The Archeology of Text
SYLLABUS VIEW, English 241.001, Fall 2009, MWF 2:30-3:20
Athenaeum 435, MWF 2:30-3:20
Weekly Schedule and Assignments Last edited: 05/19/2011 16:09
Note: Assigned readings are in online full-text documents, public folder postings, photocopies, and printed texts. Read the syllabus carefully, with an eye for typography and color, to know where assigned readings can be found. Boldface type warns you when the assignment comes from required printed textbooks, an actual DVD (vs. a web video), or in photocopied handouts you should get in the preceding class. A parenthetical black-text underscored message indicates readings that are located in the "Course Documents section of the "Archeology of Text" course on Blackboard. Hyperlinks to online readings are underscored in blue text. Words in italics, unless they are book or periodical titles per MLA style, are general discussion topics, but don't let them keep you from bringing up other issues.
Because all class meetings will take place in the Rare Book Seminar Room (Athenaeum), wash your hands before each class so that we will be able to handle rare materials on any given day without special preparation. If you make it a habit to do so before entering any rare book collection, you will have developed one of the first essential traits of the rare book researcher. Also, even if you arrive in haste or distracted from another course, please take a moment on the way into the collection to slow down. Haste and inattention are the enemies of fragile old documents. First treat yourself with care, and you will be ready to treat them with care. As often as necessary during the semester, refresh your memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.
Week 1 Texts, Archives, and Research Today--The Nature of the Problem
Wednesday, 9/2: Course introduction; choice of "cadaver books"; syllabus and web-site review; reading assignments in various textual media (original print, photocopy, scanned PDF, digital versions of print on Blackboard, "born digital" on the Internet); graded work (writing on digital, print and MS texts, your "cadaver book" description, and the independent research project); sharing our interests as researchers. What brings you to this course? What do you hope to learn to do? What textual media do you think you will want to research independently?
Before class, please read Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman, "Saving Our Digital Heritage," The Washington Post, 16 May 2007, A15; Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving, "Bring on the Exaflood!: Broadband Needs a Boost," The Washington Post, 24 May 2007, A31; Lisa Rein, "Hello, Grisham--So Long, Hemingway?: With Shelf Space Prized, Fairfax Libraries Cull Collections," The Washington Post, 2 January 2007, A01; Frank Ahrens, "Death by Wikipedia: The Ken Lay Chronicles," The Washington Post, 9 July 2006, F7. (These readings are short newspaper articles located on the "Archeology of Text" course on Blackboard). What can print collections do with de-accessioned print materials? "LJ Talks to Terry Belanger," Library Journal, 11 October 2005, Available online at: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6265925.html. (Until his retirement in 2009, Mr. Belanger ran the Rare Book School at University of Virginia.) Guests: Nancy Magnuson and Margaret Guccione.
Friday, 9/4: Hard Choices Dead Ahead!: Logistics, economics, cultural change and modern technology vs. the survival of print media. What was "microfilm" and how did it affect pre-digital attempts to solve archival storage space problems? What will happen to "news" when newspapers go out of business? Nicholson Baker, "Deadline" (in Writing Material, 9-34); Marlene Manoff, "The Symbolic Meaning of Libraries in a Digital Age," Libraries and the Academy 1:4 (2001) 371-81; and Michael Massing, "The News About the Internet," The New York Review of Books 56:13 (August 13, 2009) (This is a short magazine article located on the "Archeology of Text" course on Blackboard.) Also, test your initial bibliographic research skills by searching for your "cadaver book" using these four search engines: the Goucher Library's Advanced Keyword Search, WorldCat.org's advanced search,, the University of Karlsruhe Library virtual catalog., and the ABEBooks advanced search engine at http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchEntry. What have you learned about your book? If you have trouble using any of these search engines, please let me know so that I may help you.
