Record of Overdue Books and Fines. University of Pennsylvania Archives UPB 55, Box 6.

The entry recorded an overdue notice for a book checked out on May 11th, 1907. The book didn’t seem too remarkable – “Gummere, F.B. Handbook of poetics” – but I was struck by the tardy borrower, reader number 2785: “Mr. E.W. Pound.”

A quick look at a separate ledger of reader numbers showed reader 2785 to be “E.S. Pound” [sic] from Wyncote, Pa. of the College class of 1905:

Ledger of Library Readers’ names, University of Pennsylvania Archives UPB 55, Box 6.

This confirmed my suspicions that the overdue borrower was indeed the famous poet Ezra Pound who came to Penn from Wyncote in 1901 as a member of the class of 1905. He left Penn for his junior and senior years, graduating from Hamilton College in 1905. That year he returned to Penn for a masters program in Romance literature (apparently taking up his old reader number!). Pound completed his degree in 1906 but his last year at Penn, academic year 1906-07, was an unpleasant one. He failed to receive a fellowship to continue in the doctoral program and was told he would no longer be retained as an instructor [1].

One of Ezra Pound’s first published works of criticism “Raphaelite Latin” Book News Monthly 25.1 (September 1906), p. 31

The book Pound checked out that unhappy spring was an edition of Francis B. Gummere’s  A Handbook of Poetics for Students of English Verse (Boston, 1885 – other eds.:1888, 1892, 1895,1898,1902). Today the Penn Libraries hold three copies of the text in two different editions but unfortunately none appear to be the exact copy which Pound failed to return on time [2].  In Spring 1907, the semester in which he checked out the book, Pound was enrolled in five graduate courses: Chaucer with Prof. Clarence Child (1864-1948), Drama with Prof. Felix Schelling (1858-1945), Literary Criticism with Prof. Josiah Penniman (1868-1941), an independent study in Current Criticism, and Contemporary Poetry with Prof. Cornelius Weygandt (1871-1957)[3]. This last class, entitled in full: “The Development of English Poetry from 1850 to the Present Day” met from 11-1 every Saturday and seems a likely candidate for requiring a text like the Handbook of Poetics [4].

It is curious to think of what Pound, one of the 20th century’s most famous poets, would have thought about Gummere’s “Handbook” on poetics at the time- did he keep the text beyond its due date out of interest or just forgetfulness? We do know that  Pound had a decidedly negative opinion of Weygandt’s class that spring,  later writing “Weygandt [was] afraid I should think I might do something” [5]. This however didn’t keep the professor from later asking Pound for a free copy of his poetry, a request that Pound found exasperating [6].

Though a fascist later in life, Pound was not an inconsiderate library patron. Issued an overdue notice on May 28th,  he promptly returned the book the next day. One wonders if this was perhaps his last act at Penn, for with the school year ending and no degree, in early June 1907 he put the university behind him and began tutoring in New Jersey for the summer. He taught briefly that Fall at Wabash College in Indiana before leaving for Europe in 1908. Pound never got his Ph.D. and didn’t have much love for Penn as an institution over the rest of his life [7]. While I don’t know if he returned books late again, librarians might take comfort in the fact that upon leaving Penn he “complained bitterly” about the absence of a suitable college library [8].

The Penn Libraries have a significant collection of material on Ezra Pound. The Special Collections Center, for instance, houses several collections of research notes, correspondence, and primary materials by and about Pound, most notably Ms. Collections 181, 182, 183, and 510.

————-

[1] For a basic account of his time as a graduate student at Penn see James Wilhelm, The American roots of Ezra Pound (New York, 1985), pp.152-54 and Anthony Moody, Ezra Pound: poet (Oxford, 2007), pp. 27-33.

[2] Penn’s copies are of the 1885 edition and 1892 edition. For a facsimile of the third edition see  http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.49015000813957

[3] Course list from Spring 1907 from Pound’s graduate record, cited in Wilhelm, p.182.

[4] A detailed list of graduate courses for 1906-07 can be found on pp. 301-302 of the University of Pennsylvania Catalogue for that year. Pound’s university notes and essays are held at the Beinecke and it would be interesting to see what kinds of assignments he produced for Weygandt.

[5] Letter to  John Quinn, 19 April 1917: The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn: 1915–1924, p. 108. For a remark on the class noting that the reading was better than the lecturer see Wilhelm, p. 154. Weygandt’s autobiography, which makes no mention of Pound, was published in 1946. See http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/franklin/record.html?id=FRANKLIN_1953673

[6] See The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941 (London 1950), p. 173.

[7] His attitude towards Penn is most famously evidenced in a letter he wrote to the alumni secretary in April 1929 on receiving the alumni newsletter:

“The matter of keeping up one more otiose institution in a retrograde country seems to me to be the affair of those still bamboozled by mendicancy, rhetoric, and circular letters.” Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, pp. 302-3.

[8] See Wilhelm, p. 166.

For many years, a faded assortment of colorfully-bound but unassuming Japanese books sat relatively undisturbed in the East Asia stacks, perhaps examined once or twice, but almost never circulating. These items—small, aging, and brittle—were retired from active browsing and sent to the Penn Libraries’ High Density Storage facility (now LIBRA).

The Libraries’ bibliographic records for these books were mostly bare-bones: brief catalog cards bearing limited romanized information with additional material in Japanese were soon replaced by digital records—with all of the valuable “vernacular” script stripped out. Now buried even deeper than before in storage, this treasury of early 20^th century fiction lay in wait for someone to dig them up again.

Volumes of Penn’s Japanese juvenile pocket fiction collection

So dig I did. Armed with a stack of original cards from the East Asia card catalog and data freshly harvested from the Libraries’ Data Farm, I was able to get all of the books unearthed and shipped right to me. These diamonds-in-the-rough—or perhaps, roughly-hewn gemstones, given their panoply of colors and well-worn condition—proved to be much more interesting than I had imagined.

Scope of the Collection

The collection of early Taishō period (more properly, very late Meiji through early Taishō) fiction held at the Libraries is a snapshot of early 20^th century Japanese publishing history. These 188 small books (roughly 12.75 cm high by 9.25 cm wide) largely contain tales of bravery and adventure: reimagined samurai swashbucklers, ninja-turned-heroes, fantastic journeys, and wars of glory. The romanticized bygone days of the post-medieval Edo period (1600-1868) provided a wealth of material for young urban readers.

Only two of these volumes stand alone as “single works”—the remaining 186 were all issued as volumes in a series (generally numbered). The Penn Libraries’ holdings of these pocket books span a few series, none of which are completely owned. The majority of these books feature a series bibliography in the form of publisher’s advertisements (found after the colophon page, generally located at the end of Japanese books). Whether or not these had been published or merely planned is not clear. Even Nichigai Associates, an information specialist company whose bibliographies are enormously helpful in identifying Japanese materials in print, draws complete blanks on some of the titles Penn holds. Of the ten series represented in the collection, Nichigai’s “Catalog of Series in Japan 1868-1944” lists only four—and none of these are without incomplete portions. In fact, some of these series and titles are truly unique at Penn, with no records of them in libraries or used book networks worldwide. With scant publication records in existence, the best source of describing what may have existed is the items themselves—many of which, of course, no longer exist.

Frontispiece from Nan’ō tantei kidan yūreikutsu, a novelized adaptation of an unidentified Italian film.

