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The Horse as Cultural Icon

2011-10-30T10:07:35Z

The Horse as Cultural Icon: The Real and the Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World is a new collection of essays about early-modern horses edited by Peter Edwards, Karl Enenkel and Elspeth Graham, and published by Brill. It should be out next week and it’s already available for preorder on Amazon US (if you’ve got loads of money) but I can’t find it on Amazon UK yet.

I’ve got a chapter in it about the military and social value of horses, mostly in early-modern England but it also touches on the middle ages and the First World War. It’s basically exploring Bruce Boehrer’s idea that horses were socially devalued in early-modern England. It includes an alternative narrative of cavalry warfare, a discussion of how horse ownership and cavalry service were (or weren’t) related to elite social status, and a look at the cultural myths of cavalry and chivalry in literature.

The full contents are:

Greg Bankoff, ‘Big Men, Small Horses: Ridership, Social Standing and Environmental Adaptation in the Early Modern Philippines’, pp. 99-120.
Pia F. Cuneo, ‘Visual Aids: Equestrian Iconography and the Training of Horse, Rider and Reader’, pp. 71-97.
Louise Hill Curth, ‘‘The Most Excellent of Animal Creatures’: Health Care for Horses in Early Modern England’, in pp. 217-40.
Peter Edwards, ‘Image and Reality: Upper Class Perceptions of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 281-306.
Amanda Eisemann, ‘Forging Iron and Masculinity: Farrier Trade Identities in Early Modern Germany’, pp. 377-402.
Jennifer Flaherty, ‘‘Know Us by Our Horses’: Equine Imagery in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, pp. 307-25.
Elspeth Graham, ‘The Duke of Newcastle’s ‘Love For Good Horses’: An Exploration of Meanings’, pp. 37-69.
Ian F. MacInnes, ‘Altering a Race of Jades: Horse Breeding and Geohumoralism in Shakespeare’, pp. 175-89.
Richard Nash, ‘‘Beware a Bastard Breed’: Notes Towards a Revisionist History of the Thorough bred Racehorse’, pp. 191-216.
Gavin Robinson, ‘The Military Value of Horses and the Social Value of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 351-76.
Elizabeth Anne Socolow, ‘Letting Loose the Horses: Sir Philip Sidney’s Exordium to The Defence of Poesie’, pp. 121-42.
Sandra Swart, ‘‘Dark Horses’: The Horse in Africa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, pp. 241-60.
Elizabeth M. Tobey, ‘The Legacy of Federico Grisone’, pp. 143-71.
Andrea Tonni, ‘The Renaissance Studs of the Gonzagas of Mantua’, pp. 261-78.
Elaine Walker, ‘‘The Author of their Skill’: Human and Equine Understanding in the Duke of Newcastle’s ‘New Method’’, pp. 327-50.

Faking Shakespeare (Part 1): Passionate Pilgrims

2011-10-27T21:13:00Z

People have been faking Shakespeare since the sixteenth century. No, I am not talking about that conspiracy theory, which, to the chagrin of (proper) Shakespeare scholars everywhere, has been given renewed attention with the impending release of that film, which I won't be linking to here. My purpose is not to address the so-called authorship "controversy" that motivates the film -- others have already written on this matter with force and eloquence, showing that this can only be considered a "controversy" if one totally and completely ignores the entire historical record, not to mention the evidentiary materials and intellectual principles upon which that record is based.
(For starters, see Holger Syme's heroic series of blog posts at dispositio, along with Jim Shapiro's recent op-ed in the NY Times. Shapiro's brief letter here is based on his book Contested Will, a brilliant genealogy--and deconstruction--of the various conspiracy theories proposed since the nineteenth century.) The adherents of the various authorship conspiracy theories have much in common with the other skeptical conspiracies that seem to pervade our culture at this moment -- it is less a matter of skepticism than of belief or faith, which can be maintained in the absence of (or indeed, because of) a complete lack of evidence that could confirm such a belief.

My purpose here (and in the projected series of "Faking Shakespeare" blog posts I'll be writing) is to show that the history of Shakespearean authorship -- that is, the history of the construction of a concept, and indeed, various conceptions, of Shakespeare as an author -- is inextricably tied to the history of what I'll call "faking" Shakespeare. This is not a novel idea; in fact, Shapiro devotes much of the first section of his book to the Ireland forgeries, which gave late-eighteenth-century devotees of Shakespeare exactly what they desired. Edmund Malone spent nearly as much time debunking forgeries as he did conducting the research that virtually created the recognizably modern (or [gasp!] "genius") figure of Shakespeare. Much of the scholarly work in Shakespeare studies conducted in the late-twentieth-century was aimed at deconstructing this mythical, solitary Shakespeare -- or, at least contextualizing and historicizing Shakespeare and his contemporaries, along with the decidedly romantic myth of the genius Shakespeare, a myth that was already and influentially institutionalized in the eighteenth century. This version of Shakespeare was collaborative -- the solitary author was displaced by a collaborative Shakespeare, meaning both that Shakespeare was a collaborator (particularly within the business of the theatre) and that the idea of "Shakespeare" was always a collaborative one (perhaps most easily seen in the book trade, where a plethora of agents participated in making and marketing Shakespeare's works). Some recent work has pushed back against this collaborative conception, arguing for a more assertive, authorial Shakespeare -- a version of Shakespeare that in many ways looks back to that romantic myth, and which is all the more attractive now with the spate of biographies that have been published in the last decade. I don't tend to agree with a lot of this work, but I do recognize, and in some cases even admire, the detailed research required to make some of these claims. And it is of course ironic that just as (some) academics have turned their attention to evidence-based arguments about Shakespeare's awareness of his status as an author, the spurious arguments aimed against that authorship have been articulated with renewed vehemence.

My own scholarly work focuses on the early modern book trade, in particular on the ways in which Shakespeare's reputation was made and re-made by publishers, booksellers, and readers. So my work does occasionally engage with some of the biographical myths about Shakespeare. The "Shakespeare" I'm concerned with is the persona created within the world of print -- this "Shakespeare" is not William Shakespeare of Stratford, not because someone with a different name wrote the works attributed to him, but because this "Shakespeare" is a corporate entity, a commercial property, even a recognizable brand -- that is, an author, which is something rather different from what we might distinguish as the writer. The latter puts quill to paper; the former is a theoretical concept, a collaborative construction, and a profitable piece of merchandise. It is the conflation of these two entities that largely drives both bardolaters and conspiracy theorists.

There have always been attempts to appropriate, or simply capitalize and cash in on, the fame and reputation of Shakespeare. One of my favorites is The Passionate Pilgrime, a slim collection of poems published in 1599 as "By W. Shakespeare." I regularly teach my students about this little pamphlet, because it so clearly establishes a Shakespeare that is unfamiliar to us now, and it also shows that his works circulated in a variety of ways (and in a number of different versions).

The title of this collection seems to be an allusion to one of Shakespeare's most popular (and recently published) plays, Romeo and Juliet (recall the shared sonnet that the eponymous characters speak at their first meeting, rife with playfully clever images of blushing pilgrims). The collection includes two "genuine" Shakespeare sonnets -- variant versions of what would be published as #138 and #144 in the more familiar sequence of sonnets published in 1609:

The Passionate Pilgrime also includes three sonnets copied from Shakespeare's play Loves Labors Lost (published just the year before in 1598, as "Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakspere," the first playbook title-page to feature his name). The rest of the collection, though, consists of poems that we now know Shakespeare did not in fact write -- some are now attributed to other writers, such as Marlowe and Richard Barnfield, while others remain anonymous. Several of the poems are on the theme of Venus and Adonis -- the eponymous subjects of Shakespeare's first published work, the wildly popular and influential Venus and Adonis. The poems do, admittedly, vary in quality, but they are perfectly coherent as a poetic miscellany of erotic love poetry. This little volume is crucial to understanding Shakespeare's early reputation as a poet -- he was primarily known as the author of Venus and Adonis and its companion piece, Lucrece, not to mention the pleasant comedies of Romeo and Juliet and Loves Labors Lost, and so for a customer browsing the stalls in 1599, this volume would make perfect sense -- and it would be an attractive purchase, as well (attractive enough that the first extant edition of 1599 was preceded by an earlier edition, which now exists only in a fragment which lacks the title-page, and thus the date in the imprint).

Why did the publisher William Jaggard choose to produce and market the little book in this way? That question puzzled scholars for a long while, since Jaggard would eventually become one of the publishers of the Shakespeare First Folio. How could someone so responsible for establishing Shakespeare's canon and legacy stoop to such a level? Well, first of all, Shakespeare was not then the Bardic "Shakespeare" we know now. And secondly, at the time a volume such as this made perfect sense -- it may even have been based on a manuscript miscellany, of the kind that was pervasive at the time. It was a reasonable and profitable business decision -- not only for Jaggard, but for the bookseller William Leake, who not coincidentally happened to own the rights to Venus and Adonis in 1599. Get your erotic, Ovidian Shakespeare poems, all in one place!

The Passionate Pilgrime was successful enough that a decade later Jaggard published an expanded third edition:

There were two different versions of the title-page -- one with Shakespeare's name, and one without Shakespeare's name. The usual interpretation of these variant issues is that Jaggard was forced to remove the name at the objection of Thomas Heywood, the author of the "two Loue-Epistles" that were "newly added" to this edition. Jaggard had published these two Heywood poems a few years earlier, in Heywood's Troia Britanica (1609); since Jaggard, as the publisher, owned the rights to the work (remember, at this time there was no authorial "copyright" in the modern sense) he was perhaps within his rights to reprint the poems as he saw fit. Ethically, though, the action was suspect, and in an epistle appended to his Apologie for Actors (also published in 1612), Heywood voiced his displeasure:

Here's a transcription of the key passage:

Here likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest iniury done me in that worke [i.e., Troia Britanica], by taking the two Epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a lesse volume [i.e., The Passionate Pilgrime], vnder the name of another [i.e., Shakespeare], which may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him; and hee to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name [i.e., presumably the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets]

Heywood goes on to say that "the Author" -- that is, Shakespeare -- was "I know much offended with M. Iaggard (that altogether vnknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name." Heywood seems to imply that Shakespeare was "much offended" by the publication of the little volume of poems that bore his name, and so it is usually thought that Jaggard removed Shakespeare's name to appease either (or both) Heywood and Shakespeare. It is a convenient narrative -- although that is not the only interpretation. Colin Burrow, in his monumental edition of Shakespeare's poems, analyzed the two title-pages (the very title-pages that are reproduced above -- these are the EEBO images of Malone's copy, at the Bodleian) and concluded that is was just as, if not more, likely that Shakespeare's name had been added, not removed (so, perhaps Jaggard or the printer forgot to include that marketable brand name?). Heywood's letter is of course not a neutral report, and he could be recruiting Shakespeare -- ironically, without his permission -- as a witness in his public case against Jaggard. The story seems to give us a Shakespeare keenly invested in the publication of his own work -- but it also shows how little control any author, including Shakespeare, had over the publication of that work.

Which, finally, brings me to the early modern book history puzzle I recently came across. Here is the final pastedown of a book from the Iowa Special Collections library, a collection of Shakespeare's poems:

The librarians tell me that around one hundred books from the collection of John Martin are housed in Special Collections -- but over three thousand of his books form the core of the collection of the fantastic John Martin Rare Book Room in the Hardin Health Sciences Library here at Iowa (it's a fantastic resource of the history of medicine, with a sterling early modern collection -- click here for a brief bio of Dr. Martin). There is no evidence of where or when Dr. Martin bought this book, which is really too bad, because it's a gem. The call number intrigued me before I even saw the book -- it's catalogued as a book from 1700 (here's the InfoHawk record) -- but there was no edition of Shakespeare's poetry published in 1700. Starting with the First Folio in 1623, the poems and sonnets were excluded from collected editions of Shakespeare's works, until Malone finally reintegrated the corpus late in the eighteenth century. There were editions of the poems published, though, often as "unofficial" extra volumes to multi-volume editions of the plays -- but again, the first multi-volume edition wasn't published until 1709.

