The Archeology of Text

SYLLABUS VIEW, Literature 341.001 / BKS 341.001 / VMC 341.001, Fall 2023, MW 10:40-12:30, Athenaeum  435

Weekly Schedule and Assignments  Last edited: 12/4/23 1:00 PM

This syllabus page contains reading and other assignments that should be completed before each class meeting for which they are scheduled.  If students are especially interested in a day's or week's topic, they usually will find links to additional resources beneath the basic assignments.  After the first few weeks, most Tuesdays will be spent discussing readings and many Thursdays will be structured like natural sciences labs, based on the writing assignments that are due for each of the three text-delivery systems we study (digital, print, and manuscript).  The labs at the end of the semester will support your independent research project, though you can begin working on it at any time before then.

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.  Some reading assignments are indicated for students with particular interests (e.g., digital coding), but required readings are all indicated by

Boldface type warns you when the assignment comes from required printed textbooks, an actual DVD or web video, or in photocopied handouts you should get in the preceding class.  An underscored title in black indicates readings that are located on Canvas.  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 435), students should wash their hands before each class so that we will be able to handle rare materials on any given day without special preparation.  If it becomes a habit to do so before entering any rare book collection, students will have developed one of the first essential traits of the rare book researcher.  Special Collections staff ask that students enter ATH435 through  the front door of Special Collections.  The "back door" into the Periodicals Room will remain locked.  Please put backpacks in the lockers on the right of the entrance hall, and do not bring food or drink into the classroom.  Students can bring to the classroom paper notebooks, laptop or tablet computers, cellphones set to "buzz" or "Airplane Mode," and use only pencils--no pens, please. 

       "Authorship Period" before class: if you you arrive before the class is scheduled to begin, please use this opportunity to practice manuscript authorship, i.e., write in your notebook.  Put away your phone and/or laptop or tablet.  Cease to be a consumer of text and become a text producer.  Think about what you have read or viewed for class and what you want to know about it, find important or objectionable or puzzling about it.  Think of this period as essential preparation for class discussion.  Teachers do it when "prepping" for class, and you can learn a lot by following their practice.  An old writing instruction maxim says "How do I know what I really think until I have written it down, reacted to it, understood my own motives and reactions?"  It's sometimes called "writing as discovery" and you can teach yourself amazing things by practicing it.

        Also, especially if students arrive in haste or distracted from another course, they should please take a moment on the way into the collection to slow down.  Haste and inattention are the enemies of fragile old documents.  If students prepare to treat us all with care, they will be ready to treat the books with care.  As often as necessary during the semester, we should refresh our memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.

Week 1: Course introduction; Texts, Archives, and Research Today--The Nature of the Problem

Monday, 8/28: Course introduction; syllabus and web-site review; reading assignments in various textual media (original print, photocopy, scanned PDF, digital versions of print on Canvas, "born digital" on the Internet); graded work (writing on digital, print and MS texts, your "cadaver book" description, and the independent research project).  Once the course is in our view, I hope we can share our interests as text readers and creators, and 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?  Review of "seeing vs. reading" skills. 

Texts, Archives, and Research Today--The Nature of the Problem

Wed., 8/30:  Hard Choices Ahead!  Logistics, economics, cultural change and modern technology vs. the survival of print media, especially in academia.  Digital texts compete with print texts for readers' attention, and for library acquisition dollars.  Digital texts take up far less space than print texts, but digital texts may not display as well for readers as print texts, and loss of any link in the networked chain of access will prevent reading, whereas print texts are theoretically readable even at night in a power blackout.  Access to digital texts is initially cheaper to acquire, but it usually doesn not mean "ownership" of the text, but rather a "rental of access" that must be renewed by subscription periodically, like a magazine subscription.  One way to test things that might go wrong in the shift from print to digital text is to compare the previous solution libraries offered to reduce storage and text acquisition costs:microfilm. 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?  What can real newspapers tell the researcher that digital images cannot?   What will the flood of digital text mean for current and future writers, readers, and researchers?

            Nicholson Baker, "Deadline" (in scanned chapter from Writing Material, 9-34 in Canvas "Files"-->"Writing Material Scans");  "Education publisher Pearson to phase out printed textbooks," BBC, 16 July 2019; David Yaffe-Bellany and Jacob Stern, "Yale students aren't ready to close the book on the school's libraries just yet," The Washington Post, "Higher Education," 4/21/19; and Marlene Manoff, "The Symbolic Meaning of Libraries in a Digital Age," Libraries and the Academy 1:4 (2001) 371-81;  Goucher Library Collection Balance (ebooks vs. print books, 2018-19 vs. 2020);  Goucher Campus Master Plan (PDF--see pages 51, 56, 58, and 137 and look for referencs to the Athenaeum, especially the third floor and the "Campus Resource Center".

      Note: Baker's New Yorker article and his 2001 book, Double Fold, made some charges against librarians relevant to Manoff's article but which Manoff does not rebut directly.  Could you use her thinking about how non-librarians tend to view libraries to help explain Baker's fury about microfilm replacing print collections?  What costs have we come to accept in exchange for the speed and convenience of access to digital text in preference to print text?  Beyond the readability and aesthetic appearance of print vs. microfilm or digital text, which are important (better texts will be used more often, defending their retention/preservation), we also must consider accessability.  Click here for a short discussion of the logistics governing access to digital texts, such as ebooks in the Goucher Library collection.

       To prepare for a lab experience comparing digital images with real newspaper pages, see these digitally scanned images of the London Gazette for January 21-24 and October 1-4, 1688.  What do the digital surrogates conceal from you that handling the actual broadsheets might reveal?  Those images are relatively clear images of the real printed leaves.  Bad digital images, like bad microfilm images, can be illegible.  For an example, click on this link to view out this "bad microfilm" picture of Shoeless Joe Jackson, of "Chicago Black Sox" and Field of Dreams fame.  Could you positively identify anyone in the picture? If you have never used microfilm before, these two short Rhode Island College Library videos will give you a sense of the process and results.

If you are interested in researching library "collection management" issues, consult Manoff's bibliography, and click here for some additional possible paths for research.

Week 2: Texts, Archives, and Research Today--The Nature of the Problem (cont.); Research in Digital Texts: Digital Text Construction, History, and Future   [Midterm Papers Due on or before Thursday, 10/12]

Monday 9/4: Labor Day Holiday


Wed., 9/6: Code 'em up solid, so they won't come down"   We will study the alphabetical and typographic "codes" of print and manuscript books in later weeks.  Now we must become aware of the complex layers of code required to produce the simplest text on a computer screen or smartphone.  How are digital documents made and read?  We will visit computing codes and mechanisms from the teletype machine and "standalone word processor" to the HTML-based codes used by all devices today?  How do computers (including cell phones) store and recall text for 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? 