While the Penn Libraries is still in the process of enriching our catalog with careful description and Japanese scripts, the following series bibliography with the number of volumes owned of each can be offered: Bushidō bunko [武士道文庫] (3 titles) ;  Katsudō bunko [活動文庫] (2 titles) ; Kaiketsu bunko [怪傑文庫] (2 titles) ; Kodan bunko [講談文庫] (3 titles) ; Okamura kōdan sōsho [岡村講談叢書] (6 titles) ; Shidan bunko [史談文庫] (30 titles) ; Shūchin bunko [袖珍文庫] (10 titles) ; Shūchin Okawa bunko (AKA Shūchin shosetsu bunko) [袖珍大川文庫・袖珍小説文庫] (61 titles) ; Tachikawa bunko [立川文庫] (61 titles) ; Taishō bunko [大正文庫] (8 titles).

Of these, the focus of much scholarly research and nostalgic reminiscences has been the Tachikawa bunko series.

Tachikawa Bunko: Popular Fiction and the Birth of the Heroic Ninja

The stories that formed Tachikawa bunko and enthralled their readership trace their origins back to the spoken-word performance art of kōdan in the latter half of the 20^th century. Kōdan featured stories of heroism and wars, delivered in a dramatic and colloquial but certainly professional style. These tales eventually formed the basis for a genre of literature called sokkibon, or to use J. Scott Miller’s term, “phonobooks”. Stenographers of kōdan used newly-imported Western techniques for shorthand (sokki) to transcribe the narratives of performers into readable texts. These printed stories, written with a decidedly oratory style, proved to be hugely successful in the greater Osaka area. With the proliferation of sokkibon as a literary genre, authors familiar with the kōdan and sokkibon penned their own stories in the same vein, conflating the functions of both storyteller and transcriber.

It was from the minds of professional storyteller Tamada Gyokushūsai (1856-1921) and his second family that the wildly popular stories of Tachikawa bunko were conceived. Born Katō Manjirō, Tamada trained as a tale-teller under the first Gyokushūsai, who specialized in Shinto religious tales. After Gyokushūsai’s death, Katō assumed the mantle of his former mentor. Tamada’s first wife and child died of cholera, but later he became acquainted with a woman named Yamada Kei (1855-1921). Kei, already a married woman, ran off with Tamada and brought her children with her, eventually settling in Osaka.

Tamada, his wife, and his stepchildren (in particular eldest son Otetsu) collaborated on creating stories for publication. Eventually, the idea of a serialized sokkibon publication occurred to the family, who shopped around the idea with little success. Finally, the proprietor of publishing house Tatsukawa Bunmeidō, Tatsukawa Kumajirō (1878-1932) received their idea with enthusiasm and began publishing their stories under the name Tatsukawa bunko, which was mostly referred to with colloquial pronunciation Tachikawa bunko.

The books were marketed chiefly to a juvenile audience, mostly the poor teenage apprentices of the Osaka area. Designed to fit easily into the pockets of these working youth, the Tachikawa bunko volumes priced between 25-30 sen (a now obsolete unit valued at 1/100 yen). Although poor apprentices could not afford to spend all of their pocket money on reading material, Tatsukawa Bunmeidō offered a novel trade-in deal: a new volume could be purchased by trading in an older volume, with an additional 3 sen trade-in fee. Of course, readers borrowed and lent titles amongst their friends as well.

Frontispieces from four Sarutobi titles published in Tachikawa bunko. Art by Hasegawa Sadanobu III

Between 1911 and the mid-1920s, roughly 200 titles were produced to meet the rampant demand (the exact number of books is uncertain—see the Notable bibliographies of Tachikawa bunko at the end). The content of these books were largely jidai shōsetsu, or historical fiction. But the character that provide to be the breakout success of the Tamada-Yamada creative team was ninja Sarutobi Sasuke, or “Monkey-Jump Sasuke”, who debuted in 1913 in volume 40 of Tachikawa bunko (Penn owns a 1916 edition, and a reproduction of a 1914 edition). A fusion of historical and fictional accounts of ninja with the skills of legendary literary hero Sun Wukong (known in Japanese as Son Gokū), Sarutobi Sasuke was a new type of ninja, largely unfamiliar to his readership. Rather than serve as a villain corrupted by the dark arts of ninjutsu, Sasuke was a spritely and mischievous antihero who used his myriad magic powers for virtuous ends. Sasuke continued to appear in other Tachikawa titles, and his popularity heralded the rise of a “ninja boom” that lasted until the latter 1920s.

With the death of Tamada in 1921, the Yamada family’s literary efforts waned. Tachikawa Bunmeidō continued to operate and reprint earlier titles of the series, up until the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. Tachikawa Bunmeidō continued to publish until early 1945, when an air raid on Osaka destroyed their offices, records, and all of the printing plates within.

 Tachikawa Bunko in Comparison

Each volume of Tachikawa bunko was bound in cloth in one of seven colors (red, blue, yellow, green, orange, black, or purple) with spines featuring the full title in gold leaf. Almost every book featured a frontispiece by ukiyoe artist Hasegawa Sadanobu III (1881-1963). These artistic merits surely appealed to their readership and lent an air of literary legitimacy to these cheaply produced books.

Lining paper patterns from six of the ten pocket fiction series owned by Penn

As the forerunner of the “bunko boom”, Tachikawa bunko became something of a household name. Imitators of Tachikawa’s success such as Taishō bunko and Shidan bunko (both held in part by the Penn Libraries) sold well, but continued to be compared to and grouped under the generic trademark of Tachikawa bunko. Many competing series, many published in Osaka and others in Tokyo, modeled their look on the Tachikawa books. Bound in bright colors, given elaborate spine designs, and some featuring their own frontispieces, these books are on first glance indistinguishable from Tachikawa bunko volumes. Indeed, seeing all of these volumes together in bulk, I had thought they had all been published by the same company. Take a look at the photo from earlier on: the Tachikawa books each have a five-petaled flower on the lower half of the spine; the other books are all from competitors.

Lining paper spreads from three of the ten pocket fiction series owned by Penn

While Tachikawa bunko and other Osaka-based bunko sets focused largely on historical fiction and fictional historical personages like Sarutobi Sasuke, Tokyo publishers drew on the wealth of existing national literature. Shūchin bunko, for instance, reprinted many classics of Japanese literature, from the 8th century Kojiki to Edo period novels. The similarly named but distinct Shūchin Ōkawa bunko took a more middle-road approach, publishing biographical fiction of well-known warriors along with classical war stories like Genpei seisuiki and the Edo samurai tale Nansō Satomi Hakkenden.

The Tokyo-Osaka/East-West divide can be further noted in that the exploits of the Tokugawa clan, the family who held the shogunate of Japan during the Edo period, are treated with very different tones depending on the locality. Osaka area bunko stories painted the Tokugawas, particularly Ieyasu, as villains to be thwarted, while Tokyo-based bunko featured them as heroes. These conceptual differences notwithstanding, competing publishers did feature some of the same notable personages, whose exploits were unaligned with regional sentiments.

Frontispieces from two stories about legendary Zen monk Ikkyū:(left) from Ikkyū zenji (series Shūchin Ōkawa bunko), artist unidentified; (right) from Shokoku man’yū Ikkyū zenji (series Tachikawa bunko), artist Hasegawa Sadanobu III

Many more pocket fiction titles similar to Tachikawa bunko existed as well. An exhibition held at the Himeji Bungakukan in 2004 featured representative volumes of at least 18 other series. One of these titles, Poketto sōsho, measures roughly two times smaller than Tachikawa bunko, at a diminutive 9 cm high by 6.5 cm wide. See the exhibition catalog Tatsukawa Kumajirō to Tachikawa Bunko: Taishō no bunkoō for details.