Before class, also visit and explore these two web pages describing two major microfilming initiatives that have now gone digital: UMI.com (formerly University Microfilms International, microfilm repository of all doctoral dissertations completed in the United States of America) and Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (an ongoing attempt to rescue images of unique Christian manuscripts stored in libraries vulnerable to destruction by wars, initially those in European states bordering the former the Soviet Union and thought likely to be destroyed in the event of nuclear war). Guests: Nancy Magnuson and Margaret Guccione. (and Bill Leimbach?) [Note: Baker's New Yorker article and book made some amazing charges against libraries which Manoff does not exactly rebut directly. To see a point-by-point answer from the Association of Research Libraries, click here. For the ARL collection of related pages to help their members track and respond to the controversy created by Baker's article and book, click here. Libraries probably have not had so much attention in headlines since the burning of the ancient library of Alexandria.] What can newspapers tell the researcher? See these images of the London Gazette for January 24 and October 1, 1688. Note the bindery stitching on their left-recto edge--they were once part of a bound archive which has been dis-bound and sold on Ebay by the leaf. London Gazette online archive. A "bad microfilm" picture of Shoeless Joe Jackson, of "Chicago Black Sox" fame. "Bad microfilm" off-gassing.
Week 2: Research in Digital Texts: Digital Text Construction, History, and Future
Monday 9/7: LABOR DAY HOLIDAY To prepare for this week's classes on digital texts and archives, spend some time recalling and writing about how you first encountered digital words. What hardware and software were you first aware of using? How did it affect your training to read and to write? Did you parents and/or teachers introduce you to this technology of literacy or did you discover it on your own? What digital literacy technologies do you currently use, and how do they affect your reading and writing? Consider both academic and private uses of literacy in your memoir. Because you will have a long holiday weekend to think about this, you will have time to ask your parents and others who were witnesses at the time to help you fill in or check details. Come prepared to help the class develop a picture of how digital literacy has overtaken print and manuscript literacy, and how the three literacies currently co-exist for each of you.
Wednesday 9/9: How are digital documents made and read, from the "standalone word processor" era to the present day? How do computers store and represent text to us? What are the layers of digital code, file architecture, and other software and hardware that are required to operate digital media? How do they compare with the apparatus needed to produce and read text in manuscript and print media? Click here for some sample document codes. Before class, read Nicholson Baker, "A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book?," The New Yorker, August 3, 2009 either in the hyperlinked web version (blue underscore above) or in the MS-Word document version or print version from the copy stored on the "Archeology of Text" course on Blackboard. Which one did you choose? Did you try to read more than one version, and did you read it on screen or print it first? Keep track of your reading experience. "Writing" assignment: figure out how to write your first name in ASCII code. (For instance, "ARNIE" is 010000010 / 01010010 / 01001110 / 01001001 / 01000101.) How many layers of "reading" stand between us and the machine code computers "read"? Guest: Bill Leimbach Web page for today and last Friday ["Baker Meets Manoff" on owning text vs. leasing the right to display digital text]
Friday 9/11: How are digital documents stored, retrieved, and archived on networks linked to the Internet? Networks, packet-switching, and the history of the Internet and World-Wide-Web. Spend a little while browsing this online Internet Timeline and watch this two-minute video excerpt, "Today Show January 1994...What is the Internet?!" (The "people in California" who can't go to sleep had just survived the Loma Prieta earthquake.) Then read P. Biddle, P. England, M. Peinado, and B. Willman (Microsoft Corporation), "The darknet and the future of content distribution," DRM 2002: 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management (18 November 2002) available online. Biddle, Peinado, and Willman mention "digital watermarking"--click here for an image that has been coded with a visible "digital watermark" to make it impossible to reuse without identifying its source. What would be the function of an invisible digital watermark? What did the original "watermark" look like, where would you find it, and why was it a mark made by water? Guest: Bill Leimbach Web page for today: use the Internet Timeline link for today to answer the questions on this page.
Week 3: Research in Archives of Digital Texts: Digital Text Construction, History, and Future
Monday 9/14: What factors affect the survival of digital documents, and what must be done to preserve digital information? Joel Rothenberg, “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information” (February 22, 1999 Rev. of 1995 Scientific American article): available in its most recent revision only online at http://www.clir.org/PUBS/archives/ensuring.pdf (Try to follow his somewhat technical description of the "bit stream" in the middle of the article, but the beginning and end contain the most important information for 241.); "Warning of Data Ticking Time Bomb," BBC News, 3 July 2007. Available online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm (Note how many years have elapsed between Rothenberg's article and the BBC article!) Also, browse the web site for LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), especially the "About LOCKSS" page. This project is an attempt to answer the needs raised by Rothenberg's article. Vicky Reich, Director of the Stanford University Library LOCKSS, Program, is a Goucher grad (1975).