A look at the title-page immediately shows that the date "1700" in the catalogue was simply a guess:

Here we have Sonnets To Sundry Notes of Musicke, attributed to "Mr. William Shakespeare," with the imprint claiming it was "Printed in the Year 1599" in London. You may even be able to tell -- quite quickly -- from this image that this book was certainly not printed in 1599. (In person, it was clear to me right away that this was a false imprint, due to the type and, to a lesser extent, the paper quality). The title is a familiar one, because it derives from The Passionate Pilgrime -- both the 1599 and the 1612 editions include an interlinear title-page with the same title (even though, in both cases, the title-page and the section that follows are both integral to the volume):

So the title is a familiar one, but our little book does not simply consist of the few poems from The Passionate Pilgrime that originally appeared after this title-page. It includes the entire 1609 sequence of sonnets (including A Lover's Complaint), along with a charming section at the end called "Sonnets, &c." which consists of the Passionate Pilgrime poems:

A typescript note in the back of the book explains the mystery:

According to the note, this volume is an "unrecorded" eighteenth-century forgery. The note says that the volume consists of quires from some eighteenth-century edition of the poems; the Sundry Notes page has been moved to the front in "a clever attempt to create an edition of the Sonnets predating the rare 1609 edition." The note cites a couple of (very brief) mentions of this volume (the Lowndes is here, while the listing in Halliwell's Shakespeariana is here), but otherwise leaves it at that, saying only that "No copy has ever appeared at auction" and concluding with the simple statement that it is "An attractive copy."

Attractive and clever, indeed! Whoever was responsible for altering (and creating) this book knew what they were doing -- the title-page is a nod to the (once popular) Passionate Pilgrime, and the inclusion of the sonnets reveals a desire to have an authorized (or at least earlier) version of the Sonnets. With a bit of help from ECCO, I was able to track down the specific eighteenth-century edition that was altered to make this volume: A Collection of Poems published by Bernard Lintott in 1709, a collection that included Shakespeare's two narrative poems along with the sonnets and the Passionate Pilgrime. Here's the title-page of the collection from ECCO (which seems to include some inked ruling not present in the Iowa copy):

Near the end of the collection appears the page that serves as the title-page of our copy:

As you can see here (just barely), this section heading page has a page signature at the bottom -- a page signature that was discreetly, yet visibly, removed from our copy:

It would be beyond obvious if the "title-page" of this "rare" collection of Shakespeare poems had a page signature -- and a signature "L" at that -- so it was simply rubbed out. As the note in the volume says, the collation is a dead giveaway, and one that's easy to identify (the note even gives advice on how it could have been made into a more effective forgery). Without any provenance information (beyond Dr. Martin, a twentieth-century collector) it is impossible to know who was responsible for altering this book, or whether it was (or even was intended to be) a successful forgery. To a book historian's eyes, this is an easy catch, but perhaps an avid collector would overlook the alterations in the rush to acquire such a rare and valuable book as this purports to be.

The altered volume, whether a true forgery or an elaborate joke, shows the investment in and desire for some tangible evidence of authorized Shakespearean texts. Scholars still disagree over the 1609 Sonnets: were they authorized and designed by Shakespeare? Or, like The Passionate Pilgrime, was this an attempt to capitalize on Shakespeare's poetic fame? A 1599 edition wouldn't solve that problem, but it would provide a rare early edition of the sonnets -- one published in the decade in which the sonnet vogue was at its height, rather than the more problematic date of 1609, when, supposedly, sonnets were out of fashion. Just as interesting, though, is the fact that a century later Lintott published all of Shakespeare's poetry together in a single volume -- not simply the two narrative poems that first made his fame, or the "genuine" sequence of sonnets, but The Passionate Pilgrime as well. It's a more capacious view of the Shakespeare canon, one that demonstrates the crucial place of that slim little ("non-Shakespearean") pamphlet in Shakespeare's canon and career. It's a conception of the canon that would be lost for centuries -- only in the last decade has The Passionate Pilgrime regained a place in the canon, and garnered the serious attention of scholars.

The final point I'll make here is that this episode shows how messy the idea of authorship can be -- living in our fallen, post-Romantic world, we are stuck with an idea of the author as the sole creator and owner of a literary work. Yes, post-structuralist theory killed off the author, and historicist scholarship has for quite some time been focused on the collaborative and institutional frameworks within which early modern literary work was created, and which helped construct the idea of "literary authorship" itself. And yet--Shakespeare is "the bard," the focus of myth-making for so many centuries, and the subject of countless current biographies (not to mention conspiratorial speculations). This cultural status and popularity often overshadows other, more unfamiliar versions of Shakespeare -- the versions, it must be said, that most scholars prefer. Shakespeare's status is certainly a boon to our profession, as a kind of guarantor of the relevance (or at least validity, in some sense) of our work -- but it can also be deeply frustrating. Which is why I am so attracted to this little volume of poetry that Shakespeare didn't even write.

Knowledge is Power: Shakespeare, Bacon, & Modern Cryptography

2011-10-24T11:42:35Z

Currently re-igniting the Shakespeare authorship controversy is Roland Emmerich’s new movie Anonymous, which posits that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays. With the filmmakers presenting themselves as “iconoclastic heroes of intellectual honesty” (Syme), and academics and bibliophiles of all types understandably up-in-arms in response, this 150-year-old battle seems a no-win situation. But that doesn’t mean there’s no silver lining. In a fascinating and little-known by-way of history, the authorship controversy led directly to some of the most important 20th-century advances in a seemingly unrelated field: cryptography.

The belief that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him originated in the mid 19th century, coinciding with an upsurge in his popularity and with the Victorian interest in puzzles and mysteries. Though more than 70 candidates have been proposed as the true author, for many years the most popular option was the natural philosopher and politician Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626).

As a young man Bacon lived for several years in France, where he studied statecraft and learned about cryptography, a field in which that nation was leading the rest of Europe. He developed his own “bilateral” cipher, which used the letters a and b to generate the entire alphabet, like this:

a = aaaaa

b = aaaab

c = aaaba

d = aaabb

… and so on. But if used outright this was still identifiable as a code and could be broken. Instead, Bacon needed to disguise the fact that the message was in code, and the power of his cipher lies in his realisation that a and b don’t have to be letters–they can be anything that can be divided into two classes. For example, regular text and bold text. To warn a secret agent to “fly”, Bacon could send a message saying the opposite:

do not go til i come

aabab ababa babba

fly

Here the words “do not go til I come” are meaningless to the intended recipient; all that matters is the pattern of plain and bold text, where plain letters stand in for a and bold letters for b, which in turn code for the true message. The cipher was ingeniously flexible, meaning that Bacon could “make anything signify anything”. Poetry, numbers, musical notation, even a drawing or a group of objects could disguise a secret message.

Though Bacon developed his cipher in the 1570s it wasn’t fully published until his first philosophical work, The Advancement of Learning, appeared in its Latin edition of 1623. He did, however, discuss ciphers in general in the first edition of 1605, and in the reproduced passage below he explains that anything may signify anything – “omnia per omnia” – by “infoulding”, or encoding, it:

Elizabeth Gallup

Returning to Shakespeare, one of the most well-known Baconians, an American school teacher named Elizabeth Gallup (1838–1934), became intrigued by the bilateral cipher. She believed that Bacon had used it to encode secret messages in the printed versions of the Shakespearean texts, with subtle differences between typefaces being the key to the cipher (the difficulties this would have presented to early modern printers seem to have been overlooked). To Gallup, the bilateral cipher proved that Bacon was not only the author of Shakespeare’s plays, but also the son of Queen Elizabeth and brother of the Earl of Essex, and that he had written works attributed to Christopher Marlowe and other authors, as well as five previously unknown tragedies based on contemporary events. She even travelled to London in the belief that the missing manuscripts were still hidden in the neighbourhood of Islington.

At the beginning of the 20th century a wealthy and eccentric Baconian named George Fabyan founded the Riverbank Institute, a private research organisation housed on his estate in Geneva, Illinois. In addition to departments investigating medicine and agricultural science, there would be an American Academy of Baconian Literature, which Elizabeth Gallup was hired to direct. Here she set out to research the bilateral cipher using new photographic techniques, and began producing books and articles explaining her work.

Photos of the Riverbank Laboratories and the equipment used to investigate the bilateral cipher in early modern texts.

In 1915 a young biologist named William F. Friedman was hired to run Riverbank’s Department of Genetics, but found himself drawn instead to Gallup’s department. As a child he had been introduced to cryptography by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug”, and he was interested in the bibliographical and and photographic methods the team used. He was also attracted to Gallup’s young assistant, Elizebeth Smith, herself an expert cryptographer. Once he began working with the Baconians it became apparent that Friedman had “an intuitive grasp of cipher systems that must have been breathtaking” (Sherman). Soon he was creating many of the cryptographic images used in the department’s publications, as well as producing his own work such as the first description of the index of coincidence, an important tool in code-breaking.

At the outbreak of the First World War Riverbank was the only institution in the United States with expertise in cryptography, and in a short time William and Elizebeth were cracking codes for the war effort and training the US military’s first unit of elite cryptographers. In a beautiful example of the power of the Baconian cipher, Friedman had his recruits pose for a group photograph that used their bodies to encode the phrase “knowledge is power” (click here to see a decoded version of the photograph – the soldiers facing the camera represent a and those facing away represent b).

William Friedman with an AT&T cipher machine.

In May 1917 William and Elizebeth Smith married, and in 1918 he volunteered for military service, serving as the chief cryptographer to General Pershing. After the war the couple moved to Washington D. C., where both played important roles in the development of government cryptanalysis (a term that Friedman had himself coined). Friedman became chief cryptanalyst for the War Department in 1921. He helped develop the United States’ most important cipher machine (SIGBA) and his numerous books and articles formed the foundation of modern, scientific cryptography. Elizebeth worked for the War Department and the Navy, and later during Prohibition for the Treasury, where she cracked bootleggers’ codes. William Friedman’s greatest success came at the outbreak of the Second World War, when his team broke the Japanese code PURPLE, allowing the US to intercept high-level Japanese diplomatic communications (including the order to cease negotiations that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor). After the war he worked for the new National Security Administration, and retired in 1956, after more than thirty years as the government’s leading cryptographer.

William and Elizebeth’s work came full-circle in the 1950s, when they turned their attention back to Shakespeare and produced The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, a masterful work on the Baconian controversy. Published in 1957, it conclusively demolished the theory that any encoded messages are present in early editions of Shakespeare. Despite being debunked, the early Riverside publications that gave “the world’s greatest cryptographer” (Kahn) his start are highly sought-after by modern book collectors, and we are lucky enough to have two of these volumes in stock:

The Keys to Deciphering the Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon. Geneva, IL: Riverbank Laboratories, 1916.

Fundamental Principles of the Baconian Ciphers and Application to Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Geneva, IL: Riverbank Laboratories, 1916.

Many of Riverbank’s publications were produced in unusual formats using materials suggestive of 17th-century England, such as the the light-brown reverse calf in the image above. The Riverbank team also took advantage of new photographic techniques, and many of the pages in these books are reproduced entirely photographically rather than by traditional printing methods. Originally published in very in low numbers, these fragile materials made the books even less likely to survive, and they are rare today, with only five copies of Fundamental Principles of the Baconian Ciphers known to be held institutionally.

Title page.

The Baconian Bi-Lateral Cipher.

An explanation of Bacon’s cipher (click to enlarge). Note William Friedman’s signature on the lower right – this appears on many of the pages that he created for these publications.

Examples of the purported a and b letterforms in the works of Shakespeare.

Elizabeth Gallup’s theory rested on the use of two different types in the early editions of Shakespeare. Much of the The Keys for Deciphering the Greatest Works of Sir Francis Bacon is given over to analyzing the two forms of each letter. Unfortunately for her theory, it was common for early modern printers to use a variety of type, not all of which was identical. And it would have been almost impossible for the compositors to identify tiny variations in the letters while setting the type.

Example of a Bi-Formed Alphabet.

