A Woodblock on Pilgrimage: From Flanders to Philadelphia

[Ed. note: we are very grateful to Dr. Patricia Stoop, visiting Brueghel Chair at the University of Pennsylvania / Universiteit Antwerpen for contributing this post.]

At the beginning of this year, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts of the University of Pennsylvania purchased a unique and fascinating woodblock (c. 12.5 × 9.5 inches). Apart from the fact that for mysterious reasons over the course of time, a strip of about half an inch was cut off from the left end of the block—this was already the case when it belonged to a private owner in Eindhoven (Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands) in the 1950s—the woodblock is in excellent condition.

Woodblock (UPenn Object Coll. Box 27)

Image from M. de Meyer, “Een oude bedevaartprent van Scherpenheuvel” in Volkskunde 13 nr. 3, 1954, p144

The devotional print is related to Scherpenheuvel (literally ‘Sharp Hill’, most often called ‘Montaigu’ after the French), which since the beginning of the seventeenth century was the main pilgrimage center in the Habsburg Low Countries. Its cult goes back to at least the beginning of the fourteenth century. In his continuation of the Spiegel Historiael the Brabantine priest and author Lodewijk van Velthem (c. 1260/75–after 1317) mentions a holy oak, which had the form of a cross and stood on the hilltop between the towns of Diest and Zichem, where he was ordained as a priest. The tree was worshipped because of the healing powers ascribed to it:

Van ere eyken die men anebede. LVII. In desen tiden was ganginge mede Tuscen Zichgem ende Diest der stede Rechte bi na te middewarde. Daer dede menich sine bedevarde Tot ere eyken, dat si u cont, Die alse .i. cruse gewassen stont Met .ii. rayen gaende uut. Daer menich quam overluut, Die daer ane hinc scerpe ende staf Ende seide dat hi genesen waer daer af. Som [s]liepense onder den boem. Dus quam hem voren in haren droem Datsi vanden boem genasen. Aldus so quamen daer die dwasen, Ende die waren meest siec vanden rede, Ende vele verlorne daer optie stede. Dit duerde wel .i. half jaer, Sodat menige scerpe hinc daer Ende menich staf anden boem.

On an oak that was worshipped. Chapter 57. In these days pilgrimage took place to a place almost in the middle between Zichem and Diest. Many went on pilgrimage there to an oak, that as you should know was grown in the form of a cross with two diverging branches. Apparently many put their pilgrim bag and their cane on the tree and said that they were cured thereof. Some slept underneath the tree. They believed that in their dreams they were healed by the tree. Thus the fools came there, mostly sick of mind, and lost many belongings in that place. This took place definitely for half a year so that many pilgrim bags and many canes hung there on the tree.

(Book 4, Chapter 57, ll. 4256–74)

Not too long after Velthem’s disapproving observation, a small statue of the Virgin Mary was placed in the cross-shaped tree. According to the legend, a shepherd had noticed around 1415 that the statue had fallen down. When he lifted it up in order to take it home, he was unable to move. Only when his master, who was worried because the shepherd had not returned home after work, put the statue of the Virgin back into the tree, was the servant able to move again. In this way the Virgin had shown the spiritual importance of the place. In the woodblock the shepherd is depicted in the lower left corner: he is identified by the French word berger, which indicates that the prints to be produced from this block were intended for a French-speaking audience.

After the miracle with the shepherd, the site was frequented by inhabitants of the surrounding villages whenever they were sick or a member of their family suffered from illness or pain. As suggested in the short passage from the text by Velthem, the pilgrims hung their support aids on the tree when they did not need them any longer: in October 1603 the tree counted no less than 135 canes. But there was also a lively trade in ex-votos: pilgrims could buy representations in gold, silver or tin of the body parts that were cured or needed healing (in the last case it was believed that the representation of the ill limb would take over the disease). These votive offerings were left hanging on the holy tree, as can be seen in the image above the radiant aureole in which the Virgin is depicted.

In the 1580s Scherpenheuvel found itself in the midst of the battlefields of the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648). While occupied by Protestant forces of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands between 1580 and 1583, the statue of the Virgin fell victim to an act of iconoclasm and was removed. After the town was retaken by the Spanish army, the cult was restored in 1587 by the parishioners of Zichem. (This town is represented in the woodblock both by the striped coat of arms at the left end of the woodblock and the stag with the crucifix at the right end of the block, which refers to St Eustachius, the town’s patron saint). By that time the site also had a strong appeal to Spanish soldiers who were wounded or infected by diseases. Via them, stories of miraculous healings spread all the way to France and the north of Spain. One of the people who benefited from these miraculous healings is represented centrally in the lower edge of the woodblock. Hans Clements—or Jean Clement as he is called on the woodblock (both names are derived from the Latin name Johannes)—, citizen of Lucerne in Switzerland, was born crippled. He traveled throughout the Netherlands on this knees, begging, until he arrived in Scherpenheuvel where the Virgin Mary finally answered his prayers and cured his disability.

The story about Hans (or Jean) Clements is one of the most famous miracles that happened in Scherpenheuvel in 1603 and 1604. It is extensively described by Philips Numan (c. 1550–1627), humanist writer and town secretary of Brussels, in his collection of miracles ascribed to Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel: Historie van de mirakelen die onlancx in grooten ghetale ghebeurt zijn door die intercessie ende voer bidden van die H. Maget Maria op een plaetse genoemt Scherpen heuvel by die Stadt van Sichen in Brabant [History of the miracles that happened recently in large numbers by the intercession and mediation of the Holy Virgin Mary in a place named Scherpenheuvel near the city of Zichem in Brabant]. Numan collected the miracles by order of the archbishop of Mechelen, Mathias Hovius (1542–1620). The first edition was printed in Louvain by Rutger Velpius in 1604. The image below is taken from the third edition printed by the same printer in 1606. Besides the publication in Dutch, Numan wrote a French version for the local nobility and a Spanish one intended for the court. Not much later an English translation was printed (1606). A Latin version was published by the famous humanist Justus Lipsius (1605).

The third edition of the Historie van de mirakelen (Brussels: Rutgeert Velpius, 1606). Copperplate engraving. Copy of the Heritage Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, Antwerpen, RG 3091 I 13. In the middle Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel is depicted in the same radiant aureole as can be found on the woodblock. She is accompanied by Hans Clemens to her right and Catherine du Bus, who is exclaiming the message of the devil.