Week 3  --Internet History, Internet Connectivity, and Internet Parasites & Predators--"I knew the Internet in 1983 when she was a 300-baud baby with under five hundred host computers!"  How are digital documents stored, retrieved, and archived on networks linked to the Internet?  The DeepNet or DeepWeb vs. the DarkWeb.  Where does almost all of our digital text really "live"?

Monday 9/11: You could not read ANYTHING online without the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the chain of transmission which determines how packets are routed from storage servers which supply the digital code which creates the screen you are  viewing to the device on which you are viewing it (computer, smartphone, tablet).  The BGP is both extremely "robust" (adjusts readily to wide variations in network traffic volume and numbers of user demands) and extremely dangerous because it's completely out of control--honest!  Imagine if your drive home might go through Baltimore, or China, depending on random factors neither you nor the highway administration could predict.

Wed., 9/13: The Darknet--"Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!"  [NOTE: Students surely know that some Web sites contain disturbing, illegal, and dangerous content.  We have to discuss them as part of the course's digital text unit, but students are not required to search for them.  Students who choose to explore the Darknet should do so carefully, and at their  own risk.  Ask me about individual sites for guidance.  If you don't know what a TOR browser is, please do not even think of going beyond the readings linked below.  Fowler and Albergotti are reporting recent instances in which the Darknet and "5G" or Fifth Generation Internet of Things devices are creating "texts" and delivering "texts" we did not intend or desire.  In effect, the Darknet is coming to you.  Now that AI-generated texts have begun infiltrating the human-written Internet, your perceptions of digital text must allow for the possibility that it has no "author" or that its "authority" has been synthesized by stealing the online intellectual property of countless human authors.]

Resources for Students Wishing to Specialize in "Darknet" Digital Text Research

Thursday 9/14 Midterm Paper Conferences (optional)--sign-up by  emailing me some possible times and I'll try to give you one.  If none of these times works but you still wish to talk, after class (12:30-2:00) might work.  Let's negotiate!  Bring laptops.  I would be happy to help students follow some line of investigation they invent on they own, or pick some of the approches I suggest on the "Required Graded Work" page linked to the Home Page.  Some general questions might be deduced from my suggested topics: How does online reading, especially hypertext reading, affect readers' experience of some kind of text compared with its closest print ancestor?  What challenges do digital surrogates pose for print literature and the future of the book? Who are the "librarians" of the digital text world and how do their practices compare with those of the Goucher Library's librarians?  Using one or more well-chosen examples, how does a digital assigned text compare with its print version and what are the consequences of the trade-offs between them in terms of cost, access, readability, utility as a research tool, etc.?
For writing tips and my chief hopes for papers, which can be treated as an evaluative rubric, click here.
Week 4:  What Did 1990s Scholars Predict about Moving from Print to Digital Text and How Does that Compare with Your Own Experience?Longevity of Digital Texts--Hardware and Software Hazards; Research in Archives of Digital Texts: Digital Journalism  [Midterm Papers Due on or before Thursday, 10/12]

Monday 9/18: "I can feel my mind going, Dave!"  What non-malicious factors affect our actual abilities to read digital texts, and the ordinary survival of digital documents under the best of circumstances?  What must be done to preserve digital information?  How does online reading, especially hypertext reading, affect readers' experience of the text?  How does reading on screen differ from reading print or manuscript text?  Rothenberg will challenge our sense of what makes digital texts durable enough so that we can even read them.  Then we can turn to the special problems and advantages experienced by readers of digital texts. Be prepare to discuss Bolter's optimistic forecast of the "dialogic" hypertextual world he imagined in 1991 and Birkets' expectation that crucial kinds of reading quality will be lost when all reading is on-screen.  Students interested in cognitive studies may wish to turn from Bolter's theoretical predictions to look at Ralf Schneider's review of research in cognitive studies for what it can tell us about readers' actual experiences of digital hypertext reading and reading in standard printed texts (see the "Resources" link below).  Test Bolter's 1991 and Birkets' 1995 predictions on your own experience.  Have they come true, totally, partially, or not at all? 

        Rothenberg is conceptually pre-Internet, imagining a digital text "ecology" wherein all readers of digital text stored their own texts on their own disks, CDs, or flash drives, and read them using their own copies of software programs on their own computers.  Even in 1999, there were no "smartphones" on which to read text.  (Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007.)  For a post-Rothenberg idea of Internet-based digital text's most catastrophic cosmic vulnerability, read this Web page and watch the three-minute NASA video: The "Carrington Event": September 1-2, 1859;  NASA X-Class: A Guide to Solar Flares.  Keep in mind that all computers connected to the Internet, the nodes and routers of the 'Net, itself, and all cellphones and cellphone towers, contain integrated circuits that combine hundreds of millions of transistors  operating at very tiny voltages to make digital text (and everything else) work.  An electromagnetic pulse, whether generated by a military device (nuclear weapon, high voltage microwave weapon, vircator) or by a coronal mass ejection, may overload the circuits of many or all such devices even if they are on the side of the Earth facing away from the CME event.  Satellites are peculiarly vulnerable to coronal mass ejections from the largest solar flares.  No little transistors = no 'Net.  No 'Net = no digital books, cloud-stored music or movies, cat videos, or 341 online syllabi.  For smaller instance of "space weather" impacting the Internet, see Sean Hollister, "A geomagnetic storm may have effectively destroyed 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites," The Verge, February 8, 2022.  Available: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/8/22924561/spacex-starlink-satellites-geomagnetic-storm 

 

Wed. 9/20: "All the news that fits in bytes": Research in Digital Journalism as the Archives of History's First Draft;   The printing press and mass literacy (ca. 1452-ca. 1700s) predate by only a few centuries or decades the unexpected return (after Athens' fall in 400 BCE) of democratic governments.  Democracy requires informed citizens who will be well-informed enough to vote on their laws and government policies (wars, trade, crisis aid, etc.).  Democratic governments' quality of life depends, fundamentally, upon the quality of information available to each citizen, and that information (since the early 1600s) was provided by journalists reporting the "news," literally the new happenings or discoveries.  Think about why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids any law restricting the freedom of the press.  But the Founders made no provisions for the quality of reporting we get from our press. How will digital journalism affect the future of news, newspapers, reporting and reporters?  How have social media "feeds" become so many people's source of news, how has Wikipedia become so many people's online "library," and what makes Google the "librarian" or "curator" controlling our access to the World-Wide-Web? What do we pay for our dependency upon these digital substitutes for print news gathering, edition, and printing? 

§  For the first half of class, read Michael Massing, "Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?" and "Digital Journalism: The Next Generation"; [first 2 parts of a 3-part article] in The New York Review of Books, June 4 and 25, 2015, available as MS-Word files on Canvas, but formerly (2022!) available at  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/digital-journalism-how-good-is-it/ and  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/25/digital-journalism-next-generation/;  [click on the links and see what happens--it's part of understaning the fragility of digital texts.] 

