pointing to Carnivalesque submissions

A quick but important announcement first: I am hosting the next early modern edition of Carnivalesque. Please nominate your favorite early modern blog posts by using the Carnivalesque nomination form, commenting here, or by emailing me directly (you can find my email address through my profile). The no-holds-barred Carnival fun and wisdom is scheduled for publication on March 21st, so get me pointed in the right direction now!

And that last bit is my not very subtle transition to the lovely pictures below. I promised my last commenter that I would follow up that great pointing forefinger (or Fonz's thumb, depending on your tastes) with some more examples. So here's another great set of pointing fingers, this time complete with fancy ruffles. This is from a 1475 commentary on Aristotle--again, more commentary on commentary, as we saw with the Boethius. Some genres of writing would seem to invite more pointing notes than others. Here we've got not only the fists, but annotations and brackets. In fact, nearly the entire text on this page is marked off with brackets. (Zoomable image; catalogue entry)

Can I just say again how much I love these elaborate drawings? The best place to learn more about what these pictures are doing is William H. Sherman's Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (U Pennsylvania P, 2008). He's got a whole chapter on the subject, "Toward a History of the Manicule," that is fascinating reading and very fun to look at. (I've mentioned before that my source for all my blog images is the Folger's Digital Image Collection, a collection that is assembled in part deliberately and in part piecemeal through staff and reader requests. The pictures of fists that I've pulled out of the collection are there thanks to Bill Sherman, who requested them for his book. So we should all pause for a shout-out to him for that, even before we get to reading his book.)

I've been calling these images fists, which is how they tend to be identified in the Folger's catalogue. But as Sherman discusses, there is no standardized language for this image, even as we tend to instinctively understand what it is that the pointing finger is doing:

I have now found no fewer than fifteen English names for what I prefer to follow the manuscript specialists in calling the manicule: hand, hand director, pointing hand, pointing finger, pointer, digit, fist, mutton fist, bishop's fist, index, indicator, indicule, maniple, and pilcrow.

I can't do justice to his insights here, but it's worth reading Sherman's piece to think about the ways in which the very word that we use to describe this mark makes distinctions between origins in manuscript and print and suggests the various ways in which the mark is used to organize the text, the hierarchy of authorities governing it, and readers' responses to it. Go forth and read!

In the meantime, I leave you with a less fanciful manicule, one that doesn't provide a commentary on commentary, but that marks out a somber and beautiful passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene (image; catalogue):

I look forward to seeing your blog post nominations, fanciful, somber, or otherwise.

looking at Boethius

I failed to include any pretty pictures in my last post, so now I give you this:


It's a page opening from Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, printed in 1498 in Venice. Actually, that's a completely inadequate description of what we're looking at. And that's one of the reasons I like this image--there is a lot to see when you look at this book. For starters, there is the text in the large font, printed in several blocks over the two pages. That text is Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, written around AD 524 while Boethius is imprisoned and awaiting trial for treason, for which he was to be executed. It was a highly influential piece in the medieval and early modern worlds, one that was studied and passed on in manuscripts and, eventually, printed texts. (You can find an online edition and an English translation at the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center.)

Evidence of the traditions of commentary on Boethius's text can be seen in how it is presented on the page. Surrounding the blocks of text from De consolatione philosophiae is commentary by an early fourteenth-century Welsh priest, Thomas Wallensis. The commentary is in the same style of type, but a smaller size, and not laid out with as much open space. To my eye, when I look at the page, the commentary is clearly commentary, a subsidiary text to the primary Boethius. You don't even need to know what you're looking at to get that dynamic.

Surrounding and interlined with the printed text is an extensive manuscript commentary by an early user of the book. There are notes written in the leading between the lines of Boethius's text, as well as in the inner, outer, top, and bottom margins of the pages. It's evidence of someone who not only looked at this book, but who read it closely and really used it. There's commentary on commentary here. Describing this as Boethius's Consolation does not do justice to what is happening on these pages, even if that is how it is catalogued.

Finally, one last great image. The same reader who provided the manuscript commentary above has left annotations throughout the book, including this wonderful picture of a hand pointing to exactly where we should be looking.


For your further looking pleasure, you can find zoomable images of both Boethius pages here (don't forget to set your browser to allow pop-ups), and the catalogue entry in Hamnet for the book here.

accessing and looking at books

My last couple of posts on "navigating the information landscape" and "democratizing early english books" have gotten a number of links and comments--it's great to have such thoughtful feedback, and I wanted to use this post to clarify some of my thoughts.

