Snippet from the Acta Eruditorum, June 1711 issue, p. 269.
Friday n° 29, April 25th, 2019
If being
remembered or forgotten is a function of reference frequency, of circulating
information, an obvious conclusion seems to be that if you want to be
remembered, you yourself should start circulating information lest you get
forgotten. In scholarly contexts, this basically means spreading the word about
what one is doing or has produced. This might in turn trigger references to you
and your publications, discoveries, theories or other achievements which in
turn might provide starting points for other references. Self-advertisement,
for this and other, more directly visible reasons, has been and is part and
parcel of academic communication. In network analysis, the reasons why such
attempts at self-promotion were successful or not is often explained or even
predicted by the structural features of the individual’s networks.
Shadowy
networks
But what
about the networks we are only partially able to reconstruct because of source
loss? In some cases, I know that there were connections but can’t say much more
about depth and nature of these connections because the source documents
necessary to judge this have been lost. Any network reconstructed under such
circumstances will be distorted, because the parts of it traces of which have
survived as documents will be privileged over those parts where this is not the
case. So what to do with the parts of the network which can only be traced as
shadows, as ghosts of nodes and edges that once were?
Self-advertisement,
done successfully
Let me
start with a small piece of circumstantial evidence with throws one such ghost
edge in my network of letters into sharper relief. In June 1711, the Acta Eruditorum published a small piece
of seven pages titled “On the manuscript commentary of Blessed Jerome which
exists in the library of Marcus Meibom in Amsterdam”.[1]
Most of the text was composed of excerpts from the manuscript in question, but
ahead of this the editorial board of the Acta
Eruditorum lost a few words on how they got the paper in form of a short
introduction:
“Lately the illustrious Adriaan Reland whom we already have given honourable mention in these Acta more than once has sent us some excerpts from a manuscript commentary on Job by [St.] Jerome, whishing them to be included in our Acta with the intention that scholars may by this specimen pass judgment on whether it is a genuine work by Jerome or not.”[2]
[Mencke]: De b[eati] Hieronymi commentario m[anu]s[cri]pto in Jobum, AE 30, June 1711, p. 269.
This
passage now not only fits in quite well with my overall framework of references
and their valorisation in scholarly circles. It also explicitly states what I –
based on studies such as that of Huub Laeven on the networks of Otto Mencke
(1644–1707) and his son Johann Burchard Mencke (1674–1732), the successive
editors of the Acta Eruditorum[3]
– already had suspected: that either Mencke sr. or jr., or both, were in direct
correspondence with Reland. Until now I just had no tangible evidence for such
a connection, as the letters of all parties involved, Otto Mencke, Johann Burchard
Mencke, and Adriaan Reland, have only fragmentarily survived. The letter
concerning the codex containing the work in question here, the commentary on
the Old Testament book of Job supposedly written by St. Jerome, the church
father, does not exist anymore (at least not to my knowledge). But the easiest
way to account for the passage just quoted is to assume that it indeed did
exist.
Ghost edges
As glad as
I am to finally have made sure that this particular ghost edge really existed, I
am nevertheless aware that the basic problem context underlying this discovery
has just become a bit more serious at the same time.
For on the one hand some of his surviving letters already point to Reland being a conscious and very active self-promoter who had a keen eye and good hand in picking opportunities to distribute his publications, and to this another distribution channel – that of the Acta Eruditorum – has just been added now. As there are quite a few “honourable mentions” of Reland by the Acta Eruditorum, like Johann Burchard Mencke wrote (or let write: as leading editor he has to be held responsible for anonymous texts in his journal), this prompts the question of how they were caused in the first place. As there are at least two letters by Reland to Jean-Paul Bignon (1662–1743), editor of the Journal des Savants in Paris, which deal with Reland sending Bignon his publications for distributing them amongst his French connections including review copies,[4] there is no reason to assume that something similar might not have taken place in his correspondence with the leading German scholarly journal as well as with its French model. This might seem to be supported by the rising reference frequency in the Acta Eruditorum concerning Reland between 1701 and 1711:
(Only the text pieces containing references to Reland are counted, not the total of references.)
The upward trend visible here might be taken as just the depiction of a young scholar’s rise of fame while making his way through academia. Reland had been awarded his first professorial post in Harderwijk in 1698/99, only to move to a more prestigious chair at Utrecht in 1700/01, publishing continuously. Or it might be an illustration of a correspondence successfully feeding the editorial board at Leipzig with relevant news and thus ensuring continuous reference to oneself. As I cannot say much more about the ghost edge than that it existed, but not for how long and how intensively it was used, the question has to remain open for now.
And on the other hand, the fragmentary state of the Reland correspondence has by now turned up quite a handful of such connections where there are either indications of direct correspondence and no surviving letters or one or two letters surviving, indicative of a communication channel which must originally have accommodated many letters more. As I already pointed out in one of my earlier posts, the correspondence between Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze (1661–1739) and Reland is only documented by three letters, all of which are no longer extant in the original. Given the close intersection of research interests between the two of them it is highly unlikely that there were not much more originally; but how could this be translated into a meaningful part of a network? The same is true for Johann Baptist Ott (1661–1744) the communication between whom and Reland is only evidenced by one printed letter in Reland’s second treatise on the Samaritan coins, as I pointed out here. It is also true for Marcus Meibom (1630–1711), the scholar whose manuscript was the reason for the note in the Acta Eruditorum which caused me to write this post in the first place. It is even true for another of my protagonists, Johannes Braun, as there are a few letters between him and Reland still extant but the bulk of Braun’s correspondence is also lost. This is by far no complete list, but I am determined to draw one up as far as this will be possible.
The
Chicken-and-Egg of Loss, Forgetting, and References
The
question posed by ghost edges is of course how they relate to forgetting. They
are clearly indicative of structural forgetting taking place, but in which way?
Their presence could be seen as a natural effect of processes of structural forgetting:
As someone fades from structural remembrance, his papers or letters become
devalued and thus more likely to be sold off, discarded, or altogether lost.
But their presence could also be the cause rather than the effect of becoming
forgotten: As the papers and letters of someone become sold off, were
discarded, or otherwise lost, materials are removed from the archival record
which might have triggered new references had they still been there, which in
turn leads to a drop in reference frequency and thus to structural forgetting.
This is a new variant of the ages-old chicken-and-egg problem, so I have go to
searching for additional factor which might help me figuring out if a
particular shadowy part of the network is a ghost edge chicken or a ghost edge
egg.
[1] [Johann Burchard Mencke]: De
b[eati] Hieronymi commentario m[anu]s[cri]pto in Jobum, qui Amstelodami in Bibliotheca
Marci Meibomii exstat, in: Acta Eruditorum 30, June 1711, pp. 269-275.
[2] Ibid, p. 269: „Misit nuper ad nos
Vir Cl. Hadrianus Relandus, cujus non semel honorificam in his Actis fecimus
mentionem, Excerpta quaedam ex Commentario MS. Hieronymi in Jobum, eaque Actis
nostris inseri cupivit eo consilio, ut eruditis hoc e specimine iudicandi copia
fieret, sitne is genuinus Hieronymi foetus nec ne.”
[3] Cf. Huub Laeven: Otto Mencke
(1644–1707): The Outlines of his Network of Correspondents, in: C.
Berkvens-Stevelinck, H. Bots, J. Häseler (eds.): Les grands intermédiaires
culturels de la république des lettres. Études de réseaux de correspondances du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles, Paris:
Champion 2005, pp. 229–256 ; —: “Dies ist wol ohne Streit die größte
unter denen Holländischen Public-Bibliotheken“. Johann Burkhard Mencke’s
bezoek aan Leiden in 1698, in: Omslag. Bulletin van de Universiteitsbibliotheek
Leiden en het Scaliger Instituut 4, 1/2006, pp. 1–3.
[4] UB Leiden BPL 885 – 052
(Rabault-Risseeuw): Adriaan Reland to Jean-Paul Bignon, Utrecht 13 June 1714
(19th century copy), and KB Den Haag 72 D 37, 11 A: Adriaan Reland to Jean-Paul
Bignon, 23 June 1714.
Voltaire: Le siècle de Louis XIV., tome premier (1785, p. 136).
Friday n° 28, April 19th, 2019
“Voltaire blaims him for having prevented Bayle’s dictionary from being printed in France. This is very natural in Voltaire and Voltaire’s followers; but it is a more serious objection to Renaudot, that, while his love of learning made him glad to correspond with learned Protestants, his cowardly bigotry prevented him from avowing the connection.”[1]
Chalmers’s general biographical Dictionary, vol. 26, 1816
Bad press,
good press
As it is
Good Friday, I wanted to get this week’s post out early as an advance Easter
surprise. Fittingly, this piece will cover an issue with a confessional nature.
And as I until now managed to avoid big names in my study of forgetting quite
well, I thought I’d deal with a rather well-known episode this time, because it
was connected – at least by Alexander Chalmers’s (1759–1834) dictionary, as you
just have read – to a quite big name also. In fact, to two of them: Pierre
Bayle (1647–1706) and François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire
(1694-1778). Until now, both have only appeared in the margins of my project –
Bayle because he died before three of my protagonists, and Voltaire because
there were no direct connections between him and my four scholars, although he
was something of a contemporary to all of them. He was eight years old when
Thomas Gale died, and 26 at the death of Eusèbe Renaudot.
And it is precisely Renaudot who is in the center of today’s issue, as the polemic between him and Pierre Bayle concerning the Dictionnaire historique et critique might have had an impact on his posthumous reputation. At least in Chalmer’s dictionary it left a mark in the entry concerning him. The question now is: What does that mean in the context of forgetting? Isn’t bad press always good press? Should the connection to a work as prominent as Bayle’s Dictionnaire not be sufficient to hold a name in circulation, let alone if supplicated by Voltaire? Well, let’s have a bit of a look at that.
What
happened …
In 1697, Eusèbe Renaudot submitted a memoire concerning Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire on behalf of the court, because some Paris printers had applied for a royal printing privilege for a second edition of the book. Renaudot was called upon to examine whether there was anything suspicious in it; and he found enough things not to his liking that he advised against such an edition. Pierre Bayle, who already had been provided with a copy of the draft memoire by Pierre Jurieu, replied to Renaudot’s points, while Jurieu got the memoire printed.[2] In the meantime, Renaudot’s advise had been followed, and there had been no second French edition of the Dictionnaire historique et critique.
… and what was reported …
The entry on Renaudot in Chalmer’s The general biographical Dictionary I started from is closely modelled on French sources, however, most notably the entries on Renaudot in Jean-Pierre Niceron’s (1658–1738) Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la Republique des lettres[3] and in the later edition of Le grand dictionnaire historique originally edited by Louis Moreri (1643–1680),[4] as he duly acknowledged. Now Le grand dictionnaire historique – ‘the Moreri’, how it was commonly called – itself had Chalmers relied on a third source also, but I’m going into this only a bit later. First, let’s check the dictionaries he made use of.
Niceron’s 43 volume series on illustrious scholars featured a rather large entry on Renaudot, which also covered the issue of the memoire. Niceron stressed that Renaudot had drawn it up at the explicit request of the minister, had found things against religion in it, and had advised against a reprint. The memoire had fallen into the hands of Jurieu, Bayle had been furious, but after a fierce polemic both contrahents – as was quite usual in the late 17th century Republic of Letters – were reconciled again, and Bayle did not comment on the whole thing in the second edition of the Dictionnaire printed outside of France.[5] So far, the story closely matches Chalmers’s depiction of the events, only that he skipped the happy ending. Moreri’s dictionary, which had been especially designed to champion Catholicism, skipped the whole episode however; the entry on Renaudot makes no mention of it.
… and how it evolved …
This already predicted a pattern to be followed throughout the paper trail Renaudot left in the dictionaries. Some of these dictionaries would mention it, others would not; and most of them – as was quite customary at the time – would not indicate their sources. Even Chalmers did not fully disclose his sources for his entry, for it is more than likely that he copied at least the Voltaire part from the predecessor dictionary to his work, theNew and general biographical dictionary : containing an historical and critical account of the lives and writings of the most eminent persons in every nation, particularly the British and Irish, from the earliest accounts of time to the present period, which appeared in London in eleven volumes from 1761 to 1762. The anonymous author of the Renaudot entry could, this time, draw upon a source which had not been yet available as Niceron and Moreri’s editors had compiled their entries: Voltaire’s Le siècle de Louis XIV., which had first been printed in 1751, and which the New and general biographical dictionary now cited: “Mr. Voltaire says that ‘he may be reproached with having prevented Bayle’s dictionary from being printed in France.’ [Siecle [sic] de Louis XIV. tom. II.] »[6] Much more than that Voltaire really had not said about the whole affair (see snippet above).[7]
This might explain while other dictionary entries up to 1800 did not say much more about it, if they said anything about the episode at all. Nicolas-Toussaint Le Moyne Des Essarts (1744–1810) kept silent about in his Siècles littéraires de la France,[8] although it would likely have been the best place to put it. In John Watkins’ An universal biographical and historical dictionary, nothing about it was said in the Renaudot entry,[9] but only in the entry on Bayle Watkins wrote:
“The same year he formed the plan of his celebrated dictionary, the first volume of which appeared in 1695, and was uncommonly well received, though some parts of it were attacked by M. Jurieu, and the abbé Renaudot. […] He [Baile] was undoubtedly a man of brilliant parts, and of an acute intellect; but his religious principles appear to have leaned towards infidelity.”[10]
John Watkins: An universal biographical and historical dictionary, London 1800
… and why it was told that way
Precisely this
– that Bayle was in orthodox circles, Catholic as well as Protestant, still
suspected of the most dreadful crime imaginable, atheism – might have been the
case not to refer on Renaudot stopping a reprint of the Dictionnaire historique et critique which would have proliferated
Bayle’s ungodly sentiments, or if, to refer to it in a rather neutral way. As
Voltaire sometimes was suspected to be guilty of the same sin as Bayle, it
might have seemed prudent not to refer to him as an authority in the matter
also.