The Future of the Collection

Some of these materials may not exist anywhere else in the world, and are extremely unlikely to be reprinted. Although some reproductions of Tachikawa materials exist, these are largely out of print as well, and do not offer a complete reproduction of the series as a whole. As the Penn Libraries embark on a reevaluation of the bibliographic description for these precious items, some of which Penn uniquely holds, we are exploring options for the preservation and access to their content.

I would like to thank: Joe Kishman and the staff of LIBRA for kindly and carefully shipping these fragile materials to me; PJ Smalley for scanning help; and all the ILL staff who helped me procure articles and books for my research.

For further reading and bibliographical information about Tachikawa bunko…

Notable bibliographies of Tachikawa bunko

Given that each volume of Tachikawa bunko bears a listing of the cumulative series contents, building a bibliography of the series seems simple enough. This is not the case. For example, the post-colophon series listing of volume 108 (a Sarutobi story) lists volume 108 as “Kumada Jingobē” (which was actually published as volume 105). Moreover, the final page of this Sarutobi tale ends with an illustrated announcement of the next installment of the series “Bonji Tarō”, which the reader may guess as volume 109. Instead, this title appeared in print as volume 111, despite being listed as volume 106 in the volume-end series bibliography. Despite these difficulties, several notable bibliographies have been constructed.

• Himeji Bungakukan [姬路文学館].  Tachikawa bunko kankō ichiran [立川文庫刊行一覧]. In Tatsukawa Kumajirō to Tachikawa Bunko: Taishō no bunkoō [立川熊次郎と「立川文庫」—大正の文庫王]. (Himeji: Himeji Bungakukan, 2004).

The most complete with listings up to vol.201 (some volumes listed as “unknown”), this bibliography refers to earlier bibliographies and also provides notations on what intuitions and individuals own each volume. Some volumes are not listed as owned by anyone. Of these, Penn holds seven titles (vols. 24, 68, 90, 92, 96, 104, and 114).

• Imabari Shiritsu Toshokan [今治市立図書館].  Tachikawa bunko shozō ichiran [立川文庫所蔵一覧].

This incomplete bibliography spans from vol.1 to vol.197, offering the holdings of the Imabari City Library, in Ehime Prefecture, Japan, where Tachikawa bunko is kept as a special collection. The Sarutobi titles are in blue, with a ninja graphic nearby. Accessed Apr. 12, 2013.

• Niijima, Kōichirō [新島廣一郎].  “Shōnen kōdanshū” shiryō: “Tachikawa bunko” mokuroku [「少年講談集」資料―「立川文庫」目録]. In Shōnen shōsetsu taikei, bekkan 2 “Shōnen kōdanshū” (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1995).

Fairly complete with listings up to vol.201 (some volumes missing), this bibliography draws from Niijima’s own collection as well as others’, and revises the bibliography from the first edition of Adachi Ken’ichi’s Tachikawa bunko no eiyūtachi (Tokyo: Bunwa Shobō, 1980). This bibliography clearly delineates the titles from their tsunogaki, or “supratitles”.

• Nichigai Asoshiētsu [日外アソシエーツ].  Zenshū, sōsho sōmokuroku: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa senzenki II: Kagaku, gijutsu, sangyō, geijutsu, gengo, bungaku [全集・叢書総目録：明治・大正・昭和戦前期Ⅱ　科学・技術・産業・芸術・言語・文学]. Tokyo : Nichigai Asoshiētsu, 2007 (p.1120-1123).

This title listing ends at vol.186 and does not offer the explanatory tsunogaki. It does document the printings consulted (one title was printed at least 20 times). Curiously, some volume numbers are duplicated with variant titles, or completely different titles altogether.

References for Further Reading

• Adachi, Ken’ichi [足立巻一].  Tachikawa bunko no eiyūtachi [立川文庫の英雄たち]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1987.
• Himeji Bungakukan [姬路文学館].  Tatsukawa Kumajirō to Tachikawa Bunko: Taishō no bunkoō [立川熊次郎と「立川文庫」—大正の文庫王]. Himeji: Himeji Bungakukan, 2004.
• Imabari Shiritsu Toshokan [今治市立図書館].  Tokubetsu korekushon ichiran [特別コレクション一覧] (Accessed Apr. 12, 2013)
• Kuwabara, Saburō [桑原三郎].  Tachikawa bunko to shōnen kōdan no bōkendan no shudai: “Miyamoto Musashi” ron [立川文庫と少年講談の冒險譚の主題—「宮本武藏」論]. Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū, vol.32 no.12 (Oct. 1987).
• Kyokudō, Nanryō [旭堂小南陵].  Meijimatsu—Taishōki Ōsaka kōdanbon no sekai: Tachikawa bunko o chūshin ni [明治末〜大正期大阪講談本の世界―立川文庫を中心に]. Ōsaka no rekishi, vol.66 (July 2005).
• Langton, Scott Charles.  A literature for the people: a study of the jidai shosetsu in Taisho and early Showa Japan. Dissertation for The Ohio State University, 2000.
• Miller, J. Scott.  Japanese shorthand and sokkibon. Monumenta Nipponica, vol.49, no.4 (Winter 1994).
• Niijima, Kōichirō [新島廣一郎].  Shōnen oigataku [少年老い難く]. Shōnen shōsetsu taikei geppō, no.25, Mar. 1995. Issued with Shōnen shōsetsu taikei, bekkan 2 “Shōnen kōdanshū” (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1995).
• Ozaki, Hotsuki [尾崎秀樹].  Kaisetsu [解説]. In Shōnen shōsetsu taikei, bekkan 2 “Shōnen kōdanshū” (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1995).
• Ozaki, Hotsuki [尾崎秀樹].  Taishū bungaku no rekishi, jō: Senzen hen [大衆文学の歴史 上: 戦前篇]. Tokyo : Kōdansha, 1989.
• Torrance, Richard.  Literacy and literature in Osaka, 1890-1940. Journal of Japanese Studies, vol.31, no.1 (Winter 2005).

This is a story about merchants and menus in medieval England. Two manuscripts in the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection at Penn, LJS 238, The Statute of Wynchestre, a record of the regulations for breadmaking in 16th-century England and LJS 61, a Register of Writs and Formulary from 28 January of the 13th year of the reign of Richard II (1390) to 28 April in the 8th year of the reign of Henry IV (1407), a legal register of royal chancery writs, seem at first to be unlikely bedfellows. But taken together, these two documents offer rich insight into the diet of late medieval England and its relationship to larger issues of social and legal practice [1].

Let us begin by considering LJS 238. This chart, written in English on a large single folio of parchment was produced in Winchester, near London, during the 16th century. The document gives the prescribed weights for five varieties of loaves of different grades of wheat in an attempt to standardize local policies and regulations for bakers in England [2].

At the top of the folio, the chart’s contents are described as an “Assise of all man[n]er of breade of what grayne of corne soeuer yt be”. The final three lines of this block of text affirm the baker’s right to payment for costs incurred during the baking process “to his aduan[n]tage.”

The table’s six columns are topped by headings illustrating each type of loaf in simple the fine-lined images: a bag of grain atop the first, followed by five varieties of loaves in descending order of value – a symnel, a wastel and three other kinds of everyday loaves.

Reading from left to right, their costs range from 4 shillings to 20 shillings a quarter; the loaves are quarter [i.e. farthing] “symnell”, “farthing wastel”, “ob. [halfpenny] white lofe”, “d. [penny] wheten lof” and “d. [penny] houshold lof”. Thus the finer the quality of the grain, the more expensive the loaf. The first two varieties, more like fine cakes than bread, typically graced only the tables of the nobility. The symnel loaf in particular was considered the very finest bread in medieval England. This desirable bread was also known as “paynedemayn”, a name attributable to the image of the Savior and the Virgin Mary impressed upon each loaf (demesne/demeine bread/Panis Dominicus/ “paynedemayn”). Chaucer himself attests the whiteness – and thus luxury status – of this bread when he jokingly says of the pasty complexion of that “doghty swayn” Sir Thopas: “Whit was his face as payndemayn”[3].

