. It always takes longer than I predict it will to work through the material. I could do with a good six months here, frankly. I’d like to share with you, dear reader, some of my research and thinking process:
Last year, towards the end of my trip, I was very excited to happen upon Samuel Bradburn’s Bible, a discovery that resulted from blind luck. Bradburn (1751-1816) was an itinerant lay preacher who became so well known for his pulpit performances that he was referred to as the Methodist Demosthenes. He began his itinerancy in 1774 in the Liverpool circuit, travelling and preaching incessantly for the next forty years. I found his Bible while going through a box of his papers. Expecting only handwritten material such as diaries and letters, very valuable resources themselves, I was surprised to discover a fat, leatherbound, printed book. None of the library’s finding aids that I had consulted made reference to this Bible. I’m not even sure that any scholars have spent any time looking at it before me.
The first thing I noticed was the handwriting on the pages throughout the entire book. Marginalia is not uncommon, of course, but this is really something else. These marks are often very useful for reconstructing the practice of reading, a central concern of my larger research project and of many scholars in the fields of book history and critical literacy studies. Like many readers, Bradburn did write a few comments related to the content of what he was reading; for example, next to Exodus 8.14, he wrote, “The frogs were only dead, not removed! This was to convince Pharaoh of their being real ones, that he might truly repent. Such are thy dealings, Lord, in many afflictions towards thy people!” But compared to the other kinds of marginalia to be found in the book, such comments are fairly rare. More noticeably, Bradburn also drew distinctive symbols next to individual verses, more than a thousand of them, in fact. I am cautiously interpreting these symbols as markers for verses that he used for his sermons. In order to confirm this hypothesis, I need to consult his sermon memoranda. Incredibly, Bradburn recorded a few brief details about every single sermon he preached for 40 years: over 13,000 sermons. Each one lists which Bible verse he used, so if I cross reference the Bible and the memoranda, I’ll have a good idea of what the iron crosses were for. This will provide us with some valuable clues about the practice of preaching and the ways in which it was interwoven with reading. This cross reference will have to wait until I return to American, however, where the memoranda are available on microfilm. I’m using my time to focus on material only available here.
Most impressively, to me, Bradburn sketched out on the endpapers what I originally took to be an elaborate reading schedule for the entire year, a schedule of study broken down day by day such that in twelve months he would have read most of the Old Testament once and five books of the New Testament three times. Until relatively recently, I thought this was an example of the Methodists’ obsessive concern with regular and disciplined reading habits. John Wesley, for example, advised followers and preachers, in particular, to set aside time in the morning and evening for study. Jeff, however, suggested I consult the Church of England lectionary to see how Bradburn’s study might compare. Now, I will humbly admit that I had never even heard the term “lectionary” before. In the words of the Oxford Companion to the Bible, “A lectionary is a set selection of passages from the Bible to be read aloud in public worship over a fixed period of time.” The Church of England lectionary is to be found in their Book of Common Prayer, and a quick comparison of the BCP and Bradburn’s Bible reveals that there is not a significant difference between the two. A more detailed examination might uncover something, but for now, I’m just recording his reading schedule. When I get back to American, I’ll undertake a detailed comparison.
So what do I do with the fact that this reading schedule is not, in fact, evidence of the characteristically obsessive reading habits of Methodists? Well, for one thing, it’s a bit of evidence that they were not as different from establishment churchgoers as outsiders feared they were. Although the Methodists did not split from the Church of England until 1796, they were long the target of suspicion as radical religious nuts. Bradburn’s Bible, admittedly one piece of evidence among thousands, is evidence of an adherence to the state church schedule of worship.
But really, I need to gather more information in order to make any informed conclusions. I need to avoid making too many generalizations based on limited data. Here are some as yet unanswered questions:
- How does Bradburn’s Bible, with its detailed marginalia, compare to other Bibles from the same period?
- Did other preachers use a similar system of marking their sermon verses?
- Did lay people make the same kinds of notes in their Bibles?
- Do Bibles owned by members of different sects have significantly different marginalia?
- Was there any taboo associated with writing on the pages of a sacred text?
- How unusual was it for someone outside of the Church of England to follow the official lectionary?
The challenge, of course, is relatively limited time. I could research until the end of time, always finding a need for new information. But the fact is that I am here in England for only so long, and I only have so many years to work before I have to have produced enough published material to make tenure.
Like many assistant professors, I need to cut out reasonably-sized slices to publish as articles while I work on the book. I try to have patience, but it’s not easy.
zero time
There’s a moment when you’re crossing all the time zones at 625 miles per hour, when the light in the sky no longer looks normal, when flight attendants have brought you a meal and you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be hungry or not but you eat it anyway. There’s a moment when the hands just fall off the face of the clock, the gears slip loose from the spring, and you have no idea what time it is. I started thinking of this as “zero time.” The passage of time eludes your senses. I kept doing the math, and it didn’t seem to help. The inside of the Boeing 777 offered no usual indicators of time, and the trip here to England seemed to be over before I knew it. I managed only about 2 hours of fitful sleep.
I’m researching Methodist communications networks in eighteenth-century Britain: preaching, letter writing, diaries, publishing, reading, writing, listening, sharing. The first day in the library was pretty spacey due to lack of sleep, but I managed to get some good work done, returning to the inventory of books that was completed upon John Wesley’s death in 1791. It’s a very detailed snapshot of Methodist publishing activity in the late eighteenth-century.
Next, I returned to the Bible of Methodist lay preacher Samuel Bradburn, obsessively recording as many details from it as possible. This book is filled with marginalia, most of it in the form of fat “iron crosses” next to particular verses, which I take to be his system for reminding himself which texts to use when he preaches. Over a thousand of them are spread throughout just about every book in both the Old and New Testament. As far as I know, no one has ever written about the ways in which preachers customize their Bibles to improve their use as tools like this. I don’t know how many Bibles that look like this survive from the eighteenth century, and I did not expect to find it: I just opened what I thought would be a box of Bradburn’s personal papers and there it was.
I also got a tour of the boxes and boxes of manuscript material downstairs. Librarians and archivists are wonderful people, listening to what you’re interested in and then pointing you towards what you need. And each box seemed to contain something unexpected. There are dozens of boxes containing thousands of pages, and as with most special collections, the level of cataloguing with most of the material is relatively general: you know the box contains the papers of so-and-so, but you don’t necessarily know what those papers are. Diary? Receipt book? Letters? It’s a treasure hunt. Fun and scary at the same time. What if I miss the best stuff? What if what I hope to find isn’t here? What if it doesn’t exist?
If you want to see something silly and fun, Manchester is currently doing the CowParade.
And just for yucks, here’s a brief playlist of Manchester music in roughly chronological order:
- Buzzcocks, “Just Lust”
- Joy Division, “Digital”
- New Order, “Blue Monday”
- The Smiths, “Boy With the Thorn in His Side”
- Badly Drawn Boy, “Pissing in the Wind”
Note: last year’s Manchester Adventure starts here.