But shortly after 1800 this changed, at least for a while, and now one could read other entries in other dictionaries, as that on Renaudot of Thomas Morgan (n.d.) in the General biography, the 8th volume of which was printed in 1813, three years before Chalmer’s 26th volume went off the press in 1816, and which said: “It’s a circumstance which reflects no honour on his memory, that the unfavourable representations which he gave to the ministry, of Bayle’s “Dictionary”, were the means of preventing that work from being printed in France.”[11]
A shadow thrown on memory…
By now, suppressing Bayle had obviously become a stain on Renaudot’s memory. Morgan only did not elaborate upon how he came to that conclusion. But Chalmers did, and now it pays to have a look at the third of his sources, and that is Leonard Twell’s (+1742) The Live of the rev. and most learned Dr. Edward Pocock of the same year 1816 as the entry on Renaudot. To have a look at it means to read a – I am sorry to admit – really very long quote from this biography of the Oxford orientalist Edward Pococke (1604-1691), where Twell gave an account of the correspondence between Renaudot and Pococke in the preparation of Renaudot’s Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio[12]:
“In this epistle the writer professes a very high esteem for our author, desires the liberty of consulting him in all the doubts, that should occur in preparing the works above-mentioned, and promises, in return for this favour, to make a public acknowledgement of it, and to preserve a perpetual memory of the obligation. It is highly probable, that death prevented Dr. Pocock from giving any assistance to Renaudot in these designs; but I am sorry to say, that the treatment that learned person has given to the memory of our author has not been consistent with the expressions of respect for him, with which this letter abounds. For when he came to publish his Collection of Eastern Liturgies, forgetting his own professions, and the duty of a gentleman, a scholar, and, above all, of a Christian, he goes out of his way, in the end of his preface, to reproach him with a mistake, which, perhaps, was the only one which could be fastened upon his writings, though Renaudot, as above-mentioned, had, without good grounds, charged him with another; but the Abbot’s zeal against the Protestants got the better of his candour, and though he could treat the learned amongst them with civility in a private way, it was not, as it should seem, adviseable to observe such measures with them in the eye of the world.”[13]
Leonard Twell: The Live of the rev. and most learned Dr. Edward Pocock, 1816, pp. 339-340.
…or not?
The problem
with Renaudot now became that he seemed to have been a model fanatic Catholic,
dismissing protestant authors out of sheer bigotry regardless of their results,
and that this was now used by Chalmers to explain why Renaudot had voted
against Bayle: not for any scholarly reason but for blind (and most probably
misguided) faith only. Fittingly, Chalmers had been the editor of Twell’s Life of Pocock. But the religious issue
obviously only became pressing when it was used to throw a shadow on the memory
of an English scholar – Pococke – and only then turned into something that
could be used against Renaudot’s memory in return. At least theoretically. For obviously
at least in the world of dictionaries this episode – although it was connected
to famous persons, writings, and contained a juicy religious element – only spread
in English-language ones, and only for a while, until the middle of the 19th
century as I have been able to establish so far. In French-language
dictionaries on the other hand, if the affair was reported, it was reported
closely matching Niceron, and thus neutralized. But most of the time it was
just left out altogether. So in this case bad press was not good press in the
end, but no press after all; it failed to significantly boost Renaudot’s
frequency of reference in any way. This might have been due to the complex
entanglement of religion, language, and national sentiments at play here; but
this is something I have to have a closer look at still.
Happy
Easter!
[1] Anon: Renaudot (Eusebius),
in: Alexander Chalmers (ed.): The general biographical Dictionary containing an
historical and critical account of the lives and writings of the most eminent
persons, particularly the English and Irish, from the earliest accounts to the
present time (32 vols.), vol. 26, London: J. Nichols 1812-1816, pp. 140-141.
[2] [Pierre Jurieu (ed.)], [Eusèbe
Renaudot]: Jugement du public et particulierement de M. l’abbé Renaudot, sur le
Dictionnaire critique du sr Bayle, Rotterdam : Acher 1697.
[3] Anon: Eusebe Renaudot, in :
Niceron, Jean-Pierre (ed.): Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes
illustres dans la Republique des lettres (43 vols.), vol. 12, Paris : 1733,
pp. 25-41, and vol. 20, Paris: Briasson 1733, pp. 35.
[4] Anon: Renaudot (Eusebe), in: Moreri,
Louis (Founder): Le grand dictionnaire historique ou Le mélange curieux de
l’histoire sacrée et profane. Nouvelle et derniere édition revûe, corrigée et
augmentée (6 vols.), vol. 5, Paris : Vincent 1732, pp. 481–482.
[5] Anon: Eusebe Renaudot, in :
Niceron, Jean-Pierre (ed.): Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes
illustres dans la Republique des lettres (43 vols.), vol. 12, Paris : 1733,
pp. 25-41 ; here p. 39-41.
[6] Anon: Renaudot (Eusebius),
in: A New and general biographical dictionary: containing an historical and
critical account of the lives and writings of the most eminent persons in every
nation, particularly the British and Irish, from the earliest accounts of time
to the present period : wherein their remarkable actions or sufferings, their
virtues, parts, and learning are accurately displayed : with a catalogue of
their literary productions (11 vols.), London: Owen/Johnston 1761-1762, vol.
10, pp. 136-137; here p. 137.
[7] Jean-Jacques Tourneisen (ed.), Voltaire: Le
siècle de Louis XIV. Tome premier (=Oeuvres completes de Voltaire. Tome
vingtieme), Basel : Tourneisen 1785, p. 136.
[8] Anon: Renaudot, Eusebe, in: Nicolas-Toussaint
Le Moyne Des Essarts (ed.): Les Siècles littéraires de la France, ou nouveau
dictionnaire, historique, critique, et bibliographique, de tous les Ecrivains
français, morts et vivans, jusqu’à a la fin du XVIIIe. Siècle (6 vols.), Paris:
Des Essarts 1800-1803, vol. 5, pp. 372-374.
[9] John Watkins: Renaudot (Eusebius), in: —: An universal biographical and historical dictionary. Containing a faithful account of the lives, actions, and characters, of the most eminent persons of all ages and all countries; also the revolutions of states, and the successions of sovereign princes, ancient and modern. Collected from the best Authorities, By John Watkins, A.M. L.L.D., London: Philipps 1800, p. [760].
[10] John Watkins: Bayle (Peter), in:
Ibid., p. [136].
[11] Thomas Morgan: Renaudot, Eusebius,
in: John Aikin, Thomas Morgan, William Johnston: General biography; or lives,
critical and historical, of the most eminent persons of all ages, countries,
conditions, and professions, arranged according to alphabetical order (10
vols.), London: Robinson 1799-1815, vol. 8, pp. 506-507; here p. 507.
[12] Eusèbe Renaudot (ed.): Liturgiarum
Orientalium Collectio : Adjunctae sunt Rubricae rituales ex variis codicibus
Mss. collectae, & suis locis appositae (2 vols.), Paris: Coignard 1716.
[13] Leonard Twells: . The Live of the rev. and most learned Dr.
Edward Pocock, in: Alexander Chalmers (ed.): The Lives of Dr. Edward Pocock, the celebrated
orientalist, by Dr. Twells; of Dr. Zachary Pearce, bishop of Rochester, and of
Dr. Thomas Newton, biship of Bristol, by themselves; and of the Rev. Philip
Skelton, by Mr. Burdy, vol. 1, London: Rivington / Gilbert, 2 vols., 1816, pp.
1-356; here pp. 340-341.
Two Samaritan coins from the collection of Jacob de Wilde, depicted by Maria de Wilde in: Adriaan Reland, Dissertatio altera de Inscriptione Nummorum quorundam Samaritanorum, Utrecht: Thomas Appels 1704.
Friday n° 26, April 5th, 2019
I have
touched upon many topics in this blog so far, but gender has not been one of them
yet. Not because gender does not play a role in here but because it is – alas –
very hard to tackle which role precisely given the circumstances of my project.
How to find women?
First of
all, it suffers from the near-universal male bias in intellectual history,
history of knowledge, and history of science. Although there have been many
attempts to break this male gaze and to also focus on the roles of women in
academia for the past centuries, these studies are still isolated in so far as
they highlight particular individuals – and because none of these plays into
the circles of my protagonists, as far as I can see at the moment, I am a bit
lost there. All I can do is try to check my data for the more general patterns
of including women and their contributions into academic information circulation.
But as the history of knowledge and scholarship in the 18th, 19th
and early 20th centuries, which is where most of my sources and data
come from, most of the time just silently passed over female contributions of
all kinds, I only very rarely am able to substantiate the scattered findings in
my sources with more specific information which would point me to further lanes
of inquiry.
How to deal with those women found?
Second, there
are only scattered findings: my protagonists themselves have left only few
traces of their female connections, most of them pertaining to their family
life. This was not only their fault. Much of it is due to the ways in which the
source materials available today were produced, traded, and ultimately kept, which
were quite unconducive to transmit materials connected to women. The surviving
letters of all of my protagonists were not directly filed into institutional
archives at their death – which is where they are kept today -, but rather
passed on privately by inheritance and sale before being donated to or bought
by the institutions in possession of them now. While inheritance processes would
be favourable to conserving materials connected to women for family reasons, generally
spoken they are less favourable to preserve materials connected to women
outside of domestic affairs. One might well keep letters and documents dealing
with one’s female ancestors or relations, but might accord less value to such
materials dealing with female artists, or perhaps even with women engaging in
scholarly pursuits. The selections involved in selling the papers of a dead
scholar would, on the other hand, be less favourable to materials ‘only’
connected to his (as my protagonists are all male) domestic affairs and
relations, as they were for long, and sadly still are sometimes today,
considered of minor if any importance to scholarly matters. Autograph
collectors would prize letters from famous scholars to other famous scholars
but in general be less interested in those materials dealing with less
prominent figures, which in their eyes normally applied to women. In both
processes, inheritance and sale, some source materials which I would really
like to have at hand to provide me with information about the gender dimension
in my protagonist’s academic world are likely to have been deselected from
being passed on, and as both processes happened in the transmission of these
materials, sometimes more than once, this has geared the sources available into
a perspective which is hard to overcome.
With official
documents it is quite the same; the female contacts figure in these most
prominently in domestic matters (contexts such as birth, death, marriage,
inheritance) if they are in them at all. And not all documents of such interest
are still available.
From 1.838 to 74
But all
these restrictions and biased perspectives aside, what do I have got concerning
women so far? If I take a look at my database, the figures are not very
encouraging: Of 1838 persons in there (as of today), only 74 are female, or a meagre
4 %. Of these 12 modern-day female scientists have to be deducted, leaving me
with 62 women mentioned in my sources.
From 74 to
30
If I now also
deduce all those who only entered as historical figures, that is, wifes,
mothers or sisters of scholars from generations preceding my protagonists, I am
left with 30 women for which I recorded anything between 1650 and 1750. Compared
to 1128 men for which I have anything recorded for that period, the figure
dwindles down to 2.6 %.
This
imbalance is of course to be lamented from a point of view concentrating on historical
justice. It is quite clear that these numbers are likely not to be accurate in
terms of intellectual contributions. Those case studies that we have indicate
that women could be involved in academic intellectual production in various roles,
at almost each stage of the process, and that their contributions are not to be
seen as negligible. There surely is a lot of unacknowledged female labour that
went into the publications and discussions featuring my protagonists. But my
interest in this particular case of research is not so much in discovering or
restoring such female contributions, although this would be a fascinating topic
in itself. As I am trying to make sense of processes of structural forgetting
here, I take these heavily gender-biased data as a fact in its own sense, and a
noteworthy one at that.
Because I
have not consciously tried to avoid women in my research, the reason that their
presence in the database is so low is not due to my bias but to the source
material’s bias. The co-citation approach I am pursuing means that I collect
references to persons who are not my protagonists based on three criteria:
these persons are referred to on the
same page as one of my protagonists and/or one of his publications
these persons have contributed to a
publication cited on the same page as one of my protagonists and/or one of his
publications
these persons are necessary to
construct the relationships between other persons in the database.
From 30 to
3
The bias in the database now originates from the fact that women are, throughout my sources, almost completely blended out from categories 1) and 2). This results in most women who are in database being entered by way of category 3), that is, they are needed – as wifes, mothers, or sisters – to complete family relations between persons from categories 1) and 2). And while I am convinced that such relations played a vital role in the social formation of early modern academia, it is very difficult to reconstruct them without recourse to primal source material (if it exists), as secondary literature has much too often been silent about kinship ties of academics, too. And if they are acknowledged, this is seldom done in the form of giving concrete references to individual women, such as names, birth and death dates and other information which would come in handy for my purposes, but most often in the form of “X, who was married to the daughter of Y, …”.
So if I now
again deduce all women which only are referenced in my database via kinship
ties from the 30 women left for the century between 1650 and 1750, I am down to
three.
From 3 to 2
The three women who are actually being co-cited with my protagonists in my sources upon closer inspection narrow down to two, because one is the formidable and inescapable Madame Dacier (Anne Dacier, née Le Fèvre, 1654-1720). This is not to belittle her considerable achievements but shall only be taken to mean that she was part and parcel of the discourse about the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, and it was in that context that she was co-cited together with Thomas Gale and 53 other scholars in the October 1734 issue of the Journal des Savants (see here).[1] This rather heavy case of name-dropping does not serve to indicate any deeper connection between Dacier and Gale but rather testifies to both being part of the same epistemic community, in this case of the Anciens party. As this was a rather large community, shared membership only points to some shared assumptions and thus to a purely topical relation.
With Anne Dacier thus deducted, only two women remain who are mentioned in a closer kind of connection to one of my protagonists. These two ladies are Maria de Wilde (1682-1729) from Amsterdam and Anna Waser (1678-1714) from Zürich. Both are not only mentioned in connection to the same of my protagonists, Adriaan Reland (who seems to become kind of inevitable within this project, too), but also by the same source: The June 1705 issue of the Acta Eruditorum (see here). The references were part of the review of Reland’s second treatise on the coins of the ancient Samaritans, the Dissertatio altera de Nummorum quorundam Samaritanorum of 1704 (see here for the whole review).[2] In fact, they were both mentioned together in the closing lines of the review:
“That those [coins] of Reland’s the most excellent maiden, Maria de Wilde, from her father’s[3] collection most elegantly depicted, as Anna Waser, great-great-grandchild of Caspar Waser[4], this posthumously most laudable man, those of Ott;[5] therefore our Reland has finished his little work with two poems in praise of de Wilde’s very excellent artworks, and what more could be remembered in Ott’s letter, will be set aside for another time and leisure.”
Acta Eruditorum 34, 06/1705, pp. 284-285.
Two Samaritan coins from the collection of Johann Rudolf Waser depicted by Anna Waser, in: Adriaan Reland, Dissertatio altera de Inscriptione Nummorum quorundam Samaritanorum, Utrecht: Thomas Appels 1704.
