David and Goliath, redux

I know what you're thinking. Gee, this looks familiar:




And it ought to. Compare it to this:



The first is a Book of Psalms from the British Library's collection, with an embroidered binding depicting David and his slingshot on the front panel and David with Goliath's head on the back. The second is our friend from my last posting, a Book of Psalms from the Folger, with an embroidered binding depicting David with Goliath's head and, yes, David and his slingshot.

I'll wait while you compare the two (clicking on each image should bring you to an enlargeable picture).

That's right--they're the same! Of course, they're not exactly the same. The BL binding reveals that what I took as a cheesy grin from Goliath is actually a mustache, the Folger David holding Goliath's head has a unibrow that the BL David does not, and the Folger binding has a much more soothing color scheme of blues. And I like that the BL copy reverses what was, to my sense, a weirdly backwards chronology of encountering the beheaded Goliath before you meet David with his slingshot. Those tiny differences aside, these are two bindings obviously done from the same pattern for two different psalters.

I stumbled across the BL book when I was scouting out a response to a comment on my last post. Lycimnius wondered about the date of the binding because he was struck by the approaching date of Charles I's beheading. The Folger's catalogue identifies the binding as approximately 1639, a date obviously taken from the publication of the text. The BL book is a 1640 copy, which makes me suspect that the embroidery was done closer to the publication date than 10 years on.

In any case, I was browsing through the British Library's database of bookbindings looking to see what examples of embroidered books they had, when lo and behold, there was my David! There are lots of other examples in their database (do a quick search for "embroidered" to see for yourself). For those of you wanting to learn more about embroidered bindings, there's a brief research guide provided by the BL's Philippa Marks, Curator of Bookbindings, Early Printed Collections. The key points to know are that such bindings were typically done by professionals, often from pattern books or other sources. Religious works, such as the Books of Psalms that I've been using as examples, are the most frequent texts bound this way. Embroidered bindings reached their height of popularity during the seventeenth century, and largely disappeared after the Civil War.

I don't have any answer for Lycimnius about the relative popularity or lack thereof for depicting the slaying of Goliath on psalters--images of David are popular, of course, given his status as author of the Psalms, but they tend to depict him with his harp (see this or this as examples). But I was pretty thrilled to find another example of the same pattern, thus answering a question I hadn't even realized I was asking.

David and Goliath

It has been nearly a month since I last posted, for which I can only apologize. Although that might be an eternity in blog-days, in real-life days, the time has just flown by, what with the excitement of college basketball and grading and Passover and the annual Shakespeare Association of America conference. Oddly, there were very few obvious points in common among those events, but there I was, nonetheless.

I can, I think, actually find a common thread among some of them with this picture:

What is this, you ask? It's The whole booke of Psalmes: collected into English meter by Tho. Sternhold, Jo. Hopkins, W. Whittingham, and others, conferred with the Hebrew, with apt notes to sing them withall. Newly set forth, and allowed to bee sung in all churches, of course, printed in 1639 and here with a stunningly gorgeous embroidered binding. And who is that on the binding, you wonder? David and Goliath! To be more precise, that's David and his slingshot on the left (aka the back cover) and David with Goliath's head on the right (the front cover). To me, it looks like David is in the act calling out, "Hey, you great big lug, over here!" and like Goliath is still stupidly smiling even after his head has been cut off. But that might be my take on the story. Regardless of your take, it's a fabulous binding. (catalog entry/zoomable image)

And so how does that connect to the big events that have kept me preoccupied? The religious connection to the recent holidays should be obvious. And my students have been writing papers on the individual histories of their books, including what the bindings might signal about a book's use and provenance. The Shakespeare link is more tenuous, but I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about Shakespeare's plays as books and how their appearance as such shapes our use of them (more on that in future posts).

And college basketball? Let's just say that in the championship, I was rooting for the David that almost slew Goliath but instead never got the slingshot ready to go. A crushing defeat for those of us who are State fans, but there are always books as consolation!

Here, for your perusal, are some more psalters in our collection with embroidered bindings. Make sure you look at this lovely dos-a-dos combination of New Testament and Book of Psalms, a great testament to the ways in which we adopt books to our uses. And I'll be back up to speed and my regular slow pace of posting soon--thanks for sticking around!

UPDATE: I've fixed the broken links for the zoomable images, so they should now work--but don't forget that you need to have your browser set to allow pop-up images!

Carnivalesque 48

Welcome, one and all, to Carnivalesque 48, the early modern edition!

As should come as no surprise, some of the most interesting posts on early modern studies in the last few months have come from two sources. Both Mercurius Politicus (written by Nick Poyntz) and diapsalmata (Whitney Anne Trettien) routinely have fabulous posts; I'll single out a couple here, but really, their blogs are worth reading regularly. Mercurius's Killing Noe Murder discusses Edward Sexby's 1648 pamphlet justifying the murder of Cromwell; part of Nick's concern is the production and distribution of the pamphlet, a theme he takes up in a broader examination of the rise of newsbooks in The Great Game.