The second great miracle is depicted in the lower left corner of the woodblock: there we see a woman on her knees, her arms spread while she expresses the message of the devil. The woman is identified as Catherine du Bus, a woman from Lille, France, who was able to speak Hebrew and Greek, although she never studied those languages, a clear sign that she was possessed by the devil. While being exorcized, she made predictions about the siege of the city of Ostend, which at the time was occupied by the Dutch rebels. During the process, which initially failed a number of times, the devil—in both the woodblock and the copperplate engraving he is pictured in a speech balloon—via Catherine’s mouth shouted to eyewitnesses that they were wrong in believing that the Spaniards would be able to win the siege. After eating a fragment of the oak tree of Scherpenheuvel, however, the devil was forced out, and on 22 September 1604 the Royal Spanish troops of Archduke Albert of Austria (1559–1621) took over Ostend, all thanks to the intervention of the Virgin of Scherpenheuvel.

Miracles like these established the fame of Scherpenheuvel as a pilgrimage site on a greater level than a regional one. In 1603, after they had heard that the Virgin had wept blood, the Archduke and his wife Isabella (1566–1633), who are depicted in the lower right corner of the woodblock (which is quite exceptional in devotional prints from Scherpenheuvel), visited the place for the first time and took it under their protection. In order to spread the devotion, books such as Numan’s and other devotional representations were mass produced. In the meantime a small wooden chapel was built for the statue of the Virgin in front of the oak in 1602. As we see in Velthem’s text, the worshipping of a tree was not much appreciated by the Catholic priests. Only two years later this wooden chapel was replaced by a larger, stone version. Likely it is this chapel that is depicted on the woodcut. In 1607 Albrecht and Isabella, out of gratitude for the expulsion of the Calvinists from the Southern Low Countries, decided that Scherpenheuvel had to be transformed into a fully-fledged pilgrimage site. In order to stimulate this they commissioned the building of a new basilica as a symbol of the Counter Reformation. The foundation stone of this new church was laid by them on 2 July 1606, the Feast of the Visitation of the Virgin. It is usually this basilica, which still is the destination of many pilgrims to this day, which is represented on devotional prints from Scherpenheuvel such as the example below.

Jean Clement and other pilgrims being healed by Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel, with the new basilica in the background. Printed by Johannes I van den Sande (1600–c. 1675), after 1620. Antwerpen, Ruusbroec Institute, Collection Alfons Thijs, KP 31.17.

This observation may help us in dating the woodblock. Contrary to the date of c. 1750 offered in the catalogue of Samuel Gedge Ltd. (from whom the Kislak Center acquired the piece) it is more likely that the woodblock is from a much earlier date. The fact that the woodblock does not depict the new basilica that was built from 1609 onwards (and consecrated in 1627), but instead the chapel that stood at the pilgrimage site before, indicates that the woodblock was produced in the short period between 1603/04, the years in which the miracles of Hans Clements and Catherine du Bus took place, and 1609 when the chapel was torn down in order to replace it with the new basilica, or certainly before 1627 when the new basilica was consecrated. Given the fact that devotional prints such as this woodblock were intended to propagate the cult of both the Virgin and the pilgrimage town, it seems to make little sense that one would not depict the impressive new church on devotional prints after it was completed. Moreover, the striking similarities in iconography with the copperplate engraving in the third edition of Numan’s Historie printed in 1606 as well as with a devotional print from 1602 and especially an approbation by the church on 17 November 1604 (see below) seem to support a dating in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

–Patricia Stoop

Copperplate engraving by the Antwerp engraver and print publisher Adriaan Huberti (active between 1573 and 1614) from an ecclesiastical approbation (1604) showing Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel in the oak, the three miracles ascribed to her, and archduke Albrecht and his wife Isabella. Under the mandorla with Our Lady one can see the little stone chapel that is also depicted at the woodcut. The coats of arms are those of Zichem (under the mandorla), Brabant (left) and the princess of Oranje-Nassau, the Lords of Zichem (right). Brussel, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 20614, fols 2v–3r.

References

Bowen, K.L., Marian Pilgrimage Sites in Brabant: A Bibliography of Books Printed Between 1600–1850 (Leuven: Peeters, 2008).

De Meyer, M., ‘Een oude bedevaartprent van Scherpenheuvel’, Volkskunde: driemaandelijks tijdschrift voor de studie van het volksleven, 55 (1954), 144–45.

Duerloo, Luc and Marc Wingens, Scherpenheuvel: het Jeruzalem van de Lage Landen (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2002).

Duerloo, Luc, Dynasty and Piety: Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars (London: Routledge, 2012).

Samuel Gedge LTD, Catalogue xxv, no. 20.

Beyond the First Folio

[Ed. note: Today’s post is by Isabel Gendler, a rising Penn senior and history major who is a CURF fellow at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts this summer]

On my first day interning at the Kislak Center, I paged through the Furness Library’s copies of the Second, Third and Fourth Folios. A group of scholars examining the less-studied later Folios had contacted Penn wanting to know if these copies contained any marginalia, corrections, or marks of provenance. To my surprise, I discovered that the flyleaves of Penn’s second copy of the Fourth Folio were virtually filled with notes in the same neat handwriting. The most recent work referenced in the notes, Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810), suggests the annotations were written in the early 19^th century.

Readers have long written, doodled, and made notes in their books.[1] The majority of marks made by readers simply indicate ownership. However, people also wrote in books to express their opinions or organize their responses (as readers do today), whether for personal enjoyment or for scholarly or professional purposes.[2] In her work on reader annotation, H.J. Jackson states that, while marginalia are potentially highly valuable to individuals studying literature and literary culture, scholars debate the degree to which marginalia can reliably be used to reconstruct an individual reader’s thoughts or a particular intellectual climate.[3] The copious notes present in Penn’s Fourth Folio suggest that if such notes do not lend themselves to definite conclusions, they may serve as a starting point for inquiries into the individuals and cultures that created them.

Three copies of the Fourth Folio, published in 1685, were donated to Penn in 1931, as part of the extensive library of Shakespeare and Shakespeare-related materials collected by Horace Howard Furness, Sr. and his son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr.. The title page of the copy designated “copy two” bears the signature “Bartram,” the only clue relating to its earlier history. The annotations in question comprise a mixture of excerpts from the plays themselves and references to scholarly and non-scholarly works. The reader cited the work of two respected Shakespeare editors and commentators, Edward Capell (1713-1741) and Edmond Malone (1741-1812), demonstrating a certain level of familiarity with the world of Shakespeare criticism. They also referenced an eclectic group of texts, including one of Petrarch’s sonnets and Bishop Robert Lowth’s treatise on Hebrew poetry (1753).

