Seventeenth Century Benefactors Books

One of the things I love most about teaching is the opportunity to engage with subject areas that neighbour my own research interests.

In recent years I’ve been fortunate to supervise dissertations by several students working in Oxford and, in supporting the development of their research, to gain a deeper awareness of some of the libraries in the university system there.

One of these dissertations was further developed into an article. The Bodleian’s Binders’ Book is just one of the many manuscript resources that record library practices in the Early Modern period. Such manuscripts have local interest within the city but an obvious significance in library history more widely.

Tonight’s library history seminar discussed another group of library records – the benefactors’ books maintained by most of the colleges from the early 17th century. The speaker, Dr William Poole ( New College), provided an introduction to these sources, which he sees as useful in connecting the history of intellectual ideas and the history of the book. He provided us with examples in which we can trace the vernacularization of scholarship; the shift from manuscripts donated as working documents to their donation as antiquarian objects (e.g. Books of Hours donated after the Reformation); the specialisation of particular college collections (e.g. Plant Science at Magdalen); and, from the 1630s, when the Anatomy School Museum was founded, the separation of non-book collections from books in libraries.

The influence of Bodley can be seen: the Bodleian benefactors book was begun in 1602 and displayed prominently, with clear instructions on whose names would be entered in it and whose would not. In 1604-5 All Souls’s benefactors book was begun. Bodley himself was influenced by practices at Leiden, a model for various practices at the university at that time.

The seminar demonstrated how provenance information can be of local significance while exemplifying techniques with wider application. The organisers recorded Dr Poole’s paper, and so I hope it will be available as a podcast soon – certainly it will be useful for Historical Bibliography students as an example of how provenance research techniques can be used by scholars.

If you could not make the seminar and are looking for resources on this topic, ahead of the podcast’s becoming available, here are some listed on Dr Poole’s handout:

Jonathan Bengston. ‘Benefaction Registers in Oxford Colleges’. Library History 16 (2000), pp. 143-52.

Arthur MacGregor et al. Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collection, 1683-1886. (Oxford, 2000-2006).

Paul Morgan. Oxford Libraries Outside the Bodleian. 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1980).

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Image: bookshelf at Christ Church, Oxford, taken on a visit during last year’s Rare Books and Special Collections Group Conference.

The Importance of Page Design

Really enjoyed today’s workshop on scholarly annotation organised by the Institute of English Studies. Because of other commitments I was only able to attend the first half, but it was a great opportunity to hear about and ponder the challenges faced by editors of scholarly editions of texts.

The first paper was by Dr Valerie Rumbold (University of Birmingham), and discussed her work to render The Dunciad in Four Books (1743) teachable to modern undergraduates. She gave a brief history of how she came to edit the Longman Annotated Text of it, after having claimed at the start of her career that the capabilities of the web to provide hypertext editions would render print editions obsolete. Thank goodness for the rest of us that (a) she was wrong in this youthful assertion and (b) she was willing to reconsider her opinion and embark on the task of producing the Longman edition.

Dr Rumbold spoke clearly and concisely on the decision-making processes she faced as an editor, working out what requires annotation in order to contextualise and elucidate the text for the primary audience of undergrads while remaining useful for Pope scholars. As is the case with any full paper given by an expert presenter, there was lots of food for thought – too much to do justice to all of it in a brief blog article.

One point that was beautifully illustrated by Dr Rumbold was the importance of page design in communicating the text to the reader. Users of the earlier Twickenham edition by James Sutherland had reported that it was challenging to identify the modern editor’s annotations (as opposed to Pope’s own). In the Longman text, a swelled rule was used to indicate the end of Pope’s work (above) and Rumbold’s (below the rule). A modern font was also used to set the modern commentary. A page of the original 1743 Dunciad is shown on p. viii of the Longman text, which is available in the “look inside” preview on Amazon, “showing the complexity of the original layout and typography”. Dr Rumbold mentioned in passing that Pope used every bit of print technology available to him. She also discussed the irony with which she and other Pope editors have to feel comfortable –   knowing that they are involved in the kind of book-making activity Pope satirised in some of his work.

