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 ».
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.
Saturday, December 21st, for Friday No. 11, December 20th, 2018
This is the
last one! No, not the end, it’s just the last one for this year, as I’m off for
vacation from – what was it – ah, now. But only until January 2nd,
so come next year, come new research posts.
This should
be a good time to reflect upon the state of the project so far. And to take
some time to see what might still be changed for the better. So what I want to
present you today is no fully-fledged piece of research but rather some
thoughts on the limits of the project as it stands now.
What it’s all about
To sum it
all up in a few lines again, my aim was (and is!) to work out the patterns that
emerge as remembrance fades and structural forgetting sets in. More precisely, I
wanted to show these patterns for the societal subset of what I call the
academic metier, and for humanities’ scholars whose memory faded. To do so, I
follow four specific scholars – Thomas Gale of Cambridge, Johannes Braun of
Groningen, Adrien Reland of Utrecht, and Eusèbe Renaudot of Paris – and track
the frequency of references to them across the centuries after their deaths.
For when such references dwindle and their pattern changes from one of being
frequently referenced to one of only intermittently being referenced,
structural forgetting can be actually made visible.
This was my basic assumption at least, and I still think that it is sound in principle. I am using a relational database and network visualization program, NodeGoat, to gather my data and visualize them diachronically, and by now patterns really do start to emerge. The question now is: Which patterns are these?
References and framing categories
I already
hinted at the problem of measuring the frequency of references to a dead
scholar. Of course citations and quotations can be counted – but within which
kind of frame? For early modern scholarly communication, there are basically
three categories of materials still available for me: letters; publications
(both manuscript and print); and journals. Everything else is either no longer
extant or not available in accessible format. Perhaps auction catalogues
provide something like a three-point-fifth category – they survive as printed
books, so basically they are publications – but that is about it.
Letters…
Now each of these categories is tricky. Letters only survive in some cases, and in those cases then most often too many survive to make it possible to scan them all for metadata such as “mentions person X”. There are projects like Early Modern Letters Online, ePistolarium, Mapping the Republic of Letters, Electronic Enlightenment and such, but they either do not fit my timeframe or do not provide the information I am looking for. So while it is crucial to keep an eye on letters wherever possible, I cannot do so in a systematic way. Which means that I will only with great care be able to extract intermittent reference patterns from this part of my data set.
Publications…
Publications
do survive in massive numbers, and in massive numbers are electronically
available and searchable by now. Countless digitization projects have made
available masses of material. Yet the masses produced are always larger still.
There is still so much out there which is not digitized, and which I therefore
would have to search in a library and go through manually, that I will not be able
to establish a suitable framework for my reference patterns this way, too. Even
if I reduced my research to a certain discipline, area, or language, it would
still be an insurmountable task. And most of it would be very frustrating, too,
because the majority of these books – by far! – would not contain any
references to my four protagonists (and presumably the more so as I advance in
time towards today). So while I will use all means of automatically extracting
information from publications that there are to find references to my
protagonists where I don’t expect them, I cannot claim to establish something
like a representative sample this way.
Journals…
Which
leaves me with journals, as it seems. And journals certainly do have many
advantages compared to my other two sources types. First of all, they do
survive in sufficiently complete form as to make general inferences possible.
We know with great certainty which journals there were, and most of them
survive. Second, they have been subject of lots of research by now, so that
their relative importance and their outreach can be determined at least fairly
well, and their workings and peculiarities are known to a large extent. Third,
they are – at least the larger and more important ones – available in good
editions, either in print or digitally, and thus searchable (via index or
query). So I can draw up a sample of important journals for the fields, times,
and places I am looking at, go through these journals, and have a data set
which allows me to really infer reference frequencies for the first time. Or,
given the only very partially comparable character of these early modern and 19th
century learned journals, several data sets most probably. Reference spikes in
the journals then would point me to the relevant developments in the reception
of my protagonists.
Journals?