This series of posts has been prompted by Robert Darnton's latest essay in the New York Review of Books on "Google and the Future of Books." Darnton's call for the need to create a Digital Republic of Learning led me to wonder what it would mean to democratize access to early modern books. Does access to those books equal understanding those books? Perhaps. But not necessarily. As I argue in my last post, early modern books look different from modern books in ways that alienate us from the books and from their texts.

There is a lot going on in Darnton's piece that I don't address in my posts, or only mention glancingly. The financial implications of access came up briefly in "navigating" with my frustrated aside about what it was like to be a independent scholar who didn't have access to those fabulous resources like EEBO, a frustration that is echoed and expanded over at PhiloBiblos:

Reading and learning (and teaching) must be valued, there can be no dispute about that. And I don't expect expensive databases like EEBO, ECCO, Digital Evans, &c. to suddenly be free and available. But I certainly wish they could be. Sure, there might be people who don't get every nuance of what they see (opening up a great opportunity for those of us who can help in that regard to provide contextual details). But not having access to them severely limits scholarship, especially for those of us who are no longer students and don't happen to work at places that can afford access to all of them). Leadership from Harvard and other major research libraries on that front could help too; a clamor for open access to such resources would go a long way toward making it happen.

And one of the commentators on my last post, Vaguery, feels similarly about the desire for people outside the walls of academia for access to those resources:

I can attest---having just paid my $380 annual fee for the privilege of dragging my butt downtown and sitting at a low-grade computer in a campus library so I can swear at the stupid EEBO scans or read JSTOR's precious license-protected 19th century public domain journals (without being permitted to save or print them)---I can attest there are still real people out here that folks inside the monstery walls who find utility in these scans. :)

I hadn't dwelt on that digital divide because I was on a different trajectory in that post. But that gate around those resources is key to Darnton and to many of my readers and it is to me, too. I'm at the Folger now, and my faculty affiliation at GWU and Georgetown gives me access to amazing riches, but when I was conducting research without those resources, it was deeply frustrating. (And I want to point out, too, contrary to some assumptions, not all scholars are at institutions that provide access to such things: they are expensive resources and even before this age of declining revenue, not all schools or universities were able to or could see the value in paying for them.)

The possible divide between credentialed scholars and amateur scholars is another topic that I did not address. It's at the heart of Darnton's examination of what we might be able to learn from the Enlightenment: what began as the opening of access to learning did not open up beyond a small, elite class of readers, and that elite class of readers contracted even further once learning was professionalized and hardened into academic disciplines and profit-driven publishing companies. My suggestion that early modern books were so estranged from our habits of reading that they were not going to be easily made accessible simply by providing free digital images was not intended to coincide with that division between "professional" and "amateur" readers. Vaguery makes the useful observation that there are lots of folks out there today who are not professional scholars but who are able to read these early books:

But the texts you've tapped as "challenging" wouldn't faze the hundred blackletter specialists at Distributed Proofreaders; the marginalia would be sought out as a challenge by a dozen fans---for fun. While they might not talk about it aloud or explicitly, amateur volunteers are doing the required modeling of the document when they're planning and creating an authoritative transcribed electronic version. It happens as a matter of course.

And he reminds me as well that the very fact that we have so many books available to be transcribed is due to the knowledge and skills of the amateurs of times gone by:

It's as if the Academy has forgotten all about the antiquaries---the men who actually collected and saved these physical documents in the first place. The ones who published the 18th and 19th century magazines that fill my shelves with interminable discussions of inscriptions and editions and mysteries and local knowledge, and spent their middle-class disposable income having wood engraved reproductions made of their collections, and wrote these pedantic letters on local names, and filled innumerable miscellanies and folklores.

Vaguery is right: the books I have highlighted are by no means illegible. Nor are they legible only by folks with PhDs. But these examples illustrate all the more what I've been arguing--it takes skill and practice and love to read these books. We teach ourselves to read them by reading them over and over. It's still learning to read, whether we teach ourselves or are taught by professors or encounter them through blogs.

It also makes me wonder, where are the antiquaries of yesteryear? Do they now collect twentieth century pulp fiction? Classic sci-fi? Modernist design magazines? Is it too expensive to collect earlier works? Are collectors and antiquaries the same thing, anyway?