The Bi-Formed Alphabet Classifier.

The Bi-Formed Alphabet Classifier

The two removable guides shown above were meant to be used while reading the Shakespearean texts, for quick and easy identification of the letter-forms. Both include Friedman’s signature.

The cipher as used in the list of principal actors.

On the left, the original catalogue of Shakespeare's works, and on the right, Gallup's "updated" list.

Though it doesn’t make the authorship controversy any less troublesome (or the film Anonymous any less laughable) we can take some comfort in thanking Bacon and his followers for many of the cryptographic breakthroughs of the 20th-century. As James Shapiro writes in Contested Will, “…Mrs. Gallup never achieved the fame [she] sought, but their work on ciphers helped win a war”.

To learn more about these subjects you can explore the resources outlined below:

How to Make Anything Signify Anything is an excellent piece by William H. Sherman published in the winter 2010/11 issue of Cabinet magazine. It contains a more detailed discussion of the bilateral cipher and of Friedman’s work at Riverbank, as well as some excellent photographs (and the Knowledge is Power photo is available as a poster). Sherman is also the author of two of my favourite book history publications, John Dee and Used Books.

The Friedmans’ interest in books extended to the mysterious Voynich manuscript, which they spent much of their free time trying to decode. This article discusses their work on it in detail.

Academic and blogger Harold Syme has written several excellent pieces on Anonymous and the Shakespeare controversy, particularly People Being Stupid About Shakespeare & Enough Already. His RSS feed is a must for anyone interested in the early modern era.

Contested Will, by James Shapiro, examines the origins, history, and cultural implications of the authorship controversy. Shapiro has also written an excellent take-down of Anonymous published in the New York Times on 16 October.

The Codebreakers, by David Kahn, is the definitive history of cryptography.

The Shakespeare Authorship page is a comprehensive collection of resources on the authorship controversy, with the editors on the Stratfordian side.

The Marshall Foundation houses the archives of William and Elizebeth Friedman, and each finding aid includes a short biography.

The NSA also hosts short biographies of both William and Elizebeth Friedman.

One of the world’s most famous unsolved codes is the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture, which remains uncracked by even the brightest minds in the security field.

Enough Already

2011-10-18T06:29:53Z

For the longest time, academic Shakespeare specialists have simply ignored the so-called authorship controversy. In the face of a steady stream of books proposing one supposed “real Shakespeare” after another, we in the academy have largely shrugged and turned back to the kind of work we consider important, relevant, and worthwhile; and most of that work has nothing to do with identifying shadowy figures allegedly hiding behind the “Shakespeare” tag. “Authorship Studies” is a recognized subfield of the academic Shakespeare industry, but it doesn’t concern itself with what the self-styled skeptics are interested in; as Brian Vickers recently made clear, it “exclude[s] the legion of misguided souls who deny [Shakespeare's] authorship or even his existence as both actor and dramatist.”

I have a lot of sympathy for this attitude. I completely understand it, and for many years, I have shared it. Anti-Stratfordians love to misinterpret the cold shoulder the academy has almost universally shown them as an ostrich’s: they think our trembling heads are buried, not in the archive or the library, but in fear. Personally, I have never, ever met a single Shakespearean who is afraid of the Earl of Oxford. I have met many who are deeply, profoundly bored by the debate. And I have met a significant number whose reactions to the discussion fall somewhere on the spectrum between irritation and rage.

Boredom is a perfectly understandable reaction. Many of us, after all, work on research for which the question of authorship is almost entirely irrelevant. Speaking for myself, I’m fairly confident that not a word I’ve ever written about Shakespeare’s plays would be invalidated if we discovered tomorrow that all of the works were in fact authored by a hitherto unheralded haberdasher’s son from Ashby-de-la-Zouche. Or by the Earl of Rutland. Despite the biographical virus that has swept through the ranks of senior Shakespeareans in recent years, the vast majority of academic publications on early modern drama have little or nothing to say about the presence of authors in their works; in the absence of biography as a critical category, arguments and conclusions aren’t profoundly affected by biographical controversies or revelations.

Explaining the various shades of anger would take more time — irritants range from the sense that the entire discussion is a waste of limited time we should spend more productively to the frustration of the well-meaning debater who finds herself up against arguments that don’t seem to rely on recognizable standards of evidence. Personally, I find both the near-religious fervour and the extraordinary smugness of many anti-Stratfordians more than a little off-putting. No-one I have ever met, however, is angry because he or she sees Shakespeare’s authorial identity under threat.

But I fear things are changing right now in a way that will no longer allow us academic Shakespeareans to opt for the luxury of mute disdain. Forgive me if what follows sounds a little manifesto-ish. It’s sort of in the air.

First, there is Roland Emmerich’s awesomely benighted Anonymous. I explained elsewhere why I think this is a horrible film, but I’m not at all certain that its sheer badness will dilute its deleterious potential. As James Shapiro reports, Sony Pictures is actively encouraging High School teachers to use the film as a quasi-textbook, distributing ready-made lesson plans in glossy packages that superficially ask students to look into the authorship debate without taking sides even as every page’s footer trumpets “Uncover the true genius of William Shakespeare: See Anonymous — in theaters October 28, 2011.” Nowhere in these materials are teachers or students told to adopt the position Emmerich, Orloff & Co. have been retailing in various public venues, that the film is “just a movie” and shouldn’t be held to the same standards as a work of scholarship, or even a newspaper article. I want to believe that most high school teachers would not delegate instruction in literature and history to Hollywood blockbusters, but I can’t say I’m truly confident.

And then there is this:

Not only is this a German theatre advertising its upcoming production of Macbeth as by de Vere — it’s the municipal theatre of the town I grew up in, the place where as a child I saw my very first play (and my first Shakespeare productions). That one hurt.

The poster has a genealogy, and it’s instructive. Two years ago, the same theatre’s production of Romeo and Juliet was advertised as Shakespeare’s. But last year, the playhouse hosted an interview with Germany’s foremost Oxfordian, the publisher and essayist Kurt Kreiler, and after that interview, things changed. Kreiler’s book, Der Mann, der Shakespeare erfand (The Man who Invented Shakespeare), which largely rehearses the same arguments as the major Oxfordian publications in English, appeared in Germany last year, was widely reviewed, and received a very warm critical welcome. With academic Shakespeareans leaving the field largely to journalists, the “mystery-like” appeal of Kreiler’s narrative seemed to matter more than its credibility. And in the virtual absence of a serious scholarly dismantling of Kreiler’s arguments and assertions, they have begun to attain the kind of cultural authority that makes it possible for theatres to present Shakespeare’s plays as someone else’s without so much as an asterisk alerting audiences to the controversial nature of the claim.

All of which makes me think that we can’t afford to ignore the anti-Stratfordians anymore. Worse, it makes me think that it’s not enough to deconstruct the intellectual basis of their projects, as Shapiro did so brilliantly in Contested Will. I fear we will actually have to engage with what they consider evidence; we will have to explain, in venues and formats as popular and widely available as those used by the anti-Stratfordians, why their claims don’t make sense; and we will have to be much more robust in our presentation of the facts. I don’t find this an intellectually stimulating (let alone rewarding) prospect, nor do I think there are many constructive conversations to be had. I also don’t relish the thought of having to spend any of my time in the company of Charles Beauclerk’s writings. But if we don’t take part in the public discussion, if we don’t carefully detail our own position and debunk the supposedly skeptical point of view in as accessible a language and manner as the other side, we risk losing by default. Silence will be interpreted as defeat or, worse yet, consent. I’ve read Much Ado About Nothing. I don’t want to be Hero.

If nothing else, a serious engagement with anti-Stratfordian claims might make us better scholars, too. Shapiro in some sense led the way there, in rejecting the recent vogue for biographical readings of Shakespeare’s plays, but we should go further. We might as well acknowledge that the entire authorship controversy is Bardolatry’s evil twin: without the nineteenth-century invention of Shakespeare as the original genius, we wouldn’t have to deal with people who find it hard to conceive of a glover’s son in that role. (Before that, a glove-maker was no less suitable a father for a great playwright than a cobbler, a bricklayer, a saddler, an innkeeper, or a coach maker.) And if Harold Bloom’s hyperventilating Shakespeare criticism weren’t as prominent in the public eye as it is, the anti-Stratfordian view wouldn’t receive as much attention either. The more Shakespeare’s supposed singularity is emphasized, the more the notion that his biography must be correspondingly exceptional will gain hold. (Stephen Marche doesn’t help….)

And we might as well admit that traditional Shakespeare scholarship has its own significant blind spots. One of the Shakespearean arguments one hears over and over again is that Oxford can’t have been the true author, because he died in 1604, “before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written” (that’s Shapiro in his recent New York Times op-ed, but the point is commonplace). Anti-Stratfordians always call out Shakespeareans for this sort of claim — and they’re right. We’re far too ready to assert, with an air of certainty, when which plays were written; we rely, far too often, on the magnificent work of fiction known as The Annals of English Drama, or “Harbage.” Early modern theatre history thrives on myths and strong (if hollow) assertions. Anti-Stratfordians know this, sort of, and they’re happy to point at our naked emperors (blithely ignorant of their own earl’s threadbare outfit). I don’t think pretending to a certainty we can’t honestly — intellectually — defend strengthens our position at all. But if confronting the misguided skeptics allows us to score in the public debate while simultaneously forcing us to interrogate our own practices and assumptions as Shakespeare scholars, I’d be happy if we used that stone for the murder of both those birds.

Paradise Regained

2011-10-22T21:07:59Z

There are ~~(at least)~~ two different electronic editions of Paradise Lost on Project Gutenberg. The first, produced by Judy Boss and released in October 1991, was Project Gutenberg EBook #20. If you do an internet search for “project gutenberg paradise lost,” this is probably the edition you’ll find.

The second, Project Gutenberg EBook #26, was released in February 1992. This is a curiously short interval, particularly considering that there’d only been 25 ebooks encoded and released by Project Gutenberg in the 20+ years it had existed, and there are (when you stop to count them) many more books in the English language that were available. Even Milton fanatics would probably agree that this was a little early in a mass digitization project to start doubling up.

It turns out, though, that EBook #26 is special. In fact, it merits a special unsigned introduction by Project Gutenberg. By contrast, Boss’s 1991 edition doesn’t have an introduction. Instead, it has a totally charming disclaimer:

Disclaimer:

All persons concerned disclaim any and all reponsbility
that this etext is perfectly accurate. No pretenses in
any manner are made that this text should be thought of
as an authoritative edition in any respect.

This book was TYPED in by Judy Boss
eng003@zeus.unomaha.edu on Internet
eng003@unoma1 on Bitnet
(Judy now has a scanner)

Perfect, right? No authority, just a little signature of the scribe. “Judy made this.” Now she has a scanner.

Ebook #26 needs more context. Here’s the introduction:

This is the February 1992 Project Gutenberg release of:

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The oldest etext known to Project Gutenberg (ca. 1964–1965)
(If you know of any older ones, please let us know.)

Introduction (one page)

This etext was originally created in 1964–1965 according to Dr.
Joseph Raben of Queens College, NY, to whom it is attributed by
Project Gutenberg. We had heard of this etext for years but it
was not until 1991 that we actually managed to track it down to
a specific location, and then it took months to convince people
to let us have a copy, then more months for them actually to do
the copying and get it to us. Then another month to convert to
something we could massage with our favorite 486 in DOS. After
that is was only a matter of days to get it into this shape you
will see below. The original was, of course, in CAPS only, and
so were all the other etexts of the 60’s and early 70’s. Don’t
let anyone fool you into thinking any etext with both upper and
lower case is an original; all those original Project Gutenberg
etexts were also in upper case and were translated or rewritten
many times to get them into their current condition. They have
been worked on by many people throughout the world.