Wednesday 9/16: How does online
reading, especially hypertext reading, affect readers' experience of the text? Jay David
Bolter, "The New Dialogue" (in Writing Material, 75-87); Schneider, Ralf. (ralf.schneider@uni-tuebingen.de)
"Hypertext narrative and the reader: a view from cognitive theory."
European Journal of English Studies; Aug2005, Vol. 9 Issue 2, p197-208, 12p.
Available at:
http://sea
Friday 9/18: What challenges do digital surrogates pose for print literature and the future of the book? Sven Birkets, "Into the Electronic Millennium" (from The Gutenberg Elegies [N.Y.: Faber and Faber, 1994], rpt.in Writing Material, 62-74); Stephenson, Wen. "The message is the medium: a reply to Sven Birkerts and 'The Gutenberg Elegies'." Chicago Review 41.n4 (Fall 1995): 116(15). Expanded Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. Goucher College - Julia Rogers Library. 8 Jan. 2007. Available online from this stable URL: http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A17837719&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=goucher_main&version=1.0 Web links for Week 3 Friday.
Week 4: Research in Archives of Digital Texts: Digital Text Archive Construction, History, and Future
Monday 9/21: What makes Google the "librarian" controlling our access to the World-Wide-Web, and what do we pay for our dependency upon it and other search engines whose designs are even more commercially motivated? Everyone should read Stephen E. Arnold, "Relevance and the End of Objective Hits," Online (September-October 2005) 16-21 [photocopied handout] and the following web pages: Google's Version of Its History, Google "Page-Rank" Search Algorithm., Google Book Search., and Google Hot Trends. The following links take you to pages which explain the operations of search portals other than Google: Ask.com; Yahoo. If you are specifically interested in digital text archives, you can find further reading in these examples of Modern Literature Online Surrogate Sites. (Current examples include Rossetti, Blake, and a German Emblem Book aggregation. Please send me URLs for others as you find them!) [Further reading in Batelle's The Search (2005), a Julia Rogers Library book on reserve for 241, is recommended for students specifically interested in digital archiving, searching, and retrieving information: John Battelle, The Search: The Inside Story of How Google and its Rivals Changed Everything. N.Y.: Portfolio, 2005, “The Database of Intentions,” “Who?, what?, where?, why?, when?, and how (much)?,” “Search before Google was born,” “Google.” 338.761 B335s 2005] Two relevant web pages.
Wednesday 9/23: How do digital text archives affect the design and operations of "bricks and mortar" sites like the Julia Rogers Library? ACADIA 1998 International Design Competition for a Library for the Digital Age: http://www.acadia.org/competition-98/winners.html (Winners Page—click on individual designs for explanations of their construction.) Also see the rationale for Medieval MS vs. early print vs. digital media work spaces at: www.acadia.org/competition-98/sites/integrus.com/html/library/org.html, and the three rare book collections at Johns Hopkins University, the Eisenhower Library Rare Book Collection (a closed-stack university collection), the John Work Garrett Library (formerly a wealthy man's private collection), and the Peabody Library (an open-stack university collection). Take a few minutes to explore the digital competition, Project Gutenberg and The University of Virginia's EText Initiative. How would you compare the experience of reading from those online archives of text with reading printed books? Guest: Nancy Magnuson Some relevant web pages re: libraries of the distant past. [NOTE: after class, roughly from 3:30 to 4:30, Tara Olivero will introduce us to the Special Collections of the Library. Please make time for this. Once you know how to use the Special Collections, you will be able to take advantage of them with greater confidence for the rest of the semester. If for some important reason you cannot attend this session, please let me know and we will arrange a make-up session for you.]
Thursday 9/24: [National Punctuation Day!]