More to the point, though, I want to close with an observation that what I have been interested in when thinking about what it means to digitize early books is what habits and cultures of reading affect our interaction with those books. Jonathan Hsy comments that digital images, like the one of the Nun's Priest's Tale in my last post, encourage us to approach texts differently:

What I appreciate about digitalization projects like those at the Folger is precisely the wider access they provide - a digital image allows you not only to read a text but to *look at it* as well, picking up on what it transmits in addition to its "content."

The difference between looking at and reading is a valuable one for those of us interested in how books work and what we can do with them. It also opens up questions about how different codes of looking at encourage us to read or not read in different ways. DrRoy (who writes the great blog Early Modern Whale) asks in response to my last post and to Vaguery,

Tell me, which is easier to read, page images off EEBO, or the transcribed texts created by the text creation partnership? My answer would tend to be the page images: the eye copes with a line of maybe 12 words: the text creation partnership transcripts run maybe 20 words or more across your browser. I get eye-slip all the time. Of course, for the sheer ease of getting a quotation into a document, I tend to read the transcription. But I often think I should revert to the page images.

I'm exactly the same--I find it much easier to read the image than the transcription. I can read transcriptions, of course, and they are very handy for all sorts of reasons, including making it possible to search texts. But they slow me down in a way that the image does not.

My problem, though, has less to do with line length and eye slip and more to do with the mixed signals I get when I look at the text. I was just telling my students, most of whom are new to reading unedited early modern texts, that when they quote from them they should not modernize the spelling, nor should they regularize i/j or u/v, but they should absolutely use the modern short "s" rather than the long "s" form. It's standard transcription practice. But why is that? I always have at least one student who finds a font on her computer that has a character to reproduce the long "s" and who wants to use that in her transcriptions. But I find it impossible to read. The long "s" I have no problem with in an early modern font. But put it in a modern font and I cannot process it--the signals are just all wrong, with one set of signals telling me to read one way, but with the "s" form belonging to a different set of signals that aren't otherwise there.

And that's my point. It's not that any of us are incapable of reading. But we all have habits of reading, habits that are activated by the presence or absence of signals of which we are not necessarily aware. Without being aware of those habits, we cannot assume that access equals understanding or that reading equals looking at. One of the great possibilities of digitizing early books is that it can open our eyes to those ingrained habits so that we can see anew what it means to look at and to read books.

democratizing early english books

So after my last post, I've been thinking about what it means to make digital early modern books available in the sort of democratic access that Darnton hopes for in an Digital Republic of Learning. My final point, in that post, was that when my students are first confronted with early English books, they don't know how to make sense of them.

Here's one example of the sort of book that might perplex them:


Just looking at the page opening brings up some of the details that estrange us from early books: the catchwords at the bottom of the page, the signature marks, the fists and marginal comments. None of those are details that we are used to seeing in how today's books are laid out. And then there's the text:


This is a pretty straightforward and easy-to-read example. But even so, there are the long s's that look like f's, the non-standardized spelling, the interchangeable (by modern standards) u's and v's and i's and j's. (This image is from John Brinsley's 1612 Ludus literarius: or, the grammar schoole, an appropriate choice, I thought, for thinking about learning and the connections between learning and reading and writing. Don't forget to note your scripture in the margins! A zoomable image of the page opening is here--although you'll need to have your pop-up blocker turned off--and the catalogue listing is here.)

What about this for being accessible?


That's not as easy to read. It's not simply that it is in a gothic font, although that doesn't help--it's not a font we're used to today. But there are different letter forms even in that font: there are two different forms of "r," for instance, as seen in the last two words in the seventh line. There are also different spellings than we are familiar with, not to mention the different vocabulary. There's also the use of abbreviations, such as the thorn (what we would describe as a "y") with a superscript "t" in the fifth line. And then there's the second line which is too long to fit on one line, and so the final letters spill over onto the third line, marked off with the bracket.

What is this text? It's the start of the Nun's Priest's Tale, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, here shown in an edition printed by Wynken de Worde (my man!) in 1498. Here's a transcription (I have not regularized u/v or made any other changes):

A poore wydow somdele ystept in age
Was somtyme dwellyng in a pore cotage
Besyde a groue stondyng in a dale
This wydow of whyche I telle you my tale
Syn that day that she was last a wyf
In pacyence ledde a full symple lyf
For lytyll was her catell & her rent
By husbondry of suche as god her sent
She fonde herself & eke her doughters two
Thre large sowys had she and nomo
Thre kyne & eke a shepe that hyght malle
Well soty was her bour & eke her halle
In whyche she ete many a slender meel
Of poynaunt sauce ne knewe she neuer a deel

Oh, yeah, there's one other difficulty in reading this: no punctuation!