In the course of our searches for Professor Raben and his etext
we were never able to determine where copies were or which of a
variety of editions he may have used as a source. We did get a
little information here and there, but even after we received a
copy of the etext we were unwilling to release it without first
determining that it was in fact Public Domain and finding Raben
to verify this and get his permission. Interested enough, in a
totally unrelated action to our searches for him, the professor
subscribed to the Project Gutenberg listserver and we happened,
by accident, to notice his name. (We don’t really look at every
subscription request as the computers usually handle them.) The
etext was then properly identified, copyright analyzed, and the
current edition prepared.

To give you an estimation of the difference in the original and
what we have today: the original was probably entered on cards
commonly known at the time as “IBM cards” (Do Not Fold, Spindle
or Mutilate) and probably took in excess of 100,000 of them. A
single card could hold 80 characters (hence 80 characters is an
accepted standard for so many computer margins), and the entire
original edition we received in all caps was over 800,000 chars
in length, including line enumeration, symbols for caps and the
punctuation marks, etc., since they were not available keyboard
characters at the time (probably the keyboards operated at baud
rates of around 113, meaning the typists had to type slowly for
the keyboard to keep up).

This is the second version of Paradise Lost released by Project
Gutenberg. The first was released as our October, 1991 etext.

This is honest-to-goodness digital humanism, from start to finish. 113 baud keyboards. IBM punch cards. All caps and no punctuation — like a real Latin text! (In 1964, at least you had spaces between words and periods for the ends of sentences, I guess.) Tapping it out, in many hands, knowing that the number of people likely to even know what they’ve done is probably going to be limited to a handful.

Then in the early nineties, a new generation of digital humanists hears whispered rumors about this file and its editor. Then, after months of persuasion and conversion, “another month to convert to something we could massage with our favorite 486 in DOS.”

Meanwhile, the text itself has actually been recreated by a new editor/typist, working alone. But Project Gutenberg — probably Michael Hart himself — still recreates the text. To maintain that chain unbroken with the past.

When Michael Hart passed away in September, he was hailed as the “inventor of the ebook.” But Hart himself doubtlessly knew better.

He wasn’t the first to type a text into a computer. He didn’t even know who had been, if it was Joseph Raben and his typist(s) or someone else.

Hart didn’t invent the ebook. He invented something more: the place where these digital books and their editors’ names and stories could be preserved and shared. He invented a library; he invented an ark.

Man covered in blood

2011-10-22T12:50:58Z

This is a picture of a man covered in blood. The man is in the process of being killed. He is in pain. He is about to die. Don’t worry, though, he is a fictional character, Sonny Corleone, played by the actor James Caan, being made to look as if he is covered in blood and being killed using special effects in a film, The Godfather. This week, specifically Friday, the front page of every major national newspaper bore a picture, or pictures, of a man covered in blood. The man was in the process of being killed. He was in pain. He was about to die. He was factual and not played by an actor; he was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, deposed leader of Libya, who was finally, and perhaps inevitably, captured and killed by rebel troops in his home city of Sirte on Thursday. The video footage from which the ubiquitous screen grabs were taken was shown on BBC News in the afternoon, over and over again. I don’t know if the footage was shown on Sky News, but I suspect it was.

This was a newsworthy image, from newsworthy footage, and its newsworthiness was never in doubt. Gaddafi was a dictator and he was killed by his own people (with a bit of bombing help from NATO) after 42 years in power. The uprising against him, and the sanctioned NATO assistance, tell us a lot about the so-called Arab Spring, which continues to rage across the Middle East and North Africa, and I’m not debating the need for the world media to cover this story in detail. It’s front page news in any year, in any decade, in any country, in any language.

What I question is the decision to run these gory pictures, in many cases blown up to large size for maximum impact. When I went to pick up my paper on Friday morning I was pretty offended by the sweep of bloody faces at my feet in the garage. Gaddafi is dead. Gaddafi was killed. Gaddafi was beaten to a pulp before being shot. We get the picture. But did we actually need to see the picture, without warning? I’m really only talking about the impact of the front cover images here, the ones that were on display in newsagents and garages up and down the land, where tiny children – and, hey, the adult squeamish – were likely to see them.

Clearly, none were more offensively framed than this one, but it’s no more or less than we’ve come to expect from The Sun:

I know, I know, the argument runs thus: this image of a bloodied, pre-death dictator was all over the internet within seconds of the footage being released by the National Transitional Council (they don’t sound much like a death squad with that name, do they?), so it would be a dereliction of journalistic duty for the mainstream news media not to follow suit and publish/run it. It is, after all, proof of a man’s death. And hey, it’s already out there. But there is still a difference between the internet, where many unpleasant images are just a click away from the eyes of users of all ages, and stacks of newspapers in a newsagent. It felt a bit like Snuff Day.

It felt to me as if it was OK to run pictures of this particular man in pain and about to die because he was a bad man. I’m not saying he wasn’t. But although the Sun went mad with vengeful bloodlust, it was no more exploitative than the other, more “respectable” papers really. (You had to admire the Express and Times, and I think the Star, who at least ran the picture small.) As Billy Bragg stated on Question Time the other week, human rights apply to all humans, and not exclusively to those humans that other humans have deemed worthy. Was there no dignity available for Gaddafi? Had he actually forfeited that human right? You might say yes. After all, when the body of Mussolini was hung on a meat hook from the roof of a petrol station in Milan in 1945, I expect these photos were sent around the world (albeit perhaps with a little less velocity).

As with my recent whine about animal rights, some of you may think me wasting my energy worrying about the dignity of a dead dictator. But it does coarsen our view of the world if men covered in blood, moments before death, are displayed across our newspaper covers. When I was at the NME, we debated long and hard about whether we could print the photograph of Richey Manic after his self-inflicted “4 REAL”. If memory serves, we decided against running it as the cover image, and only ran it in black and white on the news pages. It appeared, in full colour, inside the paper. But he was not dead. He was fine. This was 20 years ago, when competition with other media was less stiff, and newspapers were in a less of a panic about copy sales. I guess it took a brave newspaper editor not to run the bloody Gaddafi pic full splash on the front cover.

I’m not sure I always approve of the world I live in.

Wherever you go…

2011-10-11T19:04:29Z

… there you are.

I couldn’t have done this hobo nomadic thing before now. I guess I could, but it would have been very different. Before it would have been about getting away from something or trying to find something I didn’t have. I don’t feel like there’s anything I want to get away from or anywhere that I’m trying to get to today. There are some things that I feel like I should do – some things that are just in my head and on scraps of notebook and stuff at the moment and it would be disappointing for them to stay there forever, but I feel like (at least for today) I’ve let go of the fantasy that “When I have X…” or “When I’m Y enough…” or “When I’ve done Z…” then I’ll be able to be happy etc.

One of the things that I’ve come to know better through wandering is the recognition that any turmoil, drama or crisis is happening within me, it’s not the outside circumstances, it’s not the people I’m hanging out with, it’s the story that I have playing in my head. That’s what causes me any pain or disturbance. Other people may be sharing in it, but they’re having a different experience, for different reasons and doubtless playing out a different drama. And I’m 100% responsible for my own feelings about it. And that empowers me greatly, because then there’s something I can do about how I feel, I’m not dependent on anyone else for it. I can look back at my early decisions about the world and see where I’m fighting to be right about something in the face of the present reality. Because those feelings most often stem from wanting to be right about the world, wanting things to be as I’ve decided them. Wanting them to be as I decided probably 40 years ago or more.

What sort of decisions am I talking about? All sorts of things, but you can recognise them primarily by the toddler tone “I don’t need anyone’s help; Nobody loves me; Girls always steal your stuff and break it”. They’re just a selection of my favourites.

The ones that give me most pain now are things like “I don’t fit in, I’m not like everyone else, I’m not welcome here.” I remember clearly when I thought that for the first time. You see the big white van in the picture above? In 1969, people didn’t park their cars up in front of their houses like that, all the houses had walls and front gardens. But on that spot in front of the house that now has a white van, when I was four years old and newly arrived in the Croft, I went over to play with the kids from the street for the first time. I was wearing a grey duffle coat. I don’t know what happened really, some pushing, shoving, shouting? demands for money? a big push, a punch perhaps, tears? - but I came away quite convinced that I didn’t fit in that I was not welcome. And I strongly associated it with that spot. Whenever I wanted to replay the episode to bolster my belief that I’m an outsider (probably with embellishment to suit the context) I saw the toggle on my duffle coat, the lichen on the garden wall, the cold greyness of the pavement. These are the ways that we keep these things alive. A strong association with a place. And in time I’ve come to imagine that it’s still there, some remnant of the scuffle, the emotional upheaval, marking the spot in the road.

I went back there a week or so ago and knew that it wasn’t there at all. It’s never been anywhere but in my head. It’s just not there, it’s forgotten by all but me. What if I was wrong in the initial formation of that decision, what if I was wrong in all of the evidence I’ve gathered over the years to support my belief in it? What then? How might I live differently then?

So here’s something about how wrong I can be. When I was walking there, taking the picture above, I thought “Oh, they’ve moved that telegraph pole, it used to be on the other side of the road” I was quite sure of it. I thought it was very odd, I mean why would you move a telegraph pole just a few yards to the other side of the road? You’d have to connect all the lines up again and everything, it doesn’t make sense, but my memory was very clear – after all, it was not just a telegraph pole in those days, it was the acky post and as such the centre of our communal lives through those long hot summers of childhood (us, you know the kids in the street, the ones that I didn’t get on with… or well at some point i must have…). Anyway – so when I got back from my walk I got ready to write a post about the moving of the acky post and to provide proof of my discovery I went to look at this picture of my sister in about 1971 riding along that bit of pavement. And of course I found that I was wrong. The telegraph pole had always been in the same place. The lamp-post has been modified and the paving slabs have been replaced with tarmac, but the telegraph pole is in just the same position as it was 40 years ago. It was only ever somewhere else in my head.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Patrick Collinson and the pleasures of second-hand books

2011-10-03T13:56:00Z

I was sorry to hear of the death of Professor Patrick Collinson. His obituary at History Today suggests how warmly he was remembered by his former colleagues, and though I haven't been working on Reformation topics long enough to have met him, I do owe him one rather nice memory I'd like to keep here. Last year I bought a second hand book online, which arrived complete with a small sheaf of papers tucked inside. At first, I thought it was a copy of a printed review; instead, it turned out to be a small set of letters relating to a review of the book by Patrick Collinson, and a typescript version of the piece itself. Since it was with a copy of the book, and the type is light in places, this is presumably a carbon copy of the review and covering letter sent to the editor. The letter offers a very polite apology for dilatoriness in returning the review; it's one I might use as a model if the need arises. I've blotted out the text in the picture, as it seems impolite to publish someone else's correspondence, and the letter would otherwise be rather more legible than I'd imagined my phone camera could possibly manage.

early modern women printers: an Ada Lovelace post

2011-10-07T20:37:18Z

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, based on her 1842 treatise on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine; Ada Lovelace Day began in 2009 as a way of increasing the profile of women in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math (commonly referred to as STEM fields).

I’m not in a STEM field (though I’m the almuna of a college that prides itself on turning out huge numbers of women who are). But you know who we could see as being early STEM pioneers? Printers. Early modern printers were using a new technology that had a radical impact on their world.¹ And you know who we find in printing in early modern London? Women.

Here’s a fun thing to try: search the ESTC‘s publisher field for “widow.” There’s 352 results! Now trying searching for “Elizabeth”: 405 results! Jane? 112!

I do an exercise with my students on using the Stationers’ Register and during the course of tracing one book’s passage through the Register, we come across three different women who printed or published the book. It’s sort of an accident that that’s the book we work with it, but it’s a really effective exercise. My students are always shocked that there are women working as printers in this period. But why is it so shocking?

I suspect that it is, in part, because we have become so used to thinking about the early modern period as being repressive for women. Chaste, silent, and obedient. But that’s an assumption that blinds us to the lives of actual women in early modern England. Women might have been supposed to pass from father’s household to husband’s without ever being subjects in their own right. But if you look at the records, you find women owning property and conducting business. Not just one or two, but handfuls of women. I’m not going to claim that the opposite of “chaste, silent, obedient” is true—women were not by any means empowered or enfranchised—but our blind spots shouldn’t mean that we don’t reconsider our assumptions when we start to see what we’ve been missing. How many of the unnamed printers in imprints are women?