Friday 9/25: What is the "past," and what is the "future" of digital archives and digital documents?--First, take a look at these two images of two famous scholars in their personal libraries: James Wilson Bright (Johns Hopkins University) and http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=imh&AN=imh216881&site=ehost-live which should take you to an image of J. R. R. Tolkien (Oxford University). Visit and explore the following online archive sites: The Internet Archive (esp. "The WayBack Machine" search engine) If you don't know of any sites that have disappeared, try searching The Wayback Machine for a very cool, very gone site called www.concordance.com.); California Digital Library. (a print/digital hybrid--some titles are public access and some are subscriber-based); "Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning" available online at: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/25 (18:45), and "Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo," available online at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129. (I know it sounds like a huge PR puff, but see if your mandibles don't loosen just a bit.) Other relevant web page URLS. (visit these if you have time)
Sunday, 9/27: First written assignment due by noon in my Inbox as a MS-Word or Rich Text Format (.rtf) document attached to an email, or a URL in an email that directs me to some web-writing (using standard academic English and MLA format, of course). Click here for possible topics and specific instructions.
Reading the 1938 Hobbit Aloud: The Athenaeum Forum, Saturday, September 26, from 9:00 AM to 6:30 PM Celebrate the 72nd publication anniversary of the English first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit by attending a reading of Goucher College's copy of the 1938 American first edition. Hear it as it was meant to be read, aloud, with projected images of original drawings and paintings created by Tolkien especially for this edition. Bring your modern Hobbit editions and listen for his editorial changes as he revised this earliest published tale of Middle Earth to fit his fully realized vision of it in The Lord of the Rings. Contact Arnie Sanders by email before September 11 if you want to be one of the readers.
Week 5: Print Texts: Construction, History, and Future (NB: for unfamiliar terms in the print and MS section of the course, before you ask me, try looking it up in this online PDF version of John Carter's classic reference work, ABC for Book Collectors).
Monday 9/28: How are hand-press books printed and bound? Over the weekend, go to the Library circulation desk, get and watch the English 241 reserve copy of The Rare Book School's two-part DVD, The Anatomy of a Book: Part I: Format in the Hand-Press Period and The Making of a Renaissance Book (running time for both, approximately one hour). Before you watch the DVD, using this hyperlinked page, print at least four pages of paper with watermarks and countermarks on them to practice bindery folding and format detection. For an online refresher about identifying format from chain lines and watermark positions, see this online guide from the Japanese Diet Library. Before class, read Richard W. Clement, ORB Online Encyclopedia, Books and Universities, Medieval and Renaissance Book Production, “Printed Books,” available at: http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/books/medbook2.html; look at the images on Sanders, "Inking, Paper Registration, and Pulling: Hand Press Printing, c. 1460-1800", and skim the Chronological Table of Printed Book Production (National Diet Library, Japan), and the Harry Ransom Center's selected images from The Gutenberg Bible (circa 1454) (U. Texas, Austin). The point is to familiarize your eyes with an older type font and page layout--don't try to read the whole Gutenberg Bible! The main points relevant to our discussion of early printed books can be absorbed from looking at the typography and page layout of just a few pages, or even one page.
Wednesday 9/30: How do bibliographers describe hand-press books, what kinds of books were first printed, and how did they make the paper on which most of the books were printed? Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapters 1 & 2 ("Introduction" and "Analytical Bibliography") 1-35. Also, spend an hour or so reading and looking at these four web pages and accompanying exercise on typography, the forensic analysis of hand-press printers' type fonts. This is not a lot of "reading," just some intense "looking." Williams and Abbott's discussion of type fonts as evidence (19-20) has no illustrations, but typography is a supremely visual science. For an amusing way to view font design, see The Periodic Table of Typefaces. Guide to today's discussion.
Friday 10/2: What did print do to the way we read, and how did circulation of print documents leave evidence of their use by readers? How did manuscript punctuation conventions change when printers marked up MS copy for editions? Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown, "The Social Life of Documents"; and Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Some Features of Print Culture"; both in Writing Material, 104-22 and 124-33. David R. Thomas, "Whence the Semicolon?: Thoughts on Sign and Signal in Western Script," in Early English and Norse Studies: Presented to Hugh Smith in Honour of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London: Methuen, 1963), 191-5. [photocopy] Also, think about the significance of the data in these two tables that summarize printed book production by country and by language in the first century of print--the first era of "imaginary worlds" produced by printers: Incunable Production in the Fifteenth Century (Sanders ex-Rudolph Hirsch and George Painter). Web page for today--talking points from Duguid and Brown, Eisenstein, and Thomas. Web link from Thomas re: standardization of punctuation.