Front pastedown of UPenn Furness Folio PR2751.A4 copy 2

In particular, the reader quoted Petrarch’s Sonnet 29 in association with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

The reader’s familiarity with the sonnet and their decision to quote the poem in the original Italian suggests, much like the references to Capell and Malone, that the reader was well-educated, with a broad interest in literature. The sonnet’s value appears to be thematic rather than contextual – the narrator’s vision of the relief offered by death bears an obvious resemblance to Hamlet’s speech, but the 14^th century sonnet seems to have little other relation to the 16^th-century play. One might consequentially theorize that the reader was annotating for personal enjoyment rather than for more formal scholarly purposes. Whereas the aforementioned Capell compiled texts written before and during Shakespeare’s lifetime to better understand the intellectual climate in which the playwright operated, this reader may have quoted Petrarch simply because they enjoyed pairing the soliloquy with a beautiful poem expressing a similar sentiment.[4]

The reader further copied numerous lines of the text onto the front and back flyleaves, sometimes accompanied by mentions of scholarly or fictional works. Intriguingly, two quotes are preceded by the headings “woman” and “women – influence” and many others seem to center on femininity.

These quotes – which included Hamlet’s famous line “Frailty, thy name is woman” as well as selections from ten other comedies, tragedies and history plays – construct a somewhat complex image of Shakespeare’s female characters. In this reader’s vision, women appear to have a singularly powerful and sometimes destructive hold on men – selections from Measure for Measure  and Henry VI, Part I suggest that women can use their feminine grace and vulnerability to influence men, while Lady Macbeth goads her reluctant husband into action and the jealously of Adriana of The Comedy of Errors seems to have driven her husband insane (5.1.70-89). However, certain quotes describe feminine power and charm in a positive light – Henry VI, Part III’s Queen Margaret successfully rallies her son’s followers and a quote describing the captivating Cleopatra is followed by the phrase “no insipid beauty.” This may be a quote from the Shakespeare commentator George Steevens (1736 – 1800), from a note to the same scene in which he urged his female readers to note that many of the women who have “enslaved the hearts of princes” did so through their mental, rather than physical, charms.[5] It is probable that an individual familiar with Capell and Malone had also read Steevens’ work, leaving the modern reader to wonder if the annotator similarly believed their female contemporaries should learn from the examples set by the woman of Shakespeare.

This group of quotations illustrates how marginalia can spark scholarly inquiries. How, for example, does the image of women constructed by these quotations (if one agrees that these quotations do present a definite sense of feminine weakness and persuasiveness) compare to early 19^th century norms of female behavior? How do these quotations compare to contemporaneous studies of women in Shakespeare?

————–

[1] H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 53.
[2] Ibid., 14, 33-35
[3] Ibid., 15.
[4] Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretive Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 185.
[5]  Isaac Reed, ed., The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare with the Corrections and Annotations of Dr. Johnson, George Steevens and Others (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1905), 6:126.

 

A passage from a lost play

[Ed. note: Today’s post is by Andrew S. Keener, a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at Northwestern University who recently spent time researching in our collections]

“Doo Comedies like you wel?” asks a speaker on the first page of John Florio’s bilingual conversation guide First Fruits (1578). Such a question is hardly out of place among this book’s two-columned Italian and English dialogues, which scholars from time to time have labeled as “theatrical” or “dramatic.” Indeed, critics have often located Florio, a language instructor, translator, and lexicographer, in relation to the world of Renaissance drama. One tradition, for instance, holds that William Shakespeare fashioned Florio into the pedantic Holofernes for his comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost; according to Frances Yates, this character “spoke in a way which the audience would recognize as Florio’s very voice and manner”[1].

The Holofernes connection remains speculative, but the more we know about surviving copies of books like First Fruits, the more we might learn about the connections between these supposedly “theatrical” language-learning dialogues and works of early modern drama. To this point, an annotated copy of Florio’s book at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts features an early reader’s handwritten transcription of a prologue from a seventeenth-century play. In striking terms, the speaker reprimands an antsy audience before the play begins:

Florio his first fruites (1578). UPenn Furness PC1121.F78 1578

Transcribed for legibility, the text reads:

You who sitting heare, do stand
To see our play, which must this
Night, be acted heare to day –
Be silent, pray, tho: you allowd
Do tallke, sture not a jott, tho vp
And down you walke, for every silent
Noyes the players see, will make them
Mute & speake: full angerly, o tarry
Heare vntill you doe departe,
Gentl[i]e your smileing frowns
Do vs impart, and then wee
Most thankless, than[k]fulle will
Apeare, and waite vpon you
Home, but yett stay heare

Intriguingly, this prologue belongs to a lost play, and it does not seem possible to identify the work of drama at all, by title, playwright, or company. However, this passage does appear elsewhere in seventeenth-century print. “Comfortably inside books of poetry and miscellanies, ‘severed’ prologues find a new life as ‘poems’ amongst other poems, or as jests amongst other jests,” states Tiffany Stern, who refers specifically to this case[2]. To name just two examples, The Booke of Bulls (1636) situates this prologue under the header “A Bull Prologu [sic], to a foolish audience,” while a volume entitled VVit and drollery (1656) includes the passage simply as “A Bull Prologue.”

Penn’s copy of First Fruits features a fascinating, and previously unknown, manuscript witness to this lost play’s prologue (including a textual variant that seems to appear nowhere else in print, “tarry”). We can also attribute the inscriptions with confidence to Richard Parsons (1641/2 – 1711), an ecclesiastical judge and antiquary who signs his name in the same hand elsewhere in the volume. Known as a cantankerous suppressor of dissent, perhaps Parsons found something appealing in this prologue’s censorious language. Could he have brought First Fruits with him to the theater, copying down the verses as he heard them, or shortly thereafter? What makes Florio’s book a good place to record a dramatic prologue? How does this dramatic extract square with Parsons’s other inscriptions, both on this page and elsewhere in the book? Clearly, the Penn copy of First Fruits poses a number of questions. Whatever the answers, the book encourages us to consider the ways in which language-learning dialogues mingled with drama in a broad economy of seventeenth-century language and literature.

[Ed. note: This post has been updated from its initial publication of June 1]

[Author’s note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly linked this prologue to John Tatham’s The Whisperer. Like Tatham’s prologue, the one in question here belongs to a lost play, seems to have been acted at the Red Bull, and surfaced later on in verse miscellanies, but its completely unknown origins render Penn’s copy of First Fruits all the more mysterious and fascinating.]

——-

[1] Frances Yates,  John Florio; the life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 335.

[2] Tiffany Stern, Documents of performance in early modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 99.

Race and the Haitian Constitution of 1805

Constitucion politico del imperio de Hayti UPenn Misc Ms. Box 22, Folder 1.

[Ed. Note: Today’s post is by Julia Gaffield, a professor of history at Georgia State University and expert on early independent Haiti. Her new book on the subject Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World was published in October by UNC Press.]