In-Class Workshop: in small groups, go to Massing's digital news sources and discover which ones are still in business since 2015, which have vanished, or changed their business model, and (most importantly!) which ones you most trust to give you truthful, fact-checked, expert-sourced news.

§  For the second half of class, read Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,"  Science 333: 6043 (5 August 2011) 776-8 (Harvard and Prof. Wegner have made the original Science article available from this hyperlink), and visit this Web page for two ways Google search results may be manipulated.

§  Web page re: developing midterm paper topics from Massing and Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner.

Thursday 9/21 Midterm Paper Conferences--optional: sign-up by  emailing me some possible times and I'll try to give you one.  If none of these times works but you still wish to talk, Wednesday after class (12:30-2:00) might work.  Let's negotiate!  Please come to SC&A to talk with me about possible topics for your Midterm Paper due on or before Wednesday, October 11 (before Fall Break).  Why not start working on it now?  Bring laptops.  I would be happy to help students follow some line of investigation they invent on they own, or pick some of the approches I suggest on the "Required Graded Work" page linked to the Home Page.  Some general questions might be deduced from my suggested topics: How does online reading, especially hypertext reading, affect readers' experience of some kind of text compared with its closest print ancestor?  What challenges do digital surrogates pose for print literature and the future of the book? Who are the "librarians" of the digital text world and how do their practices compare with those of the Goucher Library's librarians?  Using one or more well-chosen examples, how does a digital assigned text compare with its print version and what are the consequences of the trade-offs between them in terms of cost, access, readability, utility as a research tool, etc.?
For writing tips and my chief hopes for papers, which can be treated as an evaluative rubric, click here.

Resources for Students Writing the Midterm Paper on Digital Text, Networks, Reading and Writing, Part II--click on this link!
Week 5: Digging Down into the Past--Cold-Type Hand-Press Books (introduction); Print Text Construction: Hot-Lead Printing; the Cold-Type Print Shop, Print-Shop Jobs, and the Hand Operated  Moveable Type Printing Press; and Paper as Textual "Substrate.".


Monday 9/25: Read Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 1 ("Introduction" pp. 1-14) and watch the two videos linked below) Hand-press printed books (ca. 1450-1800) created the world digital text now lives in.  How are hand-press books printed and bound?  How do bibliographers describe hand-press books, what kinds of books were first printed, and how did they make the type fonts with which the books were printed? Before class begins--chose one of the available "cadaver books."  (Each student will study at least one book as a medical anatomy student studies a cadaver, though without taking it apart, of course.  [Some are already damaged, but learning to work with old damaged books is good training.])  Make sure you have washed your hands before this and all subsequent classes!  Use foam book supports ("cradles") and weights ("snakes") to gently hold books open without damaging the spine or leaves, and avoiding contact with your hands as much as possible.  When in doubt, "never take a book anywhere it doesn't want to go" (a Rare Book School maxim).

Review of Williams and Abbott, Chapter I: Types of Bibliography and Terms from "Anatomy of a Hand-Press Book"  English Short Title Catalog

Before watching the videos below, go to the "Files" folder on the 341 site on Canvas and open the "Goucher Watermark Eng BKS Countermark ChainlineSheet" Word file.  Print at least four pages of paper with watermarks and countermarks on them so that you can follow the video's instructions to practice bindery folding and format detection.  This is a crucial form of "haptic learning," literally learning through your hands and fingers how books were assembled from  full-sized printed sheets in various formats (i.e., "folio," "quarto," "octavo," etc.)  If you print extra sheets, you can take one of each format's folded sheets through the cutting and sewing (or stapling) process to produce a fully assembled quire of leaves.  Make sure you number your leaves, front and back, before you bring your folded "signatures" (also sometimes "quires") of leaves to class.  At the beginning of class, we will assemble each of your lab kits, and practice safe rare book handling with book supports/cradles and book weights/ "snakes".

§  After reading Williams and Abbott Chapter 1, go to the Rare Book School's Youtube site and watch these videos: The Anatomy of a Book: Part I: Format in the Hand-Press Period (30 minutes) and The Making of a Renaissance Book (21 minutes).  (Terry Belanger, founder of the Rare Book School and presenter for "Anatomy," says the "next video" in the sequence will be about collation, but that video is not available online.  I will teach you to collate a book to determine its edition.)  I have given you the YouTube RBS Site link above in case you are interested in some of the other videos the RBS has produced.  The training I received from them in descriptive bibliography and book making in the fifteenth century has been essential to this course.  Uncut Quarto Edition Sheets from Bindery Waste--you will be able to see and handle the actual sheets in class.


Wed. 9/27:   Read Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 2 ("Analytical Bibliography") pp. 15-35. This is not a lot of reading, but I hope it will help you contextualize what you see in the videos and still images of hand-press printing.  Williams and Abbott's discussion of type fonts as evidence (19-20) has no illustrations, but typography is a supremely visual science.   We will explore type fonts fully, visually, in a later class.

     Examine two images of the hand-press book production system in the Print Cycle (hand-drawn by Paul Needham, Librarian of the Scheide Library, Princeton) and  The Print Cycle in a "Dance of Death" engraving.  The "danse macabre" woodcut illustrates a hand-press print shop  in operation.  Can you identify what each of the living print shop workers are doing as part of the printing process?   (If you want to know more about the "Dance of Death" as a cultural "meme" of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Ned Pennant-Rea's 17 April 2018 article, "Hans Holbein's 'Dance of Death' (1523-5) at Public Domain Review: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hans-holbeins-dance-of-death-1523-5 Our modern adjective, "macabre," derives from "Doctor Macabre," a character in many DoD sequences who was brought on at the end to announce the moral lesson one should derive from scenes of all humanity brought low by skeletal representations of Death.  What fun!)

You can see images of cold-type, hand-press printing on Sanders, "Inking, Paper Registration, and Pulling: Hand Press Printing, c. 1460-1800", and watch this three-minute video in which paper-mounting and lever-pulling parts of the whole process are slowly demonstrated.  Then 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). After the front cover image, the remaining first set of images are blanks.  Jump to the second ("2") set of thumbnail images to see "The Letter of St. Jerome" (translator of the Vulgate (Latin) Bible, itself) in Gutenberg's black-printed pages, beautifully decorated in red, green, and gold by illuminators who also painted manuscript books in the same fashion.  Then use the right-column menu of "3" to go to Vol. 1 f. 5r, Genesis, to see the first page of the first book of the Bible, itself.  Or just click on this hyperlink! Note that in the very first two lines of the Gutenberg 42-line Bible "Genesis" there are typesetting errors that have been hand-corrected. Click here for a Roman font transcription of the Gothic type, a translation of the Latin, and a possible explanation of why the typesetter made these mistakes 

Gutenberg Bible printing history  English Short Title Catalog  University of Karlsruhe (DE) Virtual Catalog (for books printed in places other than England or its colonies to 1800))