There is some more material book history over at diapsalmata, where Whitney has been looking at the practice of cut-ups in a series of posts. The first draws connections between early modern commonplacing, Dada cut-ups, and digital poetry--a great synthesis of material reading and writing practices across the centuries. There are also recent posts on the Little Gidding "harmonies" and the function of manicules in early printed books that are beautifully illustrated and elucidatory.

I'm not done with book history yet: bookn3rd looks at the history of anatomy illustrations and BibliOdyssey reproduces some illustrations of early machine technology from Heinrich Zeising's 1612 Theatri Machinarum--read through the post comments for further information on Zeising, and notice the illustration of the printing press.

The Scriblerus Memoirs writes about reading Paradise Lost while thinking about Google, and comes up with some observations about searching and knowledge, and angels and algorithms. At Early Modern Whale, Roy Booth has been thinking about murder and comes up with The awful plot again Curate Trat. Over at Parezco y digo, Chad Black's thoughts about etymology and sodomy lead to a thoughtful exploration of gender and sexuality and its linguistic markers in eighteenth-century Latin America.

A few libraries have started blogs to highlight their collections, and there's been some great stuff showing up. The Wellcome Library's post on "The Tribulations of Father Bernardo" is a great discussion of the seventeenth century Genoese painter Bernardo Strozzi. Yale's Beinecke Library has a blog devoted to our period; many times those posts simply feature images of works, but this one not only shows but discusses a mid-seventeenth century commonplace book including Donne poems. The Beinecke is also behind this word-a-day blog of Dr Johnson's Dictionary--not only will you expand your vocabulary, you'll see Johnson's annotations to the first edition as he prepared for the fourth edition. Never has encyclopedia seemed more fitting. Yale is also home to the Yale Law Library, which has its own blog that features, on occasion, early modern materials; here is a series of posts about their collection of early Italian statutes.

There's been some great blogging around book reviews in the last month or so, too. At In the Middle, a group blog for medieval studies, Karl Steel reviews James Simpson's early modern focused Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents, succeeding not only in a thoughtful response to Simpson's book but in starting a smart discussion in the post's comments.

Judith Bennett's History Matters: Feminism and the Challenge of the Patriarchy is the subject of a roundtable discussion by a series of feminist historians, with each post touching on some important questions about what it means to be a historian, what it means to be a feminist, and what it means for the two to intersect. The first discussion is hosted by Notorious PhD; the second by Historiann (don't miss her follow-up in which she expounds on why "Lawrence Stone is a tool"); and the third discussion is hosted by Tenured Radical. Part 4 will appear at Another Damned Medievalist on March 23, and the final part will feature Bennett herself at Notorious PhD.

I realize, by the way, that this is a medieval-heavy cast of characters, but the discussion is certainly relevant for our period, too. If you're aching for some meta-discussion about the implications of history and labels by someone based in the early modern period, check out the thoughts of Chronologi Cogitationes on what it means to do "maritime history."

But let's leave things on a lighter, more popular note. Some of you might have noticed some talk about a discovery of a painting of someone. But who? Shakespeare? Overbury? Stanley Wells says it's Shakespeare, but he's almost the only one. Mr Shakespeare's blog gives an overview (and lots of links, including the huge discussion at the New York Times blog, The Lede) but withholds judgment; Adam Gopnik, blogging for the New Yorker, is thoroughly unconvinced.

Many thanks to all of you who submitted nominations, and particular thanks to these great bloggers who made doing this so much fun. Happy reading!

Update: Mr Shakespeare's blog posted this latest yesterday, with greater skepticism about the portrait, summarizing and linking to articles recounting the doubts of National Portrait Gallery curator Tarnya Cooper about the portrait as being of Shakespeare and providing some insight into why we should be happy to have a newly discovered portrait of Thomas Overbury.

Carnivalesque nominations: time's a tickin'!

If you haven't already done so, get your blog post nominations in for Carnivalesque 48, the early modern edition! If you've come across--or if you've written--a great blog post that concerns the period 1500 to 1800, please let me know about it by emailing me or by using the nomination form. I'll be posting my edition this weekend, so get your suggestions in now!

I assume most of you recognize the image I've used to illustrate my theme of time's a tickin'--it's Abraham Lincoln's watch, recently opened up by the Smithsonian to reveal messages inscribed on the underside of the watch movement. It seemed appropriate for this post not simpy because it demonstrates the passage of time, nor because it lets me demonstrate my fondness for things pertaining to Lincoln, although it does do both of those things wonderfully. But it also gestures toward something that I am not usually concerned with, given my focus on things bookish: writing happens not only on paper and on parchment, not only in the context of books and blogs, but in a wider range of contexts and on a wider range of materials than we sometimes remember to consider. I don't know when I'll be returning to this theme, but the place to go for learning more about this sort of writing practice in our period is Juliet Fleming's Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania P, 2001).

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.