Week 6: Print Archives: Construction, History, and Future (NB: for unfamiliar terms in the print and MS section of the course, see John Carter. ABC for Book Collectors).
Monday 10/5: How were the earliest libraries constructed, and how did the advent of print and serious book collecting reshape libraries? Kenneth M. Setton , “From Medieval to Modern Library,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 104, No. 4, Dedication of Library Hall of the American Philosophical Society, Autumn General Meeting, November, 1959. (Aug. 15, 1960), pp. 371-390. Available online from this stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-049X%2819600815%29104%3A4%3C371%3AFMTML%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z. Spend a little while exploring the Library of Congress Classification System and the Dewey Decimal Classification System, both of which are now in use in the Julia Rogers Library. Guest: Nancy Magnuson?
Wednesday 10/7: When we hold a book in our hands, what are we really holding and how might it relate to other versions of itself? Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 3 ("Descriptive Bibliography" 36-56). Be prepared to do some formal "desbib" on your cadaver book. Post your initial results to the Blackboard Forum.
Friday 10/9: When we hold a book in our hands, what are we really holding and how might it relate to other versions of itself? Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 4 ("A Text and Its Embodiments," 57-70). Guest: Nancy Magnuson. Jonathan Evans (U. Georgia), "Walter F. Oakeshott and the Discovery of the Winchester MS," and British Library Web Site for Images of the Malory MS (British Library Additional MS 59678--i.e., that is its accession number and its identifying name in their collection, corresponding to an LC number or DD number for a copy of a printed edition). What is a "manuscript," an "edition" of a manuscript, and an "impression" of an edition? Click here for a diagram showing the Textual History of Malory's Morte Darthur What Tolkien edition are you holding and what is its relationship to the other editions?
Week 7: Print Text Archival Research Methods-Paper, the Edition, and the Book (NB: for unfamiliar terms in the print and MS section of the course, see the online PDF version of John Carter. ABC for Book Collectors).
Monday 10/12: How should we
analyze the papers from which early printed books were made, and what kinds of evidence do they reveal?
The Paper Museum--samples of paper
from many nations and for many uses.
Alan Stevenson, "Paper as Bibliographic Evidence," The Library 5th
Series XVII:3 (September 1962) [photocopied excerpt] 197-204, and "Watermarks Are Twins," Studies in Bibliography 4
(1951-52) 57-91. "Watermarks" is available online at:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/ (Use the "Browse by Volume" menu in
the left frame and click on "4"--Stevenson's article is the fourth.
Why might this digital copy be preferable to a photocopy?) See this
site for images of watermark types used in the first century of printing, many
of which continued to be used in later papers--Watermarks in Incunaula Printed in the Low Countries: The early paper market was based on exports from
countries like France and Italy which grew large flax crops, and their low costs
of production enabled them to capture the market in most places to which
printing had spread. Choose the "browse by main group" option to see
examples. For more information on and illustrations of watermarks, see the
English language index of
Watermarks.info.
Digital "watermark" example.
Paper sizes.
Hand-Press Era Paper Mill
("laid paper") The
Fourdrinier machine (ca. 1801) ("wove paper")
For a quick introduction to the early history of papermaking in Asia, see the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild "Paper" page. Visit this animated web site illustrating a French paper mill in operation, see Le Musée du Papier D'Angoumois--Le Moulin: A French paper mill site that illustrates, with moving images, the stages in the production of hand-laid paper such as that used in Medieval manuscripts and printed books until around 1800. Today, pay special attention to your cadaver book's paper!
Wednesday 10/14: When we hold a book in our hands, what are we really holding and how might it relate to other versions of itself? Read and prepare to discuss Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 5, "Textual Criticism" (71-89) and Chapter 6, "Editorial Procedures" (90-126). (Just skim the examples of bibliographic descriptions at the end--we won't be doing the full-dress version, but they will give you some idea of how much a trained eye can see in a book and how bibliographers communicate with each other about what they hold in their hands.) Some terms and illustrations for Williams and Abbot on "Textual Criticism" and "Editorial Procedures." Why "modernizing" editors' punctuation decisions about manuscript- and Early Modern Print-Era texts matter.
After discussing what kind of decisions editors make when turning manuscripts into printed editions, we will begin The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory. See this page for some Introductory tips. Each of you will be assigned one of the laboratory book leaves. For each leaf, we want to know: what is it?; how should we describe it?; and how do our pages relate to one another? (Refresh your memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.)
