Guest-edited by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, and developing out of a conference held at Plymouth University in 2011, the issue features an introduction to the latest developments in the field (in which EMLO gets a name-check); eight case studies of particular correspondents and correspondence networks; and a spectacularly useful select bibliography on the manuscript letter in early modern England. All articles are free for download from the journal website. James also contributed to our 2011 seminar series (here’s the podcast), while his latest book on the material letter has just been reviewed by the IHR.

So, the evenings draw in, All Hallows’ Eve is upon us, and I find myself creeping through autumnal mists to the Bodleian’s Special Collections in search of ghosts.

There are many fleeting glimpses of hauntings in EMLO. In 1675, William Fulman asked Anthony Wood to confirm ‘the story of a ghostly funeral procession at night to St Peter le Bailey which terrified some of the Masters who were walking with the Proctor, but two which followed the procession to the Church door found the doors to open of their own accord, and then all to vanish and are since dead’. In 1706, Anne Griggs reported ‘the ghostly interview at Souldern Vicarage between the Vicar Mr Shaw and the apparition of his friend Mr Naylor on July 28… The apparition foretells the death of Mr Shaw…’ (sadly, Mr Naylor was a well-informed ghost; the Clergy of the Church of England Database [Person ID: 20286] reveals that one Geoffrey Shaw, rector of Soulderne, Oxfordshire, died on 17 November 1706, less than four months after this ghoulish encounter).

Bodleian Library, MS Ballard 1, fols 72–73: A seventeenth-century poltergeist. Images reproduced courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries.

One record above all others tempts me out into the damp October fog: on a handwritten index card from the Bodleian card catalogue that gives no year, and describes a John Mompesson writing to a Reverend Doctor (now known to be William Creed, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity) on 6 December (now known to be 1662), are the words ‘supernatural beating of drums’. Calling up the letter, I encounter a spine-chilling tale of a seventeenth-century household terrorized by a poltergeist. Mompesson describes how, following his apprehension of a fraudulent drummer in Ludgershall (Wiltshire) and the confiscation of the latter’s instrument, his family home in nearby Tedworth (now Tidworth) was assailed by nocturnal thumps and noises so extreme that ‘the windows would shake and the beds’. His children were special targets; apart from a brief interlude of three weeks after his wife gave birth, their beds were beaten, and the family had to endure the tune ‘Roundheads and Cuckolds goe digge, goe digge’ (more on this popular early modern ditty here). Whatever ‘it’ was ran ‘under the bed-teeke’ and scratched as if it had ‘iron talons’, tossing the young ones in bed; it left sulphurous smells, it hurled shoes over the heads of adults, pulled the infants by their nightgowns and hair, and even threw a bedstaff at the rector of Tedworth, John Cragge (CCED Person ID: 21834, yet another cleric who died relatively soon after his brush with the supernatural). See the letter images above for the whole terrifying story.

A demonic representation of the Tedworth drummer from Glanvill’s 1681 treatise

Endorsements on the letter, including a cross-reference to a 1663 news book

The Drummer of Tedworth, it turns out, is a celebrated case within the historiography of witchcraft and the early modern occult; it was given a central place in Joseph Glanvill’s 1681 attack on scepticism, the Saducismus Triumphatus, its notoriety continued to grow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it has even been subject to minor Disneyfication. The incident, its manuscript witnesses, and its complex appropriation and memorialisation by and within different intellectual traditions is analysed in detail in a 2005 article (pdf) by Michael Hunter, which includes a full transcription of this same 6 December letter collated from three known extant versions: a copy in Corpus Christi, Oxford; a now untraceable copy formerly in a private collection in Dorset; and a copy in the hand of Anthony Wood. The document thrown up by our cryptic Bodleian card record is almost certainly not Mompesson’s original letter – there is no seal, and the lines extending to the page edges on both sides of the folio are indicative of copying – but rather adds a fourth scribal copy into the mix, one that, judging by the endorsements in two separate hands, enjoyed a complex afterlife before becoming part of the Ballard collection, most likely via the papers of Arthur Charlett (on the scribal publication and circulation of newsworthy missives in early modern England see chapter seven of James Daybell’s recent monograph on the material letter and his podcast in our 2011 seminar series). Even if this account is second-hand, close the curtains, pull up a chair, and get reading; there’s nothing like a percussive poltergeist to add drama and intrigue to Halloween…

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.

The event, organized by Rhodri Lewis and Noel Malcolm and attended by a record audience of over 100 delegates, assembled an all-star cast of eighteen international authorities on early modern letters, who over a three-day programme explored and celebrated the ways in which intellectual interests and activities of all kinds were pursued and propagated through correspondence during the long seventeenth century.