This does
work. I found John Swinton this way (Philosophical
Transactions are already done up to 1800, which was easier as thought
because they only contain very few references of interest to me, fewer even
than I thought they might). And, to give a less obvious example, I found the
dead predikanten of the 1730s this
way who by their obituaries gave occasion to reference Johannes Braun.
Everything
alright, then? I frankly don’t know. It somehow doesn’t feel alright. I can
only do a certain number of important journals, and I am not completely
comfortable in just going where they point me. It feels a bit like being told
what to do. And I am not sure if I want my enquiries directed by anonymous
journalists three centuries gone. Well, time to think about it.
Saturday, for Friday No.10, December 15th, 2018 (Holidays are coming and everything is getting complicated to schedule…)
I do not have touched upon one facet of scholar’s posthumous reputation yet, although it is commonly believed to possibly have a powerful influence upon it. And that is the impact a scholar’s pupils can have on his or her memory.
The pupil hypothesis
The hypothesis behind this is quite simple. If you study with someone, who provides you the starting point for your own learning and perhaps even your career, you might be especially likely to keep that person not only in fond memory privately butalso to refer him or her professionally by quotation, citation or other forms of reference. This would then contribute to the overall reference frequency of the teacher. And you might even pass his or her theories, ideas, writings or whatever to your own pupils as a kind of intellectual legacy. At least this is what is commonly thought to be happening in the formation of intellectual communities, schools of thought, or scientific disciplines.
As with all hypotheses this one also should be tested before being assumed too easily. Toput it to the test is unfortunately a bit tricky. The problem with it is that it has been drawn from the showcase examples. For those cases in which we areable to see such a pattern at work clearly are the successful ones, those that really did establish intellectual communities, schools of thought, or scientific disciplines and framed them as certain person’s legacies. They are present, powerful, and seem to indicate the value of the hypothesis because it is able to explain them. The question now should be, are these cases representing the standard against which all others should be measured, or are they exceptional? If they are exceptional, the patterns that formed them are likely to be exceptional, too. They should, therefore, only with care be applied to other cases as long as this possibility cannot be ruled out.
How to test this?
If I now want to test this hypothesis with my four protagonists which clearly do not represent successful showcases of establishing intellectual legacies, this raises a number of follow-up questions. The first and perhaps crucial of these is simply: Who is a pupil? Obviously not every student who ever heard a lecture by one of them should qualify for that. And also not every younger scholar who ever exchanged letters with one of them should do so. But if the source material is scarce anyway, how am I to determine the closer kind of relationship which would qualify as a teacher-pupil-relationship?
The second and third questions are not very much more easily solved either. For having identified someone as qualifying for a pupil in the sense of the hypothesis, I would have to determine his (in my cases there are no hers, unfortunately) overall impact; and then to single out from this impact his references to his teacher to be able to determine how much this particular individual contributed to the reference pattern.
I do not have very conclusive evidence to present yet (for two select cases see below) but from what I have seen so far I strongly suspect that for the average scholar, the impact of pupils is highly overrated by the standard hypothesis. It really does not seem to matter so much. But before I go into speculation about why that might be so, first let me present two very contrary examples which are completely non-representative but which may give you an idea what I am after here.
First: a forgotten scholar’s unknown pupil
In 1713 the Journal des Savants (issue 34/1713, August 21th) reviewed a scholarly commentary of some Hebrew texts, the Hilkōt maʿśerōt Seu Commentarius Philologicus De Decimis Judaeorum[1] by Johann Conrad Hottinger (1688?–1727?). The young author was characterized in this piece intwo ways: First, as he was himself kind enough to tell in the title of thereviewed book, he was a member of the Zürich Hottinger family of reputedscholars for all matters theological and oriental. It even detailed the precisenature of this connection: He was a nephew of Heinrich Hottinger (1647–1692) by being a son of Heinrich’s brother Conrad, most likely Johann Conrad Hottinger (1655–1730). This would make “our” Johann Conrad Hottinger the second of the name, and stemming from something like a sideline, as his father was none of the celebrated scholars of the name but a physician and numismat of lesser fame. That his uncle rather than his father was named as the reference point for the family connection on the title page of Johann Conrad the younger’s printed work would make perfect sense then. Second, and not directly forthcoming from the title of the work, Adrien Reland was referred to by the reviewer as “the young author’s teacher”.