I don’t know very much about the history of women printers in this period, or about female labor, but there’s a book coming out next year that should help me get a better sense of the range of activities: Helen Smith’s “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England. If you can’t wait that long, you can check out her article in TEXT on the subject.² And there are a couple of sites out there to start filling in some gaps: a blog post about the early American printer Dinah Nuthead and an exhibition from the University of Illinois library. The more traces of this history I find, the more I want to learn!

And it matters that we learn these things. It matters that we understand the past as a variegated and nuanced time in part because it enables us to see our own time that way. It matters that we remember Ada Lovelace and Rosalind ~~Crick~~ Franklin and Elizabeth Allde because it matters that they contributed to our knowledge of the world and that we can contribute too.

UPDATE: What a horrible thing to mistype Rosalind Franklin’s name in a post about women pioneers in STEM fields and to give her Francis Crick’s last name instead! I’ve fixed it now. Go read about her and then go read Kate Beaton’s comic in Hark, a vagrant.

Please don’t send me comments about how the printing press didn’t cause any revolutions. No one thing changes the world in isolation. But moveable type was fucking huge.
“‘Print[ing] your royal father off’: early modern female stationers and the gendering of the British book trades”, TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, 15 (2003), 163-86.

For Ada Lovelace Day: Eleanor Coade

2011-10-07T19:07:00Z

In 1769, Eleanor (sometimes Elinor) Coade arrived in Lambeth from Lyme Regis, bringing with her one of Georgian London’s forgotten wonders: Coade stone, or as she called it Lithodipyra. She had been born in 1733 to a family of ceramicists, and to a father who couldn’t stay solvent. He died in 1769 and in the same year, she and her mother, also Eleanor arrived in Narrow Wall, Lambeth, taking over an artificial stone foundry from one David Picot who retired or left the business two years later.

There had been a history of artificial stone being made in the area, with Richard Holt being a pioneer from 1720 onwards, but the Coades had a secret. Their stone was finer and more durable than anyone else’s. They made it to a secret formula, which they guarded during their lifetimes. The younger Eleanor Coade was the brains behind the formula and she took on the term ‘Mrs’, although she never married.

Coade soon became the stone to have, due to their imaginative and life-like modelling. Their sculptors were drawn from not only Britain but also some of the talented foreigners working in London at the time, such as John de Vaere who would later work for Wedgwood. You could commission what you want, or choose from their catalogue, now in the British Museum.

Coade is an incredibly durable fake stone and it stays clean and isn’t eaten by pollution. These things were not necessarily so important when it was made, but it could be made into very fine decoration, which was perfect when the Adam brothers began to decorate London in the 1770s and 1780s. An unmarried woman with her own business, Eleanor Coade would go on to become the Georgian London’s greatest ceramic artist. She took on her cousin John Sealy as a partner in 1799, by which time she would have been ready to retire. She died in Camberwell in 1821, a devout Baptist and the recipe for the stone died with her but the secret ingredient has since been identified: ground ceramic.

Amongst London’s extant Coade is the castrated lion on the south side of Westminster Bridge, the Twining’s tea shop front and Captain Bligh’s tomb in St Mary’s Churchyard, Lambeth.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Introducing @whensmybus

2011-10-03T12:51:04Z

A few weeks ago TfL put all their information from Countdown, the service they use to provide bus arrival times, online. There’s a TfL Countdown website and you can enter a bus stop name, or ID number, and find out the latest buses from the stop.

But, it’s a bit fiddly. The main website doesn’t automatically redirect you to the mobile version if you are on a phone. If you type in a location, (e.g. my local Tube station, “Limehouse Station”), you have to pick a match for the location first (from two identically-named options), then a second screen asking you to find a bus stop, and then you get the relevant times. On a phone, it’s just feels fiddly and frustrating ~~especially when I know my phone has GPS in it and knows my location anyway.~~

Update/correction There is, as it turns out, the ability to find by geolocation on the mobile site, it’s just on a mobile browser I just get the main website and don’t get redirected to the special mobile site, which means I never knew about it (thanks to Ade in the comments for pointing this out).

If only there was a mobile-friendly, geolocation aware, real-time way of fetching information. Oh wait. There is. It’s called Twitter. Twitter has geolocation allowed on Tweets (if you opt in) and an API to fetch and send messages, so we have a system set up already in place for our needs.

I owe a big debt of gratitude to Adrian Short, who wrote a Ruby script to pull bus times from TfL. TfL have not officially released an API for Countdown just yet, but Adrian found it, and it’s there and accessible – providing the data in JSON format for each stop. That use got me thinking – if that data is available and can be parsed quickly and easily, why not make a Twitter bot for it?

With that, @whensmybus was born, and is now in beta. Try it out now if you like. Make sure your Tweet has geolocation turned on (for which you’ll need a GPS-capable smartphone), and send a message like:

@whensmybus 135

Or whatever bus you are looking for. Within 60 seconds, you’ll get a Tweet back with the times of the next buses for that route, in each direction, from the stops closest to your location.

Why each direction? Specifying a direction is fiddly and ambiguous; bus routes wind and twist, and some of them are even circular, so “northbound” and “southbound” are not easy things to parse. The name of your destination can have ambiguous spellings, and I haven’t yet got round to tying it in with a geocoding service like Google Maps. So, at the moment the bot simply tells you buses in both directions from the stops nearest to you. I might change this in future, once I’ve got my head around geolocation services and fuzzy string matching and all that.

It’s still beta (thanks to an early unveiling by Sian ;) ) and I plan in future to add enhancements such as the ability to use without GPS. ~~I also need to write some proper documentation for it, and stick the source code on Github later tonight once I am home~~. The source code is now available on github, but do bear in mind the codebase is a bit unstable right now. So, if you are a Londoner, please do use it and tell me what you think, either on the comments below or on Twitter. @ me, don’t @ the bot – it will think it’s a request for a bus service and get confused. :) All suggestions are welcome.

(And now, some tech stuff for the more interested)

The bot is a Python script, run every minute via a cronjob. It’s quite short – 350 lines including comments for the main bit. As well as the live data API, the service also uses two databases officially provided by TfL’s syndication service for free; one is of all the routes, and one for all the bus stop locations. I converted these from CSV format to sqlite so the bot can make SQL queries on the data. TfL use OS Easting and Northing locations for the bus stops, so I have to convert the GPS longitude and latitude; I am indebted to Chris Veness and his lat/lng to OS conversion script, which I translated from JavaScript to Python; I am also now much more educated on subtleties like the difference between OSGB36 and WGS84. Finally, I use the Tweepy library to receive and send the Tweets, which is really rather excellent and saves a lot of faff. Finally, the whole project would not be possible without the ideals of open data and open source software behind it, so if you’ve written even a single line of free software, then thank you as well.

Patrick Collinson has died

2011-09-28T17:21:00Z

I am profoundly sorry to report that the distinguished scholar of early modern religious history, Patrick Collinson, died last night. His passing is a very sad event. If anyone has memories of him in an academic or personal capacity that they would be willing to share with others, please post a comment below.

‘Studied for Action’: How do we do digital?

2011-09-27T10:14:44Z

Last Thursday saw our first day back at school, and there was real excitement at discussing CELL’s plans and projects for the year ahead. One project in particular elicited a murmur of curiosity and approval: in collaboration with Princeton University, CELL will create an online edition of sixteenth century polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Livy’s history of Rome.[1]

Harvey's marginalia in Livy

The volume is heavily inscribed with Harvey’s extensive marginalia, and yet has not received the critical attention it calls out for in large part because this very same annotation means that a standard print edition just cannot do it justice.[2] The scholarly article can only describe so much to the reader; the book itself is always at one remove.

But! The recent explosion in interactivity online, and the opportunities it holds for making a truly ‘dynamic edition’ possible, might just change all that. Anthony Grafton, Arnoud Visser, Lisa Jardine and Matt Symonds will be working out how best to do this, and in this process – and this is what gets me – be echoing a corresponding intellectual navigation traversed centuries before by Harvey and his contemporaries. Digital is the new print.

The printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, with the sixteenth seeing up to a tenfold increase in the number of books churned from their bulky frames. Thus the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries saw an emergent book culture, as societies transformed around the accessibility of the written word. What we are living through is an emergent digital culture: similar negotiations to that of the Renaissance reader with their book are being made now on how we interact with and use this new media.

Take that delicious clue-holder of the early modern reading experience, marginalia, as an example. This is at root inscription by the reader in the margins of the printed text in a book. It might be to trial a pen or a new script, just to doodle, to note down a reminder or something much weightier, or to interact with, interpret or guide one through the contents of a text. All of these I saw recently on Wynken de Worde’s excellent blog on the marginalia in Caxton’s printing of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, amazingly including a deed of the transfer of land written into the blank space beneath the text.

This goes to show that early modern interaction with a text could be unlike what we might expect or do ourselves. We jot down notes on spare scraps of paper precisely because of their throwaway nature, rather than in the sacred leaves of a published book, whereas someone then might be more inclined to write in the nice white expanse in a large printed volume, because it ensures its permanence. Additionally, when paper is expensive and writing involves fetching ones materials (including your homemade ink), sharpening your quill, dipping, writing and sealing, the whole process is much lengthier and more involved than grabbing your nearest biro (even when it has inevitably run dry from being abandoned sans lid).

Manicule or hand-shaped pointer in the margin of a letter

This sees early modern readers navigating, trialling and creating different ways of using and interacting with the printed book, just as we are now navigating and creating a digital culture as it grows around us.

The speed with which technological advances become a ubiquitous part of our lives gives an air of normalcy to what is actually still very culturally new. It has become so easy, so user-friendly, to live much of our lives online, that discourse and philosophical questioning of the subject is lagging behind, occasionally sprinting to make up the distance with the odd breathless panic about privacy on facebook.

Social networking is the beast that is most exciting, fearsome and, despite this, omnipresent. Children and teenagers are increasingly ‘plugged-in’; growing up like this is radically new, and we wonder how it feels. Google+ has just been released to the public, a new strain of this online species of socialising site, and one with wide-reaching ambition. Perhaps it is the very thing that makes it exciting that makes for a sense of fear; the ambition feels global, the drive to connect and share everybody and everything takes no prisoners. This is ideology: the removal of privacy and so the risking of the individual for the sake of the collective.

We haven’t quite decided whether we should limit or love this connectedness. Is the fear that comes with such a muscular newcomer founded, or is it just that: fear of the new? It’s hard to imagine a world without the printing press, and even harder to imagine resistance, or even righteous hatred or real fear, at its stupendous promise.

There is risk here, there are challenges, but there are also opportunities for use not yet thought up. I mean this both in society at large, and in terms of academic work, and in the latter case (excitingly) for more than just accessibility; for active exploration of texts. There is much work to be done…

[1] T. Livius Patavini, Romane historiae principis, decades tres, cum dimidia (Basle, 1555).

[2] For an important exception, see: Lisa Jardine, A. T. Grafton, “Studied for action’: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’ , in Past and Present, Volume 129, p.3-51 (1990)

Some thoughts on quitting Facebook

2011-09-23T09:29:01Z

I did an odd thing last night, for a social media webponce. I disabled my Facebook account, perhaps for good (at least that’s the intention).

Although this was not solely due to what came out of the latest Facebook f8* conference, it probably was some sort of straw that broke a proverbial camel’s back. At f8, Mark Zuckerberg announced the Facebook Timeline, a way of not just showing what you are up to right now, but your whole life as Facebook saw it, digitised and shown to all. And my reaction was along the lines of:

Fucking hell, I’m going to be spending the rest of my life tagging photographs of myself

I joined Facebook early in 2007 when they let ordinary civilians in, and at first I quite liked it. It was a cute way of tying in and aggregating one’s content, thoughts and photos, and keeping up with people I knew, or used to know. What a nice service. And for free! But over time, the fun faded. Facebook kept on quietly changing privacy settings and made a landgrab for copyright of uploaded photos (later rescinded).

