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

Podcast available on the seminar page!

In the fourth paper of our seminar series on Thursday 17 May, Dr Glenn Roe – formerly of the University of Chicago, and current Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities at Oxford’s OERC – gave a sophisticated and suggestive paper on ‘Text-Mining Electronic Enlightenment: Influence and Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters’.

.
Building on his recent work with the Electronic Enlightenment corpus and other online repositories of long-form historical text, Glenn started his talk by observing the irony that the recent efflorescence of big data, culturomics, network analysis, and other quantitative approaches to culture – focusing in many cases on the macro interpretation of metadata over content – has authorized and promoted a convention of ‘not reading’ within the digital humanities, in which historical texts themselves can be marginalized or effaced altogether by the superabundance of information. The ready modelling of letters as a finite number of abstract datapoints (sender, recipient, and so on) and the vast quantities of diverse and often disorganized information exchanged within epistolary systems makes correspondence highly susceptible to such an approach.

Glenn during discussion.

Visualizing influence.

As a supplement to this ‘distant’ reading, Glenn went on to demonstrate the potential of the latest machine-learning technologies to render significant volumes of transcription meaningful via text mining and the automated creation of patterns, frequencies, statistical models, and other forms of ‘mediated’ or ‘directed’ reading. Glenn distinguished between three kinds of text mining: predictive classification (used to generate new categories from unprocessed texts); comparative classification (used to correct and refine existing categories within processed texts); and similarity (used to measure broader similarities between documents and parts of documents, especially in terms of the identification of meaningful borrowing and instances of intertextuality). He then demonstrated each kind of approach within a rich series of examples drawn from his work with the ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, and most recently Electronic Enlightenment, before concluding his analysis by presenting – with caveats – some preliminary radial visualizations of textual influence generated using the D3 JavaScript library.

With its whirl of bunting, teapots, cotton frocks, and the river pageant, Diamond Jubilee fever is sweeping the country for just the second time in British history. Early modern subjects might not have had the opportunity to celebrate a sixty-year reign, but it’s clear from Early Modern Letters Online – itself replete with royalty from across Europe – that they knew how to mark in style royal and aristocratic betrothals, marriages, and birthdays, whilst countrywide celebrations of military victories and triumphant peace treaties helped bolster national unity.

Then, as now, cities, towns, and institutions arranged peals of bells, official gun salutes, and lavishly styled river pageants for their inhabitants to enjoy. Eminent speakers delivered orations and sermons from pulpits at moments of national importance – we read how ‘Dr. Sherlock is to preach in St. Pauls before Q.Anne to celebrate the glorys and triumphs of the late victorys in Germany. “You may easily imagine that the D. of M. will have no inconsiderable part in the panegyrie”’. Professional intelligencer John Pory wrote to Sir Robert Cotton in 1607 describing the masque Hymenaei which was designed by Inigo Jones and written by Ben Jonson to celebrate the marriage of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and Lady Francis Howard (not that of Prince Henry, as erroneously noted in the abstract). Just as we do today, they enjoyed firework spectaculars; and at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession we find ‘an invitation to the freeholders of Canterbury to partake of a roast ox, bread and beer to celebrate Peace on July 8’ (a service in St Paul’s Cathedral was held also to mark the Peace of Utrecht, at which Handel’s Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate was given its premiere). As one might expect, bonfires and beacons lit the night sky on numerous occasions and finery was donned for balls and dances, but, in a week during which the highlight here at Cultures of Knowledge has been a paper on the correspondence of James I’s daughter Elizabeth Stuart (podcast to come!), the ‘Winter Queen’ reminds us what’s missing today: scheduled into the festivities that marked her marriage to Frederick, Elector Palatine is the description of a ritual we have lost in these modern celebrations – the tilting match, or joust. Something to suggest to cyclists at the local street party?

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. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

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

Since its arrival from the New World and a serendipitous combination with milk and sugar the cacao bean has held European taste-buds in its thrall, and those who craved ‘a fix’ during the Lenten fast might empathise with Andreas Colvius who wrote to Isaac Vossius in 1643 with a request to salute the Spaniards and ‘ask for a description of chocolate’ together with ‘a capsule of it’.