Journal des Savants, 34/1713, August 21th, p. 450.
It is always a bit risky to trust your sources too much but in this case there is no other evidence I yet know of contradicting this, so I trust the anonymous reviewer to have done his homework and to have known what he wrote. That a complimentary letter from Reland to the author was added to the work makes it an interpretation highly probable. So what I have here is a prime case fulfilling the hypothesis, at least on the face of it. There is a teacher-pupil-relationship in which the pupil uses the name and fame of his teacher to proliferate his writings, and by referring back to his teacher in return circulates his name. The problem is that this in all likelihood did not benefit Reland much, as the young Hottinger seems never to have made himself much of a name. It is quite hard to find any reliable information about him; even the larger catalogues have problems disambiguing him and his father. And even if one of his publications surely had the potential to be influential interms of circulating references to his “maitre”, the Journal “Altes und Neues aus der gelehrten Welt”, it seems to have been rather short-lived and not to have spread very far. So as a first preliminary conclusion from this case the hypothesis would have to be specified in that you may only expect substantial returns in terms of reference frequency from your pupils if they are either at least modestly successful themselves – so as to have an audience – or if they are very many (to compensate for little individual success).
Second: a famous pupil of two forgotten scholars?
Johannes Braun, professor of theology in Groningen and himself often busy with the exegesis of scriptural Hebrew, had many pupils of minor fame who later ventured to become predikanten in Dutch churches, an occupation for which a solid theological education was necessary. But there were also others among those who listened to his lectures. One of these, the young Albert Schultens (1686–1750) in 1706 defended a thesis on the utility of Arabic in the study of scripture presided over by Braun. In an age where the defended thesis often was acollaboration between president and respondent, this points to a rather close relationship, as does the theme. And moreover, Schultens afterwards relocated to Utrecht in 1707 to further study Arabic under Reland, living in his house. His first publication, the “Animadversiones philologicae in Jobum” is said to have been written under Reland’s direct guidance, and as Hottinger’s book also contained a letter to the author by Reland as a prelude – as well as a laudatory examination verdict by Johannes Braun and his colleague Paulus Hulsius (1653–1712). Now Schultens embarked on a very solid career, became an appreciated Orientalist and Arabist, and the founder of a dynasty of three generations of renowned Arabists. This, then, would be the ideal pupil for the hypothesis: Building on the knowledge inherited from his or her teachers an own career, becoming esteemed, and also creating a family tradition of proliferation of this intellectual legacy he or she should be perfectly able to carry on the name and fame of the teachers who had been instrumental in laying the foundations to these accomplishments.
Only that Schultens does not seem to have done so, at least not overly zealous. As far as I am able to determine at the moment. So even famous pupil might net you not much return for your own reference patterns in the end, perhaps – one more preliminary conclusion – because they are too much taken up by building their own reputation.
But if neither minor nor major pupils really add to your reference patterns as the hypothesis supposes, who then does? Well, I don’t know yet, but I’ll going to try to find out.
[1] Johann Conrad Hottinger: Hilkōt maʿśerōt Seu Commentarius Philologicus De Decimis Judaeorum: Decem Exercitationibus absolutus. In quo omni, quae ad hanc materiam illustrandam pertinent, tum è Sacris Litteris, tum ipsis Judaeorum veterum monumentis explicantur, variaque alia Sacrarum Antiquitatum themata ex occasione tractantur. Auctore Joh. Conr. Hottingero, Henr. ex Conr. Nep. Helv. Tigurino. Praemittitur celeberimi viri Hadriani Relandi Epistola ad Auctorem. Cum Indicibus necessariis, Leiden: Isaac Severinus 1713.