LJS 238 shows not only the variety of breads being produced in 16th-century England but also its social and economic importance. The bread business was big business in medieval England: long before the days of the pre-packaged sandwich and the imported delights of the Italian ciabatta or crusty French baguette, simple loaves played a dual role at the mealtimes of medieval England, functioning both as foodstuff and utensil – being used in lieu of tableware as trenchers. Needless to say, there was big dough in the bread market, and by the 16th-century the English government felt the need to standardize and regulate the legal standards governing bread’s production. LJS 238 speaks to just how important the practices of commerce and trade governing bread’s production and sale were to the country’s economy.

If LJS 238 emphasizes the importance of mundane foodstuffs, LJS 61 fascinates in its glimpse of more elite edibles. Produced in London in 1407, LJS 61 is also concerned with the organization of information into a regimented schema, though in a textual rather than tabular format, taking the form of a parchment codex in 231 folios [4]. Near the end of the codex, we suddenly find ourselves relocated from Chancery hall to the dining hall: on f. 214v there appears a trio of menus recording three feasts held at Oxford in 1427 and 1428. Unlike the more workaday  LJS 238, LJS 61’s menus are written in all three of medieval England’s languages, Middle French, Middle English and Latin.

The first menu itemizes the dishes served at a celebration marking the commencement/graduation of Robert Nevill(e): “Le Fest de la comensement  M’   Robert Nevill  Epi.  S’lez.”  This gastronomic extravaganza featured over 75 dishes, including some truly exotic meats in the form of “signets rostez” [roasted cygnets (young swans)], “pecok ove la cove roiall” [peacock from the royal brood??] and “swanne henarmez” [larded swans] [5]. The second menu commemorates a dinner given for Robert (or Richard?) Babthorpe: “le   dyner   monsire   Robert   Gab[  ]” at which diners were served a similarly eclectic range of dishes ranging from the solidly British “Grete ribbes de beef” and the aristocratic “Fesant” [pheasant] to a dubious-sounding miscellaneous “jely.”  The third menu was written for “Le dyner de sergeantz”, likely a meal celebrating the sergeants-­at­-law or king’s sergeants. Again, some dishes overlap with the fare served at the other two feasts – “Capon”, “Fesant” and “Rabete” feature on all three menus, but a far greater portion of the items on the sergeants’ menu are described as “rostez” (roasted), including “Crane”, “Kidde” [goat], “Venieson” and misc. “Viande” [meats].They do, however, seem to have been served a dish that looks intriguingly like “Pufin yk Chikyn blanc vendorrez” [puffin and chicken in white wine] Hopefully the wine flowed freely in the banquet hall that night.

Pufin yk Chikyn blanc vendorrez (Puffin and Chicken in white wine). LJS 61, f.214v.

Below the third menu’s heading is a note in English: “A heraud to proclayme the worshipe of the fest”.  Several “subleties” were to be paraded, elaborate ceremonial showpiece dishes made to represent a theme relevant to the feast: included on the list are dishes featuring the seven liberal arts, the Emperor Theodosius conferring laws to the Romans, Perseus on horseback, and a sea-­battle of fishes. The sergeants were thus treated to dinner and a show all in one.

In addition to their value as cultural curiosities, the menus in LJS 61 offer vital clues to the book’s provenance. The volume first belonged either to the Robert Nevill whose feast dinner menu is recorded on f. 214v, or to one of his legal officers. Nevill was born in 1404, the fifth son of Ralph, earl of Westmoreland and Joan Beaufort, daughter of  John  of  Gaunt.  He was the brother of Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and uncle to George Neville, archbishop of York. After he studied at Oxford, Robert became Bishop of Salisbury (1427-37/8), and later Bishop of Durham, a position he occupied until his death in 1457. Thus the feast whose menu is recorded in LJS 61 celebrated the career of one of 15th-century England’s more illustrious men.

As noted above, these hidden gems are tucked away in a manuscript whose main text comprises a register of royal chancery writs from 1390 to 1407. These were important legal texts: royal writs form the basis of English Common Law and registries of writs such as this were intended for distribution among feudal manors, bishoprics, monasteries, or other authorities. The subjects of the writs contained in LJS 61 vary, including lands and manors held by various men from the King, instructions to the King’s bailiffs, tenancies and inheritances, and ecclesiastical holdings and prebendaries, proving itself a rich source of information on daily life in medieval England. The register itself is preceded and followed by alphabetical indexes (ff. i-xvi, ff. 207-214) facilitating readers’ navigation of the history of English law during the reigns of Richard II – Henry IV (ff. 1r-151v) and followed by a subject index treating the remainder of the register devoted solely to the rest of Henry IV’s reign (f. 152v-204r). In the 16th century, the blank pages following the indexes were filled by the addition of six further writs from the reign of Mary I (ff. 204v-205v). Thus, while LJS 238 makes apparent how legal practice shaped the business of daily living vis-a-vis England’s most common foodstuff, LJS 61 records the texts that shaped the matter of English Law itself. Together, these manuscripts enhance our knowledge of medieval cuisine from field to table and from the kitchen to the banquet hall.

Both LJS 238 and 61 are currently on display in the new exhibition “A Legacy Inscribed: The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection of Manuscripts”, on exhibit through August 16^th in Van Pelt Library’s new Special Collections Center (6^th Floor, The Goldstein Family Gallery): http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/legacy.html

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[1] For full descriptions of these manuscripts and additional information see Lisa Fagin-Davis’ excellent entries here: LJS 61, LJS 238.

[2] Rare Book & Manuscript Library University of Pennsylvania MS LJS 238: The statute of Wynchestre (regulations for breadmaking), in English, manuscript on parchment scroll (flattened). Winchester, England, 16th century (437 x 338 mm).

[3] The Canterbury Tales, “Sir Thopas”: Fragment VII: B2, lines 1914-15.

[4] Rare Book & Manuscript Library University of Pennsylvania MS LJS 61: Register of Writs and Formulary from 28 January of the 13th year of the reign of Richard II (1390) to 28 April in the 8th year of the reign of Henry IV (1407), in Latin and French, manuscript on parchment. London, England, 1407 (231 fols., 260 x 173 mm).

[5] Recipes for some of these dishes may be found in Maggie Black’s The Medieval Cookbook [London, 1992].

University Library Staff, Technical Processing (ca. 1948). In what is now Fisher Fine Arts Library. [UARC20071217006]

I like the clutter and commotion of the card catalog drawers, the books ready for processing, and the eerily-lit ambiance. On a lark I thought I would dig up one of the books waiting for processing that day in 1948.One of the goals of a library is to hold knowledge and enable its easy retrieval so I figured it would be a fitting example of the ways libraries stand the test of time. Despite all the books in the picture I was only able to spot one with a legible title (position indicated above).