As we jump from digital to hand-press cold-type printing, we have made a huge leap over the last 100+ years of mechanized hot-metal type setting that produced the newspapers and books you read today.  The process produced a much more standardized commodity text that we have become used to buying by title or author or publisher without thinking about how the texts were made.  The key to their production was the "linotype" machine that it sets "a line o' type" all at once in hot metal rather than setting type character-by-character like earlier "cold type" printing.  Note that even in the linotype era, the New York Times still set headlines in cold type.  Watch "Farewell etaoin shrdlu"(link below) a 30 minute video about the July 2, 1978, the last day on which the New York Times was printed using "hot lead type" before shifting to computerized typesetting, apparently the last stage in printed text production we will witness.  Linotype operators set the paper line-by-line in reverse (mirror-image) before it was converted to "right reading" curved stereotype plates that were mounted on the nine identical continuous feed newsprint presses in the basement of the Times building: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/09/a-fascinating-film-about-the-last-day-of-hot-metal-typesetting-at-the-new-york-times/

  Week 6: Papyrology--the study of paper and paper making--How were the earliest Asian and European papers made?; Typography and Type Founts/Fonts--How Was Cold Type Made and How Can We Describe It?  [Midterm Papers Due on or before Thursday, 10/12]

 

 Monday 10/2: Papyrology--discussion of Stevenson, paper terms, and papermaking history; examination of paper samples (1st hour) and close examination of your  cadaver books' paper (2nd hour).  Hand-made paper made mass-produced hand-printed books possible--so how was paper made?  How should we analyze the papers from which early printed books were made, and what kinds of evidence do they reveal?  What terms are used to describe paper in printing?  The Paper Museum--samples of paper from many nations and for many uses.  For convenience and speed, I have summarized Dard Hunter's 1957 summary of papermaking history on this Web page.  Use it for reference and to give you some context for Asian vs. Islamic vs. European papermaking.  Get ready to challenge your assumptions about what "paper" is and can be.  Also, we will do a quick introduction to typography and type design.

"Papyrology" or "What we know about Paper"--


               To  tie our overview of print shop organizatino from last week with this week's work on papyrology and typography, read Bill Kovarik's short digital essay, "The Print Revolution," paying close attention to what he says about paper and type in the mid-1400s.

§  Paper Analysis Basics--

§  View Digital Images of Paper Watermarks--browse one or both of these sites for a few images of watermark types used in the early centuries of printing, many of which continued to be used in later papers--Briquet Online (Briquet's Les Filigranes was the first major illustrated catalog of European watermarks--this Web site is still being developed but you may find your watermark in it if you can translate a little French); WZMA - Wasserzeichen des Mittelalters (Austrian Academy of Sciences, for Central European papermakers);  Watermarks in Incunabula 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.

Then view at least the first two videos, and the third is highly recommended if you have time:

"Traditional Paper Making Process," a 3-minute video documenting a Medieval/Renaissance mill, the Moulin Richard de Bas (Ambert, France), using the old wooden equipment.

Avi Michael, "Chancery Papermaking," University of Iowa Center for the Book, 28 May 2013: an 11-minute video documenting a modern paper-making team of vatman, coucher, and layer, creating 100 sheets of chancery (small) paper per hour.

Sylvia Rodgers Albro, "Fabriano: City of Medieval and Renaissance Papermaking," Library of Congress, 24 July 2017: a 58-minute video of her talk, illustrated with still photos of paper making equipment, paper makers at work, paper in rare books, etc.  It's a lecture, not a dramatic recreation, but she knows sher subject.  Special Collections contains her book of the same title (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2016): TS1093.I8 A43 2016

The "Bologna Stone" and standard hand-press-era paper sizes.  For more information on and illustrations of watermarks, see the English language index of Watermarks.info.   Digital "watermark" example.  

If you are especially interested in paper as a key element in print and manuscript text creation, ask me for a photocopy of Edward Heawood, "Sources of Early English Paper-Supply." The Library, 4:3, 1 December 1929.  282–307; and get the Library's copy of Dard Hunter's magesterial Papermaking: the history and technique of an ancient craft.  NY: Dover, 1978. Dewey shelf number: 676 H94pa  To learn more about the use of watermarks to estimate the printing date of an otherwise undated (or possibly falsely dated!) book, rread Alan Stevenson, "Watermarks Are Twins," Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951-52) 57-91.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/40371091. Once you have had a chance to see it, think about why might this digital copy of Stevenson's article be preferable to a photocopy in print?; and "Paper as Bibliographic Evidence," The Library 5th Series XVII:3 (September 1962) 197-204  [Scanned file in "Files" folder on Canvas].
   


Wednesday 10/4: Typography--discussion of type font creation and font examples (1st hour) and Graham Pollad on Bookbinding Style Dates; application of Pollard on binding styles and typography terms to your cadaver books (2nd hour).

§  Type Font Creation--to begin training your eyes and mind to decode hand-press era type fonts, first view Stan Nelson's demonstration of cutting a punch for an individual piece of type (a "Garamond" font letter "R") (7 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eExllUeGtvc&playnext=1&list=PL1A1CE1A090522E19&feature=results_main.  

§  When Nelson's "R" matrix (L. "mother" of many pieces of type) is complete, molten lead mixed with antimony and tin will be poured into it and the resulting piece of type will look like this.

 §  Type Font Analysis, Roman and Gothic--

·        To describe what a type font's letters look like, study this vocabulary guide appropriate to Roman types, so-called because early sixteenth-century Italian printers began to use these (to us) modern, rounded, relatively unadorned fonts that imitated the handwriting of scribes in the very early, "Carolingian" period of manuscript book making ("era of Charlemagne," ca. 700s-800s).  In the same period, manuscript scribes began to use the similarly open, easily read "Humanist" manuscript hands that came to dominate Early Modern handwriting.  So when you see these Roman types or related Humanist scribal hands, you can guess you are looking at a late 1400s or after 1500 piece of text!  Test your ability to describe these modern type founts which are descended from Roman.  To test your Roman type "seeing" skills, can you tell whether these two title pages are identical or not? 1687/1689 Chaucer Edition Issue Images

·        Before Roman type like the font of this Web page, there was "Gothic" or "Black Letter" type, so-called by later readers who had become unused to reading its ornate letter forms.  They were originally designed to resemble mid-fifteenth-century scribal scripts in manuscripts made during the same period.  Scribes only adopted Italic and Roman scripts late in the 1400s and early 1500s, perhaps by imitating newly invented Renaissance printers' fonts (!).  Gothic fonts tend to vary widely from printer to printer in the earliest, "incunable" period (ca. 1451-1551)  Click here to see a large selection of Gothic and Roman type  founts used in Europe and England from 1455-1501, the "Incunable" period of moveable type handpress printing.  Click here to see Conrad Haebler's invaluable catalogue of the earliest European Gothic type fonts distinguished by the way each font made the capital letter "M."  In the first half-century of printing, almosts all printers used Gothic type fonts because those letter forms were what readers were used to seeing in manuscript books.  In fact, to pre-1600 readers, "Gothic" type seems to have been easier to read than Roman, which often was used for unusual emphasis like modern Italics.  Gothic scribal hands died out rapidly in the late 1400s, but Gothic print continued to be used for texts that were supposed to be "authoritative," such as Bibles, laws and legal books, and poetry written in the 1400s, like the collected works of Chaucer (until after the 1687 edition!). 