Friday 10/16: The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory: Sharing Our First Evidence--Bring the results of your research to class. (Refresh your memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.) Also bring your lab kit (magnifier, light, tape measure). Before our return from Mid-Semester Break, work with your book leaf's digital images to extract as much information as they can reveal, and plan what you will try to learn from the leaves, themselves, when you have access to them in Special Collections. Remember to share what you learn with your colleagues by posting your findings on the Discussion Forum of the "Archeology of Text" Blackboard course.
MID-SEMESTER BREAK [10/17-20]
Week 8: Print Text Archival Research Methods--the Book, its Readers and its Authors (NB: for unfamiliar terms in the print and MS section of the course, see John Carter. ABC for Book Collectors).
Monday 10/19: MID-SEMESTER BREAK--note that you have access to the digital images for the Hand-Press Book Laboratory in the event you have time for a little extra study.
Wednesday 10/21: The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory: Putting All the Evidence Together. What do we know? What don't we know? How do your pages relate to one another? How do they relate to other copies of this edition, and to other editions of this text, in the libraries of the world? Bring your lab kit (magnifier, light, tape measure). Library Home Page link to WorldCat.Com English Short Title Catalog (SSTC) ABEBooks.com MeasuringWorth.com
Friday 10/23: What is an author and how did earlier eras understand where books come from, to whom they "belonged," and who deserved the credit or blame for their existence? Roger Chartier, "Figures of the Author," from The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (originally published in France as L'ordre des livres [Paris: Editions Alines, 1992], trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994), pp. 25-59. [photocopied excerpt]
Friday, October 23, 2009, at 3:30, leave for the Walters Art Museum Rare Book and Manuscript Collection for a tour of the Reading Room with Ben Tilghman. (Refresh your memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.)
Week 9: Manuscript Texts--Construction and Analysis / Modern and Early Modern Manuscript Hands--Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1
Monday 10/26: How is manuscript text created and what kinds of character shapes do manuscript readers and writers recognize? Dennis Baron, "Pencils and Pixels" (first part, to "Telephone"), 35-45; Naomi Baron, "Art and Science of Handwriting," 54-61, both in Writing Material. Plumbago Mine graphite, Borrowdale, England Also, this is the introduction of Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1. Before the next class, spend some time with the digital image of the digital images of the recto and verso of the leaf assigned to you and your partner. You should be able to read it within ten minutes, especially if you read with your partner and use the largest image (click on the first one). Transcribe it as you figure it out. When you have deciphered some of the text, can you determine what it is and (in some sense) "who wrote it"? (Hint: use your modern Internet tools.) Thinking specifically about your manuscript leaf as an object, itself, who is its "author"?
Tuesday 10/27: Second written assignment on the hand-press book lab is due by noon in my Inbox as a MS-Word or Rich Text Format (.rtf) document attached to an email. Click here for specific instructions.
Wednesday 10/28: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1. What do we know? What don't we know? Bring laptops to class if you have them, but as always, wash your hands before class and don't bring food or drink to this one. We will discuss the document as a source of evidence which hand-written documents contain that most printed documents do not. Our goal is to describe it, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms of Chartier's chapter, "Figures of the Author." What kind of "author" wrote that MS? If you are interested, this manuscript also can be part of your independent research project. Bring your lab kit (magnifier, light, tape measure) (Review Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 4, "A Text and Its Embodiments," for clues about how to interpret this evidence.)
Wednesday, 10/28, at 4:00 PM, in the Batza Room of the Athenaeum, a public lecture by Earle Havens (Curator of Rare Books at the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University): "Scribal Culture in the Era of Print: Persecuted Catholics, Censored Books and Scribal Publication in the English Catholic Community, 1580-1610." [Co-Sponsors: The Brooke and Carol Peirce Center for Undergraduate Research in Special Collections and The Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Pre-Modern Europe]
Friday 10/30: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1. What do we know? What don't we know? Bring laptops to class if you have them, but as always, wash your hands before class and don't bring food or drink to this one. We will discuss the document as a source of evidence which hand-written documents contain that most printed documents do not. Our goal is to describe it, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms of Chartier's chapter, "Figures of the Author." What kind of "author" wrote that MS? If you are interested, this manuscript also can be part of your independent research project. Bring your lab kit (magnifier, light, tape measure) (Review Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 4, "A Text and Its Embodiments," for clues about how to interpret this evidence.)