Detail of the 1948 photograph (rotated 180 degrees)

On further examination, after rotating the image, the title looked like “Dance Observer” and I headed to the online catalog to see if we still had it in the stacks. The first hit in the catalog, the Dance Observer turns out to have been a periodical published between 1934 and 1964, more importantly the issues were here in the library only a few floors above me. Figuring the issue in question would have been published in or before 1948 I went browsing through covers to see if one matched. Only a few minutes later, there it was:

Dance Observer 14.1 (January 1947). Penn GV 1580 D248 v.14

Easy to identify because of the striking photo of Doris Humphrey on the cover, this issue is today on the 5th floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. It’s traveled over the years though, when it first came out in January 1947 it went to the Maria Hosmer Penniman Education Library at Penn which served as the departmental library of the School of Education. According to a small pencil mark inside the cover it was transferred on January 8, 1948 to the Furness building, which was once the main Penn library, and bound with other 1947 issues of the magazine. In the 1960s it then of course made the move over to the new Van Pelt library which celebrated its 50th birthday last year. It’s nice to see this magazine of dance reviews and news still right where it should be, thanks to the constant work of catalogers and library staff from the photo 65 years ago to today.

Friendly Microfilm Drawer at Van Pelt

The lowly microfilm has taken a lot of abuse over the years for its sometimes grainy quality, retina-numbing display, and propensity to spool all over the floor when one least expects. However, digging deeply into Penn’s microfilm holdings it’s not hard to see why microtexts have been essential to scholars for decades. Penn’s extended microfilm collections of government documents, obscure magazines, and early printed books all remain valuable even as more and more of them become digitized [1]. Yet for me, it’s the collections of archival material that offer the most continued benefit from the medium.Take the example below from Penn’s microfilm collection – a promissory note for the delivery of beaver pelts in Quebec from 1713. This forms part of a six-reel collection of microfilmed documents relating to French Canada taken from regional archives in France. Instead of making the trip to La Rochelle scholars at Penn have access right now to a wealth of archival material.

Frame from Van Pelt Microfilm 1651, reel 1. Documents filmed in La Rochelle by the Centre de recherche en histoire économique du Canada français.

Further, as with digital resources, researchers can quickly shift from archive to archive as they change reels. From a source closer to home, below is an image of a 1666 posthumous inventory of the goods of a woman named Charity White, found in the court papers of Suffolk county Massachusetts which are reproduced on 72 rolls of microfilm held at Penn [2].

Frame from Van Pelt Microfilm 689, reel 1. Records of the Probate Court of Suffolk County, Mass., 1629-1799.

Among the goods present in the inventory are a “chamber pot,” “a dish or platter,” “a hud and a cloak,”"a feather bed,” and various other household items. Containing a record of the material possessions of thousands of people who lived in the Boston area as well as documents relating to bastardy and contested wills these are important sources for scholars of early America and you won’t find them at just any library.

Skipping ahead from the early modern to the modern, Penn holds a wealth of 20th century special collections on microfilm. Doing research on the Cold War and Hollywood? Penn has 14 juicy reels of confidential surveillance files from the entertainment industry. Writing about presidential campaigns and local politics? Try the 51 reels of papers from the archives of the Republican Party. Beyond these large collections look also to the smaller collections which are practically unique to Penn.

Frames from Van Pelt Microfilm 1905

The document above, for example, was specially filmed in the 1940s from papers of a Lithuanian exile organization entitled “34 secret documents issued by the People’s Commissariats for Internal Affairs and State Security pertaining to mass arrests, exile, and deportation to corrective labor camps from Lithuania in 1941.” These kinds of documents, held by private organizations and individuals are especially difficult to get a hold of and I suspect that Penn is one of the few places where researchers could find the memos above [3].

Mt. Athos, Iveron Ms. 5437. Description in Lambros, Catalogue of the Greek manuscripts on Mount Athos (Cambridge, 1900) v. 2, p. 263.

Moving again backwards in time, researchers at Penn have access to a treasure trove of medieval manuscripts – many specially microfilmed for Penn faculty. For example, interested in this early-14th century Greek compendium of grammatical and other works?

You have two choices: travel to the  Iveron Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece (sorry no women allowed) or come to Penn and use Van Pelt Microforms Medieval MSS 534 [4]. Want to peruse documents from the Vatican secret Archives? No need to travel to Rome – there are thousands of documents from the archives in the Henry Charles Lea microfilm collection right here at Penn.

Though each microfilm reel at Penn necessarily duplicates a text or item extant elsewhere, taken as a whole, the collection of rare and hard-to-find archival material is truly unique.

——–

[1]

See the excellent guide to large microfilm sets at: <http://gethelp.library.upenn.edu/guides/microforms/microforms.html>. Penn is also a member of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) which has a lending library of tens of thousands of reels of scarcely held microfilm and well worth checking out.

[2]

These reels cover the years 1629-1799 and are cataloged as Microfilm 689. Only three other libraries hold the complete set.

[3]

These documents were filmed from their owners in New York in the 1940s and it seems that only Penn and the NYPL have copies today.

[4]

For a detailed guide to the majority of the medieval manuscripts on film here at Penn see  <http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/microforms/medmss.html>.

UPenn Ms. Codex 109, f137r.

I enthusiastically retweeted the image and began trying to figure out just what was going on in the manuscript [1]. Since then, the “rocket cat” has gone somewhat viral, appearing in the Atlantic, BoingBoing, and elsewhere. Given the illustration’s new-found fame I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a bit of context.

The illustration above comes from UPenn Ms. Codex 109 which came to the library as part of the Edgar Fahs Smith history of chemistry collection. This manuscript is one of several at Penn dealing with the early history of gunpowder, artillery, and explosives. Based on the title I assumed it was one of the many manuscript copies of the famous c.1420 Feuerwerkbuch which provides instructions to artillery masters on how to construct weapons, aim guns, and manufacture various explosives [2]. So where does the explosive cat fit in? I looked through both the printed German text of the Feuerwerkbuch and the English translation in vain – “explosive fire balls” and “fire arrows” are covered in the text but no fire cats. Along the way I also discovered that another of Penn’s manuscripts had an almost identical illustration:

LJS 442:Book of instruction for a cannon master, f.60r

In this case, a c.1590 “Book of instruction for a cannon master.” Clearly these fiery animals were more than just the fancy of one manuscript illustrator. Further, the text accompanying the illustration in both Codex 109 and LJS 442 did not match anything I could trace in editions of the Feuerwerkbuch. Fortunately, in the torrent of tweets about the rocket cat, one came in citing yet another example of the illustration, this time from a manuscript at the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.

Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 128, f.74r

Heidelberg has cataloged their manuscript as the “Buch von den probierten Künsten” of Franz Helm. Though drawing on the Feuerwerkbuch, this text dates from a century later (c. 1530) and includes large new sections on siege warfare and different types of explosive weapons. In fact, the Penn collection includes an identified copy of Helm’s treatise, though unillustrated (LJS 254). Thanks to a recent critical edition of the work I was able to confirm that the text of both LJS 442 and Codex 109 were indeed from the Buch von den probierten Künsten [3].

Franz Helm of Cologne was an artillery master in the service of various German princes and likely served in campaigns against Turkish forces during the mid-16th century. His  treatise circulated widely in manuscript but was not published until 1625. Remarkably, that print edition of his work (a copy of which is here at Penn) also includes an image of the cat and bird:

Armamentarium principale oder Kriegsmunition und Artillerie-Buch (Frankfurt a.M., 1625), p.48

So what does Helm actually say about these explosive animals? Are there rockets involved at all? In the text accompanying the images is a section entitled “To set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise” [4]. This section details how to use doves and cats loaded with flammable devices to set fire to enemy positions. On cats the text paints a grisly picture of attaching lit sacks of incendiaries onto the animals to have them return to their homes and set fire to them. In my awkward translation:

“Create a small sack like a fire-arrow … if you would like to get at a town or     castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.” [5]

There’s no way to know if Helm himself ever employed this method of pyrotechnic warfare but strangely enough the idea of using cats and birds in just this way appears in historical texts from many disparate regions of the world. In a magisterial article on the subject, the Finnish scholar Pentti Aalto cites examples of incendiary-bearing cats and birds from a 3rd c. BCE Sanskrit text, the Russian Primary Chronicle, early Scandinavian sources, and an early modern history of Genghis Khan [6].