At the heart of the Age of Revolutions were complex debates about individual and collective identity. While the American and French experiences focused on the meaning of concepts like liberty and fraternity within dominant cultures, Haiti’s Declaration of Independence on January 1, 1804 set the stage for intense and enduring controversy about racialized definitions of civic membership. Prior to the world’s only slave revolution, the French colony had been the most profitable in the world because about 465,000 enslaved men and women labored on sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations and in the houses of their masters as well as in Saint-Domingue’s port cities. The free population of the colony (about half white and have free people of color) was only about 60,000. Few white people remained in the colony after the Declaration of Independence. Because of this and because of the fact that the country’s leadership was either black or mixed race, Haiti was often referred to as “the black republic” (even when it was not a republic) [1].

The Haitian Declaration of Independence proclaimed the “state of Hayti,” rather than a republic, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared himself emperor (Jacques 1er d’Hayti) of the Empire of Hayti in October 1804. The 1805 constitution is therefore an imperial constitution. After Dessalines’s death in 1806, the country divided in civil war with a republic in the South and “the state of Hayti,” in the North. Henry Christophe, the president of the northern part of Haiti, soon proclaimed the Kingdom of Haiti and took the title King Henry of Haiti. The country was reunited in 1820 under the republican constitution of the south.

“Black Republic of St. Domingo,” Farmer’s Cabinet, Amherst, New Hampshire, 10 April 1804, page 3.

Haitians themselves, as well as outsiders, connected race and country in defining their new national identity. The Haitian government published its first national constitution on May 20, 1805. Newspapers across the Atlantic printed portions portions of this path-breaking constitution while various copies and transcriptions circulated widely. Although few copies are known to still exist, either printed or in manuscript, the version recently purchased by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries is a contemporary Spanish manuscript translation of the document that likely circulated on the eastern side of the island of Hispaniola.[2] Formerly a Spanish colony, the eastern side had transferred to the French Empire during the Peace of Basel negotiations in 1795.

When French forces evacuated the western side of the island in 1803, a small contingent established itself in the city of Santo Domingo and claimed to be the legitimate authority for the entire island. The Haitian government, however, claimed that the entire island was within the geographic boundaries of their country.

The particular copy of the 1805 constitution now at Penn differs from the official Haitian printing of the Constitution at Aux Cayes in its organization and numbering, including the fact that it skips a few sections. The translation, however, does include Article 14, which has in recent years become such a focus of scholarly attention that this constitution might be the most cited document in Haitian history. In Article 14, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Emperor of Haiti at the time of its publication, articulated an explicitly ideological conception of race.

“Article 14: All meaning of color among the children of one and the same family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall henceforth be known by the generic appellation of blacks.”

Constitution d’Haïti (Aux Cayes, 1805). Article 14. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Images available at www.modern-constitutions.de

The fact that the preceding article in the constitution explicitly acknowledged that some “white women,” Germans, and Poles had been naturalized as Haitian citizens highlights the radical reconceptualization of race that underpinned Haiti’s entry on the world stage.

In her analysis of the profound meaning of this document, Anne Gulick argues that, “the 1805 Constitution contains what in today’s lexicon would be called a set of radical postcolonial aspirations, a community imagined, through a legal narrative, as capable of doing something none of its models had done before: identifying both blackness and humanity as the basic signifiers of citizenship.”[3] In other words, the constitution was a celebration of Haiti’s identity as a “black” country.

“Disrupting any biologistic or racialist expectations,” Sibylle Fischer argues in Modernity Disavowed, “they make ‘black’ a mere implication of being Haitian and thus a political rather than a biological category.”[4] Not only did the label erase previous racial distinctions between “black” and “white” residents, it attempted to undermine the importance of national, linguistic, and color differences within the non-white population. “This new ‘black,’” Jean Casimir argues, “encompassed the various ethnic groups that had been involved in the struggle against the Western vision of mankind. Victory in adversity gave birth to this new character, which was a synthesis not only of Ibos, Aradas, and Hausas but also of French, Germans, and Poles.”[5]

The elimination of difference was important because, as Colin Dayan notes, “the most problematic division in the new Haiti was that between anciens libres (the former freedmen, who were mostly gens de couleurs, mulattoes and their offspring) and nouveaux libres (the newly free, who were mostly black), Dessalines attempted by linguistic means and by law to defuse the color issue.”[6]

Doris Garraway highlights Dessalines’s use of what she calls “negative universalism” in the constitution—an emphasis on what Haitians were not: “it is the excluded term—whiteness—that conditions the political definition of the collectivity, seen as its opposite, the ‘black’ other that was previously reproved by white power and that now symbolizes not a biological essence but an absolute resistance to white racial supremacy.”[7]

Article 14, Constitución Política del Imperio de Hayti. UPenn Misc. Mss. Box 22, Folder 1.

The Spanish translation now held by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries promises to fuel the continuing scholarly attention to the 1805 constitution. For example, the document capitalizes “Negro” whereas the official printed copy issued by the Haitian government keeps “noirs” in lowercase. The Haitian Kreyòl word “nèg” refers to a person, regardless of skin color where as the word “blan” (derived from the French “blanc” or “white”) generally means “foreigner.” Given that Jean-Jacques Dessalines did not speak French fluently, did the 1805 constitution intend to label all Haitian citizens as “black” or as “people”? Or, did the 1805 constitution encourage the evolution of the term “noir” or “nèg” to signify the universality of all citizens?

——

From Steamer Trunk to Rare Books Collection

[Ed. Note. Today’s post comes from Dr. Elisabeth Esser Braun, the donor of the book discussed here. She was born in Cologne, Germany, completed her undergraduate education in Europe, and earned a doctorate from the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. She worked as a journalist at the United Nations and as an international executive. She retired in 1990 and now lives in Haverford, Pa.]

I recently came across a box of family memorabilia that included Hieronymus Oertl’s Geistlicher Frauenzimmerspiegel, published in Hanover, Germany, in 1708.

Geistlicher Frauenzimmerspiegel. UPenn BS575.O7 1708

I was intrigued and wanted to know: What is a Frauenzimmer-spiegel? Who was Hieronymus Oertl? Why and for whom was this book written? How many copies exist?

Researching the story of the Geistlicher Frauenzimmerspiegel has been an interesting quest. Scant literature on the subject exists, either in German or in English [1]. However, we know from secondary sources that this was the time of popular piety (Volksfroemmigkeit) and that these books were written as devotional and edifying guides (Erbauungsliteratur) for a female readership. Similar to Catholic prayer books and stories about the lives of saints, these books were meant to encourage Protestant women (Frauenzimmer) to lead virtuous lives as mirrored (Spiegel) in the lives of Biblical women of the Old and New Testament. The text was compiled from many sources and the books were lavishly illustrated with copperplate engravings so as to appeal through image as well as text.

