Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Podcast available on the seminar page!

The zoological theme continued on Thursday 3 May when Florike Egmond from Leiden University (formerly of the Clusius Project) gave a talk in our seminar series entitled The Webs of Clusius and Gessner: Correspondence, Images, and Collecting in Sixteenth-Century Natural History. In a detailed and lavishly illustrated discussion, Florike described her recent discovery of two albums of original watercolour drawings created for the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1551-1558) within the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam.

Crafted in Basel by the anatomist and natural historian (and Gessner’s friend) Felix Platter (1536-1614), the images – of a menagerie of marine life, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, across 369 pages – formed the basis of many of the illustrations within Gessner’s zoological masterwork, the Historiae Animalium (1551-1558). You can find out more about this exciting discovery in Florike’s recent blog post for the Picturing Science network, and in her recent article for the Journal of the History of Collections.

Conrad Gessner.

Anna Marie chairs Florike.

Renaissance correspondence networks, argued Florike, played a key role in sharing and disseminating (although not, curiously, in facilitating discussion of) manuscript images, as both Gessner, Clusius, and other naturalists solicited hand-drawn illustrations of animals to serve as the basis of woodcuts in their publications from colleagues and agents around the world. These exchanges, in turn, formed the basis of what Florike termed (with caveats) a kind of visual ‘canon formation’ within natural history, as elements of various portrayals were adapted, reworked, and reappropriated across different contexts and between media; as representational norms stabilized; and as the repertoire of animals deemed suitable for inclusion in zoological texts (whose wide remit originally encompassed familiar creatures such as cats and goats) was narrowed and standardized. A lively question and answer session focused on the artisanal communities responsible for producing the illustrations; how the works were commissioned and stored; and the frustrating but typical absence of any kind of discussion of manuscript images in the letters with which they circulated (resulting, suggested Florike, from the self-evident nature of enclosed materials).

Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series – and to listen to the podcast of Florike’s paper – please see the seminar webpage. All are welcome!

While Anna Marie was weaving animal magic at the Royal Society, our Technical Director Neil Jefferies and I were headed to the Forzhungszentrum Gotha of the University of Erfurt for an invited workshop on ‘Visualizing Data Resources: The Potential of  a Wikimedia Platform for the Digital Humanities’ (27–28 April 2012). Expertly organised by Martin Mulsow, Olaf Simons, and Kristina Petri, and generously funded by Wikimedia Deutschland – the largest and most active of the national chapters – the workshop provided an inspiring forum for a wide range of international participants and projects to share approaches and converge on the question of Wikipedia, the digital humanities, visualizations, and many points in between (see the full description [pdf]).

One set of presentations showcased the Wikimedia community’s own plans for data capture and computational seeing, many of which have great potential for the digital humanities; not always a straightforward relationship, as Olaf discussed in his opening address. These include Wikidata (a collaboratively curated, centralised database of entities designed to support the 280+ language editions of Wikipedia, as well as third-party initiatives, currently under development), and Semantic Mediawiki, an open source extension to Wikipedia capable of (re)organizing the site’s existing content into highly configurable, collectively editable semantic databases. The accumulation and management of structured, actionable (wiki)data within these streamlined platforms will facilitate the creation and deployment of information visualizations across the site’s many interfaces, and by its millions of users in the context of exports and mash-ups.

Scott Weingart (Indiana/CKCC), Neil (CofK/Oxford), James (CofK/Oxford), and Nicole Coleman (MRofL/Stanford).

Andreas Wolter (ImpulsBauhaus), Jens Weber (ImpulsBauhaus), and Judith Pfeiffer (IMPAcT/Oxford).

A second cluster of talks focused on the data capture, curation, and visualization techniques and applications being pursued and developed by humanistic projects based in archives, libraries, and universities worldwide. As well as presentations from ourselves and good friends Mapping the Republic of Letters, The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, CKCC, IMPAcT, and Scott Weingart, we heard about (inter alia) linked data and gamification at the University of Colorado; an adaptive, interactive, dynamic historical atlas (AIDA) being created at the University of Erfurt; and the wonderful ImpulsBauhaus initiative based at the the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Designed to collect information on and represent the global social networks of the Bauhaus, and led by the designer-developer team Jens Weber and Andreas Wolter in 2009, the project harvested extensive biographical and prospopgraphical data on the movement’s participants and affiliates within a specially designed platform which served as the basis for dynamic network infographics and an interactive three-dimensional table, presented most memorably within an illuminated cube. A video of this extraordinary project opens the post.

Podcasts on the conference page!

In commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the death of Martin Lister, and in another collaboration between Cultures of Knowledge and The Royal Society, our indefatigable Lister Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos organized a conference on History Comes to Life: Seventeenth-Century Natural History, Medicine, and the New Science at the Society’s London premises on 27 April 2012.