A familiar pattern…
The pattern visible here is a familiar one. Both “the most excellent maiden” Maria de Wilde and her obviously as praiseworthy fellow female Anna Waser contributed the engravings for Reland’s dissertation and Ott’s reply to it. Both were daughters of well-connected men in their respective communities: Jacob de Wilde, a collector of arts and antiquities of international renown, and Johann Rudolf Waser, city official and chief warden of Zürich’s Grossmünsterstift. Both excelled in painting and drawing and were given a good education in these crafts, and through their father’s contacts were introduced to scholars who then utilized their services for making their arguments. Although both of them were close contemporaries of Reland – Anna Waser was two years younger, and Maria de Wilde six years – they served as illustrators at a time when Reland had already advanced to a professorial post in Utrecht. This compares well to the biographies of other scholarly active women of the time, the most prominent example surely being Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Unlike Merian, Maria de Wilde ceased publishing with her marriage in 1710; while Anna Waser never married and advanced up to the post of court paintress to the count of Solms-Braunfels for three years, 1700-1702, before returning to Zürich where she quit painting around 1708 for unclear reasons.
…and an all-too familiar conclusion
Regardless of their achievements, apart from one scattered reference I have been able to find so far their activities were simply glossed over by contemporary academic publications which were written by men for men. A prime factor for being removed from circulation and thus becoming structurally forgotten obviously was gender. If you were a woman, your chances to be forgotten very soon were 25 times higher than that of a random male scholar of your age bracket.
Philip Sydenham to Thomas Hearne, Brympton St Every, 23 May [1725?] (Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters 15, f. 473-474)
Friday N° 24, March 22nd, 2019
I have been writing about the entanglements between lexicographical biographic memoralization and national ideas in my last post and had originally announced going further in this direction only in next week’s post. As I was in Oxford for archival research at the Bodleian library to consult correspondences I had not awaited to find anything in there fitting this thread of investigation of my sources. But sometimes one’s in for a bit of a surprise, and so I might try to connect some of my findings in these letters to the theme of national framings of knowledge.
Last week I
already observed that British dictionaries and encyclopaedias where going for
the national label early in the 19th century. This of course
provokes the question whether this was a new development, coming out of the
blue, or something which might be connected to longer-running
developments.
The introductory
clipping from Philip Sydenham’s (c.1676-1739) letter to Thomas Hearne
(1678-1735) points in the latter direction. In his letter, Sydenham complements
Hearne to his edition of the itinerary of John Leland (c.1506-552);[1]
the full passage runs:
“I hope y[ou]r publick Services for ye Honor & good of this Nation will receive publick approbation. this will be one m[anu]s[cript] to preserve & recover our old Noble Constitution many very valuable M[anu]s[cript]s deserv ye publick reading & encouragment & I hope y[ou] will proceed. ye more ancient ye more brave & Noble.”[2]
Sydenham
thus entangled the antiquarian pursuits of Hearne’s, who was an avid editor of
medieval manuscripts besides being librarian to the Bodleian library, with the
national “Honor” in two ways, on the one hand by the scholarly value of his
results and their potential of contributing to a better “publick” understanding
of the nation’s past, and on the other hand by linking this more directly to
the conditions for being a nation, to “our old Noble Constitution” to be
retrieved this way. While this way of searching the origin and the primordial
good laws of a community in the past was entirely in keeping with early modern
conceptions of how time and historical research operated, the appeal to “publick
approbation […] reading & encouragment” is somewhat more unusual and
already seems to point to later developments in constructing national
identities on a larger scale.
But
Sydenham had more to offer still. In the next paragraph, he directly linked
Hearne’s other professional activities, that as a librarian, both to the
advancement of learning in general – as was a fairly common topos – and – a
less common inflection –, to national honour also:
“I am glad [that] y[ou]r Library (=the Bodleian) is daily improving. it is so much for ye Honor of ye Nation, & interest of Learning.”[3]
The three
intersecting topoi of interest here, from the perspective of my project, are 1)
‘Fighting Oblivion’, 2) ‘Advancement of Learning’, and 3) ‘National Glory’. To
see how this affects my protagonists, of whom there has been no mention yet in
this post, I’ll have to take you to another of Hearne’s editions, the
development of which was indeed coupled to the Leland volumes Sydenham already
praised.
In 1716, Roger Gale (1672-1744), eldest son of Thomas Gale, approached Thomas Hearne in the same way as Sydenham would do nine years later, by complementing him on his just published Leland edition. The real aim of the letter was something else, though. Gale wanted to secure Hearne’s editorship for a manuscript in his possession, the Scotichronicon of John of Fordun (or Ffordun, c.1320-c.1386), which already had been partly edited by his father.[4] Hearne willingly accepted Gale’s offer of providing him with the manuscript and every assistance necessary for the edition and publication of the chronicle.[5] Both entered a long-drawn out process of working on the edition in which Roger Gale was constantly checking on Hearne to ensure the progress of the work, to provide him with colligations from other manuscripts, and helping him to gain enough subscribers for publication, he himself taking 20 copies.[6] When in 1722 the Fordun edition finally went to the press,[7] the Gale family was highly pleased with the result.
First, it
represented a success in the endeavours of both Roger and his younger brother Samuel
Gale, who both had been founding members of the Society of Antiquaries in 1718,
in fighting oblivion. To do so represented a recurrent thread in their
discussions of all fields of research they were actively engaged in, and print
seemed a convenient way of doing it. When on February 25th, 1723, Samuel
Gale held a speech before the Society of Lincoln, he spoke about the benefits
of engraving:
“Give me Leave, Gentlemen, to Congratulate ye latter age on this Noble Invention, this Beneficial Discovery, and which alone seems to surpass all the great Things the Ancients ever did. Since eben the mouldring Fragments of theire proudest Structures, ye Temples of ye Gods, ye Statues of ye Heroes, ye Hippodromes ye Amphitheatres the Triumphal Arches, Aquaeducts, Military Ways, Baths, Colums, Medals, and Inscriptions, which yet, feebly beare up against ye power of corroding Time: even these Remaines I say of Athens, Corinth, and of Rome can be, and are now, only by this diffusive Art, triumphantly rescu’d from that total Havock, ye everlasting oblivion: Which a few more revolving years must inevitably bring on, and that of the Poet, then be too sadly verified: etiam periere Ruinae.”[8]
In 1726,
Roger Gale took recourse to almost the same words in a letter to John Clerk to
explain the purpose of the Society of Antiquaries, only with less rhetorical flourish:
“Besides the ½ guinea payd upon admission, one shilling is deposited every month by each member, and this money has been hitherto expended in buying a few books, but more in drawing and engraving, whereby a great many old seals, ruins, and other monuments of antiquity have been preserved from oblivion, and the danger of being intirely lost in a little time.”[9]
Second, it was connected to the advancement of
learning, which Samuel Gale not only connected to printing, but also to the
scholars who had been paragons of learning. At the end of his speech, he made
the connection quite explicit and directed it not only to the memory of the
past, but also to the future.
“These [engravers] are They who by an uncommon Genius have almost outdone Nature, and have given Life & Spirit to Good Men after Death, Who is there yet Beholds ye Aspects of the Great & Learned, and Burns not with secret Æmulation to imitate their High Example.”[10]
And this connection might have been the driving force behind Roger Gale playing the driving force behind putting the manuscript inherited and already partly edited by his father to the press through Thomas Hearne although it costed him time, labour, and money. Samuel Gale put this into words in his letter congratulating Hearne on finishing the Fordun edition, thanking him because:
“Ye Hon[o]r You have done my Father, in mentioning him so often in It, is a great Satisfaction to Me in particular […].”[11]
And thus the history of knowledge, scholarly biographies, and – following Philip Sydenham – national honour which could be derived from both seem to have become entangled in Britain already in the early 18th century. The question is only to what end?
[1] Thomas Hearne (ed.): Joannis
Lelandi antiquarii de rebus Britannicis collectanea ; Ex autographis descripsit
ediditque Tho. Hearnius,
6 vol., Oxford: Sheldon Theater 1715.
[2] Philipp Sydenham to Thomas
Hearne, Brympton St Every 23 May [1725?], Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters
15, f. 473. Orthography as in the original, ligatures in [].
[4] Roger Gale to Thomas Hearne,
London 24 July 1716, Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters 6, N° 14a, f. 311–312.
[5] Thomas Hearne to Roger Gale,
[Oxford 1716 – Concept, no dates], Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters 6, N°
15a, f. 313–314.
[6] Roger Gale to Thomas Hearne,
London, 20 February 1722, MS Rawls letters 6, N° 35a, f. 355–357.
[7] Thomas Hearne (ed.): Johannis de Fordun Scotichronicon genuinum, una cum ejusdem
supplemento ac continuatione. E codicibus Mss. eruit ediditque Tho. Hearnius,
Oxford: Sheldon Theater 1722.
[8] Samuel Gale, Oratio Habita
coram Societate Lincolniensi vicesimo quarto Die Februarii Anno C. 1723,
Bodleian Library, MS Eng Misc E 147, f. 61, r.
[9] Roger Gale to John Clerk, [no
place] 26 April 1726, Bodleian Library, MS Top Gen d 74, pp. 178–186; p. 184.
Title plate of Jean-Pierre Niceron’s “Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la Republique des lettres” (1729-1742)
Saturday, March 16th, 2019, for Friday no. 23
Late again
This time the delay in posting this text is only partially my fault. I can blame some of it on the Biographisch portaal van Nederland, from which I wanted to draw some information but which just was not available for the last days. So I decided to do without these data for a first go, which I think will also do. I do have got enough material to present some first conclusions.
When
knowledge went national
Or, as the headline for this paragraph should perhaps better have been, when did knowledge go national? Because it seems to have been fragmented and compartmentalized into ‘national’ units which, to be frank, only make sense on a technical, not on a content level. Framing knowledge in national terms may serve to portion a bit of it to make it manageable, to get it between the covers of a book – or several books of a series, as was much more frequently the case – more easily. But when did such a framing start to impact how knowledge was ordered? As this is of course a question too huge to be answered in a few paragraphs, I’ll focus on a special branch of knowledge and of knowledge stores today, and that is what in the 18th century was called Historia Litteraria. This was the study of the history of knowledge, most often with an arts and humanities focus, but not restricted to it. It was laid down in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and it was usually biographical in nature, because heavily person-centred. Over time, this genre thinned out and became more and more specialized, while many of its more general contents were merged into the national biographical dictionaries which became popular in the 19th century. During these processes, somewhen between the 18th and the 19th century national categories became the dominant frames for laying out knowledge stores in this field, for both the specialized and the generalized forms of it. And this, at least this is my hypothesis for these materials, impacted if and how dead scholars where referenced, and so the references to my protagonists also.
How it
began
But to return to the question from the preceeding paragraph: When did this happen? The obvious answer ‘it is complicated’ seems not to be very helpful here, so it may be best to first of all look at examples which may show when it did not have happened yet to be able to posit a terminus post quem. For those of these works written in German, the first half of the 18th century still was free from being dominated by the national gaze. The omnivorousUniversal-Lexicon initally edited by Johann Heinrich Zedler (1706-1763) referred to all my four protagonists between the years 1733 and 1742,[1] and the more specialist dictionary of scholars by Christian Gottlieb Jöcher (1694-1758), the Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, did likewise in 1750/51.[2] Both applied national classifications, but neither consistently nor very prominent; the focus was on the scholarly achievements of those portrayed as learned rather than on their share of the learning their nation was supposed to have achieved.
This is interesting in so far as it was no longer completely usual. The large series of Jean-Pierre Niceron (1685-1738), the Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la Republique des lettres, contemporary with the Universal-Lexicon and a bit earlier than Jöcher, mentioned only Reland and Renaudot, skipping Gale and Braun.[3] A cautionary approach is warranted here: One of the criteria for being included in such a dictionary of course always was scholarly excellence and/or fame, and they might have just been dropped for being of too little interest. For Niceron did reference non-French scholars, as for instance Reland. But – in keeping with the special attention Niceron programmatically devoted to illustrious scholars of the French nation – it may also be seen as telling that, in contrast to the Universal-Lexicon and Jöcher were both were quite on a par, in Niceron’s volumes Renaudot’s entries total 18 pages while Reland’s total 10. Such weightings and omissions – or selections – one might also meet with elsewhere, and according to different criteria. In David van Hoogstraten’s (1658-1724) and Matthaeus Brouërius van Nidek’s (1677-1743) Groot algemeen historisch, geographisch, genealogisch en oordeelkundig woordenboek Braun and Reland received about the same share of attention, half a page each, whereas Gale was mentioned only in seven lines, and Renaudot was dropped altogether.[4] In this case, the selection might have been facilitated by the fact that the only Catholic was left out, and the Anglican Gale received less attention than the Calvinists Braun and Reland. Be that as it may, the main editor of the Groot algemeen […] woordenboek, Brouërius van Nidek – Hoogstraten had died in 1724 already, and the first volume went to print in 1725 – had edited another encyclopaedic work with a very clear national focus before, the Tooneel der Vereenigde Nederlanden (Theatre of the United Netherlands), the author of which, François Halma (1653-1722), also had died before seeing his work in print. And to make the full round, when Thomas Gale was referred to in an encyclopaedic work for the next time (since the Groot algemeen […] woordenboek), it was in volume three of Andrew Kippis’ (1725-1795) Biographia Britannica: Or The Lives Of The Most eminent Persons Who have flourished in Great Britain And Ireland,so that it was out of the question to refer to any other of my protagonists within this work.[5]
How it went
on
References to my protagonists in encyclopaedias and dictionaries, 18th to 21st centuries
So although
these were just a few spotlights on the situation in the first half of the 18th
century, it seems that a national paradigm in constructing the history of
learning was one way to do it but not the predominant. The question then must
be, when did this change, and to which effect?
In respect
to my protagonists, I am currently drawing up a list of such encyclopaedic
references to them, and although it is not complete yet, the overall statistics
you see to the left provide an indication when and how knowledge – at least of
these people – became nationally framed.
Afirst phase of interest in my protagonists which lasted until the 1750s – which was, as also indicated by other materials, the phase after which when they entered a state of being structurally forgotten. Then the references become sparse, until a renewed phase of interest begins which covers the 1830s to 1880s, and which is different for each of them. And this is, I would like to argue, due to the national framework having now become the predominant pattern of reference to scholars. Thomas Gale marks the first one to be referenced again in this way, in publications such as George Godfrey Cunningham’s (no dates, sorry) Lives of eminent and illustrious Englishmen(Glasgow, 1834-1842) and John Francis Waller’s The imperial dictionary of universal biography (London, 1857-1863) – although the last, to be fair, at least advertised itself as “a series of original memoirs of distinguished men, of all ages and all nations”. Yet the British focus was clear. Next come Johannes Braun and Adriaan Reland, in works like, Hendrick Collot d’Ésuery van Heinenoord’s (1773-1845) Holland’s Roem in Kunsten en Wetenschappen(Holland’s Glory in Arts and Sciences, Den Haag/Amsterdam 1825-1844) and Herman Verwoert’s (1801-1865) Handwoordenboek der vaderlandsche geschiedenis (Nijmegen 1851), and of course the huge dictionary of national biography, the Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden (Amsterdam 1858-1874). References to Reland are still being made in the 1880s, which is due to him also being referenced in the German dictionary of national biography, the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Berlin, 1875-1912), as I already pointed out in an earlier blogpost.