The virtues highlighted in the Frauenzimmerspiegel were wide ranging. They focused on a woman’s role as wife and mother in a patriarchal society and included, among others, honesty, chastity, obedience, wisdom, courage and, more generally, strength through prayer. Even if a woman failed to conduct herself properly, all was not lost since God, in his infinite wisdom, always granted redemption through penitence and prayer. These virtues reinforced the patriarchal hierarchy of society and validated God’s orderly plan for his creation of life on earth.

Among the forty exemplary biblical women included in the Frauenzimmerspiegel were Eve, the mother of all living beings; Sara, the blessed one; Hagar, the exiled one; Lea, the patient one; Debora, the courageous one; Rahab, the faithful one; Abigail, the reasonable one; Esther, the devout one; Susanna, the chaste one; and Maria Magdalena, the repentant one.

Portrait of Ortel. Nuremberg, 1615. (HAB copy).

Hieronymus Oertl, the author of the Geistlicher Frauenzimmer-spiegel, was no amateur scribe.  He was born in the Free Imperial City of Augsburg and died in the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg. Although disputed, most German sources identify the year of his birth as 1543 and that of his death as 1614.

The Oertl family was well established in Augsburg. They were merchants and also served as professional bureaucrats in the administrations of four Habsburg Emperors: Charles V (resigned in 1556), Ferdinand I (d.1564), Maximilian II (d.1567) and Rudolph II (d.1612). The Oertls were quiet Protestants and had been so long before the Peace of Augsburg (1550) that concluded the era of religious strife in Germany and recognized the right of territorial princes to determine the religion of their subjects. This was popularly interpreted as promoting equal rights for Catholics and Protestants in the Imperial realm.

Little is known about Hieronymus’ education. He joined the Imperial household at age 15 and advanced from Schreibmeister (writing master), copying calligraphic manuscripts, to chronicler, author, and notary. Oertl’s name emerged from obscurity in 1578, when a group of Protestants in Vienna presented a petition (Bittschrift) to the unyieldingly Catholic Emperor Rudolf II asking that Catholics and Protestants be assured equal religious freedoms in Austrian territories, as had been sanctioned in the Peace of Augsburg in 1550.

The petition was summarily dismissed and Oertl and his companions were prosecuted as heretics. They were sentenced to death but eventually pardoned and sent into permanent exile. Oertl settled in Protestant Nuremberg, where his brother-in-law was the well-respected copperplate engraver, illustrator, and publisher Johann Ambrosius Si(e)bmacher (1561-1612). Siebmacher was also the author of a highly acclaimed Wappenbuch (heraldic book). Siebmacher became the instigator, early collaborator and illustrator of Hieronymus Oertl’s multi-volume chronicle of the Hungarian wars against the Turks (1395-1607) as well as of the early editions of the Geistlicher Frauenzimmerspiegel. Unfortunately, no copies of these early editions seem to have survived.

The Hungarian wars and the Frauenzimmerspiegel were original compendia. Both began as chronicles, reformatting writings that were readily available in Augsburg and Nuremberg as centers of commerce as well as of the printing and illustrating trade. One can assume that the period of Hieronymus Oertl’s residence in Nuremberg, from 1580 to 1614 (ages 37 to 71), was the most productive of his career [2].
The first devotional book compiled by Hieronymus Oertl and illustrated by Johann Siebmacher was published in Nuremberg in 1610, just a few years before Oertl’s death in 1614. It was entitled Schoene Bildnus in Kupffer gestochen der erleuchten berumbtisten Weiber Altes, und Neues Testaments (Beautiful Portraits Engraved in Copper of the Illustrious and Most Famous Women from the Old and New Testament) and was dedicated to the Margravine Sophia of Ansbach, a pious patroness of Hieronymus Oertl. This book, it turns out, was not for sale. However, as devotional books grew in popularity, Margravine’s copy became the template for commercial editions that were published over the next century in various German, Dutch and Swiss cities. It should be noted that, unlike today, the designation Frauenzimmer had no derogatory meaning and was commonly used for ordinary women and occasionally with sweeping poetic license.

According to a recent count, twenty-three editions of the Geistlicher Frauenzimmerspiegel published between 1634 and 1755 are extant in various European and American libraries. The 1708 edition here is in a long duodecimo format, commonly used for small devotional books in the seventeenth century. In all editions, Hieronymus Oertl was acknowledged as the originator (inventor) of the book. However, others, such as clerics and poets, edited, enlarged, and embellished the text, even to the extent of being in competition with each other, sometimes to linguistically startling effects. An electronic edition of the 1755 Zurich edition of the Geistlicher Frauenzimmerspiegel (Zurich,1755) is available at the Niedersaechsische Staats-und-Universitaets-bibliothek in Goettingen. My family’s 1708 edition is therefore one of only a few survivors.

Title page opening. Geistlicher Frauenzimmerspiegel. UPenn BS575.O7 1708

The engraved frontispiece tells us that this Geistlicher Frauen Zimer Spigel contains everyday prayers freshly composed by wise men and illustrated with copper plate engravings first used by Hieronimum Ortelium. According to the title page, this 1708 edition was to be the “last edition” offered for sale by the Hauensteinischer Buchladen in Hanover. A small engraving in the lower third of the page urges its readers graphically to strive for higher reward in paradise after death.

Delivering Justice in the Mail: 6 Postcards on the Dreyfus Affair

Beitler Collection Postcards, PC162 to PC167

[Editor’s note: Today’s post is by David Murrell, a rising junior at Penn studying History and Political Science. Fascinated by all things French, he has spent this summer interning at the Kislak Center and happily sifting through piles of Dreyfus Affair postcards]

At first glance, postcards don’t appear to be particularly unique. Mass produced and intended for broad public consumption, they’re certainly not as rare as, say, the handwritten almanac that was recently featured on Unique at Penn. But that’s not to say that postcards shouldn’t be examined just as carefully. Indeed, with their unique handwritten messages and variety of printed designs, postcards provide a fascinating glimpse into the world from which they were sent.

The Dreyfus Affair (which began with the French captain Alfred Dreyfus’ false conviction for treason in 1894 for sending military secrets to the Germans) corresponded with a dramatic rise of the postcard in popular culture.  First invented in the late 1860s, by the time of the Dreyfus Affair postcards were both an exciting and novel method of communication for the masses. The Dreyfus Affair only reinforced the postcard’s popularity, as it led to the production of thousands of different political cards documenting the twists and turns of the Affair. By 1906, the year Dreyfus was finally exonerated by the French military, postcards were ubiquitous. In Great Britain alone, over 2 billion postcards were purchased that year — in other words, given Britain’s population of 40 million, every British citizen purchased an average of 50 postcards in just one year [1].