Week 10: Parchment and Early Modern Manuscript "Hands"--Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1a
Monday 11/2: Parchment Museum Day--Christopher Clarkson, "Rediscovering Parchment: The Nature of the Beast." The Paper Conservator. 16 (1992) 5-16 [photocopy] (Note that only pages 5-7 are text--the rest contain images illustrating parchment manuscript features.)
If you are interested in learning more about how parchment fits into the Pre-Modern economy, a good place to start would be these excerpts from two books about Renaissance cooking: Bill Buford, Heat (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) 239-75 & 285-301, and Giovanni Rebora, Culture of the Fork Tr. Albert Sonnenfeld (N.Y.: Columbia UP, 2001) 40-51 [photocopies available if you give me advanced notice]. Why "cooking? Think about producing books that, if they are big enough, require you to slaughter a calf for every folded leaf (i.e., four "pages"). The cowherd, the cook, the shoemaker, the tanner, and the parcheminiere or parchment maker all worked closely together.
Wednesday 11/4: English Handwriting 1500-1700: Andrew Zurcher's site is often recommended as the best online teach-yourself program to learn to decipher Early Modern manuscript hands. Early Modern hands tend to be tougher than Medieval hands because it became fashionable to personalize your script, and the proliferation of literacy led to variants in the construction of letter forms, so there were many ways to represent all the letters of the alphabet. Each writer used her/his own, so once you learn your author's hand, you can read it reliably, but until you become familiar with the typical variants, it can seem pretty hard. As always, practice makes good, if not perfect. Click here for Arnie's suggested "multi-window" strategy for using Zurcher's tools and exemplary texts to teach your eye to read Early Modern English hands. Click here for our first examples of Early Modern MS hands, which we will read together in class.
Friday 11/6: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1a. This parchment manuscript is written in an older script than Manuscript Laboratory Part 1, and you may need Zurcher's "hand alphabets" to help you decipher it. Click here for Arnie's suggested "multi-window" strategy for using Zurcher's tools and exemplary texts to teach your eye to read Early Modern English hands. We will work together in class to examine this document. What are its parts and what is it intended to do? Who is mentioned in it and when and where did they live? Can we discover more about them? As in our previous laboratories, our goal is to describe the document, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms of Chartier's chapter, "Figures of the Author." What kind of "author" wrote that MS? Especially because you will find more than one hand in the same manuscript, you will have differing answers for different hands, much like when teachers write comments in the margins of your papers.
Week 11: Early Modern Manuscript Documents--Manuscript Book Laboratory 2
Monday 11/9: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2 You will study one of six parchment manuscripts in teams of two and three. These are older examples of the same type of document that we studied in MS Lab 1a, so its parts and function should be very similar, but the scribal hands are more difficult. Use Zurcher's "hand alphabets" to help you decipher it. Click here for Arnie's suggested "multi-window" strategy for using Zurcher's tools and exemplary texts to teach your eye to read Early Modern English hands. As before, our goal is to describe it, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms of Chartier's chapter, "Figures of the Author." What kind of "author" wrote that MS? Especially because you will find more than one hand in the same manuscript, you will have differing answers for different hands, much like when teachers write comments in the margins of your papers.
Wednesday 11/11: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2 What do we know and what don't we know?
Friday 11/13: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2 Sharing our final conclusions about the documents in MS Lab 2.
Week 12: Medieval manuscript books and scribal hands--MS Lab 3
Monday 11/16: How do medieval manuscript books relate to early printed books, and how were manuscript books made? Johannes Trithemius, From In Praise of Scribes (De laude scriptorum), in Writing Material, pp. 469-75; Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (N.Y.: Dover, 1980), “Introduction,” “The Scribes,” “The Patron Demon of Calligraphy,” (1-20) and Richard W. Clement, ORB Online Encyclopedia, Books and Universities, Medieval and Renaissance Book Production, “Manuscript Books.” Available at: http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/books/medbook1.html Drogin and Clement: Scribal Manuscript Book Production Illuminated MS leaves for descriptive vocabulary practice
If you are curious about medieval scribes' practices, you read further in Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production, ed. Linda L. Brownrigg (Los Altos, Cal.: Anderson-Lovelace, 1995). A good place to start is Michael Gullick's essay, “How Fast Did Scribes Write? Evidence from Romanesque Manuscripts,” 39-58 [can be available in photocopy if you give me advanced notice].