So, I harrumphed, tightened my privacy (a tedious task), removed a lot of personal info and content (photos, imported blog posts) and despite my misgivings, carried on with a stripped-down profile to keep in touch with friends. But as Facebook matured, and my profile accrued information over time, another unwelcome feature came about.

The practice of “Friending” someone just because you met them at a party, or went to school ten years ago with them, or you work with them, seemed a good idea at the time; it’s nice, who doesn’t want more friends? Even if they are just Facebook friends. But these are people I do not see every day, for whatever reason; as sad as that may be, over time those social ties would normally fade. C’est la vie.

But Facebook ossifies these previously ephemeral social ties; they are there forever, reminding us of the past. Whereas before we would be able to let these ties fade passively, with them laid now we have to actively “unfriend” people we no longer associate with. That’s not very nice, is it – after all, isn’t the opposite of a friend an enemy? So out of politeness, we accumulate these ossified ties, even after we change jobs, cities, relationships, as a form of digital clutter.

This was as bad as it got, until now. While social ties lingered, other content on Facebook would gradually drop off your timeline and fade away. Indeed, as online archiving extraordinaire Jason Scott observed in an excoriating critique of Facebook:

So asking me about the archiving-ness or containering or long-term prospect of Facebook for anything, the answer is: none. None. Not a whit or a jot or a tiddle. It is like an ever-burning fire of our memories, gleefully growing as we toss endless amounts of information and self and knowledge into it, only to have it added to columns of advertiser-related facts we do not see and do not control and do not understand.

Be careful what you wish for. Now our Facebook profiles will have everything we ever have, dished up by default (and while Facebook’s UI has got easier to customise recently, I bet the default will still be everything). Now it’s impossible to escape your past. Everything you have ever done that has been digitally logged by you, or your friends, can now be potentially dished up as your very own digital This Is Your Life. There is, on Facebook, a photograph of me in my early twenties, passed out after drinking too much tequila on Mexican Independence Day (any excuse, my younger self would say). That’d be on my Timeline by default, no doubt.

But it’s not because of embarrassing photos that I’m off Facebook (far more cringeworthy ones exist, thankfully on analogue prints). It’s the sense that Facebook is very much about the past. The people you have known. The relationships you were in. The things you have done. And these hang around your neck and tie you down.

Whereas what’s really exciting about the web is the things you are going to do. The new fact you’re going to find out idly browsing Wikipedia. The amazing people you meet thanks to you sharing a joke on Twitter. The inspiring blog post you’ll find via Delicious. The silly lolcat you’ll find on Reddit. Facebook isn’t offering anything what makes the Internet fun, and it’s taken this change to make me realise.

With Timeline, we’re opening ourselves up with an ever-growing obsession with the past. A quote I saw last night was “We’re gonna need architectures for forgetting”. Poetic as that line is, that’s a cure when prevention might be better – for me, in any case.

I must stress that this is not to say Facebook is bad, or Timeline is going to be a failure. Plenty of people are happy to have ossified social ties – if you are in a small, close-knit social network that is relatively static, I can see it why is a boon. Timeline will be fantastic for you, if you have been on Facebook your entire adult life, and all that data is there and well-curated (which it will be, if you have been on Facebook your entire adult life). But it’s not for me; it’s not interesting to me as a user, any more. So I’m out. Bye, Facebook.^†

* Named for Fate, the all-knowing computer in V for Vendetta, right?
† Although I’m still keeping the Facebook Like button at the bottom, just for kicks and sheer hypocrisy ;)

A1 redux: "Certaine Scandalous Papers"

2011-09-20T17:22:00Z

In my previous post on the blank "A1" leaves that were sometimes used to protect the title-pages of early modern books, I missed an example from our collection. The reason that I missed it is because I had filed it away under "owner's marks," and so I'm quite pleased to see that, contrary to my earlier assertion, at least one of our blank A1 pages does indeed contain some form of writing. Here is the title-page of An Answere to Certaine Scandalous Papers, Scattered abroad vnder colour of a Catholicke Admonition (1606):

This tract was written in the wake of the Gundpowder Plot by Robert Cecil, the right-hand man of King James and, of course, the son of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. (The younger Cecil had recently been granted the title of earl of Salisbury, which explains the librarian's pencilled note visible on the title-page). An Answere was intended to justify the administration's attitude toward Catholic recusants in the heated polemical atmosphere that followed the attempted attack. Cecil's rhetorical strategy included a recitation of the death-threats he had received, due to his role in uncovering the conspiracy, and a separation of those Catholics loyal to the monarch from the extremist papists who had tried to explode the parliament building. Suffice it to say, this pamphlet would have been much in demand -- and indeed, it was quickly published abroad (in Dublin) and in a Latin translation.

As you can see from the image above, there is an owner's name written in the upper-right corner of the title-page, in a beautiful example of early-seventeenth-century secretary hand. Here's a closer look:

The owner's mark appears to be "Ric: Marshe liber" -- which would most likely translate as the standard statement of ownership "Richard Marshe's book" (although let me know if you have a better suggestion). On the previous page, on the recto of the blank A1 leaf, is a date and a title that, for the most part, reiterates the information on the title-page, but attributes the ostensibly anonymous pamphlet to Cecil:

Here's a closer look:

It is dated 1606 (the year the pamphlet was published) and states "The Earle of Salisburyes answere to certaine scandalous papers." Judging by the handwriting, I think it's safe to classify this as a contemporary note -- one that puts the relevant identifying information on what was, after all, the first page of this pamphlet (one that, according to a quick consultation of the ESTC record does not, typically, survive very often). In this case, then, the A1 blank seems to have frustrated the function of the proper title-page -- this owner, at least, felt it necessary to inscribe the title on the page that protected (and thus inhibited the view of) the title-page.

The owner read Cecil's pamphlet thoroughly, leaving a number of reader's marks throughout. The marks consist mostly of assiduous underlining, which, due to the polemical tone of the pamphlet, often reveals a bit more about the reader's interest than we might otherwise expect. Here are a few examples:

On the first page of the text, after the prefatory letters, the reader has underlined a warning to those who might willfully misinterpret the author's intent: those "adversaries" who are inclined to "make an ill interpretation onely of those thinges, which faile in execution."

The next example shows an interest in some of Cecil's more imaginative rhetoric:

The underlined passage on the left reads "the scruples of Conscience and seeds of Treason, haue growen vp as close together, as the huske and Corne in one eare" -- and the reader has taken the time to add emphasis to the epithet "vnlearned Papists, like Hawkes hooded." On the right side, the reader has, perhaps unsurprisingly, underlined another jibe at Catholics: those who "enioyne men to eate their God, vpon the bargaine of blood" -- a characterization juxtaposed, through a not uncomplicated opposition, to "those whom they [i.e. Catholics] depraue," who know that "what-soeuer God doth affect in goodnes, he doth effect by good means."

The only marginal mark that goes beyond a simple act of underlining is a nice example of a trefoil, emphasizing a more lengthy passage that restates the doctrine of Jacobean absolutism:

The reader and owner of this pointedly polemical pamphlet left no further indications of his identity, although the thoroughness with which he read it does show his political and religious affiliations -- and his commitment to interacting with the text, and, thereby, engaging in a debate over the repression (or expression) of religious belief following an attempted terrorist attack on the Jacobean state.

The witch at Newbury, 1643

2011-09-19T18:42:00Z

On or about this day 368 years ago, the woman purportedly depicted in this woodcut was summarily shot by parliamentary forces near Newbury. The picture gets reproduced in museum displays, etc: it was the title page of A most certain, strange, and true discovery of a witch being taken by some of the Parliament forces as she was standing on a small planck board and sayling on it over the river of Newbury: together with the strange and true manner of her death, with the propheticall words and speeches she used at the same time. Printed by John Hammond, 1643. George Thomason dated the publication more precisely to September 28^th, which was the day the Earl of Essex led his undefeated army back into London after getting rather the better of the first battle of Newbury (Sept 20^th). The image of course attempts no likeness, but makes the unknown, unnamed victim of the soldiers conform to a witch stereotype.

My main project here was to set off the pamphlet’s account against other references to this incident in the periodical press of the day. Having transcribed those accounts and passing mentions I have found made the newsletters, I then discovered that EEBO has not yet done a full text transcript of the 28^th September pamphlet. So I did one, and here it is; but between the two long paragraphs (and after them) I will insert some comments of my own.

A most certain, strange, and true discovery of a witch, etc, 1643

“Many are in a belief, that this silly sex of women by no means attaine to that so vile and damned a practice of sorcery and Witch-craft, in regard of their illiteratenesse and want of learning, which many men have by great learning done, Adam by temptation toucht and tasted the deceiving apple, so some high learnd & read by the same temptation that deceived him hath bin so insnared to contract with the Divel; as for example, in the instancing a few, as English Bacon of Oxford, Vandermast of Holland, Bungay of Germany, Fostus of the same, Franciscus the English Monke of Bury, Doctor Slackleach, and divers others which were too tedious to relate of, but how weake women should attain unto it many are incredible of the same, and many too are opposite in opinion against the same, that giving a possibility to their doubtings, that the malice, and inveterate malice of a woman entirely devoted to her revengefull wrath frequenting desolate and desart places, and giving way unto their wished temptation, may have converse with that world roaring lion, and covenant and contract upon condition, the like hath in sundry place, and divers times been tried at the Assises of Lancaster, Carlisle, Buckingham, and elsewhere, but to come to the intended relation of this Witch or Sorceresse, as is manifest and credibly related by the Gentlemen, Commanders, and Captains, of the Earl of Essex his Army.

(RB: like many of these pamphlets, the recital of the incidents is offered as a proof that witchcraft exists, and in this case that sorcery can be practised by women, even if illiteracy prevents them from making a written contract. A female civilian had been executed without trial. Newbury was town which generally favoured the parliamentarian cause, so there needed to be a good reason for this atrocity. At the start of the following paragraph, we will see confusion as to exactly where this fatal encounter took place. If the army really was marching through Newbury, then it happened after the battle. But at the end, the ‘witch’ finally breaks down into speech, and makes prophecy of Essex’s forthcoming victory. The straggling march with troops foraging in the hedgerows sounds like conditions in Essex’s half-starved force as it moved east from Hungerford towards Newbury on Sept. 19^th. Royalist forces moving from Wantage got to Newbury before Essex’s advance party, and were withdrawn towards Oxford after the battle, leaving Essex free to march through Newbury and on towards London.)