        By the time you are done working with Gothic type for a week or so, your brain and eyes should have begun adapting to be able to read more early type fonts on real printed pages from before 1800. 

If you have time and want to know more about book binding styles, read Graham Pollard, "Changes in the Style of Bookbinding, 1550-1830," The Library 5th Series, XI:2 (June 1956) 71-94.    [Scanned copy posted to Canvas.]  Pollard will help you, with the right evidence, to be able to guess an approximate date of a book's binding by its materials and manufacture.    Web page "quick guide" to Graham Pollard's general principles of dating by bookbinding styles 1550-1830.

Thursday 10/5:  More Midterm Paper development conferences--click here for the online schedule.  Some further  suggested topics: Who is the Internet's "Librarian" or "Curator"?  Is it Google?  If there is no functional Internet "librarian" to assure us of source quality, what can we do to limit the harms of disinformation and misinformation such as that spread by rumors, pranks, QAnon, and state-sponsored disinformation attacks?  What happens when pages and sites change, or even disappear, for natural causes like server disconnections or their owners' deaths?  How do changes from print to digital text archives affect the design and operations of "bricks and mortar" sites like the Goucher Library? Remember to plan research as part of your paper.  You must use at least some scholarly or scholarly-quality secondary sources to support your thinking.   If you are not finding any scholarly (peer-reviewed) sources or are in doubt about any you want to use, just ask me and I'll help you sort it out.  Students can follow one of the lines of investigation on the Web page linked  below, or continue the one they began last week.  Talk with me about the developing paper so that I can help focus its evolving thesis and develop creative ways to use its sources.
 Week 7:  Print Texts: Socio-Historical Effects of Early Print Books on their Readers; "Descriptive Bibliography" (AKA "desbib")--Construction as Evidence of History in Hand-Press Books [Midterm Papers Due on or before Thursday, 10/12]

Monday 10/9: 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? 

§  Read Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown, "The Social Life of Documents"; and Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Some Features of Print Culture"; both scanned chapters on Canvas from Writing Material, 104-22 and 124-33. Sir Thomas Malory (ca. 1416-1471) invokes "the Freynshe booke" as "auctorite" when inventing new Arthurian events.  What "the Freynshe book" says.

§  Read Alberto Manguel, "Best Punctuation; Point of Order," The New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999 (a short feature essay on the history of the "period" or "full stop").  [click here for a translation of the passage from Alcuin's Latin poem about punctuation "per cola et commata"]  

Also, think about the significance of the data in this spreadsheet and two tables that summarize printed book production by country and by language in the first century of print--the first era in which a mass audience of readers could enter the "imaginary worlds" produced by printers:  the lifetime press output of William Caxton, England's first printer;  Incunable Production in the Fifteenth Century (Sanders ex-Rudolph Hirsch and George Painter). 

            Additional Web pages if you have time--talking points from Duguid and Brown, Eisenstein, and Manguel;  Web page re: standardization of punctuation (Manguel with notes on other punctuation history specialists, Thomas and Parkes

A month from now you will need to read Emma Thoyts' The Key to the Family Deed Chest (London: 1893), also available under the title How to Decipher and Study Old Documents.  Print-on-demand copies can be ordered for under $10 from the Goucher College Bookstore today and would be available well before the assignment.  An online digital surrogate of the book is also available from the Internet Archive (see the Thursday Week 10 assignment), but you will find reading and note taking much easier with a print copy.

Wednesday 10/11:  When we hold an early printed book in our hands, what are we really holding, how and by whom was it made, and how might it relate to other versions of itself?  "Descriptive Bibliography" is one of 341's key skills.  Please give yourself time to read this carefully.  If you have time before class, make an appointment at SC&A to work with your cadaver book.

§  For Class Discussion (1st half) read Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 3  ("Descriptive Bibliography" 36-56);  Quick Guide to Arcane "Desbib" Vocabulary and Format Detection. Click here for the basic requirements for a workable descriptive bibliography that will suceed in meeting the requirements for the 341 assignment due during the last week of the semester.

§  In-Class Workshop (2nd half): Use what you have learned so far to do some formal on your cadaver book.  Read this page: "desbib" for a rapid review of the method with an example from Goucher's Rare Book Collection.  I also have posted to the Canvas "Files" folder two examples of successful desbib written by previous 341 students.  Post your initial results to the Canvas "Desbib" discussion.  Note that, if you have a known print edition, you can consult your book's entry in  the ESTC if the book was printed in the United Kingdom (including American colonies), or WorldCat or the Karlsrhue University catalogs if the book was printed somewhere in Europe, including Russia.  These resources may help you identify the proper edition, but be careful!  Many similar editions of popular titles exist because printers copied the successful editions of other printers, and also reissued editions of their own "best-sellers."  Printers sometimes issued folio editions first, in small press runs, and if those sold out, reset the text in smaller formats (quarto, octavo, etc.) to sell "down-market" to buyers who could not afford fancy folio editions.  Only careful scrutiny of what you hold in your hand will tell you which of several similar editions you are looking at.  It's also possible you have a "nondescript" print edition (way cool!) or a manuscript book, which would not be registered in those book catalogs for obvious reasons.  Williams and Abbot's Chapter 3 is a good basic introduction to "desbib" principles.  To go further, ask me for one of our copies of Philip Gaskell's New Introduction to Bibliography or Fredson Bowers' Principles of Bibliographic Description, Ronald McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography, or other primary resources on paper, bindings, etc..  If you are working in Special Collections outside class time (good for you!), you can locate them on the 341 book truck in the Conservation Lab.  Please feel free to use them there as you work with your cadaver books and independent research projects.

 If you are really interested in "desbib," feel free to consult this more lengthy list of Descriptive Bibliography Methods and Terms

  

[Fall Break:  Thursday 10/12 to Sunday 10/15--midterm paper due on or before Thursday, 10/12]


                Week 8:  Print Text Archival Research Methods-the Edition, and the Book;  Hand-Press Book Leaf Lab.

Monday 10/16:  When we hold a book in our hands, what are we really holding, how and by whom was it made, and how might it relate to other versions of itself? 

§  Read Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 4 ("A Text and Its Embodiments," 57-70), and Chapter 5, "Textual Criticism" (71-89). Some terms and illustrations for Williams and Abbot on "Textual Criticism" and "Editorial Procedures."  Quick, 1-paragraph explanations of "manuscript," an "edition" of a manuscript, and an "impression" of an edition.  Click here for a Web page explaining "stereotypes" or "cliches" as terms describing a C19 power-press invention to speed the reproduction of editions previously set with individual pieces of type.