Generously sponsored by the project, The Royal Society, The Wellcome Trust, the John Fell Fund, and the BSHS, sixty-three delegates attended the day-long event, which featured papers from eleven international authorities on early modern science. Speakers discussed everything from the views of French naturalists about the differences between dromedaries and camels, to the chequered history of the publication of the cabinet of natural curiosities of Albertus Seba, to the ornithology of Francis Willughby and John Ray and the scientific representation of frogs and toads.

Helen Watt, our Lhwyd researcher.

Perusing the exhibition.

Anna Marie talks to Jill Lewis.

Early modern ornithologies.

There was a concomitant exhibition in the Royal Society’s Marble Hall, also curated by Anna Marie, featuring a display of relevant books from the Society’s collections; highlights were a bear paw clam displayed alongside its illustration by Lister’s daughters in his Historiae Conchyliorum (1692-97), and John Ray’s Historia Plantarum, in which Ray deployed the terms ‘petal’ and ‘pollen’ for the first time. In a further exciting output, Anna Marie will guest edit a special conference issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society (December 2012) dedicated to the complex interplay between seventeenth-century medicine and natural history. Dovetailing out from Lister’s own contributions, the special issue will consider to what extent practices and technologies of natural history changed between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, and will explore how the acquisition of knowledge concerning the natural world and new taxonomies affected the perception and treatment of beasts for medical and experimental use.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

Alison fields questions.

Bess in the 1590s.

Dr Alison Wiggins of the University of Glasgow got our third seminar series off to a brilliant start on 26 April with a sophisticated and thought-provoking presentation on Editing Bess of Hardwick’s Letters Online. As Principal Investigator of the Letters of Bess Hardwick Project (funded by the AHRC), Alison described the benefits and methodological challenges of digitizing this unique Renaissance correspondence, which consists of approximately 245 extant letters (160 to and 85 from Bess) scattered across 18 different repositories spanning a period of nearly 60 years.

Using several examples drawn from the corpus, Alison argued that making all of the letters available in an open-access, fully searchable online edition will enable scholars to pursue a wide range of linguistic, sociological, and historical questions, and will allow them to arrive at a much more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the character of Bess herself, who has been variously depicted as a materialistic virago or as an admirable defender of women’s honour.

Moving on to more methodological questions, Alison explained that capturing and communicating significant information on the material and visual features of letters, such as the writer’s use of ‘significant space’, paper quality and size, the employment of colourful silk ribbons and flosses, seal choice, and the many varieties of folding, can be particularly difficult in a digital environment, which has a tendency to reify disembodied text at the expense of the letter-object (concerns also raised by Henry Woudhuysen and James Daybell in previous talks). This is a significant problem, since such information is not just antiquarian micro-detail; on the contrary, for contemporary recipients, all of these carefully considered material decisions on the part of the sender conveyed specific social meanings about politeness, deference, and hierarchy which set important parameters for the reception and consumption of a letter’s written content. However, such physical variables and their nuances are not easy to capture faithfully with a simple measurement or colour chart reference in a metadata field. The solutions developed by Alison and her team in the context of the Bess project (such as encoding each of the four recognized kinds of letter-fold − tuck and fold, slit and band, accordion, and sewn − within each letter’s XML to facilitate searching and filtering by plicature and packet type) genuinely move forward thinking in this oft-neglected area and will be of great interest to other digital initiatives.

Following a brief, appetite-whetting demonstration of the Bess letters alpha software, a lively question and answer session concluded the seminar, which covered such topics as the sociolinguistic significance of employing scribes and the iconographic implications of Bess using her ‘ES’ signature both in letters and as architectural embellishment on her stately home, Hardwick Hall. Broader concerns were also addressed, including the need for digital projects to produce REF-friendly outputs – an increasingly important theme – and ways of ensuring the preservation and accessibility of online resources long after project funding comes to an end. The soon-to-be-released Bess of Hardwick Letters Online will include annotated transcriptions of all of the letters and images of many, as well as articles and podcasts offering further contextual analyses of the correspondence. For news about its release date, stay tuned!

Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series – and to listen to the podcast of Alison’s paper – please see the seminar webpage. All are welcome!

Part of my work on the Bodleian card catalogue involves identifying people mentioned in the abstracts and when two friars, going by the names of ‘Joan: Mario, and Julio Cesare’, appeared on my screen in a letter dated 14 February 1614, the temptation to find out who they were proved too great to resist; little did I realise that one small card would have such a tale to tell.