“A part of the Army marching through Newbury some of the Souldiers being scattered by the reason of their loitering by the way, in gathering Nuts, Apples, Plummes, Blackberries, and the like, one of them by chance in clambering up a tree, being pursued by his fellow or Comrade in waggish merriment, jesting one with another, espied on the river being there adjacent, a tall, lean, slender woman, as he supposed, to his amazement, and great terreur treading of the water with her feet, with as much ease and firmnesses as if one could walk or trample on the earth, wherewith his softly calls, and beckened to his fellows to behold it, and with all possible speed that could be to obscure them from her sight, who as conveniently as they could they did observe, this could be no little amazement unto them you may think to see a woman dance upon the water, nor could all their sights be deluded, though perhaps one might but coming nearer to the shore, they could perceive there was a plank or deale overshadowed with a little shallow water that she stood upon, the which did beare her up, anon rode by some of the Commanders who were eye witnesses, as well as they, and were as much astonished as they could be, still too and fro she fleeted on the water, the boord standing firm bout upright, indeed I have both heard and read of many that in tempests and on rivers by casualty have been shipwracked, or cast over board, where catching empty barrels, rudders, boards, or planks have made good shift by the assisting providence of God to get on shore, but not in this womans kind to stand upon the board, turning and winding it which way she pleased, making it pastime to her, as little thinking who perceived her tricks, or that she did imagine that they were the last she ever should show, as we have heard the swan sing before her death, so did this divellish woman, as after plainly it appeared make sport before her death, at last having sufficiently been upon the water, he that deceived her always did so then, blinding her that she could not at her landing see the ambush that was laid for her, coming upon the shore she gave the board a push, which they plainly perceived, and crossed the river, they searched after her but could not find her she being landed the Commanders beholding her, gave order to lay hold on her and bring her to them straight, the which some were fearfull, but some being more venturous then other some, boldly went to her and seized on her by the arme, demanding what she was? But the woman no whit replying any words unto them, they brought her unto the Commanders, to whom though mightily she was urged she did reply as little: so consulting with themselves what should be done with her, being it so apparently appeared she was a Witch, being loth to let her goe, and as loth to carry her with them, they so resolved with themselves, to make a shot at her, and gave order to a couple of their Souldiers that were approved good marks-men, to charge and shoot her straight, which they prepared to doe: so setting her boult upright against a mud banke or wall; two of the Souldiers according to their command made themselves ready, where having taken aime gave fire and shot at her as thinking sure they had sped her, but with a deriding and loud laughter at them she caught the bullets in her hands and chew’d them, which was a stronger testimony then the water, that she was the same that their imagination thought her so to be, so resolving with themselves if either fire or sword or halter were sufficient for to make an end of her, one set his carbin close unto her brest: where discharging the bullet back rebounded like a ball, and narrowly he mist it in his face that was the shooter: this so enraged the Gentleman, that one drew out his sword & manfully run at her with all the force his strength had power to make, but it prevailed no more than did the shot, the woman still though speechlesse, yet in a most contemptible way of scorn, still laughing at them, which did the more exhaust their furie against her life, yet one amongst the rest had heard that piercing or drawing bloud from forth the veines that cross the temples of the head, it would prevail against the strongest sorcery, and quell the force of Witchcraft, which was allowed for triall: the woman hearing this, knew that the Devill had left her and her power was gone, whereupon she began alowd to cry, and roare, tearing her haire, and making piteous moan, which in these words expressed were; and is this come to passe, that I must dye indeed? Why then his Excellency the Earl of Essex shall be fortunate and win the field, after which no more words could be got from her; wherewith they immediately discharged a pistol underneath her eare, at which she straight sunk down and dyed, leaving her legacy of a detested carcase to the wormes, her soul were ought not to judge of, though the evils of her wicked life and death can scape no censure.

(The writer makes the desperate foraging sound like schoolboy fun, exactly like the boy Robinson looking for ‘bullaces’ at the start of The Late Lancashire Witches. In the imputed mood of levity, the ‘witch’ is sighted. I imagine that people who lived by lakes and rivers got very good at balancing on the slightest of craft: the woman’s apparent enjoyment of her skill brought to the mind of her assailants the kind of images of sorcerers floating on mere planks that we see in Olaus Magnus' Historia de gentibus Septentrionalibus, and hear about in tales of witches sailing in eggshells, sieves, etc.

It seems possible that the woman did scoff at or ridicule the soldiers. The Parliamentary cause had not gone well up to this point of the war, the Royalists were winning. Rather than larking about up trees, the soldiers were more likely to be very much on edge. A confused passage in the narrative seems to indicate that the woman thought she could cross the river to safety, but they seem to have gone to the trouble of rounding her up. She had said too much, they decided to finish her off. The initial impression that she was walking on the water itself, rejected by the very baptismal element itself, remains more potent in their jumpy response than any rational attention to her body board. Notice that they ask ‘what’, not ‘who’ she was: they seem at no point to have been interested in her name; her personal individuality was simply swallowed up in this new one, ‘witch’. Their attempts to shoot her are in effect her trial: that she is seemingly impervious to shot proves that she actually is what she is being shot for being, a pacted witch (and it says nothing about their potentially worrisome inability to shoot straight). After ‘scratching’, her power of ‘charmed life’ is broken, like Macbeth’s finally was, and she succumbs to a pistol shot beneath her ear. Had she been reported to have died after the first shots, this might have looked more like the murder it was, but she was by then safely incriminated to men who had no inclination to take her with them for trial (they all faced a battle, after all).

Here’s the account of the incident in Certaine Informations from Severall Parts of the Kingdome, September 25, 1643 - October 2, 1643; Issue 37.

“The general vote of the souldiers that are returned from the fight at Newbery is, that a Witch was sent by the Cavaliers into their Army to do mischiefe, who being shot at, was so impenetrable, that no bullets would pierce her, whereupon a Captaine bid shoot her with a button, and one of the souldiers pulled a brasse button from his doublet, and therewith charging his pistoll, fired it upon her head, and slew her. If it be true that she were a witch, and sent by the Cavaliers, as the common voice it, [illeg.] will verify the old verse, viz. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo

But it will be thought ridiculous that any man should be shot free. Whereunto we answer, that we have heard some English Commanders that have been in the Swedes wars, credibly affirme, that it is an ordinary thing in those parts.”

In this other parliamentary account, the witch was a royalist agent. The forces of hell are deployed against the trained bands. The 1645 pamphlet, Signs and wonders from heaven shows the persistence of this belief that eliminating witches would nullify Prince Rupert’s preternatural invulnerability: “It is likewise certified by many of good quality and worth that at the last Assises in Norfolke there were 40 witches araigned for their lives, and 20. executed: and that they have done very much harme in that Countrey, and have prophesied of the downfall of the King and his Army, and that Prince Robert (sic) shall be no longer shot-free: with many strange and unheard of things that shall come to passe.” Curious, then, that the September 28^th pamphleteer made so little of the ‘witch’ as a spell-casting antagonist, or as an associate of Prince Rupert: she is surprised (in his account) while intent on her own recreations, like Acrasia being caught unawares in her Bower of Bliss. I had not come across buttons as efficacious against supernatural things – a silver coat button would have been more familiar. But a brass one worked (as it would).

For the royalist side Mercurius Britanicus Communicating the Affaires of Great Britaine, October 10, 1643 - October 17, 1643; Issue 8, offered this derisive account of what was claimed. It in turn shows no compassion for the dead woman, but does insinuate something of the injustice: the witch was killed ‘before she was born’ (where I think the intended sense is, before she became one):

“And that the Citie may have plenty of strange things together, the Faction made a fine new Witch, borne and brought forth at Newbury, which (you must know) was the true cause why so many trained bands lost their lives, and this Witch (for certaine) they saw walke upon the water, being as light-heeld as any of the She-Committee, and had an impenetrable skin till a faithful Shoomaker scratched her on the arme, by which meanes they put a Pistoll to her eare, and so discovered her to be a Malignant woman, that is (said master Peard) a Witch or Sorceresse. So this Witch being killed (before she was borne) their victory went on bravely.

And for the Witch, since you have so much faith in her as we heare, we will sell ye her grissels and bones, you may make spels and charmes of them to keep you Shot-free and Scot-free: I am persuaded you are so superstitious, you thinke one tooth of such a grave, old woman may be the preservation of Prince Rupert himselfe, and His majesties whole Army.”

Mercurius Aulicus (1643: Oxford) (Oxford, England), Sunday, October 15, 1643 reports on the contents of some intercepted letters. The incident appears (for this writer) among the other follies the parliamentarian forces entertained: prejudices, lies, hopeful rumours, and absurdities, the wild words of a defeated rabble:

“Though their forces are not many their lyes are, which since they prosper so ill in print, they convey them confidently in writing (though sometimes they expresse a sensible sigh for the unluckinesse of their cause) many of which were this weeke were intercepted. One writes to his sister Mistresse Mary Greene, that he saw the French Ambassador come into London, but Oh sister (said he) his very horses head had all Crosses on. (sure they were not horses) Another, one Broughton, writes to Alderman Basnet at Coventree, that his unkle George Gresley saw an old Witch at Newbury with his very eyes (nay with his very eares). Another writes to his friend at Coventry that he received a wound at Auburne by one of my Lord Jermyn’s Souldiers nine inches deepe. Another writes that, Prince Rupert is mortally wounded…”

Whoever she was, perhaps an eel-catcher, trout fisher or reed-bed cutter on the Kennet, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had the folly to laugh at tired, hungry and nervous soldiers, men who were capable of believing anything of their enemy. She was, after a bit of shooting and missing, killed, and then posthumously incriminated according to that dictates of that convenient excuse, witchcraft.

myriad marginalia

2011-09-18T19:50:17Z

This week in class I showed my students (too briefly) one of my favorite books in the Folger’s collections, a 1483 printing by William Caxton of John Gower’s long poem Confessio amantis, written some hundred years earlier. I do not love this book because of its text—if I confess that I’ve never read the poem, will you hold it against me?—nor because of its author. I think it’s pretty cool that it was printed by Caxton, the man who established printing in England, and of course, there’s always kind of a thrill to any incunabula, but that’s not it either. No, I love this book because of the traces of its later owners, traces that interact with the text, traces that are all about the book but not the text, and traces that seem to have nothing to do with anything.

Here’s one set of marks that are fabulous:¹

leaf g1r

It’s a little hard to see what’s going on, so here’s a detail:

getting rid of the pope

Do you see what the reader has done? The ink’s faded, but he or she has scribbled out “pope” everywhere it appears! Even better is the verso of this leaf:

honourable or abominable?

Not only has the reader crossed out “pope”, but he’s struck through “honourable” and replaced it with “abominable.” That’s some thought-out substitution—it keeps the rhyme and the meter (I’m assuming you’d elide the “i” to get four syllables). The final “e” on that “abominable” looks like the sort of two-stroke “e” that you see in mid-sixteenth century secretary hand. Though there isn’t enough for me to be able to date the annotation, you’ll see more in a moment that might give further clues.

Not all the marginalia in this book is so attuned to the text. Other instances simply take the advantage of blank spaces in which to doodle:

a blank space needs to be filled

As you know, I like blank spaces, and I like that page in the Gower because it shows how doodlers will need to use that space. I’m inclined to agree: if you’re not going to include nice initial letters or anything else deliberate in those spaces, really, something should be added.

Blank margins at the bottom of the page are pretty tempting, too:

he's lost his head!

I suppose it’s possible that the bottom edge got trimmed during rebinding and that’s why this man has no head (or torso), but I’m not sure that’s what happened. Check out this guy:

decapitated or deliberate?

There’s clearly some text that’s been trimmed, but I’m not convinced that even before trimming this guy had a head, poor thing.

In any case, all that doodling is pretty great, I think, but the blank spaces of the book have also been used much more intentionally:

recording Swallowe's marriage

That’s just one piece of a series of notes giving information about Christofer Swallowe, this one dating his marriage, and others naming his children. But as fabulous as that is, it’s not my favorite bit of marginalia. This is:

a deed recording the transfer of land

It’s hard to read, so here’s a close-up of each page:

detail leaf i3v

detail of leaf i4r

And here’s an attempt at a transcription:

Ottley Leonard England haithe in the absence of the court surrendered into the handes of the lord of the said manner by the handes of Peter Baildon and Lawrence fflessher two c[o]stimary tennandes of the said manner being sworne All that one close callid Steren acre conteining by estimation one acar of Land & medowe with thappurte[…]es in Ottley aforesaid Now in the tenure of Christofer

And Dorithe his wife and their assigned for Duringe the naturall liffes of the said Christofer Swallowe & Dorithe his wife and the longer liuer of theme without any rentes or other duties yelding paieng or doinge therefore unto the said Leornard England his heires and assigned During the said terme /// The xii day of Marche 1[…] {lost to trimmed bottom edge}

Isn’t that wonderful? A deed! Recorded in the margins of Gower’s Confessio amantis! It’s got nothing to do with the text and everything to do with the fact that this is a big book with white spaces to spare: there’s room for the information to be copied and security that the book isn’t going to be misplaced or accidentally thrown out with the rubbish. All these different types of writing in books and all in one book!

I apologize for the low quality of these photos; I snapped them with my cell phone when I was preparing for class, primarily for my own reference, but then I couldn’t resist the urge to share them!

The Route to Zombies, Run!

2011-09-12T10:47:39Z

Zombies, Run! is an augmented audio* running game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You put your trainers on, your headphones in, and when you start running, you hear the game and story all round you, coming straight to your ears. It’s a game for everyone who loves or wants to love running, jogging, and walking.