Wednesday 11/18: How were medieval manuscript books stored, organized, retrieved for use, and protected from destruction Hereford Cathedral Chained Library; three web pages from "600 Years of Cambridge University Library: An Exhibition at the Cambridge University Library, 8 October 2002 to 15 March 2003," "Library Beginnings," "Medieval Library," "Filling the Library"; Virtual Tour of the library. Christopher de Hamel, Cutting Up Manuscripts for Pleasure and Profit (The 1995 Sol M. Malkan Lecture on Bibliography) (Charlottesville, VA: Book Arts Press, 1995, rpt. March 2006) [photocopy]. Solomon Schechter and the Ginezah fragments; Visit this web site and explore at least three instances in which MS leaves were sold on eBay: CHD Center for Håndskriftstudier i Danmark, Dismembered Manuscripts, This is an online project reclaiming digital images of Medieval manuscript leaves that have been sold on eBay and, in most cases, lost to scholarship forever. Hereford Cathedral, Oxford (Bodleian), Cambridge and Aberdeen University Libraries: links to digital images including chronological sequence from the Bodleian for practice with Drogin 25-78.
If you are especially interested in early manuscript libraries, you should see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 274.2 D858s 1992 and this Columbia University online exhibit on Manuscript Fragments and Typical Surviving Manuscript Books. For this class, we will examine some of the Goucher collection's incunabula ("cradle books," pre-1500) to rethink book construction and preservation during the era in which print competed with manuscript book production.
Friday 11/20: Manuscript Lab 3--What techniques and vocabulary do scholars have for analyzing Medieval scripts? How did Medieval scribes abbreviate and punctuate? Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (N.Y.: Dover, 1980), “The Scripts,” (21-75). Steven Reimer, "Manuscript Studies--Medieval and Early Modern--IV.vi. Paleography: Scribal Abbreviations" and "Punctuation." For help identifying manuscript hands in addition to Drogin's book, attempt some of Diane Tillotson's paleography exercises using Flash Click on the hyperlink for Manuscript Lab 3 for instructions and for hyperlinks to preview digital images of the actual manuscript fragments we will be analyzing.
Week 13: Individual Research Projects
Monday 11/23: Introduction to Individual Research Projects in Special Collections: James W. Bright Collection, Alberta Burke Collection, etc.
Tuesday 11/24: Third written assignment is due in my inbox by noon reflecting upon and analyzing the second manuscript book lab, your experiences as you worked with it, and the text's relationship to its origins and to our era. Click here for specific instructions. If you were to turn in this assignment earlier in the week, it would make my life easier!
Wednesday 11/25 through Sunday 11/29--THANKSGIVING VACATION.
Week 14: Independent Research Projects
Monday 11/30: Research Project Workshop: Plan and research individual projects on manuscript, print, or digital texts and archives. Studies of volumes from the James Wilson Bright Collection are encouraged, of course, but students should pursue their intellectual curiosities.
Wednesday 12/2: Research Project Workshop: Research individual projects on manuscript, print, or digital texts and archives.
Friday 12/4: Research Project Workshop: Research individual projects on manuscript, print, or digital texts and archives.
Week 15: Independent Research Project Reports
Monday 12/7: Independent Research Project Reports: Show us what you have found about the subject of your research so far. Be sure to make available, either online or in a printed handout, a bibliographic description of the subject text and a bibliography of works you consulted while working on it. A completed written version of the report will be due the Monday after the last week of classes.
Wednesday 12/9: LAST CLASS--course evaluation and more Independent Research Project Reports. If you have time, read "The Jewel Game", an excerpt from Rudyard Kipling's Kim. It seems to be about what we are trying to learn to do.
The Monday of Exam Week: Written version of Independent Research Project Report due by 12:00 Noon (either as MS-Word or web page or other format--please negotiate to insure that I can access and read it!).