A commodity from the outset – its shipment and delivery by carrier would have been awaited with impatience – and, as addictive then as now, chocolate was what Heinsius pleaded with Graevius to remember, and its price was of particular interest to the early modern consumer: in addition to an enclosed ‘packet of Chocolate’, in 1712 Sir Philip Sydenham considered it worth passing on to the master of University College, Arthur Charlett, that what he could buy in ‘Oxford for 4/-’ was ‘2/6 better’ in Bath.

Cherry-picking letters in EMLO as indolently as truffles, I’ve encountered a physician indulge his son as he slips treats into books and sends with pamphlets ‘three pounds of the best chocolate he ever made using double refined sugar’, and reading of the drink prescribed to Thomas Brett as part of a beneficial diet (‘chocolate, no tea, coffee is the devil’), and of Brett himself hoping to host Lady Cotton with the delicacy. The year before his death, Savilian professor of Astronomy Edward Bernard considered chocolate ‘with chicken broth’ (itself a well-known restorative) to be his ‘greatest diet’, whilst a doting niece sent a treat to her uncle Thomas Turner, president of Corpus Christi, Oxford, together with instructions to ‘make and flavour the drink’. Chocolate ‘without vanillias’ was dispatched in gratitude to botanist Richard Richardson, and Richardson penned a request that cocoa seeds be sought out in Jamaica and brought home.

It was the ubiquitous Hans Sloane who suggested the addition of milk (having considered chocolate too bitter when drunk, as in Jamaica, with water) and, convinced of its beneficial properties, promoted this practice back home. As a beverage, chocolate was swiftly normalised within metropolitan society and a range of consumer behaviours developed around the exotic new product. Individuals began to meet ‘over cups of chocolate’ and chocolate houses proliferated. One such establishment was ‘Mrs White’s’ (forerunner of the esteemed club) and Richard Rawlinson recorded its calamitous destruction by fire in a letter to Thomas Hearne. This fire, emanating from a room named ‘Hell’, burned with such ferocity that the licencee’s wife hurled herself through a window and, as Rawlinson notes, it destroyed a significant portion of Sir Andrew Fountain’s valuable art collection. A century after Sloane’s death, Cadbury Brothers chose to market Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate with the following instructions: ‘one Ounce of Chocolate (which is two Squares) to a Pint of boiling Milk, or a pint of Milk and Water; add Sugar and milk as other Chocolate’. Today, I hope, like our early modern forebears, you will take a slab of best-quality chocolate and create a treat to revive purged palates, perhaps whilst savouring a rich assortment of early modern letters.

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. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Indulge

Having stumbled across a discussion, inter alia, of early modern sleep and nocturnal activity in an article on the BBC News website, I found myself deep in EMLO this week on the elusive trail of sleeping patterns and experiences. As you might expect, cacophonous night-time irritants – cockerels, ostlers ‘scraping horses down and removing stones from their hooves’, fellow academics and students discoursing in the small hours – conspired to rob the worthy of their peace at night. We find poor Comenius and Johan Christoph Wolf suffering from insomnia, the latter ‘prostrated’ as a result. Sir John Cotton records being ‘indisposed for want of sleep’, and Narcissus Marsh finds himself so overworked he is rendered ‘unable to stand without help and more fit to sleep than write’. Dutch scholar and poet Nicolaas Heinsius the elder deserves our sympathy. Clearly a poor sleeper, he makes repeated reference to sleeplessness in letters spanning from 1650 to 1680, and the problem seems to have become especially acute towards the end of his life. Had he known of her, he might have envied the unfortunate unnamed woman, the subject of a curious case recorded in 1723, who slept ‘continuously for more than 6 weeks’ (presumably she was in some sort of coma).

Tips and recommendations for more effective slumber abound. To aid sleep, I found remedies of a cowslip mixture prescribed by Sir Hans Sloane to a long-suffering patient, and advice to Arthur Charlett, should he wish to sleep during the day, to indulge himself but to ‘sleep in a chair & not lying down’. The best counsel, however, came from none other than our own Jan Amos Comenius who, in a letter to a young man called Jindřich Dobříkovský, suggested dividing the day, taking eight hours for sleep, eight for work and study, and eight for recreation. All wonderfully wholesome and wise. As late as 1785, John Scott Hylton was writing to the Reverend Mark Noble with rules for ‘healthy living (light supper, bed and asleep by 11: nocturnal studies as bad as nocturnal revels)’. No excuse, then, for either of these gentlemen dropping off in the library.

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. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Snooze Button