Though not actually depicting ‘rockets’ of any kind, these images help demonstrate the enormous demand for manuals on gunnery and explosives in the early modern period as well as the robust world of 16th c. manuscript copying and the persistence of illustrations and manuscript forms into print.

[UPDATE: Alexis Madrigal does a great job summarizing this piece over at the Atlantic! Thanks!]

———

[1] For a storified account of these tweets see http://storify.com/MitchFraas/cat-with-jetpack

[2] For a facsimile of the first printed edition of the Feuerwerkbuch (Augsburg, 1529) along with a transcription in modern German see Hassenstein, Das Feuerwerkbuch von 1420, (Munich, 1941). For an English translation of the manuscript text of the Feuerwerkbuch with notes see Gerald W. Kramer and Klaus Leibnitz, “The Firework Book: Gunpowder in Medieval Germany,” The Journal of the Arms & Armour Society 17.1 (March 2001), p. 1-88.

[3] Rainer Lang, Franz Helm und sein “Buch von den probierten Künsten (Wiesbaden, 2001).

[4] In the early modern German text: “Ein Schloß, oder stadt anzünden der du sonst nicht zu kommen magst.”

[5] Many thanks to Brigitte Burris for her help with the text – all errors are mine of course! The Heidelberg manuscript (the most legible) reads: “Mach ein klein secklein wie zu einem fewer pfeyl…tracht ob du mogest Bekhomen im schloss oder statt, ein katzen so darein gehörig, unnd bind das secklein der katzen auff den Rucke, zunde es an lass wol gluen, unnd darnach die katzen Lauffen, So tracht sie dennegsten, dem schloss oder statt zw, und vor forcht gedenckt sie sich zuuerfriechenn, wo sie in scheweren hew oder stroe findt, wurtt es von ir angezundet.”  The printed text from the 1625 edition (p.49) is pictured below:

[6] Pentii Aalto, “Kautilya on Siegecraft,” Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae (Series B) 223 (1983), pp. 11-21. The extract from the Russian Primary Chronicle describing the actions of Olga of Kiev (c.945 CE) is particularly striking:

Penn Libraries host a number of blogs including that of the fantastic Weigle Information Commons. Yesterday, Heather Glaser, Assistant Fine Arts Librarian, posted a fascinating piece about Andy Warhol’s 1965 visit to his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Penn, then located in the Fisher fine arts library. Mobbed by students and other fans, Fire Marshals had to cut through a wall in order to get him out of the building. A 1965 photo (left) of Warhol surrounded by students caught my eye and I thought the post might interest Unique at Penn readers. For more on Warhol’s visit as well as additional photos of the event from the libraries’ collections see Rachel Pastan’s “Checklist for the Prince of Pop” at the ICA Miranda blog.

Today, we’re going on a field trip.  It’s a trip that will take us beyond the hallowed walls of Van Pelt Library and into the nation’s first hospital: the Pennsylvania Hospital, founded by Ben Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond in 1751.[1]  More specifically, we will be going to the Clinical Library of the hospital, a trip which involves a Hogwartsian journey up three flights of stairs to the Old Pine Building and then down another flight to the office of the Clinical Librarian.  Once arrived, we will be confronted with a mysterious item: R710 Ar5 a two-volume collection of twenty printed texts that can only be described with the qualifier “mostly”: mostly printed in London in the 1730s and 40s, mostly medical in character.

How this nonce collection – a book made unique by its particular selection and compilation of various published materials – ended up in Philadelphia in the library of the Pennsylvania Hospital is still something of a mystery.  The library’s catalogues reveal that the two volumes, along with two further volumes which couldn’t be located at the time of writing, were acquired by the library sometime between 1794 and 1806. The individual items in the volumes could have been compiled and bound by a librarian, but a glance through the minutes of the board of the Pennsylvania Hospital shows that large-scale efforts were being made to expand the library during this period; it seems likely that the nonce collection existed in private hands prior to its acquisition, and can be classed with other untitled volumes described in the minutes as being purchased at an estate sale, or willed to the hospital by a well-off local with a library.[2]

Pastedown and flyleaf of R710 Ar5 v.1 with manuscript table of contents.

What make the two volumes of this collection truly fascinating, however, are the hodge-podge of materials they contain.  We can begin to get a sense of this from the handwritten tables of contents in each volume , which include such titles as “Armstrong’s Art of Health a Poem” (the 1745 second edition of physician and poet John Armstrong’s The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem. In Four Books, printed for A. Millar [ESTC T22477]), and “Denoue’s Cat. of several curious of Human Anatomy in Wax” (A Catalogue Of Several Curious Figures of Human Anatomy in Wax, Taken from the Life [ESTC T149019] which accompanied an exhibition on view in London).

But to really understand the diversity of genres and subject matters contained within this strange collection, we need to turn to a few of the texts themselves.

The End of the Earl

Six items between the two volumes are connected with the man who would go down in history as England’s first prime minister: Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford (1676-1745).[3]  While there is not any clear principle for the ordering of the texts within the two volumes (neither genre nor chronology govern the order, and pamphlet responses often precede the texts that prompted them), the compiler of the collection clearly wanted to create a subsection of the two volumes that brings together texts dealing, not with the life of the Earl of Orford, but with his death.

The first of these is John Ranby’s A Narrative of the Last Illness of the Right Honourable Earl of Orford (1745) [ESTC T28449]. Ranby (1703-1773), sergeant-surgeon to King George II,[4] attended the Earl in his final weeks, and claims at the opening of the narrative that his patient wished his sufferings to be made public (presumably) for the benefit of scientific knowledge.  The result reads, at least to someone who spends more time with self-consciously literary texts, like a parody of an epistolary novel:  we find Ranby supplementing his narrative with diary entries, a transcribed autopsy report, a copy of a letter from the Earl’s country physician to his physicians in town, and even an engraving of the Earl’s kidney stones, “the stone” being an ailment which recurs in various texts throughout the collection and which can be said to have contributed to the Earl’s death even if it was not the immediate cause.

Illustration of Kidney Stones from John Ranby’s A Narrative of the Last Illness of the Right Honourable Earl of Orford

What kind of responses did this intimate narrative, which dwells unflinchingly on the Earl’s tendency to urinate blood and his desire to be treated, like many of his time, with a seemingly endless series of “clysters” (enemas), generate?  In this collection, Ranby’s Narrative is followed by two anonymous and disgruntled publications, one titled An Epistle to John Ranby [ESTC T32848] and the other Advice to John Ranby [ESTC T21059].  The author of the first objects in no uncertain terms to what he reads as insinuations by Ranby that the Earl’s death could have been avoided if he had not taken advice and medicine from other surgeons present throughout his illness: “an unwary Reader,” he complains, “would be apt to conclude, that the bloody Urine my Lord so frequently made, after Dr. Jurin had visited him, was altogether occasioned by this Lixivious Medicine” (24).  Interestingly, the author of the second publication is less interested in defending a particular surgeon than in showing, via a kind of textual exegesis, that Ranby’s language throughout the Narrative is inherently impartial, despite the surgeon’s claims to the contrary.  He also reads Ranby’s detailed discussion of the Earl’s symptoms as an invitation to diagnose the Earl himself (the solution, he claims, would have been easy had the surgeons remembered a lengthy passage in Greek which he helpfully includes in his Advice).  These attacks prompted a cranky rebuttal by Ranby which forms the last item in the sequence of six “Orford” texts, the pithily titled An Appendix to the Narrative of the Last Illness of the Right Honourable the Earl of Orford [ESTC N30315].