Those of you who know this text might notice, too, that it doesn't match up exactly with today's standard texts, and I'm not talking about how the spelling changes from one text to the next. At some point in the transmission from the surviving manuscripts of Canterbury Tales to this printed text, some of the words have changed (is the cottage narrow or poor?). Such are the joys of working with early texts. And I mean that seriously--I love that texts change as we transmit them.

So does putting early English books online make them accessible? My Chaucer example might be a bit loaded--part of what makes that book hard to read is Chaucer's language, which is distant from ours in ways that are assisted by glosses or teachers (although I do think that it's possible to understand the Tales without such aids, if you read patiently). But that is what early printed Chaucer looks like. And my first example doesn't have that problem--there are no big vocabulary obstacles and no strange printed letter forms to confuse us. But it still holds itself apart from us through the way that it appears.

I am certainly not suggesting that early modern books should not be made accessible through digital surrogates. (And there's a whole other post to be done on what digitization cannot do for us.) But it is helpful, I think, to remember that early modern books are not necessarily ever accessible without an apparatus that has been generated either in the classroom or through other forms of scholarly attention and intervention.

I don't think that Darnton doesn't know this. He certainly does. But in the discussion of what digitization means, I find it helpful to remember that access does not mean understanding. And looking back at early printed books can help us remember the ways in which texts and learning and reading are not always easily aligned.

And now to close with something pretty! Here's the lovely woodcut illustration and the marginal annotation summarizing the tale that starts things off (zoomable image of the page opening here; catalogue entry here).

navigating the information landscape

Robert Darnton has, again, written a thoughtful account on "Google and the Future of Books" in the February 12, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books. Prompted by Google's recent settlement with the authors and publishers suing it for copyright violation in its vast digitization project, Darton wonders, "How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view?"

For Darnton, the key forward is, unsurprising, through the Enlightenment, both in its ideal Republic of Letters and in its less democratic pratice of who had access to that Republic. As Darnton argues, the high ideals of the Enlightenment turned, in time, into the professionalization of knowledge and subsequently degraded to our current undemocratic world in which scholarly journals are produced through the free labor of professors and sold to libraries at insanely high prices. That's an information landscape through which we cannot continue to navigate as we have been, requiring young scholars to write books to advance professionally, but in circumstances where presses cannot afford to publish books because libraries aren't buying books because the budgets are all going toward annual journal subscriptions. (One wonders who will continue to provide the free labor for those journals at this rate.)

It's this scenario that gives Darnton pause. The way of the future is digitization, but at what cost? Are we going to reenact that Enlightment fall from grace, moving from open access to closed doors? Darnton questions, as others have, Google's power over this future of digital futures. In his view, "the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States." What does that mean?

We could have created a National Digital Library—the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit.

It's not that Darnton is against digitization, just the terms on which that digitization is happening.

But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good. We need to get engaged, to mix it up, and to win back the public's rightful domain. When I say "we," I mean we the people, we who created the Constitution and who should make the Enlightenment principles behind it inform the everyday realities of the information society. Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize. We must open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.

It's Darnton at his utopian high. And it's a stirring vision. Wouldn't it be great? A Digital Republic of Learning where we can all access the fount of knowledge without fees and ivory walls. One of the things that I found the most frustrating at various times of my variously employed career is missing access to databases of digital learning. Let's democratize, if it's not too late!

But let's pause, too, for a moment. As a scholar of early modern books, I have to wonder, how do we democratize those? Do we just agitate for free EEBO, Early English Books Online for everyone everywhere? Will those books be read? Will those books be understood? Every semester I see my students interact with early printed texts for the first time and initially, they can hardly make sense of what they are looking at. Why do they mix up their i's and j's? Why are there f's instead of s's? Why can't they spell? What's that word down there at the bottom of the page and where are the page numbers?!

Libraries, digital and otherwise, make texts available. But it is teachers who enable them to be read. Scanning all the books in the world won't make a Digital Republic of Learning if we don't value reading and learning in the first place.