The Dreyfus Affair may have actually reinforced the postcard’s popularity: thousands of different political cards documenting the twists and turns of the Affair were printed in France and other countries. Indeed, one observer at the time of the Affair estimated that over a period of 18 months, more than six million Dreyfus Affair postcards were printed [2]. The Kislak Center holds a large collection of over 200 Dreyfus postcards in the Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair.

But how many of these postcards were actually used—written on and mailed? We can group the collection’s postcards into four main categories:

• cards that were never sent
• cards that were sent but have no written text
• cards that have with writing that is unrelated to the Dreyfus Affairs
• and cards that have writing that makes explicit reference to the Affair.

For this post, I’d like to focus on this final category. In the Beitler Collection there is a series of pro-Dreyfus postcards, sent to and from Brussels in 1900, that provides a brief history of the Affair from the perspective of a Dreyfus sympathizer. While we normally think of the postcard as a unitary item that can stand alone on its own, these cards were printed in a series, as were a number of other sets of cards during the Affair. In addition, the owner and writer of this set spread his or her message across the multiple cards in the set. Each card is thus a piece of a larger puzzle, each one contributing to the overall message. What I present here is a fascinating—and certainly atypical—case where we can follow a Dreyfus supporter, acquiring a series of pro-Dreyfus postcards and then writing a pro-Dreyfus message on them, and mailing the group to someone with similar sympathies.

Even if we momentarily ignore the postcards’ written text, it is clear from their printed drawings that they are the work of Dreyfus supporter. For example, in the first postcard, we see an image of the novelist Émile Zola, an ardent Dreyfus supporter, spraying figurative  “justice” on a crowd of anti-Dreyfusards. The crowd’s anti-Dreyfus beliefs are revealed by the men’s hats, which have on them the names of France’s most virulent anti-Semitic newspapers, including Édouard Drumont’s famously vile “La Libre Parole.”

Beitler PC162

Similarly, in the fourth postcard, the French press is depicted as an old woman, a kind of monster that barely resembles a human. The figure is attempting to keep the lid on a coffin labeled “Dreyfus Affair” in order to prevent Dreyfus, whose hands are shown holding two pieces of paper labeled “humanity” and “justice,” from escaping his coffin. The powerful image inspires sympathy for Dreyfus, while also vilifying the media for its attempts to suppress the truth.

Beitler PC166

Finally, the fifth card, captioned “Close the boxes, damn it!” depicts a French soldier scrambling to literally keep the lid on the various scandals that troubled the military during the Dreyfus Affair, ranging from General Picquart’s wrongful forgery conviction, to Zola’s libel trial, to Dreyfus’ multiple sham trials. All of these events and their backstories were linked to Dreyfus and threatened the military’s cover-up. It is interesting to note that despite this drawing’s bitter and critical tone, there remains a slight glimmer of hope — indeed, there are so many boxes in the picture that it would seem impossible for them to all be covered up by one soldier. This postcard would in fact prove to be quite prescient — though it was only sent in 1900, by 1906 the army could no longer cover up Dreyfus’ innocence, and he was finally exonerated.

Reflections on a Story Revealed

The ‘Levitt’ collection

[Ed. Note: Today’s post is by Lucian McMahon a Penn Classics Post-Baccalaureate ‘14 who was a Penn Libraries Collections Student Assistant 2013–2014]

Despite the seemingly inexorable conquest of the e-book and contrary to the doom-and-gloom prognostications of bibliophiles (and publishing houses) everywhere, the physical book continues somehow to eke out an existence, maintaining a mysteriously tenacious hold on many readers. For some, the type on paper is easier on the eyes; for others, a bound book is more suitable for close reading—for underlining, circling, highlighting, writing in the margins; for others, living rooms chaotic with crowded bookshelves comfort and remind them of lives spent with the written word, each book a companion in this world and a guide to another.

Whatever the specific reason for the mysterious attraction, the physicality of the book is primary. More than just ethereal and ephemeral words on a screen, a book is a real object that can be touched, smelled, annotated, traded, inherited. We lend books to congenially-minded friends, we give them away when we move, we wrap them up as presents. We write in them to remind ourselves of a specific passage, to list characters and plotlines, to make a book a personal gift.

Our personal libraries are testaments of lives spent buying, trading, giving away, receiving, reading books. They tell a story beyond the stories in each individual book, a story found in the margins and on the inside covers and between the pages. Each annotation, inscription, forgotten slip of paper or memento is a snapshot of a life. Take all these snapshots and flip through them fast enough and you can watch a movie spanning decades.

Note dated Feb. 6, 1942 in the Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde 

Recently, while going through a gift to the Penn Libraries from Michael and Susan Levitt (not their real names), I was privileged to watch just such a movie. Looking up each book in the library catalogue as a student collections assistant, looking for defects, inscriptions, stamps, plates, etc. I began, unwittingly at first, to piece together their lives from the clues they had left behind in their books.

From the notes and dedications they and their children Jeff and Maria wrote to one another, from the letters forgotten and pieces of miscellanea left between the pages, I watched the lives of Michael and Susan unfold in fast forward: A dedication from Michael to Susan in The Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde in 1942, perhaps when he was soldiering overseas; an undated Valentine’s Day card in Borges’ Personal Anthology; a love note from Susan to Michael on the occasion of their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary in Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life; Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting a Christmas gift in 1980; Living at the Edge by Squires and Talbot given to Susan on her 83rd birthday; a photograph of Michael peacefully asleep in an armchair with an obliging cat on his lap, “found in 2010,” in the pages of God’s Funeral by A. N. Wilson.

The 1960s and 70s left their mark on Michael and Susan’s library: The Bhagavad-Gita, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Confucius’ Analects, Herman Hesse. They read poetry, Rilke and Blake and Yeats and Coleridge. They read philosophy and history. Literature too, of course. A shelf of musical scores—compositions by Michael Levitt.

I found a book of the collected poems of Jeff Levitt. The preface tells of tragic events within the household. Suddenly, the melancholy strain wending through many of the inscriptions began to make sense. Maria appears to be a Near Eastern Studies scholar and a novelist in her own right. Michael was an accomplished scholar who must have died recently—a nursing home directory falls out of Yeats’ Mythologies and next to “Levitt” the name Susan stands alone.

When these books are catalogued and scattered throughout the stacks of the library and the snapshots of Michael and Susan’s lives have become disembodied and context-less, the story unfolding in their personal library will be lost—probably forever. A future student, plucking Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives from the shelf, might find a dedication to the Levitts’ sixty-fourth wedding anniversary, not knowing anything about Michael and Susan and Jeff and Maria. The student might begin to wonder about their lives and briefly invent a new story for them, with infinite possibilities. A Library of Babel of possible Levitt lives.