Rhodri welcomes delegates and introduces the conference themes

Our largest ever audience packs the lecture theatre

Constance Blackwell, Philip Beeley, and Howard Hotson

Sir Keith Thomas and Anthony Grafton at the Scaliger Reception

Particular attention was paid to the epistolary experiences of groups and networks rather than those of particular individuals – and the role of letters in constituting these communities of practice – and to the ways in which exchanges of letters coexisted with, supplemented, or competed with other kinds of knowledge production during the period. Delegates were also treated to a demonstration of our union catalogue of correspondence, Early Modern Letters Online (video now on our infrastructure page); no fewer than two publisher-sponsored drinks receptions toasting exciting new publications and partnerships (details here); and an array of quiches, sandwiches, and cakes of unusual deliciousness crafted by Trevor and Cristina from the Organic Deli Café.

Miranda Lewis and Mordechai Feingold at the Scaliger Reception

Leigh Penman, Alexander Farquhar, and Noel Malcolm

A conference marches on its stomach: artisan quiches

Sandwiches on home-made bread also exceeded scholarly expectations

Videos of most of the proceedings will be available shortly; in the meantime, for further information, including speaker profiles and abstracts, check out the conference microsite. Details of further events in 2013 and 2014 will also be available in the coming months; to stay informed, please join our mailing list.

A leading journal in early modern studies, focusing in particular on close textual analyses of fresh sources and innovative interdisciplinary approaches, The Seventeenth Century is published four times per year. During the reception, over eighty delegates and guests assembled in the modern and airy senior common room and terrace of the Faculty of English to toast this new relationship over sparkling wine and delicious canapés provided by the Organic Deli Café. We were also treated to short speeches from Professor Richard Maber, General Editor of the journal and speaker at the conference, and Adam Burbage, Managing Editor at Routledge. In moves close to the Project’s heart, both described plans to increase the journal’s online presence, including the digitization of all back issues, full-colour publication online, a new digital submission and refereeing system for prospective authors, and a new journal website on Routledge’s cutting-edge platform.

Adam Burbage from Routledge samples some canapés

General Editor Richard Maber describes the new partnership

Guests circulate around the Routledge display table

Lilies, celebratory slides, sparkling wine, sparkling conversation

We congratulate Richard as well as Adam, Mark, Andrea, Rachel, and Louise from Routledge (and thank them for their help with and generous sponsorship of the reception), and wish The Seventeenth Century every success in its new home! Stay tuned to developments on the publisher’s website.

Post updated to include photographs

Our Martin Lister Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos has curated a small exhibition entitled ‘The Lister Sisters and the Art of Seventeenth-Century Science’, which will run in the Proscholium of the Old Bodleian Library from 18 August to 30 September (the poster can be downloaded here [pdf]). The free display showcases a unique set of drawings, prints, and copperplates of molluscs and their shells, (re)discovered among the library’s holdings by Anna Marie in 2010, which formed the basis for the illustrations in Martin Lister’s conchological magnum opus, the Historiae Conchyliorum (1685-92). Prepared by Lister’s teenage daughters, Susanna and Anna, the materials shed light on representational conventions within late seventeenth-century natural history, as well as on the gendered nature of illustrative practice in this boom era for lavishly illuminated scientific books. Anna Marie will also be giving a free lecture on ‘The Art of Science: The Rediscovery of the Lister Copperplates’ at 1pm on Wednesday 19 September in the Bodleian’s Convocation House (more info and booking on the library website). Further details of both events on The Conveyor.

Anna Marie in front of the display

Lecturing in Convocation House

In conversation with Stephen Johnston

The exhibition proves a hit

As I finalise annotations for Volume IV of The Correspondence of John Wallis (OUP), I encountered afresh one of the more curious letters in the corpus (pdf). In characteristic fashion for Wallis, the missive – written to Henry Oldenburg in April 1674 and read aloud at the Royal Society – concerns lofty topics, including Robert Hooke’s efforts to measure stellar parallax and thus to provide incontrovertible proof of the motion of the Earth. However, at the end of the letter, we find a rather more tragic story on a very human scale.