The other two publications in the sequence have a less obvious connection to medicine.  Following the anonymous Advice to John Ranby we find An Authentick Copy of the Last Will and Testament of the R—t H—-ble E—l of O—-. With Remarks, [ESTC N43281?].  Anyone interested in the legal safeguards aristocrats construct for ensuring succession of property, or interested, for that matter, in how one might subtly leave large sums of money to a former mistress and her offspring, would enjoy reading this document, although it might seem a bit dry after all the gory details of the Earl of Orford’s painful last weeks in Ranby’s Narrative.  Meanwhile, the other publication, The Character of Pericles: A Funeral Oration [ESTC T108922], honors the late Earl through an allegorical comparison to the famous orator; naturally, his quality of voice is singled out for praise.  Perhaps we might read the oration (if this is the right term for a printed document) as a different kind of diagnosis of the Earl of Orford: one that seeks to come to a conclusion about the Earl based on evidence from his political life rather than from his medical complaints.

Preserving Health?

The variety of genres generated by the Earl of Orford’s death – narrative, will, oration, letter, and the like – begs the question: what is the best genre of writing for giving health advice?  The answer of the Pennsylvania Hospital library volumes would seem to be: all of them.

One interesting item in the second volume of the collection combines a kind of lab report with a well-researched but very heterogeneous “supplement” in order to present evidence about the efficacy of a nostrum for curing kidney stones (perhaps the remedy the Earl of Orford needed!).  An Account of Some Experiments and Observations on Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines for dissolving the Stone . . . To which is added, a Supplement to a Pamphlet, intitled, A View of the present Evidence for and against Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines, &c. [ESTC T18903] offers two very different approaches to “testing” whether or not this miracle cure is as miraculous as Mrs. Stephens claims.  Here is an excerpt from Part I, rector Stephen Hales’s account of his home experiments to determine whether it is the soap or the calcified shells or something else altogether that causes Mrs. Stephens’s medicine to dissolve stones (an undertaking which required Hales to acquires some real kidney stones from a friendly physician):

I cut twenty-seven pieces out of the above mentioned Stone A, which weighed severally from 3 to 14 Grains, and having put them into so many two Ounce Vials, which were mark’d with Labels pasted on them; I put into each Vial an Ounce of cold Urine, and then dropped into each Vial, from one to twenty-six drops of capital Soap-lees, according to the Number of each Vial respectively;and this was repeated every Morning with fresh Urine of the Night past (16).

It is to be hoped that none of Rector Hales’s parishioners walked in on his rigorously recorded experiments.

David Hartley, the author of the second part of the publication, moves beyond the world of test tubes, beginning his Supplement with an account of Mrs. Stephens’s background and transcribing a certificate produced by parliament providing her with a reward of £5,000 for her medical ingenuity.  Alongside case studies of real people cured by her medicines, Hartley describes his efforts to determine whether the medicine could be produced in a fashion that reduces unpleasant side effects for the patients.  This leads him to ask important questions such as, what is the best kind of soap to include in a medical recipe that calls for large quantities of soap?  Fortunately, he has an answer:

As to the Soap, Mrs. Stephens assures us from long Experience that Allicant[5] is preferable to any other of the foreign Soaps commonly sold in London, as Castile,  Venice, Naples, Joppa, both as to its dissolving Virtue and Agreeableness to the  Stomach. But I believe any of the above-mentioned foreign Soaps will answer, as they are all made of the same Materials with Allicant Soap, viz. Lime, fixed alcaline Salt, and Oil of Olives . . . ” (57).

If the idea of swallowing soap particles sounds unpleasant, it’s important to remember that another key ingredient of Mrs. Stephens’s medicine was snails cooked in a crucible.

We should be careful, however, not to read the collection as purely a compilation of prose accounts; after all, the first volume opens with John Armstrong’s The Art of Preserving Health, a poem so popular it was republished in Philadelphia by Ben Franklin the year after its first printing in England in 1744.[6]

John Armstrong (1708/9-1779) was a physician as well as a poet; indeed, it is said that his practice may have suffered following the publication of what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online calls “a glowingly explicit sex manual in blank verse,” Oeconomy of Love, in 1736.[7]  The Art of Preserving Health, however, offers a more holistic and less controversial guide to wellness through four verse sections on “Air,” “Diet,” “Exercise,” and “The Passions,” each of which mingle didacticism with eloquent descriptions of how the body functions.  For instance, in Book IV (“The Passions”), Armstrong offers the following assessment of the body’s natural process of decay:

By its own toil the gross corporeal frame
Fatigues, extenuates, or destroys itself:
Nor less the labours of the mind corrode
The solid fabric. For by subtle parts,
And viewless atoms, secret Nature moves
The mighty wheels of this stupendous world.
By subtle fluids pour’d thro’ subtle tubes
The natural, vital functions are performed.
By these the stubborn aliments are tam’d;
The toiling heart distributes life and strength;
These the still-crumbling frame rebuild; and these
Are lost in thinking, and dissolve in air (105).

If we take a poem seriously as a form of medical advice, as I think the collection invites us to do, we might read this Augustan poetic body as a kind of stand-in for our physical bodies.  Armstrong seems to suggest that if we treat our bodies with the successful combination of evenness and variety that this poem offers even in its descriptions of weakness and vulnerability, we would all be able to preserve health.

Much more could be said about the twelve other items I haven’t discussed, which include a history of the mandrake, a defense of “tar-water” as a form of medication, a record of legal proceedings against a physician in Bath, and a treatise on diseases of the eye.  We could engage in endless speculation about what exactly compelled the original compiler to draw these diverse materials together – but sadly, it’s time to end our field trip.

The above is from Penn Ms. Codex 1572 a 14th century manuscript Gradual (liturgical music book) from Bressanone, Italy. The dragon-shaped initial ‘G’ begins a chant for Midnight mass at Christmas “Grates nunc omnes reddamus domino deo…” [Thanks let us render all to the lord God...]. Merry Christmas from Unique at Penn!

When I was browsing Penn in Hand one day, searching for manuscripts that might provide interesting ways of thinking about historical writing, I was delighted to stumble upon LJS 477, a thirteenth-century florilegium (or, collection of excerpts from other written works) probably written by a Dominican in Oxford. This manuscript offers a unique way of understanding how a medieval friar might conceptualize the relationship between faith and what we now call “science,” because it contains both sermons and excerpts about natural history. In thirteenth-century England, these subjects were not so far removed from each other, but their appearance in close proximity, especially in a manuscript most likely intended for personal use, do suggest that the scribe may have been drawing some interesting conclusions about the relationship between the two. Indeed, my research suggests that the scribe of LJS 477 uses the idea of origins to demonstrate that all human understanding is actually the product of the divine will.

Most of the manuscript is filled with religious material, which is occasionally punctuated with clusters of information about natural history from various sources. One of those sources happens to be Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, an extremely influential work of the early Middle Ages[1]. Isidore’s encyclopedic work sought to include all of human knowledge in one place, and therefore includes information about subjects as disparate as rhetoric (book II), chronic disease (book IV), lightning (book XIII), and drinking vessels (book XX). Like the scribe of LJS 477, Isidore also includes religious materials alongside these other discussions – partly, of course, because Isidore would have seen no division between these subjects, but also partly due to his adoption of etymology as the lens through which all knowledge can be understood.