But while the books are still together, they tell a story beyond just what their owners liked to read or what the metadata of the future catalogue entry includes (how many pages, published when, where, and by whom). The inscriptions and personal effects tell a story of a life lived with love and sorrow, loss and gain. It is deeply touching to think I was lucky enough to be a last witness to this, Michael and Susan’s story.

Reading Chaucer through Dryden’s Eyes

[Ed. Note: Today’s post is by Simran Thadani who received her Ph.D. in 2013 from Penn’s Department of English with a specialization in book history and special collections]

John Dryden, perhaps the most prolific seventeenth-century English poet, playwright, and commentator, is well known for his adaptations of older texts. In his last work, Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), Dryden translated works by Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. But although Dryden styled Chaucer the “Father of English poetry,” and reprinted Chaucer’s original Middle English poems in the Fables,[1] one might suspect that Dryden’s eighteenth-century readers didn’t think Chaucer a worthwhile subject of study.

I make this claim based on two readers’ manuscript annotations in Penn’s copy of the Fables (Kislak Center, RBC Folio PR3418 .F3 1700). The unidentified readers, whom I’ll call A and B, engaged broadly with Dryden’s text. Here are some different things they wrote while reading:
Definitions: Reader A looked up the meanings of several unfamiliar terms. For instance, the word “horoscope” is defined as the “configuration of the planets at the hour of Birth,” while a “Quartil” is explained as “when planets are 3 signs distant = to one quarter or 90 degrees” (sigs. C1^v, D2^r).

Other specialized terms come from fields like fencing—to “foin” is “to push in fencing”; armory—a “Morion” is a “helmet, armour for the head”; and botany—“Fumetery, Centaury, and Spurge” are “an herb,” “a plant,” and “laurel or mezerion,” respectively (sigs. E4^v, K1^r, 2G3^v; all definitions from the OED).

Almost all these words originated in the medieval or Renaissance periods: the OED says “horoscope” was first used in 1050 CE (and then in Chaucer’s Astrolabe), “quartile” in 1500, “foin” in about 1450, “morion” in 1547, “centary” in about 1000 (and then in Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”), and “spurge” in 1387. But none were in common use in 1700, so Dryden’s use of Chaucer’s idiom, while serving as an evocative tribute to the older poet, was obviously hard for Dryden’s readers to navigate. This reader was evidently more comfortable with Dryden’s classical and Biblical sources than his medieval vocabulary, for very few allusions—such as to Samson, Solomon, Medea, or Circe—are glossed.

Corrections to typographical errors: It’s hard to say which reader made these corrections from the handwriting alone, since the marks are so small and generic. Here, “chast” and “hast” are given terminal “e”s, with commas inserted to clarify the syntax (sig. 3Q1^r):

In a more substantive correction, the word “Orphans” in Dryden’s triplet is emended to “Orpheus,” restoring the correct allusion to the musician, his “Wife” Eurydice, and the “Tyrant” Pluto (sig. 2I3^v).

Classical quotations: Reader B explicitly links Dryden and his sources. This reader quotes both Horace and Ovid in connection with a dream Arcite has “at Break of Day” (sig. D2^v):

“Post mediam noctem visus, cum somnia vera,” from Horace’s tenth Satire, is a description of Romulus “appearing … after midnight, when dreams are true.” Similarly, “Namque sub auroram, jam dormitante lucerna, / Somnia quo cerni tempore vera solent,” from Ovid’s Heroides, refers to the time “just before dawn, when the star is sinking, / A time of sleep when true dreams are often experienced.”

Dryden’s “Love’s a Malady without a Cure” has a more direct precedent, “nullis amor, est medicabilis, herbis,” although the reader does not provide the source (Ovid’s Metamorphoses) (sig. E3^r).

Ovid’s Ars amatoria is the source for the note “Jupiter ex alto, perjuria videt amantum,” which follows the comment that “Jove but laughs at Lovers Perjury” (sig. E3^v).

The reader was obviously familiar with unattributed Latin proverbs, too, citing “amare et sapere vix deo conceditur” next to Dryden’s “to be wise and love, / Is hardly granted to the Gods above” (sig. F3^v).

Extended critical notes: Reader B copied out lengthy passages from the critic Joseph Warton’s Essay of the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756) [2] (sigs. G2^v, G3^r):

Crucially, neither reader goes back to Chaucer’s originals, which boast no annotations at all. Of course, blank margins don’t necessarily mean an ignored text, but still, they give us no evidence of these readers’ engagement with Chaucer, and in fact suggest a lack thereof, given how much manuscript material is to be found in Dryden’s text by comparison. It doesn’t help that Dryden doesn’t even mention the Chaucerian originals.

The annotations to Dryden’s Fables, then, start to seem like evidence of Chaucer’s obsolescence, and testimony to Dryden’s success in rendering the past legible for his readers.

---

[1] It was likely that Dryden had some say in the decision to reprint Chaucer’s original poems in the Fables; he had worked closely with Jacob Tonson, his publisher, for some time by then. None of the other three poets’ original works were included, so at least Chaucer was special in that context. But his Middle English texts were stripped of all notes and scholarly apparatus, relegated to the back of the volume where they could easily be overlooked or forgotten, printed in smaller type than Dryden’s text, and not even mentioned in the table of contents! Why would they have been included at all, then, since the cost of printing them would obviously have increased Tonson’s expenses and decreased his profits?

[2] Needless to say, the publication date of Warton’s essay provides a terminus post quem for Reader B’s annotations, which cannot have been made before 1756. It is worth noting that (a) Warton discusses not Chaucer himself, but Pope and Dryden’s versifications of Chaucer, and (b) the second excerpt from Warton also contains a reference to Spenser—again ignoring the fourteenth-century poetry in deference to its successors.

Collecting the Turkish Spring

A poster for the Occupy Gezi Park movement. It emphasizes the diversity and broad appeal of the movement.

[Ed. Note: Today’s post is written by David Giovacchini, the Middle East Studies Librarian at the Penn Libraries]

At the end of May and beginning of June, 2013, first Istanbul and then all of Turkey were shaken by widespread protests, sometimes known as “the Turkish Spring”. The protests were initially sparked by the planned demolition of a beloved urban park and square in Istanbul, known as Gezi Park and Taksim Square. When the peaceful protests were broken up by police with increasing force, the protests spread throughout Istanbul and eventually to most of the country’s cities, as Turkish youth responded to the striking images flooding the media, both social and mainstream.