And, last but not least, Eusèbe Renaudot is being re-referenced from the 1860s onwards, but – and that makes his case perhaps the most interesting in here, but this is a topic I cannot say very much about right now (scheduled for in two weeks!) – he is referred to mostly in works without a direct French national connotation, such as Louis-Gabriel Michaud’s (1773-1858) Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne which appeared, in different editions, through almost all of the 19th century. What does this say about the connections made between scholarship and nation in 19th century France (if it does say anything about it)?
[2] Braun (Johannes),
in: Christian Gottlieb Jöcher (ed.): Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, Vol. 1,
Leipzig 1750, col. 1344-1345; Gale (Thomas) in: Christian Gottlieb Jöcher (ed.): Allgemeines
Gelehrten-Lexicon, Vol. 2, Leipzig 1750, col. 830-831; Reland (Adrian), in: Christian
Gottlieb Jöcher (ed.): Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, Vol. 3, Leipzig 1751,
col.2002-2004; Renaudot (Eusebius), in: Ibid., col. 2012-2013.
[3] Niceron, Jean-Pierre: Reland,
Adrien, in: —: Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes
illustres dans la Republique des lettres, Vol. 1, Paris 1729, pp. 335-342, and
vol. 10, Paris 1730, pp. 62-63 ; Niceron, Jean-Pierre: Renaudot, Eusèbe,
in : —: Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la Republique
des lettres, vol. 11, Paris 1732, pp. 25-41, and vol. 20, Paris 1732, pp. 35.
[4] Anon: Braun (Johannes), in: David
van Hoogstraten/ Mathaeus Brouërius van Nidek (eds.): Groot algemeen
historisch, geographisch, genealogisch en oordeelkundig woordenboek, Vol. 2,
Den Haag/Asterdam/Utrecht 1725, pp. 378-379 ; Anon : Gale (Thomas),
in : David van Hoogstraten/ Mathaeus Brouërius van Nidek (eds.):
Groot algemeen historisch, geographisch, genealogisch en oordeelkundig woordenboek,
Vol. 5, Den Haag/Asterdam/Utrecht 1729, p. 11 ; Anon : Reland
(Adriaan), in : David van Hoogstraten/ Mathaeus Brouërius van Nidek (eds.):
Groot algemeen historisch, geographisch, genealogisch en oordeelkundig woordenboek,
Vol. 9, Den Haag/Asterdam/Utrecht 1732, p. 54.
[5] Kippis, Andrew: Biographia
Britannica, Vol. 3, London 1750, p. 2075-2077.
Snippet of the network visualization for the 502 publication sample described in this post; mind the prominent position of Reland’s “Palaestina Illustrata” (big green dot left on top) and the unconnected component in the lower right corner.
… Adrien Reland’s 1714 Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata!
And so the winner is me, too, for I guessed it correctly.
A two weeks’ post
But one
thing after the other. First, the date: this is my blog post for
Saturday, March 9th, 2019, for Friday
no. 22;
I seem to
acquire a bad habit of posting on Saturdays rather than Fridays. For today, my
excuses are, in chronological order, a) I had to help out at my son’s school,
fixing some shelves; b) I had to figure out how to clear some financial matters
regarding how to pay my salary from this project in a way that some of it
actually ends up with me in the end; c) my youngest daughter stubbornly refused
to go to sleep this evening. Obviously I am not very good at scheduling my home
office work hours, for although I started out at 8:00 in the morning, by 21:30
I had got down to a meagre seven hours of working time. And d) I made a tiny
configuring mistake, messed up my calculations, and had to start all over
again, ruining some two hours of work. I suspect I better had not started
calculating only at 21:30, but a), b), and c) forced me to.
Going for
some metrics, step 1: Gathering data
But the calculations are crucial, because that’s what I originally intended to show you. As I announced in my last post, I now have finished three-quarters of my projected sample of scholarly journals, which has taken me two weeks to complete, clean, and analyse now.
That is to say, I have gone through the digitized versions of the Journal des Savants, the Philosophical Transactions, and the Maandelyke uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt (more info here), between 1700 and 1799. I have added all issues of these journals referencing one of my four protagonists in any way to my database. In numbers, this means 117 issues of the Journal des Savants, 9 of the Philosophical Transactions (yes, only nine, but I have already argued they are somewhat special here), and 89 of the Maandelyke uittreksels – or 205 journal issues in total. In going through these issues I have examined each page on which at least one of my protagonists was referenced, identified all other scholars and all publications on that page, and stored these data, too, as a basis for co-citation analysis to identify perceived epistemic communities and their changes over time. This netted me another 287 quoted publications, and another 739 scholars referred to and/or connected to quoted publications (as authors, editors, translators etc.). I must confess that I am a bit proud of having managed to completely identify close to 690 of these, or more than 90%. But today everything will be about publications, so the really interesting figure is that of 502 publications in this sample.
Going for
some metrics, step 2: Setting a framework for analysis
The problem
that I now got was how to deal with these data. Plain visualizing did not work
out anymore to really map out the intriguing details. So it needed to be done
the rough way, by calculating metrics for the sample, hoping for something
interesting to turn up. The visualizations did help me, in the way of pointing
out which ways to structure the relations to be investigated would likely not
yield good results. I first thought I might try something like mapping ‘shared
contributors’, that is, connecting publications by way of the same scholars
contributing to them (as authors, editors, or translators). This turned out to
be pretty useless because it only favoured large edited collections who
assembled texts from many different authors. And that’s the reason why this
post is not about persons but publications only; the real co-citation analysis
still has to wait for a bit. So it seemed better to bypass persons for the time
being and only to link publications to publications, and I did so by way of
quotations, that is, two publications are seen as connected if at least one of
them quotes the other. That brought some interesting results about.
Going for
some metrics, step 3: Finally going for metrics!
With the framework set up to network this publication sample, it was high time (half past nine already!) to start calculating metrics. To facilitate calculation, I started with assuming the network edges to be undirected, that is, a link from publication A via a quote in A to publication B works both ways, from A to B and from B to A. I know that this might be a questionable simplification; but as this may be tested by comparison, I will set this matter aside for a rainy day when I don’t have any idea what to write in this blog for the week to have the opportunity to at least redo these calculations for directed edges. (And as I once started tracking time in this post, it is now 4:00 in the morning and high time that I get to bed to have at least some sleep. I’ll continue around noon.) Moreover, as the structure of connections within what one takes to be a network depends on what the question is, and I am interesting in tracing perceived epistemic communities here – that is, publications seen as belonging to shared domains of knowledge – edge directionality is less important than it might be for other questions to ask. (This is a piece of midnight reasoning, but it still looks sound now at 10:30 on the day after.) I could as well also have collapsed the journals into edges connecting the rest of the publications to more explicitly claim this, but I wanted to also get an impression of the position of the individual journal issues, and so I kept them as nodes. Admittedly, this model does have the drawback that relying on quotations only provides only a quite simplified picture of the interconnections structuring domains of knowledge, but it should serve to give a good first impression of the sample’s general structure. Having sample and model settled, I used the opportunity to test Nodegoat’s analysis functions and calculated some metrics.
A lot of
numbers
To keep the
scores comparable across different metrics, I chose to normalize them where
possible. A short look at the visualization (see header for larger picture)
made clear what was to be expected: the network is disconnected. Not all publications
are referred to as situated in overlapping domains of knowledge; some are
distinctly separate from the rest. This is important here because it directly
impacts the calculations of the closeness metric. Closeness serves to indicate
how close any given node is to all other nodes in the network. In mapping out
shared domains of knowledge this might be quite interesting, as nodes with low
closeness scores might be supposed to partake of many fields at once being
referenced in differing contexts, and thus be important to look at. But
closeness measures path lengths to calculate the average distance from node X
to all other nodes, and this does not work in disconnected networks (because
two nodes between which there is no path would be at undefined = infinite
distance from each other). Nodegoat provides a workaround to that by
substituting a maximum distance for path length between unconnected nodes, this maximum
being equal to the total number of nodes in the network.[1]
First:
Betweenness
The first
measure I calculated was betweenness[2]
(because of the problems with closeness). Betweenness works on disconnected
networks and thus was the obvious first choice. Roughly put, betweenness serves
to indicate whether a certain node may be considered a gatekeeper, that is, if
it is situated at a vital connection point in the network. In assuming an
undirected graph, for mapping shared domains of knowledge this resembles
closeness: it should point to publications situated at the intersection of
several domains, and thus of potential importance for each of these. I must
qualify this as ‘potential importance’ because only being situated between
different fields of knowledge does not equal making important contributions to
any of these fields; this will have to be cross-checked with other metrics,
then.
Top 10
Betweenness
These are
the top ten results in terms of betweenness for the whole of the network:
And those are the respective results for the top-scoring publications of/connected to:
Adrien Reland, by Betweenness
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Betweenness
Johannes Braun, by Betweenness
Thomas Gale, by Betweenness
What
becomes directly apparent is that there are a lot Reland’s publications in the
network, not only on vital connection points but also in total. In fact, 37 out
of 287 non-journal publications have Reland as their main author/editor, or
12,9 %; the number does matter because I only added publications to this sample
when coming across a quotation within the sample. Compared to 2.8 % for Eusebè
Renaudot (8 publications), 1.7 % for Johannes Braun (5 publications), and 1.4 %
for Thomas Gale (4 publications) this looks even more impressive. But a large
output as such does not tell anything about the quality or the reception of
that output. There also is one publication by Eusebè Renaudot among the top ten
in betweenness, too.
Second:
Closeness
As already said, the closeness scores for this sample are to be taken with a grain of salt because of the disconnectedness workaround implemented in Nodegoat. But the prediction I theoretically made when thinking about betweenness in this network – that it would line up quite closely with closeness because pointing to structurally similar positions within the network – did come true in looking at the results for closeness, so I am tempted to regard these results as usefull still. Important: The first score in the “A” for Analysis column is always the one discussed!
Top 10 by Closeness
The top ten
publications of the network in terms of closeness scores are:
This again
underscores the relevance of Reland’s publications within the network as a
whole, and especially of his Palaestina
Illustrata.
And those are the respective results for the top-scoring publications of/connected to:
Adrien Reland, by Closeness
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Closeness
Johannes Braun, by Closeness
Thomas Gale, by Closeness
Third:
Degree
In
undirected graphs such as this, Degree just counts the number of connections
any given node in the network has. To be precise, Nodegoat counts the number of
all edges starting from and ending at any given node, allowing for duplicates
edges, thus producing high scores on average.[3]
For an analysis of shared domains of knowledge as proposed here Degree should
be relevant as a corrective. Whereas Betweenness and Closeness both point to
structural positions of publications in regard to their location between
domains of knowledge, Degree points to the importance of a given publication at
this structural position. Or, to put it more precisely, to the attention
generated by the publication in question, as I am focusing on quotations made
by scholarly journals to this publication; and many such quotations do not
necessarily point to the scholarly but in any case to the public impact a work
made.
Top 10 by
Degree
Looking at the Degree scores from this perspective makes clear that while Reland’s publications might share in more domains of knowledge, within their respective domains Renaudot’s publications obviously attracted comparable attention. And looking at the respective results for the top-scoring publications of/connected to Johannes Braun and Thomas Gale in comparison makes clear that they were not only tied more closely to special domains of knowledge but also attracted less attention by the journals in question, perhaps because of this more stringent specialisation. So here are the Degree scores for publications divided by individuals:
Adrien Reland, by Degree
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Degree
Johannes Braun, by Degree
Thomas Gale, by Degree
A cautionary note: It does not pay to put too much trust in Degree scores, because they tend to push publications situated within certain reference patterns. Consider the example of Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze’s Lexicon aegyptiaco-latinum, the Coptic dictionary edited and published by Karl Gottfried Woide in 1775 which has already featured in one of my posts.
With a Degree of 33 it scores shortly below a top 10 place in Degree which, following the reasoning laid out above, should indicate its importance for its particular domain(s) of knowledge – it attracted a lot of attention, because it has a lot of quotes. But all of these quotes are in fact derived from one singe journal issue, the June 1774 issue, part one, of the Journal des Savants, as becomes visible from the cross-references section of its database entry.
And there
it assembles all of these quotes because it features in many different respects
in the announcement written by Woide himself to highlight his upcoming
publication, which makes the reference section of this piece look a bit monothematic:
Snippet from the references contained in Woide’s publication announcement
So while
Degree may be taken as an indicator of importance within a given field by
capturing public attention, this is easily manipulated, and has to be
cross-checked against another metric for validation.
Fourth:
Pagerank
Nodegoat
allows for calculating Pagerank scores, following the original Google
algorithm. As Pagerank was originally invented to determine the relative
importance of information sources (in this case, websites) in a network through
which a user might randomly move, this model might also be applied to domains
of knowledge in a web of publications, treating quotations as paper-borne
hyperlinks. Random movement through the graph is facilitated by its
undirectedness, so please keep in mind that modelling it as undirected may be a
questionable decision, and don’t trust these metric too much. The good thing
about Pagerank is that allows for determining both the relative importance of quoted
publications and of quoting journals in this particular configuration, so I
would like to use it to counterbalance the shortcomings of Degree pointed out
above. In running Pagerank, Woide/la Croze’s dictionary disappears from the
leading places all of a sudden, so this seems to work. The top publications
according to Pagerank thus are:
Top 10 by
Pagerank
Surprise, surprise:
The main hubs for distributing quotes – and thus sorting domains of knowledge –
are journals! Makes me almost wonder why I chose to go by them in the first
place… But more interesting in here is that there one publication from the 287
quoted works in the sample which managed to get a place in the top 10, and that
is – surprise again! – Reland’s Palaestina
Illustrata. This in turn is due by it being quoted by a number of journal
issues (from all three journal series) which are themselves important quotation
hubs, as becomes evident when looking at the cross-references to Palaestina Illustrata, that is, the
publications in the sample linking to it.
This looks
as if Pagerank indeed might be a good tool to determine the importance of a
publication at its respective structural position, at best in combination with
Degree (and Palaestina Illustrata
scores high on both). So what about the top scores for the rest of the field?