Now I want to go back to The Dunciad and really contemplate the page design of the different editions. Future Historical Bibliography students should look out for a class activity based on this … with full credit to today’s workshop for pointing out this excellent case study. Browsing around tonight, I’ve noticed Katherine Mannheimer’s study Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth Century Satire (Routledge, 2011). Fingers poised over the “buy with 1-click” button on a well-known online bookstore …

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Image:

Alexander Pope (Creative Commons, limited non-commercial use)

by George White, sold by Samuel Sympson, after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt
mezzotint, 1732 (1722)
13 7/8 in. x 9 3/4 in. (352 mm x 247 mm) paper size
Given by Sir Herbert Henry Raphael, 1st Bt, 1916
Reference Collection
NPG D19286

Digital Bibliography

 

The latest issue of Library Review presents, as editor Judith Broady-Preston writes, “a range of papers from the best of the current crop of postgraduates, based on their theses and dissertations, showcasing the work of new entrants to the profession and providing readable access to cutting edge research.”

Alongside papers from City University, Loughborough, Ottawa and others, we have a calling card for the kind of research alumni of the Historical Bibliography module (INSTG012) are producing. As Elizabeth McCarthy, Sarah Wheale and I put it in our article, such work “exists at the nexus of three disciplines: librarianship, bibliography and digital humanities (utilising computing in the pursuit of humanities research” (p. 562) and, I would argue, is at the forefront of the nascent field of Digital Bibliography – the utilisation of Digital Humanities techniques within the older discipline of Bibliography. In my chapter in the recently published Digital Humanities in Practice, I discuss the use of technology by bibliographers and rare books librarians, and the two case studies in the chapter – by H.R. Woudhuysen and Marieke Van Delft – are available online.

The current paper, ‘Early Modern Oxford Bindings in Twenty-first Century Markup‘ is based on Elizabeth McCarthy’s MA LIS dissertation research, and, we hope, represents an appropriate balance between the technical skills required to enhance 17th century binders’ records with TEI and the bibliographic and subject knowledge necessary to appreciate the value of the pilot study Liz conducted within the wider context of bindings research and library collection management in the early modern period. Our presentation of the significance to the Bodleian of the manuscript Binders Book that is the object at the centre of the work was enhanced by Rare Books Curator Sarah Wheale’s contribution. As a lecturer, I hope that our assertion is true, that the project provides “an example of the kind of work that can be undertaken by library employees as part of their graduate studies, which allows for innovation and the incorporation of new research methodologies within traditional library projects.” (p. 562).  Certainly, in the case of the Binders Book in TEI,

The researcher [Liz] was able to step outside the constraints of an existing library management system and encoding standard (MARC) and think about the scholarly concerns of analytical and descriptive bibliography: how could the entries in the BB best be represented? She was able to consider specialist users with an interest in Oxford bindings, and to build a resource with their needs in mind … (p. 573).

Melissa Terras has written elsewhere about the choices academics make when they decide to co-author a paper with a student or former student, and the inherent ethical considerations – principally the contribution that the academic makes to the work. This article not only is a terrific achievement on Liz’s part, but also the first of a little clutch of publications – some solo-authored and a couple written with Hist Bib alumni during or after their time studying at UCL – that sets out my wares as a Digital Bibliographer and a supervisor of Digital Bibliographers. As such, I’m delighted that Liz’s MA LIS research is first out of the publication box; that it’s representing UCL in Library Review‘s issue ‘Showcasing Postgraduate Research’; and that it’s come out right in the middle of our recruitment season for the MA LIS and MA DH. Students and prospective students with an interest in cataloguing need not worry, though, cataloguing research and supervision is, and will always be, equally core to my practice.

I’ll link through to Liz’s own blog on the article when it goes live, and, for those of you without online access to Library Review, copies of the authors’ final text will be available as soon as is possible (and legal) on the Oxford and UCL institutional repositories.

References

Broady-Preston, J. (2012). Showcasing postgraduate research. Library Review. 61 (8/9). Full-text available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0024-2535&volume=61&issue=8&articleid=17065501&show=html

McCarthy, E., Welsh, A., & Wheale, S. (2012). Early modern Oxford bindings in twenty-first century markup. Library Review, 61 (8/9), 561-576 .DOI: 10.1108/00242531211292079

Terras, M. (2011). Computer games and author lists. Melissa Terras’s Blog, 25 November 2011. Available at http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/computer-games-and-author-lists.html

Van Delft, M. (2012). Case study: Watermarks in paper: four related online projects. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice. London: Facet. Full-text available at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/chapter-7/

Welsh, A. (2012). Historical Bibliography in the digital world. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice (pp. 139-165). London: Facet. Retrieved from http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7661

Woudhuysen, H.R. (2012). Case study: The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450-1700. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice. London: Facet. Full-text available at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/chapter-7/