Example 1:  Sir Thomas Malory and the book William Caxton edited and printed under the title Le Morte Darthur (1485) gives us a famous example of how an author's manuscript and its later copies was printed, and reprinted, as a single unified text.  This was the text the English-speaking world knew as its Arthurian foundation text until the discovery, in 1934 by Walter Oakshott, librarian of Winchester College, of a manuscript that was in Caxton's print shop while the edition was being printed and contains a version of the text much closer to Malory's autograph MS.  This manuscript, now known as British Library MS Add 59678, was re-edited by Eugene Vinaver (pub. 1947, 1967), who was well-qualified to do so because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the French Vulgate Arthurian manuscript tradition.  Vinaver compared Caxton's edition with "W" and with French and Middle English manuscripts that were close to ones Malory probably was translating into his autograph MS (W's "grandfather").  Vinaver's edition, titled Works of Sir Thomas Malory (note plural "Works"!) presented the text as a compilation of eight separate "works" to which Vinaver gave titles and set off in his edition with separate title pages with tables of contents drawn from Caxton's edition's final table of contents. This set off a scholarly struggle over how to read Malory (1 work vs. many separate works) that continues to this day.

Examples 2 and 3: Below you will find two first edition vs. subsequent edition versions of literary texts by famous authors.  Compare the Dickinson poems linked below, paying close attention to minute changes in type setting and diction.  Then go to the Canvas Files section and read the scanned pages from Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time in its 1925, 1930, and 1986 editions.  I am asking you to read only a small portion of the 1925, 1930 and 1986 editions' prose so that you can be prepared to compare the changes made to the 1925 first edition in class.  Pay close attention to the "paratextual matter" added to the 1930 edition, and what was removed from the 1986 edition.  There you will be able to begin deducing the circumstances that produced these two substantively different "embodiments" of the author's texts.  Readers of all four might say "I have read Dickinson/Hemingway," but depending on which version they read, they would be interpreting quite different works of literature.

 

§  This is not required reading for today, but recommended if you are interested in print library organization and history--read this visual representation of various types of library organization ranging from Medieval manuscript to early print to digital media work spaces which which was created to accompany the ACADIA 1998 International Design Competition for a Library for the Digital Age.   Examine each library organization and be prepared to discuss how each reflects the kinds of texts and readers these libraries served.  Compare especially "open stacks" and "closed stacks" libraries, and note where the library staff are located with respect to the readers in each type.  What constraints did the library builders work under and how has the modern library adapted previous libraries' information storage architecture?        

§  If you are interested in text libraries as a concept, follow these links to see images of some great libraries: James Wilson Bright (JHU Professor of English), which you have direct access to in Goucher's Special Collections since its purchase in the 1920s; John Work Garrett Library at Evergreen, and Thomas Jefferson's Library (recreated) at Library of Congress Jefferson Building

   Resources for Students Interested in Specializing in Print Library Design, Librarianship, and Related Topics



Wednesday 10/18: Hand-Press Book Leaf Lab--hands-on analysis of leaves from a very old, hand-press printed book.  Bring laptops and smart phones and digital cameras and clean hands and no food or drink.  The tables will be crowded with equipment and fragile artifacts.  If you have not yet posted basic desbib for your cadaver book on Canvas, do so before class (format, page height, title page image and written description, basic page or folio [leaf] count).  Success in this lab will depend upon the skills that required. The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory--introduction.   See this page for some Introductory tips.  Each student 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.)  Bring the results of our research to next week's first class.   When we are not in Special Collections, we still can work with our book leaves' digital images to extract as much information as they can reveal, and plan what we will try to learn from the leaves, themselves, when we have hands-on access to them.  Remember to share what we learn with ou colleagues by posting our findings on the Hand-Press Book Leaf Lab Forum on Canvas.

            Week 9:  Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory; Manuscript Texts: Introduction.

Monday 10/23:  The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory--Putting All the Evidence Together.  What is the name of our text, according to standard bibliographic descriptions, and how do we know that?  What evidence exists in our book leaves to enable us to guess which printers might have created this edition, and what evidence can we use to eliminate as many as possible until we have a "most likely printer"?  Is there any "smoking gun" or incontrovertible evidence that identifies our edition and printer? Library Home Page link to WorldCat.Com  English Short Title Catalog (SSTC)  ABEBooks.com   Click here for some tips.   Known Editions of the Likely Copy Text for Our Edition.  Why did printing of such an evidently popular and profitable folio edition cease?


Some Terms and Attributes to Consider when Buying Old Books
Some Possibly Relevant Digital Images for the Hand Press Book Lab 

Wednesday 10/25: How is manuscript text created and what kinds of character shapes do manuscript readers and writers recognize?  What is the relationship between manuscript and early printed books in the first centuries of printing?  (Also review the first parts of Williams and Abbott, Chapter 4 "The Text and its Embodiments" for manuscripts produced as precursors to print editions.)  This is our introduction to manuscript technology.

§  Read Dennis Baron, "Pencils and Pixels," 35-53, Naomi Baron, "Art and Science of Handwriting," 54-61, both in scanned chapters on Canvas from Writing Material.

Click here for a paragraph of some issues to consider as we cross the technological frontier from hand-press printed books to manuscript documents and books.  Click here to sample some standardized lessons teaching the Palmer Method of cursive handwriting, a standard K-12 instruction strategy in America until the late twentieth century.  Examples of famous C19-20 American "penmen" or teachers of "business writing hands," "engrossing (copperplate) hands," and ornamental flourishes:  The Penmen.  Printable lined and half-lined page for handwriting practice.   Plumbago Mine graphite, Borrowdale, England  (Note the proximity of Borrowdale, the famous source of pencil "lead," to the birthplace and muse of one of England's greatest poets.)  Click here for two typical late medieval and Renaissance Chaucer portraits that show the poet holding a "penner."

[NOTE: in the second hour of class, Kristen Welzenbach, Special Collections Curator, will introduce us to the Special Collections of the Library, materials you might use for your Independent Research Project in the last weeks of class.  Once we know how to use the printed rare books in Special Collections, we will be able to take advantage of them with greater confidence for the rest of the semester.   Please do not miss this class!]


            Week 10:  Manuscript Texts and Parchment Manuscripts and Manuscript Lab 1 (conclusion)--before the first class, read "Paleography students' stages of development in the first weeks of training" (online--click here). 

Monday, 10/30: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1, introduction.   What do we know?  What don't we know?     Bring laptops to class.  As always, we must wash our hands before class and don't bring food or drink.  During class, try to read, and then transcrtibe your leaf, recto and verso.  Put doubtful readings in angle brackets <<like this>> and expansions of abbreviations in square brackets, [like this].  If you run into whole phrases or lines you cannot figure out, ask a nearby group to look at it with you.  If you are still stumped, replace the missing text with <<??>> (or more ???? for longer passages).  Post your leaf transcriptions to Canvas in the Manuscript Leaf Lab 1 folder.  Then compare your leaf with the other groups' leaves to begin getting a sense of what the document is, who might have created it, and for what purposes it was made.