Wallis relates the tale of two young Danish scholars, the brothers Peter and Martin Rosenstand, who had resided in Oxford since late 1672 in the lodging house of a Mrs Mumford near the Sheldonian Theatre (Peter, incidentally, was the letter’s bearer). The pair rapidly gained a reputation throughout the city for combining impeccable scholarship, good manners, and sparkling wit; they were ‘civil persons, studious and good scholars’, according to Wallis, whose ‘commendable and ingenuous conversation’ had won them ‘acquaintance with persons of the best quality’. However, these halcyon days were not to last, for Wallis reports an ‘astonishing accident’ which took place the previous Candlemas Day (2 February). Martin, the elder brother at age twenty, ‘was found in the House of office, some distance from the house… he lay in, dead’, with severe contusions to the neck. Although his injuries were consistent with hanging, Wallis could not believe that such a dazzling young man could commit such a heinous act as ending his own life – suicide was a serious crime in early modern England – and so floated the theory to Oldenburg that Martin had ‘in his sleep, or dream, hanged himself… it is not accountable how it should be otherwise’. This consoling explanation was apparently widely shared by seventeenth-century Oxford’s great and good as news of the ignoble death of a rising star sent shockwaves through the quads: ‘It hath occasioned many discourses… and many stories of strange things done in sleep’.

The Sheldonian Theatre, in the vicinity of which the Rosenstands lodged

The yard of St Mary Magdalen parish church in St Giles

This ‘favourable’ view (in Wallis’s terms) was not, however, subscribed to by the Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, who provided a graphic account of the incident in his memoirs, the Life and Times (Volume II, pp. 280-1). While confirming Wallis’s claim that the siblings were ‘both the civilest men that ever came into that house [Mrs Mumford’s]’ (adding that Martin Rosenstand was ‘apt to blush’), for Wood the latter’s untimely passing was not a tragic misadventure but a willful act of self-destruction: ‘He rose up about four, struck fier, put off his shirt, went down naked (with his cote, loynings, hose and shoes in his armes), and so with the candle in his hand to the privy house, where (though I myself can just stand up in it) [he] hanged himself with his cravet, which came across his neck twice, upon a little rafter that went cross the house’. Moreover, in Wood’s version of events, Peter Rosenstand meddled with the scene in order to conceal his older brother’s actions: ‘His brother rising… went down to the privy house, and found him [Martin] stark naked hanging, tooke him downe and covered his privities with his coat, strived to conceal his death viz reporting that he died at his business’. This intervention notwithstanding, a surgeon ‘found that by his neck he had hanged himself’.

Whether Martin Rosenstand’s self-inflicted demise in a lavatory on a cold February morning in 1674 was deliberate or not, University coroner William Hopkins and his attending jury agreed with Wallis and the rest of Oxford’s learned community: the young Scandinavian had ‘hanged himself in his sleep… he dreamed of it, and so hanged himself’ (a verdict Wood deemed ‘doubtfull’). With the accidental nature of the death officially confirmed, Martin’s corpse was interred in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen parish church at the southern end of St Giles at ten o’clock the following night, ‘close under the wall next to the stile or passage’ (church burials were denied to victims of suicide). Perhaps tellingly, ‘nobody [was] present but the carriers and clerk of the parish’…

Our good friends and colleagues from Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (CKCC) at Huygens ING in The Hague have a shiny new website. Most excitingly, the revamped site contains a link and extensive supporting documentation for a closed beta (or prototype) of the much-anticipated Epistolarium, a virtual research environment in which users can explore and analyze metadata and full texts of c.20,000 scholarly Dutch letters from the period 1594-1707; see the video above for a rapid-fire introduction. As a long-standing collaborator of CKCC, we’ve been fortunate enough to get a sneak preview of this exciting new resource and will be providing feedback in advance of a full public release (and a resulting edited collection) in 2013. Congratulations to Charles, Guido, Walter, Wijnand, and the rest of the CKCC team!

If you would also like access to the Epistolarium beta, please contact charles.van.den.heuvel(at)huygens.knaw.nl.

An Index of Modernity: Narratives of Communications in the Late Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic

In his paper on 31 May, Konstantin Dierks (Indiana University) spoke about the shift in the latter half of the seventeenth century from an epistolary culture to a culture of ‘communications’. This conceptual transformation was brought about particularly by the British postal acts of 1657 and 1660 which saw the creation of the role of Postmaster General and a new infrastructure of communication comprised of reliable postal routes and a series of post offices which could be held to public account. Konstantin asserted that this new infrastructure was the result of a commercial rather than imperial vision in the first instance, but that it soon became very much linked to ideologies and discourses of modernity and empire as postal systems were developed in the Americas (Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Jamaica) which were subject to the regulatory powers of the Postmaster General in London. Konstantin argued that, rather than the intellectuals and scientists of the Republic of Letters, it was the merchants and innovators who most affected government institutions by successfully articulating an ideology around the growing importance of conveying letters and goods. In other words, early modern business and enterprise trumped intellectual enquiry when it came to influencing decisions of state. Plus ça change.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

‘An After-Suppers Work’: Sir Kenelm Digby and Varieties of Correspondence in the 1630s