Adrien Reland, by Pagerank
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Pagerank
Johannes Braun, by Pagerank
Thomas Gale, by Pagerank
Combining
metrics
Well, that was a lot of tables, numbers, and scores. Well done! Only a few more to go. Now the last thing to do is to find a way to purposefully combine the different metrics results assembled so far to draw something relating to my larger research question from it. To do so, I ventured for a first try to identify the top 5 publications of each of my protagonists by comparison of the results I presented above. This yielded the following table[4]:
Top 5 by:
Betweenness
Closeness
Pagerank
Degree
Reland
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Reland
De nummis veteris Hebraeorum
De nummis veteris Hebraeorum
Antiquitates
sacrae vet. Hebr. (4th ed.)
De nummis veteris Hebraeorum
Reland
De religione mohammedica
De religione mohammedica
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
De religione mohammedica
Reland
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
Verhandeling van de godsdienst
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
Reland
Encheiridion studiosi
Dissertationum Miscellanearum
Oratio de galli cantu
Hierosolymae
Decas exercitationum […] nomine Jehovae
Braun
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Doctrina foederum
Braun
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Braun
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Doctrina foederum
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Braun
Doctrina foederum
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Braun
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Doctrina foederum
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Renaudot
Historia patriarcharum Alexandrinorum
Historia patriarcharum Alexandrinorum
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
Renaudot
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Defense de
l'”histoire des patriaches”
Renaudot
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Renaudot
La perpetuité de la
foy, 5
La perpetuité de la
foy, 5
La perpetuité de la
foy, 5
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Renaudot
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Historia patriarcharum Alexandrinorum
Genadii patriarchi homiliae
Gale
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Gale
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Gale
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Gale
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Creating a
Shortest Path Matrix
To fuse
this into something more informative I thought I might utilize a special
function of Nodegoat’s, and that is its ability to calculate shortest paths
between given selections of nodes. In this case, this meant that I first
settled on a matrix of four times four publications: The top 4 publications
after comparing the scores of all metrics for each of my four protagonists. I
chose to use the top four because only four of Gale’s publications made it into
the sample, and this provides better comparability then. Now I used the
Shortest Path function to calculate the length of the shortest path through
this network from each of these publications to each other, and set the results
down in form of a matrix.[5]
It looks like this.
Conclusions
What does
this tell me now? Well, first of all it highlights the isolated position of
some of these publications, which obviously do not share domains of knowledge
with others; this is true for the five marked with grey lines which have no
connections to the rest of the matrix. It moreover points to the broader
diversity of Reland’s publications compared to the rest of the network: His
four publications all have connections within the matrix, while for Renaudot
one publication does not and for Braun and Gale two publications each. Reland’s
and Renaudot’s oeuvres and positions are similar in that both are internally
coherent – the smallest paths to those of their own publications connected to
the rest of the matrix are two each – and well-connected: their publications
are not only connected to more of the rest of the matrix, they are also
connected by shorter paths, making their works appear to be more central. Braun
and Gale on the other hand are similar in having less many publications connected
to the rest of the matrix, and in those publications being situated in strongly
differing fields, as indicated by their larger internal distance from each
other compared to Reland and Renaudot. And both of them are on the outskirts of
the network rather than in the centre as indicated by the long shortest paths
to other publications in the matrix.
This buttresses the claims I have brought forward based on other impressions already: That Reland and Renaudot form a comparable pair of actors, as Gale and Braun do; and that Reland seems to be the most versatile of all four, which might be the reason why he was the last of the four to get forgotten. And, as I already suspected last week, that his Palaestina Illustrata might be more relevant for this process than his other works, even if they are better known today (as his 1705 De religione mohammedica for instance).
But this
has been a fairly static picture of a phenomenon spanning one century, so the
next task will be to dynamize it. Work to do!
[1] So in looking at the closeness
scores in the following, always keep in mind that the maximum path length taken
into consideration is 502.
[2] With duplicated edges taken
into account and weighted according to distance, that is, duplicates add edge
length.
[3] And Nodegoat does not automatically
normalize Degree centrality. But this is an easy operation: If you want to do
so, just divide any absolute Degree score by the total number of edges in the
network, in this case, 2577.
[4] Publications marked in red only
appear once in the table and are therefore discounted from further comparison.
[5] Please keep in mind that shortest paths are elongated in my setting because two quoted publications A and B are (almost) always connected via a journal in between, so the usual shortest path possible between A and B is two links (A –link one– Journal –link two– B).
I am very sorry, but I will have to postpone what I originally intended to post here yesterday for one week. The idea I had in mind does work, but it takes a lot more time to set up the calculations in detail than I had thought, and it will keep me busy for a few days still. In one of my former posts I preliminarily explored a data set still uncompleted at that time, consisting of all references to my four protagonists in the Journal des Savants, the Philosophical Transactions, and the Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde Waerelt during the 18th century. As this set is completed now*, it will be interesting to see what might be learned from it.
One preliminary finding – which at the same time is a hypothesis to be tested during the next days – is that in terms of being posthumously referenced it seems to pay for a scholar to diversify his research interests, or at least to offer works which may feed into many different research interests over time. For it seems that the most prominent work written by my four protagonists over the course of the 18th century turned out to be Adrien Relands 1714 two-volume “Palaestina ex monumentis veteris illustrata”. And from the contexts of the references targeting it this seems most likely to be due to its ability to be utilized for the purposes of History, Theology, Geography, and Philology alike. The downside of this is that it seems very difficult, if not outright impossible, to determine which kind of work might be suited to such purposes when writing it.
But more about this next Friday!
*At least for the moment. Next addition will be Acta Eruditorum/Nova Acta Eruditorum. To be continued!
Eusèbe Renaudot (ed., transl.): Anciennes relations des Indes et de la Chine, de deux voyageurs mahometans, Paris: Coignard 1718; title page.
Friday no. 20, February 22nd, 2019
In one of the earlier posts on this blog I said something about Louis-Charles Solvet (1795-1869) and his successful strategies of reference to Adrien Reland. One, and I would say the central, hypothesis that I built from the case of Solvet and his translation of the Dissertatio de jure militari Mohammedanorum contra Christianos bellum gerentium was that such strategies of a re-use of a dead scholar’s products and achievements against the grain of that scholar’s original intentions signal actual structural oblivion of the scholar in question, if they succeed. This dovetails quite nicely with the career and publications of Louis-Charles Solvet, I would say. But the risk incurred with this is of course that this may be a case of circular reasoning. Perhaps the Solvet case fits the hypothesis so nicely because the hypothesis was drawn up by it, and I just found what I wanted to find all along. So how might this be put to the test?
Test
conditions and pre-test assumptions
As history
does not repeat itself, I cannot just re-run Solvet’s career to see if other
patterns would probably account for the same effects in the end as well. But I
might look for similar cases, if possible by people from a shared background
and trajectory, and look for discursive and structural interconnections –
references to the same scholars and the same patterns of reference applied to
similar scholars. The argument that I would like to make is that both are
necessary to establish a convincing test case for the hypothesis framed around
Solvet. If I do find that in a similar case, in similar circumstances, the
patterns are transitive, i.e. if one matches, the other does match, too, this
would indicate that structural oblivion is not the right term to put to the
phenomenon. Because this would – generalized – have to be taken to mean that
every scholar with similar background in similar circumstances would take
recourse to the dead scholar in question in the same way. This in turn would
mean that there was a shared knowledge about this scholar beforehand, and if
this were the case, he or she would be structurally remembered rather than
forgotten. If on the other hand I should find, that the patterns are not
transitive, that is, if one matches, the other does not, structural oblivion becomes
a lot more probable. But – and this is an important caveat to make – only in
the case where there is structural but not discursive transitivity. If the
reference pattern applied in a similar situation by a similar scholar is the
same but targets another person and his or her achievements and/or
publications, the divergence in dead scholars utilized might well point to the
fact that they are, more or less, randomly selected from the reservoir of
structurally forgotten elements of knowledge.
A test case:
Joseph-Touissant Reinaud (1795-1867)
Joseph-Touissant
Reinaud was born in Lambesc, between Avignon and Aix-en-Provence in Southern
France, on December 4th, 1795, and destined for a clerical career.
When in 1814 he was sent to Paris to broaden his education, he took to oriental
languages with such fervour that he staid to study them under Silvestre de Sacy
(1758–1838) instead of becoming a priest. As Solvet, who in 1814 quitted
service with the Imperial Guards, Reinaud had dropped out of the career originally
envisioned for him. Both now served for a while with private employers
alongside their studies, Reinaud from 1818 to 1819 as secretary to the Comte de
Portalis on a mission to the Holy See. After returning and completing his
studies, his former employer helped him to gain a post at the Bibliothèque royale
in 1824, three years earlier than Solvet, who entered the French provincial
administration in 1827. Reinaud managed to continue on his librarian post
despite all revolutionary upheavals in 19th century France and to
continually rise within the system. In 1832, he was elected into the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres,
and in March 1838 after de Sacy’s death followed him as professor of Arabic at
the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes.
From 1847 on he was president of the Société Asiatique, and in April 1864
elected as head of the Ecole des langues
orientales vivantes; Solvet had been promoted to the post of Supreme Judge
at the court of Algiers in 1862. Reinaud had, perhaps because of a career
without the interruptions that Solvet had been subject to, managed to enter the
more prestigious posts; he had already in 1836 been admitted into the Legion of
Honour, 14 years before Solvet had been in 1850. In 1858 he was raised in rank
to “Officier de la legion d’honneur”, the rank that Solvet had been denied in
1865. These honorary differences besides, both men seem to be quite comparable
in respect to what I am interested in here. Both were trained in Arabic,
excelled at their studies, were zealous in pursuit of their duties, turned to
philological pursuits in their scholarly endeavours, and translated.
Now the
interesting question is whether both men are comparable also in respect to
their treatment of my forgotten scholars. Louis-Charles Solvet had translated
Adrien Reland, but had never referred to Eusèbe Renaudot (as far as I know). So
what about Joseph-Touissant Reinaud?
In 1845,
Reinaud published a corrected, augmented and annotated re-edition of an 1811
translation of an early medieval Arabic manuscript, the “Relation des voyages
faits par les Arabes et les Persans dans l’Inde et à la Chine“.[1]
The 1811 edition itself was already a re-edition, as the manuscript in question
had first been edited in 1718 as “Anciennes relations des Indes et de la Chine,
de deux voyageurs mahometans” by Eusèbe Renaudot.[2]
Reinaud clearly acknowledged that in his preface where he detailed the history
of the edited text, where he stated the edition no longer conformed to “les
progrès que la critique orientale a faits dans ces derniers temps” and had to
be redone for the sake of science, correcting both translation and annotations
to purge them of Renaudot’s leniencies.[3]
The prime reason he brought forward for the importance of his re-edition was
that he was convinced that the manuscript provided an early source for the
story which over time had evolved into the story of Sindbad as incorporated in
the Arabian Nights.[4] In
doing so he situated his publication in the scholarly branch of the Orientalist
discourse of the mid-19th century as firmly as Solvet had situated
his Reland translation in its political branch. This catered to their
respective career stations at the point of publication, with Solvet part of the
French colonial administration in Algiers and Reinaud in the center of French
Orientalist learning in Paris.
Passing the
test?
In both
cases publications were picked which were about 130 years old but could be
adapted to contemporary issues quite easily, even if they became decontextualized
from the oeuvre of the original author in the process, and both Reinaud and
Solvet presented the original authors in the way which suited their aims best –
Solvet praising Reland for use as an authority, and Reinaud downsizing Renaudot
to claim scientific progress. The underlying pattern seems to be the same to
me.
Now what
about the cross-connections? These, and that is the interesting part of the
story, really seem to be absent. Reinaud seems not to have mentioned Reland
anywhere in his publications, even when he was working about topics where one
might have expected it, as the religious history of Islam or the geography of
the Near East. But while he refrained from referring to Reland, he owned his works.
At least if the auction catalogue of his personal library can be trusted, among
his possessions were Reland’s De
religione mohammedica (2nd edition of 1717) and his Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
(4th edition of 1741). That was one work more than he owned of
Renaudot, of whom he only seems to have had the 1718 edition from which he
started his translation.[5]
So also this has been a rather quick walkthrough through the test I proposed, I
would like to preliminary assume on this basis that my original hypothesis is
sound, and both publications really testify to the original author’s being
structurally forgotten at their time of publication. To be explored further!
[1] Joseph-Touissant Reinaud (ed.,
transl.) : Relation des voyages faits par les Arabes et les Persans dans
l’Inde et à la Chine dans le IXe siècle de l’ère chrétienne. Texte arabe
imprimé en 1811 par les soins de feu Langlès publié aves des corrections et
additions et accompagné d’une traduction fran5aise et d’éclaircissements par M.
Reinaud, Paris: Imprimerie royale 1845.
[2] Eusèbe Renaudot (ed., transl.): Anciennes
relations des Indes et de la Chine, de deux voyageurs mahometans, qui y allerent
dans le neuviéme siecle ; traduites d’arabe : avec des remarques sur les
principaux endroits de ces relations, Paris: Coignard 1718.
[3] Reinaud (ed.), Relation des voyages
1845, p. v. ; p. xiii–xiv.
[5] Anon. : Catalogue des livres
des manuscrits orientaux et des ouvrages en nombre composant la bibliothèque de
feu M. J.-T. Reinaud. Membre de l’institut, officier de la légion d’honneur,
conservateur des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale, président de l’école
des ll. oo. vv. de la sociéte asiatique, membre des académies de Vienne, de
Berlin, de Saint-Pétersburg et de plusieurs autres sociétes savantes. Précéde
d’une notice sur sa vie par M. J. Mohl, membre de l’Institut, Paris 1867, cf. pp.
13, 103, 131.
Seven years ago now Caroline Winterer asked “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” [1], and the question is still too good not to be asked again. So where is America in my Republic of Letters? Until very recently it seemed to be quite absent. Only from the middle of the 19th century onwards American publications referring to my protagonists began appearing in my data, all in the context of scholarly research. But any contemporary entanglement seemed to be missing. Perhaps this does not come as a surprise so much as the question in how far the Republic of Letters covered America, which parts of it, and when. I am not going to tackle this question here, but I can present you now with some American instances of references to my protagonists before 1800. And the nature of these references may perhaps point to why it is complicated to uncover them today.
New Haven, Connecticut, 1760/1770
“A treatise on regeneration : By Peter Van Mastricht”, Preface, p. [1]-[2].
The first instance I came across was a reworked extract from Peter von Mastricht’s (1630-1706) Theologia theoretico-practica of 1682[2] which was printed in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1769/1770.[3] The anonymous translator and compiler was obviously concerned about theological discussion points current New Haven at the time, or at least he announced his treatise this way. While he had to elaborate upon “who this Doct. Van Mastricht is, and what the particular reasons are, for publishing the following treatise at this time”,[4] he added a substantial appendix to the work to buttress von Mastricht’s arguments with other Dutch and Scottish reformed theologians, with both of which he seems to have been very familiar.