     Before the next class, try to resolve the "cruces" you could not read by using the digital images, keeping in mind that clicking on the first one will take you to an enlarged image of the same leaf-side.  Help other groups decipher their cruces, as well.  We will complete our sharing of evidence in the second day's class.  When we have deciphered some of the text, we should be able to use an Internet search to determine what it is and (in some sense) "who wrote it"?  Keeping in mind what Williams and Abbott told us in "A Text and its Embodiments," we will discuss the document as a source of specific kinds of evidence which hand-written documents contain printed documents do not.  Remember that some manuscripts come from the bands of the authors who composed them, whereas other documents are scribal copies of those original "holographs," or even copies of printed editions. This document contains what might also be an "autograph," a signature that may be in the author's own hand.  What version of the text are we reading, who might have made the document, who did not make the document, and what was it probably used for?  How should such a document be described so that other scholars would recognize it?  Our goal is to describe it, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms of what we mean when we use the term "Author."  What kind of writer wrote that MS and why?

Wednesday, 11/1: First Hour: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1. (conclusion).  Bring laptops to class.  As always, we must wash our hands before class and don't bring food or drink to this lab class.  Compare your leaves' texts and look for signs of authorial writing or scribal copying.  Search for your leaves' content on the Internet and identify their author, its title, and its date(s) of publication.  Can you determine whether it is an author's holograph manuscript or a scribal copy, and in either case, can you determine what printed edition it either resulted in or was derived from?

Second Hour: Parchment Museum--Read Christopher Clarkson, "Rediscovering Parchment: The Nature of the Beast."  The Paper Conservator.  16 (1992) 5-16 [A PDF file in the Canvas "Files" folder.]  Note that only pages 5-7 are text--the rest contain images illustrating parchment manuscript features.   Also, read this Web page about some thoughts to consider about the transition backward from print to manuscript texts.


Students interested in parchment as a book-making material should click here for two additional readings that are available.



        Week 11:  Early Manuscript "Hands" and Documents--Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2 (collaborative groups).

Monday, 11/6: Manuscript Lab, Part 1a. Batten down the hatches--stormy neurological events ahead!  Former generations of writers have made English alphabet characters differently from the way we do!  Click here for the collaborative research teams for this MS and note the instructions at the bottom.
       Click here for our first examples of Early Modern MS hands, which we will read together in class before starting MS Lab 1a in class, together.

        Before this class, read Emma [Cope] Thoyts,  The Key to the Family Deed Chest : How to Decipher and Study Old Documents: Being a Guide to the Reading of Ancient Manuscripts.  London: Elliott Stock, 1893, chapters I (1, "Hints to Beginners,"1-13 in 1893 ed., 1-14 in 1909 ed.), IV (4, "Old Deeds," 41-51 [60-72, VII in 1909 edition), V (5, "Law Technicalities," 52-69 [73-90, VIII in 1909 edition]),  the one-page chart of Arabic numerals on page 79 [112 in 1909 edition], IX (9, "Old Letters," 132-7 [115-125, XVI n 1909 edition] ), and XII (12, "Abbreviations, etc.," 138-43 [193-198, XVII in 1909 edition]).  You can purchase print copies of Thoyts online in advance of this assignment, or you can read her online at this URL: http://archive.org/stream/keytofamilydeedc00thoy#page/n5/mode/2up  The book is a small (19 cm.) octavo, and most "pages" average only 150 words.

        Manuscript Lab Ia's parchment manuscript is written in a much older script than the document used for Manuscript Laboratory Part 1.  Review some of the available online and print resources for the study of English "indentures," scribal documents produced for a variety of legal functions between medieval and modern times.   To read a description of a medieval lawyer (ancestor of the man who employed our document's scribe), click here for Chaucer's CT General Prologue description of the "Sergeant of Law."  For basic paleography, explore 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.   We will work together 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 what we mean when we use the term "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, 11/8: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2  You will study one of six parchment manuscripts in teams of two or 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 because the documents are older.  But first, make sure you record the most basic information about your document, as you should for any book or manuscript you are studying: Indenture MS Reading Lab Basics  Then, 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 its functional intention,  partially transcribe it, and finally to understand its existence in terms its means of production and the people/places/things it served. What kind of "author" wrote that MS?  Who and what is named in it, and why was it written?  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.  After class, transcribe your notes into a post to the appropriate Manuscript Laboratory Part 2 Canvas discussion forum.

 
          Friday, 11/10 Class Field Trip to the Garrett Library at Evergreen, the Garrett Family mansion (Host and Guide: JHU Curator Earle Havens)--leave Goucher 1:30 at Dorsey Center Steps, arr. Evergreen 2:00-2:30, depart Garrett Library 4:30, return Goucher about 5:00)

Week 12: Early Modern Manuscript Documents (conclusion) / Medieval Manuscript Documents--Scribes, Scripts, Scribal Hands, and Manuscript Libraries  (Please consider contacting me to schedule conferences to explore your interests in possible final research project topics.)    

Monday, 11/13:  Laboratory, Part 2  What do we know and what don't we know?  Sharing our final conclusions about the documents in MS Lab 2. 

Wednesday 11/15:  Topic 1--How do medieval manuscript books relate to early printed books, and how were manuscript books made.  Introducing the earliest surviving scripts you are likely to encounter in person, carolingian minuscule (C8-C12 CE).

§  Read 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) [PDF file on Canvas "Files" folder] and Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (N.Y.: Dover, 1980), "carolignian minuscule: eighth to mid-twelfth century" (125-130, paying special attention to the diagrams of letter formations on Figure 24, p. 133). If you have time and want to know more about the evolution of European manuscript hands from ca. 400 CE to 1500 CE, read Drogin “Introduction,” “The Scribes,” “The Patron Demon of Calligraphy,” “The Scripts,” (1-75).

A short list of terms of art for describing manuscript text and illumination. 
Drogin Aids: Scribal Manuscript Book Production  Two illuminated MS leaves for descriptive vocabulary practice

Topic 2--How were medieval manuscript books stored, organized, retrieved for use, and protected from destruction  

§  View Web images from St. Walburga Cathedral Chained Lectern Library, Zutphen, Netherlands (1563)--scroll down for images from the Malatestiana Chained Lectern Library (1447-1452), Cesena, Italy; Hereford Cathedral Chained Shelf Library.

                    Week 13 (1/2 week because of Thanksgiving Vacation--if you have not yet talked with me about your interests in final research project topics, please do so before the vacation)
 

Monday 11/20: Manuscript Lab 3--What techniques and vocabulary do scholars have for analyzing Medieval scripts?  How did Medieval scribes abbreviate and punctuate?  How did scribes form the major scripts you are more likely to encounter: early gothic [C11-12]; gothic textura quadrata [C13-15]; and gothic littera bastarda[C13 to Early Modern period, ca. 1500]?   How can we use our knowledge of scripts' changing letter forms to estimate the era (century range) in which a given manuscript fragment was produced?