The early modern academic book is a used book. Of course new books were
printed and put onthe market always and everywhere. But long is art, and
life is short, and books frequently outlive their owners. In the 18th
century this created a market which lived off second-, third-, fourth,
x-th hand books which were sold and resold every so often: when their
owners died, or when they were in especially dire need for money; when
libraries where confiscated or scattered in war, revolution, or as
punishment. And on the whole this market was rather larger than that for
new books. The early modern printed book was a commodity made to endure
and as such had a very long commercial lifecycle.
This is hardly a new insight, and a lot has already been said about used-book markets and practices (see the Book History and Print Culture Network). Now, apart from a few collectors who bought books just for the sake of collecting, most of these changes of hand of early modern academic books took place for reasons of research and teaching.They were bought because they were needed. Even though they were sold second-or-more-hand, these volumes were still costly items, and the average scholar did not buy them without good reason. So I may assume that if a book changed hands there possibly also was an intellectual reason behind this economic transaction.
The Second-hand thesis
This means that ideas, notions, names and theories can not only travel openly by citationand quotation but also in a more hidden way along with the books they are contained in. In theory this opens new avenues for my quest to research processes of forgetting within science and learning, for the circulation of an author’s books might provide at least an indicator of his after-death impact.
Four first-hand problems
Practically this poses a whole bunch of new challenges to the project:
Figuring out how such indirect clues relate to direct ones and how they can be measured against each other. For it seems intuitively plausible that citing or quoting a scholar directly is stronger evidence of this scholar being structurally remembered than having a scholar’s book somewhere deep down in one’s library.
Coming to terms with indirect clues which can be directly referred to an individual person as well as indirect clues which are generic by their very nature. The difference is that of, say, the auction catalogue of a late owner’s library, which allows to ascribe the featured books to this owning individual, and the auction catalogue of the annual grand sale of a bookshop or store which gives no indication of the provenance of the volumes listed.
Accounting for the difference between books I know from such sources as the above-mentioned auction catalogues to have been offered for sale and books which I happen to know of being actually sold, and factoring this into the measure of ‘indirectness’ of the clue this gives me about the work in question being in circulation. Now this point mightseem to raise an issue a bit hair-splittingly, but it really poses a serious problem. Normally all that is left of such transactions are the auction catalogues some of which have survived – only a tiny fraction of those thereonce were, but that’s the same as with other sources. The problem is that these catalogues do allow me only to establish that at the time the sale was announced these books had been in the possession of the deceased or were in the possession of the offering entrepreneur. They normally do not allow to make any inference whether the books actually were sold at this event. Sometimes the catalogues carry annotations of certain items being underlined, check marked, or added prices which may point to someone at least being interested in buying them, but these are only very rarely conclusive evidence. So the question is, what happened to the leftovers? Were they sold off at a discount, given away, scrapped, recycled, or kept? For it would it certainly make a difference in estimating the value of an author’s name if the books announced under this name all sold highly after being battled over at the auction, or if they were all taken to the paper mill afterwards. (Which is quite unlikely unless indicated very clearly, to be honest, but to illustrate the possible spread let’s just assume it for the sake of argument).
Mears 1723, p. 25
And, last but surely not least, how can the data to be drawn from the catalogues be integrated into my co-citation approach to the framing of bygone epistemic communities? For normally these catalogues do not just list some thousand books one after the other but structure their content in a manner accessible to the potential buyers, and that is, by formal criteria on the one hand (format, features, and condition) and by contextual criteria on the other hand, so that a rubric would read “Libri Miscellanei & Juridici, Octavo”[1]or “Theologici in quarto” for instance. But should I then add all other books from that rubric as being co-cited with, say, Johannes Braun’s “Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum” of 1680 which might be found in the latter category?[2] This might seem an obvious choice, but unfortunately it is utterly impracticable because of the sheer number of entries I would have to process then. Should I, then, restrict myself to only recording those works appearing on the same page as, for instance, Adrien Reland’s “De religione mahomedica”, 2nd edition 1717[3] (see picture) as I would do for citations/quotations in a text? This might give a compromised picture because such rubrics tend to have an inner order – some reproducing that of the library’s former owner (which would be a good thing), some ordering the volumes alphabetically to facilitate browsing, or ranked by estimated value or anything else. So a consistent method might give me inconsistent results if I cannot process an amount of data large enough to even out such imbalances statistically.