His readers most probably were not as may be seen from his explanation of the denominational attributions in his text: “It should have been observed to the reader, that by the REFORMED, or the reformed church, foreign writers mean all denominations of Protestants, except the Lutherans (with respect to whom they are called reformed) and some heretical sects that have sprung up among them, as the Socinians, Arminians, &c”[5] In this section he took, amongst others, recourse to Johannes Braun in respect to the relation of the human will and divine grace, and devoted more than one entire page to quotes from Braun’s Doctrina Foederum[6] of 1688.[7] At the end of the treatise there is one passage which might be taken as an indication that the translator/compiler had not acquired his theological knowledge locally in Connecticut: “This publication would have been rendered more compleat by quotations from Turretine and the doings of the famous Synod of Dort, had not the publisher been disappointed about procuring these books.”[8] He seems not to have had such problems with his Braunius, unless he was quoting from his collected excerpts.
Two tentative conclusions might be suggested as hypotheses for further enquiry by this piece of evidence: First, that such theological knowledge was still imported from abroad into North America in the late 1760s/early 1770s, and second, that some of the publications contributing to it may have been available there nevertheless. Drawing any conclusions as to the supposed origin of the translator/compiler is not possible though, as the second piece of evidence will show.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1789
Inglis, “A charge delivered”, p. 4.
In 1789 Charles Inglis (1734-1816), appointed Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787, concluded his visitation of his new diocese with a treatise printed as “A charge delivered to the clergy of the diocese of Nova Scotia.”[9] Inglis aimed at something quite similar as the translator/compiler of von Mastricht: Giving a group of people – in Inglis’ case the clergy of his diocesis – the proper arguments to solve theological and ecclesiastical problems right at hand. To do so, both utilized a quite similar stock of literature, and that is why – at present – no inference of the anonymous translator/compiler’s place of origin can be drawn from his treatise.
The Anglican bishop used a mixture of the same Calvinist authors garnished with some Presbyterians and other dissenters alongside more orthodox Anglican writers as the stock of his admonitions. A large part of his “charge” consisted of directions for a solid churchman’s library, as “[s]everal of the younger Clergy, having, at different times, expressed a desire to have a list of such Books as would be proper for a Clergyman’s Library; I have set down the following Catalogue, and hope it may be of service.”[10] And in this directions the bishop, too, included Johannes Braun, although not with one of his staple theological works but with his treatise on the vestments of the ancient Jewish temple priests.[11] And he also included Adrien Reland in his list, once directly, and once indirectly.[12]
Inglis, “A charge delivered”, p. 62: Two references to Adrien Reland.
That Inglis included Reland in his list is remarkable for two reasons: First, because it supports the notion that Reland’s 1714 work “Palaestina Illustrata” was the longer the 18th century lasted the more firmly labelled as a theological tract (which it not directly was), and second because of what Inglis himself had written down as his criteria for selecting the works on his list: “Perhaps it is needless to observe that I could have easily enlarged the number of Books under each head; those only are selected which appear to be most useful, and are easily procured; and I confine myself to such as treat of Theology, or that have an immediate connection with it.”[13]
Conclusions & hypotheses…
Not only was Reland’s work bundled up with Theology, it was also labelled as “easily procured” even in the context of Nova Scotia, as was Braun’s Vestitus Sacerdotum Hebraeorum. Inglis did not precisely state how these works would have been procured by his clergymen, and it would be tempting to try to check if they really did, if there are inventories of late 18th/early 19th century Nova Scotia Anglican clergymen available somewhere to do so. In any case the firm theological fixation of the works in question coupled them with the respective discourses, and when the issues in context of which they had been discussed faded from the debates of New England, I suppose that references to the works and via these to their authors will have followed suit. Which opens up a new theatre of investigations nevertheless.
[1] Caroline Winterer: Where is
America in the Republic of Letters?, in: Modern Intellectual History 9, 2012,
pp. 597–623; doi:10.1017/S1479244312000212.
[2] Peter von Mastricht: Theoretico-Practica theologia: Qua, per Capita
Theologica, pars dogmatica, elenchtica et practica, perpetua symbibasei
conjugantur. Praecedunt in usum operis paraleipomena, seu Sceleton de optima
concionandi method, Amsterdam: Boom & widow 1682.
[3] Anon: A treatise on
regeneration : By Peter Van Mastricht, D.D. Professor of Divinity in the
Universities of Francfort, Duisburgh, and Utrecht. Extracted from his system of
divinity, called Theologia theoretico-practica; and faithfully translated into
English; with an appendix, containing extracts from many celebrated divines of
the Reformed Church, upon the same subject, New Haven: Thomas & Samuel
Green 1769/1770.
[9] Charles Inglis: A charge delivered to the clergy of the diocese of Nova Scotia
at the primary visitation holden in the town
of Halifax, in the month of June 1788. By the Right Reverend Charles, Bishop of
Nova Scotia, Halifax: Anthony Henry 1789.
[11] Ibid.,
p. 76; Johannes Braun: Bigdê kohanîm id est, Vestitus sacerdotum Hebræorum,
sive Commentarius amplissimus in Exodi cap. XXVIII, ac XXIX. & Levit. cap.
XVI. (2 vols.), Leiden: Doude/Elzevier 1680.
[12] Inglis: A charge delivered to the clergy
1789, p. 62; Thomas Lewis: Origines Hebrææ: the antiquities of the Hebrew
republick : In four books. I. The origin of the Hebrews; their civil
government; the constitution of the sanbedrim; forms of trial in courts of
justice, &c. II. The ecclesiastical government; the consecration of the
high-priests, priests, and levites. The revenue of the priesthood the sects
among the Hebrews, pharisees, sadducees, essenes, &c. III. Places of worship.
The use of high-places; a survey of the tabernacle, and the proseucha’s of the
Hebrews. A description of the first temple from the scriptures, and of the
second from the rabbinical writings. The sacred utensils. The institution of
synagogues, &c. IV. The religion of the hebrews. Their sacrifices; and
their libations. The burning of the red heifer, and ceremonies of purification.
Their sacraments, publick fasts and festivals, &c. Design’d as an
explanation of every branch of the levitical law, and of all the ceremonies and
usages of the Hebrews, both civil and sacred. By Tho. Lewis, M.A (3 vols.),
London: Samuel Illidge/John Hooke 1724-1725; Adrien Reland: Palaestina
ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (2 vols.), Utrecht: Willem Broedelet 1714.
[13] Inglis: A charge delivered to
the clergy 1789, p. 59.
A short network animation of all references to Johannes Braun, Thomas Gale, Adrien Reland and Eusèbe Renaudot between 1750 and 1765 in from the Journal des Savants, the Philosophical Transactions and the Maandelyke uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt, as moving four-year averages. Mind that Reland provides the only link connecting the Boekzaal references to the JdS-PT references.
Saturday, February 9th, 2019, for Friday Nr. 18
I have been busy adding another journal to the dataset I briefly discussed here two weeks ago; this time, it’s the Maandelyke uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt taken from Hathi Trust again for a Dutch perspective to complement the British and the French already in there. In doing so, I noticed an absence that makes me wonder about its possible causes.
I already wrote here about how the rediscovery of Palmyra and the decipherment of the Palmyrene inscriptions played into my research question as it illuminates how references to structurally forgotten scholars can be used to improve one’s own standing in the Republic of Letters. Both Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716-1795) and John Swinton (1703-1777) had been building on research carried out, among others, the Dutch philologist Jacob Rhenferd (1654-1712) and two of my persons of interest, Eusèbe Renaudot (1646-1720) and Adrien Reland (1676-1718). Which meant that after a period of comparative absence those names, for a while, became current again as part of the discussion over the decipherment of Palmyrene. As I had already came across this discussion in both the Journal des Savants and the Philosophical Transactions, I would not have been surprised to find a similar increase in references to these names in the Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt also.
There was a significant increase in references to Adrien Reland in the Boekzaal in the 1750s and 1760s; but none to the other proponents of the debate. To make up for this, Johannes Braun (1628-1708), who had been almost completely absent from the former dataset, was mentioned much more frequently than I would have thought during this period.
Upon closer inspection, the respective entries reveal that – as it seems – the Palmyran debate just did not place in the Boekzaal. I cross-checked for references to Swinton and Barthélemy without connections to my protagonists but did not find anything related, either. Given the interest displayed by Dutch oriental scholars and philologists in Palmyrene following the first re-discovery of Palmyra for Europe’s Republic of Letters in the 1690s, that there should be no reaction at all to the second re-discovery in 1753 is a bit puzzling.
So I look around a bit and went through Delpher, the Dutch National Library catalogues, and the STCN, and found nothing much in connection. The only directly Palmyra-related Dutch publication in this time seems to have been a (pirated?) print of Joseph Jouve’s (1701-1758) 1758 novel “Histoire de Zénobie, impératrice de Palmyre” which went off Nicolas van Daalen’s press in Den Haag. And that was not even in Dutch. Intra-textual references seem to have been as scarce, as far as Delpher is concerned (query results are here). My query only returned four publications during that time: one a geographical work set us as a fake travelogue – the first volume of Joseph de la Porte SJ’s (1714-1779) “Voyageur français”,[1] translated into Dutch as “De nieuwe reisiger; of Beschryving van de oude en nieuwe waerelt”, and the other three parts of a work of similar kind, the “Tafereel van Natuur en Konst” which appeared in 21 volumes between 1769 and 1784 in Amsterdam, a translation from an English model (volumes 1, 10, and the index volume 21).
The most curious of these is “De nieuwe reisiger”, as Jean-Jacques Barthélemy is indeed referenced in it as part of the description of Palmyra, but in a weird way. After describing the ruins, the fictive letter-writer tells his fictive addressee “that it would be desirable that one or other scholar would try to discover the beginnings of this language, which is completely forgotten.*”[2] Added to this was a footnote indicated by the asterisk running “The abbé Barthélemy has not yet made this renowned discovery public, which justly had won him the respect of all the learned in Europe […]”.[3] Now de la Porte’s French original – which has the same passage –[4] was printed in Paris in 1765, while the fictive letter just quoted from is dated to 1736. And Barthélemy’s lecture at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres was printed in Paris in 1754.[5] So while the fictive letter-writer in de la Porte’s text could not have known about Barthélemy’s discovery in 1736, both the French author and his Dutch translator could – and perhaps should – have known that this discovery was very public already in 1765.
Coupled with the absence references to the debate in contemporary Dutch-language literature (as far as I was able to make out so far) this points to that the issue, while being a scholarly polemic in France and Great Britain and well-covered in German learned journals,[6] seems not to have been of much interest to the Dutch public. The next reference to it in a publication in Dutch was made – again – in a travelogue, only this time a real one. When the Swedish Arabist and Oriental scholar Jacob Jonas Björnståhl (1731-1779) went on a rather prolonged Grand Tour through Western Europe and via the Mediterranean to the Near East, Istanbul, and Greece in 1767, he wrote letters to the Swedish publisher and librarian Carl Christoffer Gjörwell (1731-1811) who collected them. They went to print in a German edition in 1772, followed by a Dutch translation in 1779; the Swedish edition only was printed from 1780 on.
Now Björnståhl described (in the Dutch translation) in his “J.J. Björnstähls Reize door Europa en het Oosten“, volume one, in a letter from Marseille, 18 November 1770, how he met Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in Paris. He rated Barthélemy’s kindness towards other scholars “higher even than the new and grand discovery by which Mr. Barthélemy has made himself known to Europa, that one can recon from him, who was the first to teach Europe so, the time since when it is possible to read Phoenician and Palmyran inscriptions”.[7] As a curious by-note to this I may add that Björnståhl five years later, in a letter dated Oxford, 10 October 1775, reported that he had also met John Swinton: “I shall conclude my letter with Mr. Swinton. This man is, as is well known, famous for his writings concerning old, and foremost Phoenician inscriptions and coins, which can be found in the English Transactions.”[8] Björnståhl said nothing about Swinton’s role in the Palmyran inscriptions’ controversy.
Adding to
these findings that the debate was framed by some of its actors as a struggle
for national honour in claiming the first discovery, most of all by John
Swinton himself who complained about being subject to attacks by French writers,
and recognized as such by others, for instance the German learned journals, it
might have fallen out of the Dutch learned discourse of the time because of
this national framing which did not include Dutch elements – or, as was the
case with Rhenferdt and Reland, not in prestigious roles.
Yet this
did not cause a lack in references to especially Adrien Reland in the Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt during
this time. Not only where such references there, they also pointed frequently
to the same publication, his last major work “Palaestina ex monumentis veteris illustrata”,
a two-volume description of the Holy Land as taken from classical sources; they
only related to it in connection with other issues. So maybe the supra-national
character of the Republic of Letters really was under stress from nationally
framed discoursed below the surface already, and the Palmyran discussion might
be a point to illustrate this.
[1] Joseph de la Porte: Le voyageur
françois, ou La connoissance de l’ancien et du nouveau monde, T. 1, Paris :
Vincent ; Moutard ; Cellot 1765.
[2] Joseph de la Porte: De nieuwe
reisiger; of Beschryving van de oude en nieuwe waerelt, Uit het Fransch van den
Abt de la Porte, Eerste Deel. Behelzende in sich Cyprus, Aleppo,
Damascus, de berg Libanon, Palmyra, Egypten, de Barbarysche Staaten,
Griekenland, en een gedeelte van Turkyen. Dordrecht: Abraham Blusse, 1766, pp.
58-59: “Het zol dan te wenschen zyn dat de een of andere geleerde trachte
om de beginzelen van deze taal te ontdekken, die tans geheel vergeten zyn.*”
[3] Ibid: “*De
Abt Barthelemy heeft deze beruchte entdekking nog niet gemeen gemaakt, die hem
te recht de achting van alle geleerde in Europa verworven heeft; hy verdiende
dezelve reets door zyne doorgronde geleertheit in de oudheden.”
[5] Jean-Jacques Barthélemy: Reflexions
sur l’alphabet et sur la langue dont on se servait autrefois à Palmyre, Paris :
Guerin et Delatour 1754.
[6] See for instance: Nova Acta
Eruditorum, October 1757, pp. 625-630, and November 1757, pp. 671-678;
Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen 1754, August 24th; September
5th, pp. 927-928; October 17th, pp. 1066-1068; 1755, May 29th, pp. 588-589;
1756, June 10th, pp. 586-590; Neue Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen 1755, Nr. 24,
pp. 209-210; Nr. 27, pp. 233-234.