Kenelm Digby

Joe fields questions

On 7 June, Joe Moshenska (University of Cambridge) spoke about the letters of natural philosopher and courtier Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), focusing especially on the impact his 1636 reconversion to Catholicism had on the nature of his correspondence. Although at the time Digby was viewed as an emblem of frivolity for being swept along in the series of fashionable Roman Catholic conversions of the 1630s, Joe showed, through a close reading of a number of letters, that Digby had actually been engaged in serious theological debate, regularly disputing with other thinkers about the true origins of the church. Digby’s correspondence was also used by Joe as a case study to explore more general questions about early modern letters. For instance, should the courtier’s 100-page work on the early church fathers, which was written in an epistolary fashion, be considered a letter or a treatise? What actually constitutes a letter? Furthermore, did early modern people assume that all letters were public documents unless the writer specifically indicated otherwise? Were explicit epistolary requests for secrecy, as found, for example, in Archbishop Laud’s letter to Digby after the latter’s conversion, genuine or mere rhetorical posturing? These and other questions about the primacy or authority of different letter versions – manuscript copies versus printed editions, for example – aroused productive methodological debate in the question and answer session.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

Editing Evelyn Editing Evelyn

John Evelyn

Discussions continue over dinner

David Galbraith (University of Toronto) brought the seminar series to an edifying close on 14 June with a paper describing the challenges of editing John Evelyn’s letterbook while also situating it within the context of his other, better-known works. Evelyn is an example of an early modern auto-archivist who, after an illness in the 1680s, began the task of reconstructing his papers for posterity in his diary and across four letterbooks. Like editors and archivists today, he used headnotes to identify his correspondents as well as an index, although he evidently had trouble dating some of his earlier communications. According to David, researchers have tended to focus solely on the diary, but it and the letterbooks were in fact parallel projects used by Evelyn as instruments of self fashioning in which he cast himself sometimes as a mediator or cultural broker between different social worlds, and other times as an agent in the transmission of knowledge or as an instructor in morality. David argued that the letters, more so than the diary, reveal a more personal side to Evelyn; he comes across as a funny, witty individual who was adept at self parody and who enjoyed the intimacy afforded by the epistolary genre. Furthermore, the letters, characterized by much stylistic variation, offer details of Evelyn’s life that are simply not found elsewhere in his oeuvre. For instance, John Beale is never mentioned in the diary, yet was Evelyn’s most prolific correspondent on gardens, a topic of enormous importance to the creator of Elysium Britannicum, an encyclopaedic assemblage of horticultural knowledge, practice, and wisdom of the seventeenth century.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

2010 Series and Podcasts

2011 Series and Podcasts

2012 Series and Podcasts

We wish to thank all twenty-six speakers, our hard-working convenors, our many chairs from within and beyond the Project, and our loyal audiences for contributing to the success of our three seminar series since 2010.

Much was irretrievably lost, but remarkably the letters he had exchanged with the learned men and women of Europe, including Kepler, Boulliau, Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens, Oldenburg, Wallis, and Kircher, together with his treasured collection of Kepler manuscripts, survived. At that time comprising thirteen volumes, the correspondence of Hevelius constitutes one of the great resources for the study and appreciation of early modern scientific networks.

Hevelius’s 45m focal-length telescope.

Johannes Hevelius.

Making this extraordinarily rich corpus available to the wider scholarly community is the task of a major collaborative editorial project currently underway in France, Germany, and Poland, of which I am pleased to be serving on the advisory committee. With most of the over 2,700 surviving letters now housed in collections at the BNF and the Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire in Paris, it was particularly fitting that the director of the French team Professor Chantal Grell (University of Versailles) – accompanied by Professor Robert Halleux (University of Liège) – should inform our third seminar series of the background and methodologies of this ambitious enterprise on Thursday 10 May. In a talk entitled ‘Editing the Correspondence of Johannes Hevelius: Networks, Themes, and Methodological Challenges’, Chantal first provided an overview of Hevelius’s life and letters, before giving a lively account of the complex archival afterlives of the astronomer’s epistolary collection following his death in 1687, including details of the letters famously purloined by Guillaume Libri in the mid-nineteenth century. Following a conspectus of Hevelius’s many correspondents, Chantal concluded with an analysis of the exemplary seventeenth-century scientific exchange between Hevelius and Pierre de Noyers, the secretary to the Queen of Poland. Following an interesting question and answer session – which included, inter alia, discussion of the benefits and challenges of balancing hard copy and digital outputs within large-scale correspondence projects – the evening came to fitting conclusion with a visit to the opening of the Renaissance in Astronomy exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science.

Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series, please see the seminar webpage. All are welcome!

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.