§  Read Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (N.Y.: Dover, 1980), "early gothic: eleventh & twelfth centuries," "gothic textura quadrata: thirteenth, fourteenth, & fifteenth centuries," "gothic textura precisus vel sine pedibus: thirteenth century and onward," and "gothic littera bastarda: thirteenth century and onward," (133-164, paying special attention to the letter formations on Figures 25, 26, 27).

§  Before class, students should familiarize themselves with this shorter chronological survey drawn from Diane Tillotson's script tutorials from C4 through C16, organized by Drogin's and Tillotson's names for the successive eras' four main families of manuscript hands:  (Carolingian minuscule [C8 to mid-C12, 1150]; early gothic [C11-12]; gothic textura quadrata [C13-15]; and gothic littera bastarda [C13 to Early Modern period, ca. 1500].  As they study her examples of medieval manuscript hands, students should compare them with those reproduced and discussed in Drogin pp. 125-78. 

§  For help with scribal abbreviation and punctuation, read and view Steven Reimer,  "Manuscript Studies--Medieval and Early Modern--IV.vi. Paleography: Scribal Abbreviations" and "Punctuation."    Students who want to become more expert in identifying manuscript hands in addition to the aid of Drogin's book should methodically read the successive pages of the HMML Latin Paleography course.

Click on the "Manuscript Lab 3" hyperlink for for instructions and for hyperlinks to preview digital images of the actual manuscript fragments we will be analyzing hands-on in class.  Click here for some background context on this lab.

Students who are specifically interested in medieval manuscripts, their preservation and destruction, should click here for more online links.

Wednesday November 22-Sunday November 26: Thanksgiving Vacation

Week 14: Independent Research Projects--Remember to email Kristen Welzenbach to tell her what SCA materials (books etc.) you want available before class!


Monday 11/27:  First a Brief Reminder About Independent Research Projects in Special Collections: James W. Bright Collection, Burke-Winn Jane Austen Collection, Oberdorfer Twain Collection, etc.  Please come prepared to brainstorm your project topic and to help others develop theirs.  This is a chance to collaborate with the smartest, most neuroplastic bibliography researchers in Towson!  Research will be independent, but you are free to form collaborative groups to pool your expertise on a given subject.  I am happy to help in any way I can, and please remember the valuable expertise available from the Library staff.  Kristen Welzenbach knows the collection extremely well.  Melissa Straw is an expert in analysis of the material construction of documents.  Deborah Harner is an expert archivist and experienced with manuscript materials.  Nancy Magnuson, the Librarian Emerita, also can be called in as an experienced researcher familiar with neighboring rare book collections' holdings that might be helpful to you.

Remainder of the class period:  After the introductory session, we will run the class as a workshop to begin your Indepedent Research Projects.  If we run out of space in 435, ask Kristen Welzenbach for some work space in the main reading room where you can set up the materials you need to work with.   Be alert for opportunities to take digital images of your primary source(s) which would enable us to continue working when SC&A is closed. Post what you have to the Canvas IRP Discussion and you'll pick up Class Participation points.  Using those images, we also can astonish friends and family with the neat stuff we are discovering.  When each of the workshop classes is over, students should make sure they leave their work sites neat, taking special care to relocate any Rare Book Collection or 341 rare materials on the proper book trucks or reading room tables (as directed by Kristen and/or Melissa) until the next workshop.  Be sure to schedule a meeting with me soon to discuss projects before getting deeply committed to a given research topic.


Tuesday 11/28:  Click here for the Tues/Wed/Thurs conference schedule to discuss IRP topics, sources, and methods.


Wednesday 11/29: Independent Research Projects--bring laptops and other tools to work on your projects.


Friday 12/1: Class Field Trip to the Manuscript Collection of the Walters Art Museum (Host and Guide: Curator of Books and Manuscripts, Lynley Herbert)--leave Goucher 1:30 at Dorsey Center Steps, arr. Walters 2:00-2:30, depart Walters 4:30, return to Goucher 5:00-5:30 [rush hour traffic in Baltimore].


                        Week 15: Independent Research Projects--Continued  (Friday 12/8 is the last day of classes but Special Collections will be open for your work by appointment)

Monday, 12/4: Independent Research Projects--bring laptops and other tools to work on your projects.  Click here for the Mon/Tues/Wed/Thurs/Fri conference schedule to discuss ongoing IRP work.

Wednesday, 12/6: Independent Research Projects--bring laptops and other tools to work on your projects.

Saturday 12/9 to Monday 12/11: Reading Period--I will be in Special Collections and Archives all day on Monday to help students complete their cadaver book descriptive bibliographies and to focus their Independent Research Project preliminary reports, due in a "Final Experience" to be scheduled between Tues. 5/12 and Fri. 5/14.  The written IRP reports are due that Friday in my inbox as an email attachment.  Email me if you want a specific presentation slot--see below for the schedule.  Otherwise I will set it up alphabetically.  If the format of your project report requires delivery in another form (large file of embedded images, physical book, Web-based report, etc.), please make arrangements with me.

[Week 15: Independent Research Project Reports  (TBA); Cadaver Book Descriptive Bibliography and written IRP Reports due before Noon Friday 5/20.]

Tues. 12/12 : The Cadaver Book Descriptive Bibliography is due Tuesday, but you can have until later in the week if you need the time.

Friday, 12/15, 9AM-11AM--Final Experience in ATH 435: our "Final Experience" in VMC 341.  Independent Research Project Preliminary Reports are due by midnight, Sunday, 12/17 (click here for guidelines for what should be in these short reports). Click here for the Spring 2022 presentation schedule.  Click here for this semester's (Fall 2023) presentation schedule.  (We can negotiate the order of presentations.)  Students will, very briefly, show us some highlights of what they have found about the subject of their research so far.  They should be sure to make available a printed handout  containing a bibliographic description of the subject text and a bibliography of works they consulted while working on it.  (If you are out of printer points, ask me to copy it.)  Because we have only one day to discuss these projects, everyone will have to be well-prepared and ready to limit their initial presentation to five minutes.  Please rehearse your presentation and especially figure out how you will end it.  That conclusion is what hangs up many an in-class presenter.  As always, if you're having trouble articulating what to say or organizing it with a beginning, middle, and end, or deciding what visual aids to use, ask me for assistance!  A completed written version of the report will be due by Friday.  The deadline is negotiable, but I have a very real deadline for submitting final grades, after which I can no longer accept it.  Please be on time.  Earlier reports would be welcome! 

The written version of Independent Research Project Report should be either a MS-Word or Adobe Acrobat document, or web page or other format.  Please negotiate to insure that I can access and read it!  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.