[7] J.J.
Björnstähls Reize door Europa en het Oosten. Eerste deel, Utrecht: G. van den
Brink / Amsterdam: Wed. van Esveld en Holtrop, 1779, pp. 201-202: “Zulk
eene vind ik al zo groot, en zelfs grooter, dan de nieuwe en groote
ontdekkingen, wardoor de heer Barthelemy zig in the waereld zo bekend gemaakt
heeft, dat men van hem, die het Europa Europa de eerste geleerd heeft, den tijd
kan rékenen, waarin men in staat is, om Phénicische en Palmyreensche
opschriften te kunnen lézen, waartoe men te voren niet eens het alphabet
kende.”
[8] J.J.
Björnstähls Reize door Europa en het Oosten. Deerde deel, Utrecht: G. van den
Brink / Amsterdam: Wed. van Esveld en Holtrop, 1782, p. 268: “Ik zal
mijnen brief met den heer Swinton eindigen. Deze man is, gelijk men weet,
beroemd wégens zijne geschriften, de oude, inzonderheid de Phenicische, munten
en opschriften betreffende, en die in de Engelsche Transactions te vinden zijn.“
Heading of Karl Gottfried Woide’s Mémoire from the Journal des Savants, June 1774, p. 333-343.
Friday No. 18, February 1st, 2019
In one of my last posts I have been questioning if having pupils is indeed conducive to being remembered as a scholar and ended on a somewhat sceptical note. But there is no end to learning, and so I would like to take the opportunity today to shed some light on an example of a pupil’s network that really efficiently did so.
1704 –
1716: A triangular correspondence
To make clear how the following connects to my overall project, let’s first have a look at a (perhaps) somewhat unusual kind of correspondence.
Communication between Cuper, de la Croze, and Reland: Persons in red, letters in yellow, printed publications mentioned in green, and institutions mentioned in black.
This depicts the correspondences between Adrien Reland, Gijsbert Cuper (1644-1716) and Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze (1661-1739) between 1704 and 1716 as far as I have already been able to incorporate them into my database. As it looks like, they were all three very much connected, be it indirectly by way of referring to the same people (red dots), publications (green dots), institutions (black dots) or letters (yellow dots), or by relating to each other directly. But this picture is a bit misleading, one might say, because if only sender-receiver relations are visualized without taking the content of the letters into account, it looks like this.
Letters (yellow) exchanged between Cuper, de la Croze, and Reland (red); the only three letters between Reland and de la Croze highlighted in blue
There seems to have been almost no direct epistolary connection between de la Croze and Reland; at least, I have only found three letters until now. But as they were taken from the selected edition of de la Croze’s letters, published between 1742 and 1746 (fully digitized by Mannheim university), which includes none of the Cuper-la Croze letters, presumably because they were written in French, it may be assumed that there were some more.
Be that as it may, there was a huge amount of indirect communication going on between de la Croze and Reland by way of Cuper. Both would ask Cuper to deliver questions or answers to the other, and Cuper did so. What emerged was a strange triangular correspondence pattern between these three scholars. Now two of the three letters between Reland and de la Croze mention a certain David Wilkins (Wilke, 1685-1745), and that will become interesting in a minute.
A
posthumous publication
In June 1774, the Journal des Savants announced the upcoming publication of the Lexicon ægyptiaco-latinum, to be printed in Oxford at the Clarendon Press in 1775,[1] in a short piece entitled Mémoire de M. Woide, sur le Dictionnaire Cophte qu’il va publier à Oxford, & sur les Sçavans qui ont étudié la Langue Cophte. Adressée à Messieurs les Auteurs du Journal des Sçavans.[2] This piece was remarkable insofar as its author, Karl Gottfried Woide (Charles Godfrey, 1725-1790), the editor of the announced work, not only gave a detailed account of the state of the field of Coptic studies as he perceived it, but also of the genesis of the book itself, which at the time had become something like a lost learned heirloom. It was based on a manuscript that Maturin Veyssière de la Croze had compiled until 1721, but never published, and left to his former pupil Charles-Étienne Jordan (1700-1745) when he died in 1739 together with his library. After Jordan’s death in 1745, the manuscript was sold together with Jordan’s library by Jordan’s brothers, and acquired by Leiden University. In 1750, Woide had gone there to copy the manuscript, and this copy now formed the basis for the printed edition.[3] This would have been less remarkable where it not for the interconnections between the persons entangled in this research action. For, Woide maintained, he originally copied the manuscript for his use and that of Christian Scholtz (1697-1777) from whom he had learned his Coptic. Scholtz, who may have commissioned the copy,[4] was second court preacher in Berlin and had himself learned his Coptic from his brother-in-law Paul Ernst Jablonski (1693-1757), who in turn had learned his Coptic from Maturin Veyssière de la Croze, and who had supplied de la Croze with many of the primary materials needed for the compilation of the dictionary in question. Karl Gottfried Woide thus was, if I may put it that way, a fourth-generation scholarly descendant of de la Croze, working within a net of other former pupils or connections of his teacher’s teacher’s teacher.
As Woide
now brought the copy of de la Croze’s manuscript back to Berlin, Scholtz
started working on it, preparing it for print and adding annotations of his
own. But it fell to Woide to actually secure an opportunity for publication
through his contact with Oxford university, where he found a printer willing to
publish de la Croze’s Coptic dictionary as edited by Scholtz and revised by
Woide.
Back to the
beginning
And now the
circle closes back to the beginning of this post, for Woide in his Mémoir not only referred to de la Croze
and his scholars but also to those other savants of note who had been working
on the subject of Coptic. In doing so, he not only mentioned Adrien Reland but
also David Wilkins, both of which had collaborated with de la Croze to
establish a Coptic version of the Lord’s prayer to be included in John
Chamberlayne’s (1668/9-1723) Oratio
dominica in diversas omnium fere gentium linguas of 1715,[5]
which is precisely what the edited Reland-de la Croze letters I mentioned touch
upon. Wilkins in turn had offered de la Croze to print his dictionary in
England at some point in time, but de la Croze had denied the offer.[6]
Woide also mentioned, although on short notice, Eusèbe Renaudot as one among
the number of learned scholars of Coptic; perhaps on short notice as Renaudot
had always maintained good relations with the Maurists of St.-Germain-des-Pres whom
de la Croze had fled in 1696 to become a Calvinist.
And, last but not least, Woide provided the additional detail that another scholar reoccurring rather often throughout my last posts here also was in on it, for when the proofs for the dictionary were at Oxford they were given to John Swinton (1703-1777), “known for his research in antiquities”,[7] to be seen through and corrected.
Proliferation
by pupils
So this
seems to be a point in time when at least two of my protagonists were posthumously
reunited for a brief moment through their scholarly endeavours. Yet this had
only become possible through the collective endeavours of de la Croze’s pupils
over a period of more than three decades after his death. This might indicate
that if pupils shall benefit a scholar’s posthumous memory, this may only happen
through emergent effects from a working network of pupils at the time of the
individual scholar’s death, focusing on a collective goal – as the study of
Coptic in de la Croze’s case. One more hypothesis to test!
[1] Charles Godfrey Woide (ed.), Christian
Scholtz (contr.), Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze: Lexicon
ægyptiaco-latinum : ex veteribus illius linguæ monumentis summo studio
collectum et elaboratum a Maturino Veyssiere la Croze. Quod in compendium
redegit, ita ut nullae Voces Aegyptiacae, nullaeque earum significationes
omitterentur, Christianus Scholtz: Aulae Regiae Borussiacae a concionibus
sacris, et Ecclesiae Reformatae Cathedralis Berolinensis Pastor. Notulas
quasdam, et indices adjecit Carolus Godofredus Woide, Oxford: Clarendon Press
1775.
[2] Charles Godfrey Woide: Mémoire de M. Woide, sur le Dictionnaire
Cophte qu’il va publier à Oxford, & sur les Sçavans
qui ont étudié la Langue Cophte. Adressée à Messieurs les Auteurs du Journal
des Sçavans, in : Journal des Savants 109, June 1774, pp. 333-343.
[5] John
Chamberlayne: Oratio dominica in diversas omnium fere gentium linguas versa et
propriis cujusque linguae characteribus expressa, una cum dissertationibus
nonnullis de linguarum origine, variisque ipsarum permutationibus. Editore
Joanne Chamberlayno anglo-britanno, Regiae societatis Londinensis &
Berolinensis socio,
[6] Charles Godfrey Woide: Mémoire de M. Woide, sur le Dictionnaire
Cophte, p. 334.
[7] Ibid., p. 337: „connu par ses recherches
dans les antiquités ».
Monday, January 28th, 2019, for Friday No. 17, January 25th, 2019
Apologies first: This post took me a little longer than usual, I’m two and a half days late now. This is due to what I wanted to present here: The first two completed data sets for the tracking of processes of forgetting in the humanities from my project. And finishing the second one took me about 18 hours longer than I had planned. You never know what’s in the sources beforehand…
Data Sets
But now these two sets are done and ready to be presented – at least, a rough oversight of the yields of these collections. What I have done here is going through two journals, the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Savants, from 1700 until 1800 (well, in the case of the Journal des Savants until 1792). I went through two digitized Hathi Trust collections to be able to use fulltext search, so for everyone who’d like to check on my results, here you go: Journal des Savantsand Philosophical Transactions. The few missing issues were added using other similar Hathi Trust collections. I entered all issues bearing references to my four protagonists into my NodeGoat database, identified all persons co-cited with my protagonists in these instances as good as possible, and also all publications cited therein which gave me lists like these here.
December issue of the Journal des Savants, 1782, Reference to Eusèbe Renaudot and co-citations
To fully explore these datasets will take me some time still, but I do already have some preliminary findings to share.
First: Comparability
There is an obvious imbalance between the two journals regarding coverage of my protagonists. The Journal des Savants returned 117 issues with matches, while the Philosophical Transactions returned 8. Yet this is obviously caused by their asymmetric schedules: While the Journal des Savants appeared weekly from the start and monthly later on, the Philosophical Transactions appeared once a year, or once every two years. So to make for a better comparison, the Philosophical Transactions issues cover 12 years between 1744 and 1771, while the Journal des Savants issues cover 54 years between 1702 und 1789. And while the Journal des Savants data set includes about 4,5 times as much issue material over time, these individual issues are richer in both references and co-citations than the Philosophical Transactions issues are, although the exact factor still has to be determined. Overall, the Journal des Savants was definitely much more interested in the results of my protagonists over time than the Philosophical Transactions ever were. Not that much of a surprise, one might say, given that both journals were active in different areas of knowledge production and that the Philosophical Transactions were much more interested in natural philosophy than in what we would today call humanities’ research (as I already discussed some time ago). So please keep this in mind for the following visualisations.
Second: Visualisations!
The combined datasets in full extensions: The complete network of references from 1702 until 1789. Directly visible: Three of my protagonists, Thomas Gale (bottom left quadrant), Adrien Reland (bottom right quadrant), and Eusèbe Renaudot (middle of top half) do have their quite separate circles of references with a shared overlap in the middle. The full extension of the Journal des Savants dataset: The complete reference network from 1702 until 1789. Directly visible is a much weaker position of Thomas Gale (top right quadrant), and an enhanced position of Eusèbe Renaudot (bottom left quadrant). Full extension of the Philosophical Transactions dataset. Directly visible is that it is much smaller, contains less references to authors (therefore smaller red circles), and that there is no connection between a shared reference network of Thomas Gale and Adrien Reland on the left and a much smaller Eusèbe Renaudot network on the right hand.
Moving pictures!
A diachronic visualisation of the combined datasets in (something like) moving ten-year-averages for the time in which they overlap, 1740 until 1779. The Journal des Savants dataset in simple ten-year-averages from 1702 until 1789. The most interesting thing is that this dataset allows you to directly see the falling apart of a once shared reference network from the 1760s onwards. As this is precisely what I want to track and show in this project, I take this result for a preliminary proof of concept: It actually seems to work, if only within a certain framework as I already had supposed (cf. the combined dataset video where this does not become apparent). And, last but not least, the ten-year-average visualisation of the Philosophical Transactions dataset also, which directly allows to see the huge differences between both journals regarding my protagonists.
To preliminary conclude
This rather fast overview over my first two completed data sets conveys two messages, I think: First of all that a rather more thorough exploration in terms of statistics and metrics is necessary to put my preliminary findings on a firmer basis, and second, that – and these are my preliminary findings for today – my system and framework actually does seem to work. While this is great, it poses a lot of new questions as to the framing: Can both data sets be acutally merged together as I did in the combined visualisations? Or are they so different that such combinations are of no use? And if they are, where do these differences come from? Different perspectives on science? National and/or confessional framings, as might be indicated by the very different weights of the English and Anglican Cleric Thomas Gale and of the French and Catholic Cleric Eusèbe Renaudot in both sets? Or something in between, or something third?
Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Vol. 1, 1717, title page.
In one of my last posts I suggested that none of my four exemplary cases has been able to profit from a memorializing attempt by his institution. Today I would like to examine one case a bit closer, which is that of Eusèbe Renaudot and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres he was a member of from 1691until his death in 1720. The academy was an institution very actively publishing their member’s efforts. They not only regularly printed research contributions – dissertations – by their members to various subjects in their own journal, the Mémoires de litterature, tirés des registres de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres, but also every couple of years published quite massive volumes recording the institutional processes and progresses made in form of the Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres series, which began in 1717 and only terminated with volume 51 in 1843. And as if this were not enough, in 1740 the historian Claude Gros de Boze (1680–1753), together with the savant Claude-Pierre Goujet (1697–1767) and using materials by Paul Tallemant (1642-1712), compiled a history of the academy up until this time in three volumes, theHistoire de l’Academie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres depuis son etablissement, avec les eloges des academiciens morts depuis son renouvellement, published in Paris.
Commemoration done
There would
have been plenty of room, therefore, to commemorate the abbé Renaudot. Yet, if
one takes a closer look at these materials, the form in which this
commemoration took place turns out to be quite interesting. Starting with the
most obvious point, there was no eloge
on his behalf when he passed away in 1720, but only in 1729 with the 5th
volume of the Histoire
de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres. This is easily
accounted for by the notorious delay of the Histoire
volumes in wrapping up the events within the academy. The 1729 volume
explicitly only dealt with the years 1718 – 1725;[1] so he was no exception in this. This span of nine years between
the publication of the eloge and the
actual death is however quite long. It becomes even more pronounced if one
takes into account that the following five volumes did not mention Renaudot at
all, and he only appeared again within the series in the 11th volume
of 1740 – which in itself comes as no surprise because this was the index
volume to the preceding ten. From then on, until volume 16 of 1751 there would
be no notice of Renaudot in the Histoire
series either.
