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

As world economies stagger from one crisis to the next and headlines flip-flop between the Eurozone emergency and the scandal of inter-bank lending rate fixing, EMLO provides valuable historical insights into financial turbulence and the effects of similar bubbles and crashes. We may face fresh causes of fiscal breakdown today, but the boom and bust cycle is far from new.

One of the best-known early modern monetary madnesses surrounds the South Sea Bubble and EMLO teems with letters charting its frenzied course, from punters investing and reaping rewards (Heneage Finch asks Hilkiah Bedford to ‘receive on his behalf the interest on £600 East India Bonds’), to the grim aftermath as international recession set in.

Our letters chart the bubble as it swells, bursts, and stocks plummet dramatically, often in a matter of hours. In early August 1720 shares were worth £1,000; eight weeks later they stood at a mere £150. Swathes of society were ruined. Reports of fraud and wrongdoing proliferated. Parliament struggled to deal with the situation. Taxes were levied. Banks tried to enforce regulations and conditions, refusing ‘to discuss any Government proposals about the S.Sea affairs unless Mr. Walpole is made First Comr. of the Treasury’. A committee was established to investigate, but in the words of Thomas Isted ‘[a]ll thoughts are at present on the Directors of the South Sea Company who by their villanies have brought this ruin on the nation’. Heads rolled (albeit not from the block), reputations lay in tatters. A bizarre mock funeral, organised by Duke of Wharton, may have been conducted through the streets of London (see John Carswell’s 1960 publication The South Sea Bubble), but this was far from the end of the affair; in an increasingly interlinked and interdependent early modern world, financial crises were international problems and, in the same year as the South Sea debacle, France saw the collapse of Laws’ Mississippi bubble.

It was a time of high anxiety, with ‘goldsmith and merchants falling’ and money scarce. Repercussions ricocheted far and wide. William King, archbishop of Dublin wrote ‘The South Sea and the interruption of the trade with France & Spain has drained Ireland of money’, and in scholarly quarters Sir Anthony Wescome lamented he was unable to afford more of Hearne’s publications. Inflation soared as ‘The South Sea makes everything dear’. Some were fortunate to preserve a portion of their family’s wealth (including Lord Sutherland who, as First Lord of the Treasury, was one of the political casualties); others were not, and begging letters abound. As countless enterprises suffered setbacks and stringent cuts, those seeking charity faced an uphill struggle even during the boom itself, as politician and architect George Clarke revealed when, in April 1720, he sent ‘two old shirts & two guineas to some decayed gentleman for whom A.C. has appealed, fears that in spite of the affluence caused by the rise of the South Sea Stock there is little charity stirring’. Across Europe, lives were altered as a result of the crash, and ‘in almost everyone’s face’ Dr John Harris picked out ‘some fear or fatal mark of ye South Sea Project’.

From these depressingly familiar circumstances, one slim silver lining emerges tucked in a letter from a young physician called Samuel Jebb. Nuptial bliss with his beloved seemed increasingly likely following ‘her aunt’s losses in the South Sea’ as the social distance between the two lovers was correspondingly diminished. A form of justice, perhaps.

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.

Following on from our participation in a Wikimedia-sponsored data workshop back in April, our technical director Neil Jefferies has published an excellent opinion piece on Representing Knowledge: Metadata, Data, and Linked Data in the latest issue of The Signpost, the community-edited newspaper covering Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Neil draws on his extensive experience of knowledge management in both the commercial and academic library sectors to make a convincing case for flexible and non-prescriptive data models. Go read it!

Here in the British Isles, summer is living up to its reputation: that is to say, we’re armed with umbrellas, and battling wind, rain, and flood on a daily basis. Indeed, a seasonal dip into EMLO reveals that heavy rainfall from May to September was not such an unusual occurrence.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century summers saw floods the length of the Cherwell valley. There were thunderstorms, whirlwinds and panic-stricken haymakers, damaged crops, stormy summer nights, as well as danger and disruption to transport. There were stiff August winds in the Solent and delays with naval manoeuvres on account of storms in the Channel. The summer of 1682 seems to have been especially wet. Magistrate Edmund Warcup laments the effects of rain on his corn and grass, of floods on his fields and livestock – the poor chap lives in fear of cattle rot – and is forced to take action against the deluge. On 9 May of this same year, clergyman William Jenkyn wrote to Philip Wharton to warn him that ‘the floods are out so bad between Uxbridge & London that it is very dangerous to travel so advises his Lordship to postpone his journey’.

Thus, although all was not gloom and doom during these seasonal soaks (James Long informs John Aubrey that lamprey eels are ‘plentiful in flood time’), it’s small wonder that the time-honoured cliché of sodden summers came into being. As we forego sandals and shorts for galoshes and gumboots, it’s worth reflecting that our ancestors may have been thankful for cold, wet summers as, with the heat in cities, came plague (more on that in a future post), and fine weather was not a cure for all ills. On 6 June 1677 Robert Digby wrote to Thomas Smith that he hoped to see him at the next sitting of Parliament ‘if I can get rid of my cough which wears away, God be thanked, very much this kind weather’, yet favourable temperatures did not work magic in this case; the poor young man was dead by the end of the year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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