Indeed, as someone interested in the relationship between language and history, Isidore’s choice of etymology as his organizing principle is particularly fascinating to me. According to Isidore, “Etymologia est origo vocabulorum, cum vis verbi vel nominis per interpretationem colligitur”: “Etymology is the origin of words, when the force of a verb or noun is inferred through interpretation.”[2] This is often possible with Greek and Latin words, but can prove impossible with words of a foreign origin, or when no reason was used in the creation of a word. “The knowledge of a word’s etymology often has an indispensable usefulness for interpreting the word, for when you have seen whence a word has originated, you understand its force more quickly. Indeed, one’s insight into anything is clearer when its etymology is known.”[3]

Of course, modern scholars would disagree with Isidore on many of his assertions, both in the Etymologiae and in his other works. Yet what is important for a student of medieval historiography is the power that Isidore gives each word to convey meaning across words (i.e., building relationships between words with similar etymologies) and between words (i.e., tracking a word’s movement across space and time). In this way, each word becomes a form of historical writing in its own right, and that history proves necessary to the interpretation of texts.

LJS 477: 56r. All folios that include references to Isidore of Seville follow this layout

Hence my interest in LJS 477. I was curious about which selections of the Etymologiae the scribe chose to include in his work, as well as how those selections might relate to the excerpts from other natural histories and the sermons that make up the bulk of the manuscript. And even though the current order of the manuscript is different than it was when first compiled, we do know that these different genres did originally appear alongside each other in the manuscript’s original state[4]. Thus the question raises itself: what might drive a scribe to include sermons and natural history side-by-side in this manuscript? And how might Isidore fit into the picture?

To start answering these questions, I began my study of the manuscript by hunting down the references to the Etymologiae in the manuscript. The excerpts from Isidore begin about halfway down the left-hand column on fol. 56r, and end at the bottom of fol. 60v. As the image to the right shows, this manuscript is fairly utilitarian, and does not specifically demarcate the shift to natural history – the beginning of fol. 56r is a continuation of a discussion on the wood of the cross from the previous folio.

Each reference to Isidore’s text (and to other sources, as we will see) follows a standard citational style: a set of double vertical lines mark the beginning of a new excerpt; a reference to the source author, book, title, and chapter follows; and then a single vertical line precedes the quote itself. This can be seen from the first citation, a reference to Isidore’s description of Eden: “Ite[m] ysid[orus]. l[ibro]. 14. eth[ymologiae]. c[apitu]lo. 3” (highlighted below).

First reference to Isidore of Seville in LJS 477 fol. 56r, to Etymologiae XIV.3. Passage highlighted.

I have been able to track down nearly all of the references to the Etymologiae – many of them conveniently align with modern critical editions of Isidore’s work, although a few can prove challenging to find. One reference I have as yet been unable to locate in the Etymologiae, but I hope that further digging will reveal its source.

The selections from the Etymologiae copied into LJS 477 can be roughly categorized as follows: the location and description of Eden, the descriptions of various types of trees and plants, the layout and creation of the heavens and the Earth, the physics of spoken sound, lakes, stars, and snakes. These excerpts are located all over the Etymologiae, suggesting that the scribe purposefully selected the pieces of information that he wished to include in his manuscript.

Moreover, the scribe seems to have taken care to order the information from Isidore in the way best for his purposes, often reorganizing sections from the same chapter in the Etymologiae which could easily have been copied out en masse. For example, Isidore includes an entire chapter on snakes in the Etymologiae (XII.4). The scribe has copied the entirety of this chapter into his manuscript, but has done so piecemeal, copying one section, then skipping above or below in the Etymologiae, and then doubling-back to recopy what he has passed over. This is not an accident of a differently-ordered source text: the scribe denotes that he is still in the same chapter by citing a quotation as being from earlier or later in the same section of text in the Etymologiae. For example, in the ninth line in the left-hand column in the image below, one can see “Id[em] inf[ra],” or “Again, below [the previous quotation].”

LJS 477 fol. 58r. Passage highlighted.

In this image, it is also possible to see in the righthand column that, in between the discussion of snakes, the scribe has inserted information on the relationship between salt and fire, which is similar to the relationship between snakes’ venom and human blood. Salt, as a water element, “flees” (fugit) when it comes into contact with fire, according to Isidore (XVI.2). Likewise, snakes and their venom are naturally cold, and drive out the fiery soul from the body upon contact with the bloodstream (XII.4). Thus, our scribe uses the opposition of water and fire to explain how snake venom causes death. From these examples, we can see that the scribe carefully selected and organized information from the Etymologies according to his own interpretive needs.

Furthermore, I very quickly discovered that these folios do not refer exclusively to the Etymologiae, but instead references other authors as well (though none so often as Isidore). Such authors are used to supplement the information copied from the Etymologiae, rather than to provide information on completely different topics. In one instance on fol. 57r, the scribe cites a description of how spoken sound, or voice (vox), works. Although this quote actually originates from Thomas of Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum, it has here been attributed to Isidore (possibly because of an incorrect source text)[5]. Further down in that same column, the scribe gives another description of vox (accurately cited) from Isidore’s Etymologiae [6]:

Top highlighted passage: reference to Thomas of Cantimpré, attributed to Isidore. Bottom highlighted passage: correct reference to Isidore. LJS 477 fol. 57r.

Finally, after these other two references, he cites Aristotle’s De anima on the very same subject [7].

Reference to Aristotle, De anima, fol. 57r. Passage highlighted.

Even though the scribe is unaware that the excerpt he believes to be from book I of the Etymologiae is actually from Thomas of Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum, he is purposefully placing Aristotle alongside Isidore, and thus providing two authorities on this topic. Thus, the scribe does not appear to be interested in simply copying or reconstructing Isidore’s arguments on a particular subject in his manuscript; rather, he seems to be heavily using Isidore’s work, and briefly referencing the works of other authors, to compile information about the topics in which he has interest.

Moreover, these references to the Etymologiae and other sources for natural history are interspersed with exegesis, possibly for use in sermons. Across fols. 56r-60v, the scribe includes exegesis on Terra dedit fructum suum (from James 5:18, which references Psalm 66:7), Ponam vellus hoc lanae in area (Judges 6:37), and Vox clamantis in deserto (Isaiah 40:3). Certainly, natural imagery abounds here as well – the land and its fruit (and the rain referenced through Psalms); sheep; the wilderness. One could argue that the references to Isidore and the other authors are placed here to inform the exegesis of these biblical verses. But the references to natural history often occur before the biblical verse they would supposedly be supporting, making such a purpose unlikely. Moreover, Isidore’s description of vox in terms of choral music hardly seems relevant to the “voice of one crying in the wilderness.” What, then, could be the organizing principle behind fols. 56r-60v of LJS 477?

I would argue that the biblical exegesis and the excerpts from natural histories work together to create a series of references back to the early chapters of Genesis. Every topic covered in these pages can easily be seen as referring to something from Genesis – whether it be the Earth, stars, trees, snakes, or even the disembodied voice of God creating the world. In this way, the scribe’s close attention to words – whether in the context of etymology or exegesis – refers back to the universal history of the Word, which, like Isidore’s word, contains within it past, present, and future. Just as a word is best understood through its origins, so too is natural history best understood through its origins in the divine will, as recorded in Genesis. Likewise, all of Scripture is a reflection of that same divinity, the true author behind the entire Bible. Neither biblical exegesis nor natural history is privileged in this conceptualization – they both offer their own pathways to understanding creation, through the medium of words. Thus, LJS 477 reveals a glimpse into the mindset of a thirteenth-century scribe, as he uses the principles of language to tie together both his faith and his interest in the science of the world around him.