Having a complementary look at the second series of proceedings the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres produced, the Memoirs, is, unfortunately, a bit more complicated. They are digitally available in very good scan quality via Hathi Trust, yet not fulltext searchable – and it would take quite a while to read through over 70 volumes of around 500 pages each, so I have to restrict my findings to the tables of contents in this case for the time being. Nevertheless, these are quite instructive. Although the first volumes to move beyond Renaudot’s lifetime were seven to nine (covering 1718–1725), there are only four dissertations by him in all of the first nine volumes, two in both volumes two and three,[2] which basically means that he ceased publishing on behalf on the academy before 1710; and obviously there was no posthumous material published after 1720. [But as long as I haven’t done an analysis of reference to him at the intratextual level, this is not necessarily indicative of his overall presence in the epistemic community formed by the academy’s members.]
Commemmoration achieved?
Now one
might argue that this was just what was to be expected as someone who was
thirty years dead by then would in all likelihood not be able to play a large
role in the current affairs of the academy. He perhaps should not turn up there
at all. But it is a bit more complicated than that, as the 1751 volumes 16 and
17 of the Histoire series show upon
inspection. Renaudot was mentioned thrice in them, once in no. 16 and twice in
no. 17. The first instance was a reference to the correspondence between
Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741) and Jacob Gronovius (1645–1716) which had
once been triggered by a Renaudot letter.[3]
The other two instances of reference to Renaudot quoted some of his work on the
history of the Eastern churches within a dissertation about the Assassins.[4]
And then there was silence – at least for another ten volumes.
But before
I turn to the reappearance of Renaudot in volume 26 of the Histoire de l’Académie royale des
inscriptions et belles-lettres series, let me jump back to the year 1740
and have a look at the other history of the academy, de Boze’s Histoire de l’Academie royale des
inscriptions et belles-lettres depuis son etablissement, avec les eloges des
academiciens morts depuis son renouvellement. As if to make up for the
delay in publishing the eloge on the
abbé, this second history also contained it,[5]
as well as some references to Renaudot in its records of the academy’s
workings.[6]
1740 thus serves as first peak year of institutional references of the Academie royale des inscriptions et
belles-lettres to its former member, the abbé Renaudot. But as already
said, with that obligation fulfilled, there was nothing said about him anymore
apart from the three rather peripheral references in 1751.
Collateral commemoration
This only changed with the 26th volume of the Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres series of the year 1759, in which Renaudot was referred to in a particular context,[7] which I, not incidentally, already wrote about on this blog from the perspective of the other party. It was the dispute between John Swinton (1703–1777) and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716–1795) about the honour of having been the first to be able to correctly interpret the Palmyrene inscriptions. There is nothing contemporary in the Memoirs series, which is due to the fact that this series over the years had built up even more delay in publication than the Histoire – the proceedings for the years 1749-1760 were only printed in 1771. The Barthélemy version of the decipherment of Palmyrene[8] does have certain advantages over the Swinton version, one of these being that Barthélemy unlike his English colleague and/or competitor referred back not only to Adrien Reland and Jacob Rhenferd (1654-1712) as Swinton had done but also to Eusèbe Renaudot and Gijsbert Cuper (1644–1716) who both were included in his account for good reason. Renaudot had studied the inscriptions himself and then decided it was not worth the effort given the situation at his time; and Cuper had been instrumental in providing the additional inscription brought forward first by Rhenferd and later Reland.
To assume that this was what brought Renaudot back into the reference
flow once again would certainly be very far-fetched. I would rather like to
argue that Barthélemy represents a general trend here, the trend towards
antiquarian topics the likes of which Renaudot had been dealing with which
brought him back into the focus of the academy’s members now. Unlike in the
years between 1729 to 1740 and 1741 to 1758, Renaudot was referred within the
Histoire series now on a regular basis, even if with rather low frequency. From
the 1790s onwards the remarks become increasingly critical,[9] but they are
still there.
So what can be seen from these patterns of references? Although the
institution the abbé Renaudot belonged to had done him the customary honours of
memorialization, it had done so a bit belatedly, and without lasting effects.
The modest Renaudot comeback since the middle of the 1750s, more than 30 years
after his death, had nothing to do with the commemorative efforts undertaken by
the academy but was due to an external event outside the institution’s control.
[1] Histoire de
l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Vol. 5, Paris : Imprimerie
royale 1729, title page: “depuis l’année M. DCCXVIII. jusques &
compris l’année M. DCCXXV.”.
[2] Mémoires de litterature, tirés des
registres de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres, Vol. 2,
Paris : Pancoucke 1722 [reprint], pp. 318-342, 343-360; Mémoires de litterature, tirés des
registres de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres, Vol. 3,
Paris : Pancoucke 1722 [reprint], pp. 152-184; 236-245.
[3] Histoire de
l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Vol. 16, Paris :
Imprimerie royale 1751, p. 326.
[4] Histoire de
l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Vol. 16, Paris :
Imprimerie royale 1751, p. 146, 148.
[5] De Boze, Histoire de l’Academie royale
des inscriptions et belles-lettres depuis son etablissement, avec les eloges
des academiciens morts depuis son renouvellement, vol. 2, pp. 188 – 222.
[6] De Boze, Histoire de l’Academie royale
des inscriptions et belles-lettres depuis son etablissement, avec les eloges
des academiciens morts depuis son renouvellement, vol. 1., p. 16, 45, 122,
128 ; vol. 3, p. 404, 451.
[7] Histoire de
l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Vol. 26, Paris :
Imprimerie royale 1759, pp. 61, 581.
[8] Jean-Jacques Barthélemy: Réflexions
sur l’alphabet et sur la langue dont on se servoir [sic] autrefois a Palmyre
(12 Février 1754), in: Histoire de l’Académie royale des
inscriptions et belles-lettres, Vol. 26, Paris: Imprimerie royale 1759, pp. 577–597.
[9] Cf. Histoire de
l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Vol., 45, Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale 1793, p. 178, and Vol. 49, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale
1808, p. 106.
I am bit late this week with my state of research entry not because of one of the many good reasons to be brought forward at such an occasion – delays caused by family matters, urgent appointments, events which cannot be rescheduled, etc. – but because of something which happens to me only very rarely. I just did not know what to write. And to be honest, I am not entirely sure if I do now as I am writing this. The problem is that with the first three months of my project year now done, I should now know what to do and what to expect in the remaining nine months’ time, so that if any changes need to be made to the general design, I should recognize this now and implement them. But I am not so sure if that is really the case. So let’s have a quick overview over the project so far and then see what’s to be done.
The state of the project
At first view the project as such is looking quite healthy and running good. First of all I have collected a lot of data for my database (main categories, project start/now):
Persons: 530/1.511 (+981)
Letters: 720/737 (+17)
Publications: 230/1.215 (+985)
Institutions: 120/196 (+76)
Publishing houses: 224/644 (+420)
Which means that around 2500 entities have been added to the database, ranging from simple person entries only containing name, gender, date and place of birth and death, data source(s), external identifier(s) and confession (if available) to complex publications citing scores of other publications and people. While this may look impressive, the problem is that it is time-consuming, because I could not yet retrieve anything automatically. It all has to be entered manually. On average it now takes me around five minutes to identify a new entity and to add it to the database. Which means it took me around 210 hours of time only to enter my data (that’s five weeks of work). The work necessary to gain the data – finding possibly interesting archival collections, going to archives, reading through sources, taking notes; finding the necessary literature, getting that literature, reading through books and papers, taking notes – is not yet included in this figure. On a very rough estimate, it took me about as much time, perhaps a little less. So that’s another 200 hours, or another five weeks of work. The rest was spent thinking, writing, and talking it through with other people; and suddenly, three months are gone.
As to the writing, always the other side of things, it does not look that bad, either. 100 pages are written, all chapters at least begun, so that around a third of the work is done there. The project has already spawned two chapters in edited volumes, one finished, the other still in the process of being written, and I am sure there are some other interesting shorter pieces hidden within the material.
So why am I complaining?
There is a downside to all of this: I am not nearly finished. As the timespan it takes me to identify a new entity and to add it to the database has been fairly stable throughout the last two months (I checked every now and then), I do not suppose I’ll ever become faster than these five minutes per entity. And as the project time is limited, this naturally limits the number of entities I will be able to still add to the database. There are a lot more things to do than just entering data, so that my calculations allow for about 3.000 to 4.000 entities to be added to what I have now; and that needs to be it. If the distribution of data over time would be as I had thought when starting the project – hyperbolically converging towards a relatively low level as approaching the present – this should suffice. But I am no longer sure if that really is the case, because most of my data still stems from the time between 1700 and 1750. The density of references diminishes but slower than I thought; and the epistemic communities within which such references were made turned out to be much more diverse than I thought, which means that the number of entities multiplies as the number of shared persons and publications between individual epistemic communities is lower than originally assumed. So apart from a few samples, from a database point of view I am still stuck in the 18th century but do have the 19th and 20th ahead of me still.
Those episodes from the 19th and 20th centuries I have digested so far I discovered without the help of the database, and for the most part they are not yet entered into it – although already covered in writing – because I wanted to keep at least data collection roughly homogenous to rather have good data for a lesser than unevenly dispersed data for a larger timespan.
What’s the plan?
So I fear that if I go ahead as planned, I just will not be able to finish in time. Which calls for a change of plan. But what kind of change?
There are some possible solutions, but none of those I have thought of so far are satisfactorily. I am not sure that I will have found a good one until next Friday, so it’s going be some anecdotal evidence from the sources again next week. And in time again this time. I hope.
Friday No. 12, January 4th, 2019 (a real Friday post once again)
Individuals…
So far I have mostly tried to frame structural forgetting in terms of individual persons, of their acts or omissions. This corresponds with my deeply held conviction that individual persons are at the core of history, and tracing them therefore the first task set to any historical inquiry. But, unfortunately, individuals do not only act as individuals but have a tendency to coalesce into groups or collectives. Institutions might be thought of as structured collectives of individuals following that line of thought, as social (sub)systems might also. I always found Norbert Elias’s concept of figurations very helpful to come to terms with such supra-individual entities.[1]
…and Institutions
Now both institutions and social (sub)systems provide me with frames within which I conduct my research on structural forgetting, whether I like it or not – it is about forgetting scholars in the Humanities. Large parts of 18th to 20th century Western and Central European academia with all its peculiar institutions thus come into view and have to be accounted for, because they formed the environment the individuals I look at lived and acted in.
Social (sub)systems are characterized by specific memory practices.[2] One might even argue that they are constituted by memory practices, as they make stabilizing fleeting figurations of individuals into structured supra-individual entities possible over longer spaces of time. The same holds for institutions, on a smaller scale maybe. So both should be quite antithetical to forgetting as it might damage their very foundations. Which then prompts the question:
“If you are part of an institution, does this prevent you from being structurally forgotten?”
There are two possible ways to approach this question, the theoretical and the empirical. Let me give both a short try here (for the answers in both ways are much in the open still, at least for me).
1 – Theoretically…
The most basic observation regarding institutional memory practices is simply that they can never be exhaustive: No institution can structurally remember everything about itself. Memory practices therefore always include elements of forgetting by sorting out and discarding what is no longer relevant to the upkeep of the institution in question. An institution’s memory practices normally do not only entail information circulation but also storage and retrieval. What is deemed relevant is circulated; what is not (at the moment) deemed relevant is stored away where it can (probably) be retrieved again if need be, is no longer circulated, and, in consequence, is structurally forgotten. The larger and older an institution is, the more likely it is for any individual that took part in it to be sorted out and to be removed from circulation by being stored away. But the larger an institution is, the more capacities it may have to circulate those kinds of information it still sees as somehow relevant. The theoretical way to answer the question thus seems to be a definitive yes and no: Yes, you may be structurally forgotten even as a former part of an institution; and: No, if referring back to you is of importance to the institution, you might not be forgotten so easily. That said, structural forgetting and/or remembrance may even serve as an indicator of an individual’s importance to a given institution. But there is a hen-and-egg-problem coming along with this as well: Is an individual of importance because it was (and is) remembered, or was (and is) it remembered because it was important? And vice versa for forgetting. Seems like a typical example of scientific “Well, it’s not that easy to generalize…”
2 – Empirically…
Now do my four cases provide any illumination if sorted into this framework, as an empirical take on the question?
For Adrien Reland and Johannes Braun the answer seems to be deceptively simple. Both were professors at universities – Reland at Harderwijk and Utrecht, and Braun at Groningen. Harderwijk University does not exist anymore, which leaves Utrecht and Groningen to look at. At Utrecht there has some effort been made to keep Reland in the memory of the institution, but this is a development of the 19th century and subject to ups and downs (at the moment, it’s more on the upside). At Groningen Braun is mentioned but rates a poor second, not even a likeness of him survives. Both might be held to be, at least for most periods up until now, structurally forgotten by the institutions they once belonged to. This is nothing extraordinary, as most professors are. The typical university has had just way too many of them and remembers only some chosen few. The really intriguing questions now are: Why and how came these patterns observable today into being? What was the hen, and what the egg?
So what about institutions with fewer members – which at least statistically raises the chances for any given individual to be remembered rather than forgotten – and individuals who once played key roles in these institutions?
This brings Eusèbe Renaudot and Thomas Gale into focus. Both served rather prestigious scientific institutions in important positions. Renaudot was a member of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, founded in 1663, and was instrumental in the restructuring of the Academie early in the 18th century. Gale in turn was one of the early members of the English Royal Society, founded in 1660, and served as its secretary from 1679 to 1681 and from 1685 to 1693.
Now both institutions still exist – although one might argue that the Academie des Inscriptions has undergone more transformations during its history than the Royal Society – and both acknowledge their former members, Renaudot and Gale, publicly, yet not very prominently. From the point of view of both institutions I would label both Gale and Renaudot structurally forgotten: The information is there, but it is out of circulation, stored away, and not easily retrieved.
At the moment I can’t say when these patterns emerged, much less how and why – this needs further enquiry. But what I can say is that in all four cases the institutions did not shield my protagonists from being structurally forgotten in the end. What remains to be studied is whether they had serious impacts on the processes of becoming structurally forgotten at all, and if, how and why. Still a bit of work to do, but the year is young.
[1] Elias, Norbert (2009): Was ist Soziologie?, 11th ed., Weinheim/Munich 2009, pp. 10–11.
[2] Sebald, Gerd; Weyand, Jan (2011): Zur Formierung sozialer Gedächtnisse. On the Formation of Social Memory. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 40 (3), pp. 174–189; see pp. 179–181.