The government called for an end to the unrest, but the protests went on. The protesters had begun to doubt whether the Islamist Turkish government of the AK Party with its religious agenda actually represented the will of the Turkish people. Turkey has been a secular state since its creation in modern form after WWI. The Turkish protesters identified closely with the Occupy Movement, and dubbed their own movement Diren Gezi Parki (Occupy Gezi Park). As it has been in so many cases of unrest in the Middle East, social media was an important tool for the protesters. The situation was finally defused by the end of June.

A photograph depicting a “woman in red” being gassed by police became a symbol of the protest movement. This cover of a popular history magazine recreates the photo in the style of medieval Turkish illustration. 

The Middle East Collection at the Penn Libraries has acquired a remarkable group of items from “the Turkish Spring”, including leaflets, public opinion polls, local street papers, and even a small cotton mouth-covering to keep out tear gas. Most significant and unique is a collection of special issues from various Turkish journals and magazines about the events of Gezi Park and the protest movement. Of course, such an important national event would be the object of much discussion in the press, and the analysis of the protests in these journals runs the editorial gamut from radical feminist to literary to leftist to photographic to intellectual to semiotic to comic strips.

Currently, these journals and magazines can be seen by communicating with the Middle East Librarian, Rm 524 in Van Pelt Library. After processing, these items will be held in the Kislak Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscript Center. The Middle East Collection also has a large collection of books on the Gezi Park protests. These include almost all of the works which have been issued so far in Turkey about the protests, and are one of the most complete collections of this material among research libraries in the US. This collection will certainly grow, as new works are published.

To find a complete listing of Penn’s collection of journals, and books, as well as links to a number of important web and social media sites about the protest movement, go to the Gezi Park Protests 2013 LibGuide (http://guides.library.upenn.edu/content.php?pid=480136&hs=a).

A Lost Gem? Uncovering the Carey-Colwell Library

[Ed. Note: Today’s post is from Ariel Ron, currently a visiting research associate at Penn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies]

In 1872 the University of Pennsylvania obtained the core of what was regarded as one of the world’s “outstanding collections” of pamphlets on political economy. Several years later that collection received an infusion from the most important American economist of the mid-nineteenth century. Then, for reasons that are unclear, the collection disappeared. Or, rather, it effectively disappeared because it was never catalogued individually. To this day hundreds of bound volumes containing thousands of pamphlets remain secured in the closed stacks of Penn’s Special Collections Center

Stephen Colwell (1800-1872). Portrait in the University of Pennsylvania Art Collection.

The original bequest, some 7,000 items, had been the private library of a Philadelphia ironmaster named Stephen Colwell.  Little remembered today, Colwell was a major player in several arenas during his own time. Beside his business interests, he wrote widely on economic, political, and religious issues. After the Civil War, he served as a Special Commissioner of the Revenue, a position from which he helped coordinate the tariff interests of America’s nascent industrial juggernaut.  Though in many ways a conservative, Colwell frequently proposed bold and original reforms. His concern for a society increasingly defined by wage labor led him to call for the government to ensure that workers earned enough to “consume freely and largely” [1]. By basing economic growth on high wages and consumer demand, he anticipated the liberal policy regime we now know as Fordism, which reigned through most of the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

For all of Colwell’s prescience, he was by far the less important of the pamphlet collection’s two contributors. The other was Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), a major figure in American bookselling, a pioneer of large-scale anthracite coal production, a leading ideologue of the early Republican Party, and without doubt the major theorist of the American School of political economy. Some time after Carey’s death in 1879, Penn received about 3,000 pamphlets from his personal library. Mostly on ‘American political thought,’ these pamphlets are now bound into more than 200 volumes (Penn Call# 330.8 P753) [2]. This was surely only a small portion of Carey’s holdings. The majority must have gone to his nephew, Henry Carey Baird, himself an important publisher, economic theorist, and political figure.

Among Carey’s most intriguing propositions was what Paul Conkin has called the “manure theory.” This odd-sounding idea was an ingenious refutation of the population and rent theories devised by Britain’s classical political economists. According to Thomas Malthus, the bedrock fact of social life was that population grew much faster than food production, leading to all manner of horrendous “checks” for killing off excess people. David Ricardo added to this an alarming distributional analysis. As population grew, people would resort to evermore marginal lands, so that eventually all of society’s available capital would be swallowed up by the rents accruing to owners of the most fertile tracts [3].

Carey didn’t like these ideas (neither did Colwell). They were rather gloomy, to put it mildly, and they implied that American civilization would eventually descend into an endless class war between the superrich and the barely surviving. To disprove these unchristian notions, Carey scoured world history for human settlement patterns and agricultural methods. In 1855, for instance, he tracked down a Belgian book about land reclamation [4]. These studies led Carey to turn Malthus and Ricardo on their heads. People settled first on the worst soils, Carey argued, because they lacked the know-how and technologies to cultivate better ones. But as society progressed, they gained “increased power over land,” that is, the capacity to grow more food more efficiently. “The earth is a great machine,” he declared, “given to man to be fashioned to his purposes” [5]. The key to this organic machine was fertilizer, commonly known as manure at the time. Hence, the “manure theory.”

Henrik Carey, A New-Yorki Statisticai Társulat előtt 1865-dik évi decemberben tartott Előadása (Pest: Emich, 1867)

Carey’s work has recently attracted the attention of environmental, intellectual and economic historians. Colwell, for his part, features in a recent study of religion and capitalist ethics [6]. This interest by a broad range of historians should come as no surprise, because Carey and Colwell touched on numerous facet of social life. It would be wonderful, then, to know something about how they formed their ideas. This is one reason their combined library could prove valuable to scholars. Volume 185, for instance, contains extensive marginalia, probably by Colwell, around Nassau Senior’s “Three Lectures on the Cost of Obtaining Money,” from 1830. Another value of the collection is in tracking the global influence of Careyite ideas. A 42-volume set of Carey’s complete works (Penn Call# 330 C18) –the only such set I know of–features numerous translations into various languages, including Hungarian (see illustration to the right). There are also several monographs by Italian, French and even Japanese authors.

But the collection’s importance is not really dependent on Carey and Colwell. It is in fact a spectacular record of intense historical debates on all manner of social questions. Its most unique portions, so far as I can tell from an initial survey, comprise several volumes of American pamphlets on such wide-ranging subjects as education, prison reform, temperance, and science–issues that are still very much with us. A series of tracts relating to Pennsylvania’s 1838 constitutional convention includes a bald-faced instance of opposition to black voting rights. A polemic against dueling by the murderously named Henry Slicer tackles a ritual which, thankfully, attracts few people today.

Opinion of the Hon. John Fox : president judge of the judicial district composed of the counties of Bucks and Montgomery, against the exercise of Negro suffrage in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1838).

That which is morally wrong, can never be politically right : a discourse, in which is considered the history, character, causes, and consequences of duels : with the means of prevention. (Washington D.C., 1838).