We’ve written a lot about Zombies, Run! on our Kickstarter page and official website, so in this blog we want to talk about how this game became about and why we’re making it.

*We just made that term up.

The Dream: An original, self-funded game

When we founded Six to Start, we had a very simple plan: we’d make brilliant games for great clients and when we had enough profits saved, we’d make our own game. Either that, or we’d make our own game in our spare time. Easy!

Or maybe not. Believe it or not, it turns out that making brilliant games is really very difficult; if you’re spending all of your time trying to make We Tell Stories or Smokescreen – two highly original projects – as good as they can be, you don’t have that much time to do anything else. In 2008 there was the financial crash, which didn’t help our clients all that much; and during all of this time, we were trying to learn how to run a company.

We’ve had time for a few experiments, like Werewolf 359, an online framework for playing Werewolf, and Wanderlust, a location-based storytelling engine that integrated with Foursquare. Around this time, we’d also been developing an action game for the iPhone with time travel and ARG elements – unfortunately we let the scope grow too far and we didn’t have the skills to do everything we wanted to. A simple mistake, and one we were determined not to repeat with Wanderlust, which was made entirely in-house, and we tapped our writing buddies to craft stories for it. Despite being made in just a few weeks, it got a decent amount of attention and also boosted our confidence that we were going down the right path.

The Running Dead

I’m a keen runner. I didn’t always use to be one – I hated it at school – but over time I’ve really fallen for the sense of freedom and energy that you get from running, and of course, it’s got to be one of the cheapest ways of keeping fit. Being an early adopter, I’ve always had a close eye on running tech, buying two successive versions Garmin Forerunner GPS tracker and having three different running apps on my iPhone.

There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that knowing your exact pace and distance is a fantastic way to make running better and more fun; it makes your progress – both in a run and as a runner – much more transparent. That’s why RunKeeper, Nike+, and Garmin Connect are so popular.

And over the years, there have been various ‘running games’ out there, including Seek and Spell, PacManhattan, Journey to the End of the Night, and the more sedate Pokewalker. These are all really interesting and I’ve played most of them, but most of them aren’t really about running at all. They often involve running, but more in the sense of running as a side-effect of the game mechanics rather than “I’m going to spend 30 minutes running 5km this evening”.

There are even other augmented reality running games out there where players avoid enemies or collect loot that has been superimposed on nearby roads and parks! But because they often require you to look at your phone’s screen to find the next waypoint or whatever, you can’t really do any extended running unless you want to get injured. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – not everyone wants to run – but it’s not ideal for regular joggers or runners, who prefer to stick to one or two or three familiar routes (which is antithetical to the discovery-centric nature of many location-based games).

On the flipside, sites like Fitocracy, Superproof, and Nike+ are attempting to add badges, levels, points, and collectibles to running. I am sure that some people like these things and find them motivating, but they all seem centred around the idea of competing, either with other people or with yourself. The truth is that for many recreational runners, running isn’t always about beating your personal best time or distance. Running is fun and tiring and exhilarating and painful and freeing; it generates numbers, but those numbers aren’t the reason we run.

So we wanted to make an iPhone game that was really about running (or jogging, if you like). Our first idea was based around actual geography and was more classically game-like, but it didn’t seem like it would have enough longevity and was a bit too geared towards hardcore runners, so we weren’t that satisfied. Then we talked to Naomi Alderman – who became our lead writer for this game – about it and we came up with the brilliant idea of setting the game in a post-apocalyptic world of zombies where running would be an essential and life-saving skill. It was also clear why you would run – to help gather vital supplies for your people. Naturally, there would be a story delivered straight to your ears, and much more behind it. Everything fit into place.

Making It

Even better, making Zombies, Run! was something we could do almost entirely in-house, and it would exercise all of the skills that we’d been honing for years – new forms of storytelling, great user experience, sound design, ARGs – they’re all essential for this game.

We did some proper feasibility testing to make sure we could actually make the game well and in a reasonable amount of time – creating an internal prototype, writing the script, recording the audio, adding SFX – and everything looked good, so we began creating the Kickstarter trailer. While Zombies, Run! isn’t as difficult to explain as other games we’ve made, it’s not quite like anything else that’s out there. Other than saying “It’s like Nike+ but with zombies” we felt a live-action trailer and interview would convey what the game was all about.

We’ve also had many long discussions about how we balance storytelling and play in the game; at one end, Zombies, Run! might just be a podcast – at the other, it’d be a highly complex system. We’re somewhere in the middle, and the same applies to the game mechanics: we made a deliberate decision not to have traditional points or XP or levels. We do have analogues to them, but they’re much more integrated into the fiction of the game. They are the people in your base you want to save. They are the things that will feed and clothe and protect them. They are the secrets, mysteries, and tales of the people and the barren environment that you run through.

In short, we are creating a world filled with stories and characters that make you want to run – a world where your ability and drive to run is a matter of life and death, not just for yourself but for the people around you. It’s not a crude and empty system of points and levels, it’s a game that is about what it means to be alive.

Support us – and help rebuild civilization!

If you like the sound of this and you want to support us – and get a discounted copy of the game plus some great swag – check us out on Kickstarter. This is a real labour of love for us, and we think it’ll be something very special.

De disciplinam animi

2011-09-10T20:49:57Z

In reading for my Digital Humanities seminar, I was struck by a passage in Susan Hockey’s “The History of Humanities Computing” (A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Schreibman et al., Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) in the section about humanities computing in the 1980s:

A debate about whether or not students should learn computer programming was ongoing. Some felt it replaced Latin as a “mental discipline” (Hockey 1986). Others thought that it was too difficult and took too much time away from the core work in the humanities.

This idea of humanities students being required to learn some programming put me in mind of when, in what seems like a prior life, I was looking at the requirements for a PhD program in English Literature. I can’t remember now, it may have been at NYU (if so, the requirement has changed), but regardless: in addition to demonstrating proficiency in two languages pertinent to their research, PhD students would be required to demonstrate proficiency in one computer language.

As it did then, and increasingly does as I gain perspective on my humanistic education, this seems like an eminently good idea. A quick search for Hockey’s self-citation yielded nothing, but, having done coursework in Latin, Hockey’s description of studying the language as a “mental discipline” aligns neatly with my understanding of the value of learning Latin. While it certainly exposes students to beautifully constructed rhetoric and gives useful perspective on one’s native language, learning Latin is primarily a calisthenic exercise in rigorous, categorical thinking and memory.

I would argue that learning a computer language is a similarly rigorous, disciplined pursuit, with the added benefit that you can make things with your well-constructed syntax (though it should be said: a well-made sentence is a beautiful thing). At least one computer language, Perl, was explicitly made with the structure of a human language in mind. Its creator, Larry Wall (a trained linguist), often refers to its variables and functions as “nouns” and “verbs.” While it doesn’t do to get too caught up in comparing the traits of computer and human languages (here, anyway), I would suggest Hockey was on to something in highlighting the “mental discipline” the learning of computer languages might present humanities students.

Certainly, it would provide a definitively marketable skill to humanities graduates in addition to the someone more nebulous abilities to “write” and “think.” Though I would not go so far as to say students should take a course in, for example, HTML/CSS instead of Latin 101, the changing methodological nature of the humanities would make those skills, and the mental discipline they require, quite useful.

This is cross-posted, with minor edits, from our class blog for INLS 890: Making the Humanities Digital at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science.

‘A fearsome and treacherous world’

2011-09-06T13:42:09Z

So says the Guardian website of life under the Tudors, specifically referring to the experience of Henry VIII’s supposedly adulterous fifth wife Catherine Howard as she faced execution.

Political executions, as well as uxoricide, were at a particular high under Henry, his daughter ‘Bloody Mary’ is famed for religious genocide, and England under Elizabeth has been described as a ‘surveillance state’, with her ‘spymaster’ Walsingham entrapping Mary Queen of Scots and torturing Catholics.[1]

So reads the ‘horrible histories’ style Tudor dynasty. And it has a point: torture and execution were common, accepted, and often public, life was surely hard, and death and pain were more present and more visceral than in our sanitized modern society.

There is a commonly held, even subconscious, metanarrative that history is progressing in a linear style, that between then and now we have been on an upward, civilising path, where evolutionary theory infiltrates our understanding of social and even global change over the past few hundred years. We have the technology and scientific advancement to prove it.

It’s not like we watch punishment as public spectacle or condone torture to protect our way of life anymore. Not in this country, at any rate.

In a totally unrelated comment, clicking back onto the front page of the Guardian today, the recent riots and phone hacking scandal are still figuring prominently, as well as the headlines ‘TV cameras to be allowed into courts’, and ‘MI6 knew I was tortured, says rebel’.

Did the Elizabethan-in-the-street feel that they were living through a fearsome era, or just accept it as the way of things? How will we be judged? Do we progress at all, or is it simply change disguised as progress?

Reading about the (alleged) condoning of torture by MI6, previously in Pakistan and now via British involvement in the rendition of a terrorism suspect – and his family – to Libya in 2003 made me wonder how torture was viewed in Elizabethan society, and question the notion of a degree of societal barbarism then and a moral high ground now.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s encounters with the subject, but it seems to me that it wasn’t just about blood and guts on the scaffold; it could be a quiet, embedded part of political life, perhaps to be regretted, but necessary for the greater good. Sound familiar?

Torture features heavily in the career of William Waad, diplomat, intelligencer and clerk of the privy council. Part secretary and administrator, part interrogator of English recusants and foreign Jesuits, this man gained a reputation for his involvement in prosecuting every well known ‘terror’ plot after 1585: ‘the Lopez plot, the Babington plot, the Essex rebellion, the trial of Ralegh, the Gunpowder Plot, the Main plot, the Bye plot’ and more.[2] It was part of his job, and he was known for it. These are the showbiz trials, but he and many others were involved in routine inquiries and investigations that had the option of torture hanging, as it were, in the air.

Sir Thomas Bodley was a career diplomat, of reasonably high standing, before he founded what he is known for today: the great Bodleian library in Oxford. It was envisaged as providing permanent access to a wealth of books for scholars to contribute to the advancement of knowledge, for the public good. He fits into another Renaissance narrative, of the scholar, the forger of a brave new world, the Renaissance man.

We don’t want to think of him beside Waad, participating in the darker side of state business. But there he is, under instruction from the privy council to interrogate terror suspect George Stoker with whatever means necessary:

‘A letter to Sir Owen Hopton, knight, William Waad, Thomas Bodley, Thomas Owen, Richarde Younge, esquiers, that whereas George Stoker, presentelie remayning in the Towre, being latelie apprehended … it was to be probablie conjectured that his repaire into this Realme was for some secrett practise or other notable mischeife … they are herebie aucthorised and required forthwith uppon the receipt hereof to conferre with him to declare the truth of the cause of his repaire thither, and likewise to examine him uppon certaine interrogatories by them to be framed for the better discouverie of the truth; whereuppon if they should perceave that he should refuse to declare for what cause and to what end he came into this Realme, then it is thought meete that they putt him to the torture of the Racke, therebie the better to withdraw from him the knowledg of his wicked entente and purpose, and likewise secretelie to examine all such suspected personnes as he hathe had conference with…’[3]

We cannot assume that we have advanced safely past this. Torture is not just an image of Mel Gibson being hung, drawn and quartered (insert pun on his acting if you wish), nor is it simply the horrible histories caricature or the English Grand Inquisitor Waad; it is also made up of Bodley the professional diplomat and scholar, and the official rubber stamping of the mundane privy council letter. It is not just a bloody picture of the past or of a Libyan jail, it is made up of people facilitating rendition or standing by and waiting for their turn to question the suspect. Some ‘progress’ has been made if we agree that torture is at least not common, accepted and public in this country, but I would suggest that this progress is not linear, not necessary, and not to be taken for granted.

[1] Curtis Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, (London: Macmillan, 1996)

[2] Gary Bell, ‘William Waad’, ODNB, http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/view/article/28364

[3] Privy Council to Lieutenant of the Tower, Owen Hopkins, 16^th February 1588, in Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol 15, 1587-88, p365.