Besides these names, the only information from which to launch my search was that they appeared to have been in England in 1614 when John King (Bishop of London from 1611 to his death in 1621) was writing, possibly to Thomas James, the first librarian of Thomas Bodley’s collection (the Bodleian manuscript is in James’s hand), with the information that the duo had ‘proved themselves false’, that the ‘former has escaped & the latter has given a very equivocating answer when examined before the Archbishop and other Bishopes’.

From an online search, Giulio Cesare Vanini, also known as Lucilio, a Carmelite friar, born c.1585 in southern Italy, emerged. An entry for him at the Galileo Project describes ‘a charismatic character and wherever he went he collected patrons like flies around honey’ including none other than Dudley Carleton, English ambassador in Venice from 1610-15, whom, apparently, he charmed ‘right out of his shoes’. A Carmelite, Vanini had moved from Naples to Padua where his Venetian sympathies incurred papal disapproval and, in consequence, he was granted asylum in England, where he renounced his Catholic faith and was taken in by George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury. Nowhere in this account, however, was a ‘Joan: Mario’ mentioned. Googling every conceivable variation of name with a selection of dates, I picked up a link to an article of 1895 in The English Historical Review. And here was Giovanni Maria, fellow Carmelite and travelling companion of Vanini; the two appear to have met at Padua.

Having converted and renounced Catholicism, the friars hoped for advancement and when this did not materialise (the article by Richard Copley Christie continues to quote John Chamberlain relaying to Carleton that Vanini was unhappy as he was ‘fain to make his own bed and sweep his chamber, things he was never put to in the place whence he came’; whilst Giovanni Maria, who was at this point lodging with the archbishop of York, Tobie Matthew, complained that he was used to living ‘not in cities not towns but in villa, and thereupon subscribed his name Johannes in Deserto’) made overtures back to Rome. In February 1614, Giovanni Maria escaped from a window in the house where he had been placed by Abbot, climbing down a rope fashioned from sheets. Vanini was imprisoned post-haste in the Lambeth Gatehouse, and there was talk of banishing him ‘into the Barmudas there to dig for his living’. Yet he too contrived to escape and crossed the channel. Bermuda might have proved a happier destination, for he met his end at the stake (having first had his tongue cut out) in Toulouse in 1619. Of Giovanni Maria, who seems to have been spirited abroad by the Spanish ambassador, no more is heard… and John King moves on to the Index Expurgatorius.

Letters in Focus with Miranda Lewis

Miranda is editing metadata from the Bodleian card catalogue of correspondence for our union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online. Each week, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Launch Record of the Week

I’ve recently returned from the Situating Early Modern Science Networks workshop at the University of Saskatchewan in a chilly but sunny Saskatoon. Hosted by Dr Lisa Smith (who we met when she gave an excellent paper on Hans Sloane’s correspondence in our 2011 seminar series), the two-day event (12-13 April) saw scholars from the UK, Canada and the US – generously funded by the conference – speak about early modern networks from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including English, History, and the History of Science.

Introducing the catalogue.

Post-presentation discussion.

My paper ‘Digitizing Gender: Women’s Correspondence and Knowledge Networks in the Early Modern Era’ focused on the ideological and technical challenges of digitizing gender, including the so-called ‘digital gender ghetto’ wherein data on early modern women is only collected and made accessible within gender-specific online silos. Such resources, while valuable, raise methodological and conceptual difficulties; not only does the information they contain often get bypassed by large portions of the scholarly community, but the long-standing trope that early modern women occupied a hermetically sealed separate sphere is implicitly reinforced, sustaining unhelpful assumptions that they were not fully engaged in intellectual or public life. To overcome this predicament, I suggested that we need to develop digital systems which can link or speak to each other so that data on men and women can be interrogated simultaneously. By doing this, the role played in early modern knowledge communities by individuals such as Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, or Dorothy Moore Dury, for example, can be properly assessed and appreciated within a wider network of both male and female individuals and correspondents.

The ‘Digital Coffee House’.

EMLO on the big screen.

The potential for online resources to facilitate and manifest these kinds of connections became clear during the hands-on ‘Digital Coffeehouse’ portion of the workshop, during which participants were introduced to the following array of early modern digital resources: The Digital Ark, The Newton Project, The Sloane Printed Books Project, The Grub Street Project, The Textual Communities Project, Digital MappaeMundi, and our own Early Modern Letters Online. Future digital collaborations may well result! The conference was rounded out with a thought-provoking talk by Professor Robert Iliffe on the implications for scholarly work arising from the increasing digitization of the academic infrastructure. His presentation sparked a lively debate during the roundtable discussion on the future of online scholarship which covered how the UK’s REF (Research Excellence Framework) assessments handle digital humanities outputs; the ownership of digital materials; concerns about scholars losing old skills and values in favour of new ones; and a consideration of the perils and benefits of crowdsourcing.