So what to do now?
Already a while ago I tracked references to my protagonists in those auction cataloguesonline available via Eighteenth Century Collections Online. This provided me with a quite special sample because it is very much Britain-centred, but as the United Kingdom imported vast quantities of second-hand academic books from the continent during the 18th century, this is really not so bad at all. Here are the graphs for the frequencies I was able to establish for Adrien Reland and Johannes Braun through 81 catalogues between 1723 and 1796.
Reland’s books in the ECCO sample
Braun’s books in the ECCO sample
This surely looks nice, and it interestingly tells a story completely different (from what I know so far) from that told by the pattern of references to my protagonists in scholarly journals. To put it shortly, as the journal references decline, the mentions in auction catalogues rise. But what does that mean? Does it point to their ideas being in circulation through their circulating books even after they went out of fashion in the rather short-lived business of academic journalism? Or does it rather tell that as the authors went out of fashion in the journals, so did their books, being put on the second-hand market in something like a grand sell-out with a little delay?
This depends much on the answers I find to my four problems posed above, so I guess it’s fair to say that until now, this is still an open question. One hint might be that of the 81 relevant catalogues from between 1723-1796 I found, 56 may be counted as commercial, and 25 as owner-based (and 5 of these really are no sales catalogues but presence library catalogues and should only with care be included in the calculations). So what I have here is a very indirect picture – one that still has to be unravelled.
[1] Mears, William (seller): A catalogue of books in Greek, Latin, English, Italian, and French. Being a collection of trade, […] to be sold on Wednesday the 15th of this instant May, 1723, at W. Mear’s shop, the Lamb without Temple Bar; at Nine of the Clock in the Morning, [London]: n.p., [1723], p. 25.
[2] Johannes Braun: Bigdê kohanîm id est, Vestitus sacerdotum Hebræorum, sive Commentarius amplissimus in Exodi cap. XXVIII, ac XXIX. & Levit. cap. XVI., 2 vols., Leiden: Elzevier, Doude 1680.
[3] Adrien Reland: De religione mohammedica libri duo, 2 vols., 2nd enlarged edition, Utrecht: Broedelet 1717.
Fairy tale time! Today I will tell you a strange story of a man who survived all revolutions, of how he did so, what this has to do with my topic of structural forgetting, and whether there is a moral at the end of this story (or not). Only that this time, the story is real.
Revolution No. 1
The protagonist of this tale was a Frenchman – that’s one of the reasons that took me to Paris these days – and went by the name of Louis-Charles Solvet, born in Paris on the 6th Brumaire of the Year IV, or on October 28th, 1795, as you would rather have it. He was the son of Pierre-Louis Solvet (1772–1847), bookseller, and Anne Marie Charlotte Lemoine.[1] In 1812 the young Louis-Charles joined Bonaparte’s imperial army, and until 1813 advanced into a regiment of the imperial guards. In 1814 he quitted service, apparently just in time to survive his first revolution (the guards may not surrender, but quitting seems to have been alright). He began to work as a private secretary, until in 1827 he was able to get a job in the royal French administration. Solvet entered the service of the king as a lawyer at the royal court, and in 1829 had advanced to the post of secretary general of the departement of Oise.
Revolution No. 2
The revolution of 1830 may have cost him his job, but fortunately nothing else besides, as it seems. In any case he felt the need to explain about this first demission from state service in the reports in his personnel record file. Some reports signed by Solvet state as reasons for him resigning “The revolution of 1830 and [that I was] my duty’s lover, what has happened not so rarely.”[2] In other versions, the explicit reference to the revolution of 1830 is dropped, and he only stated “[That I was] my duty’s lover, what has happened not so rarely amidst great changes.”[3] Having however survived his second revolution, he just applied again for a post in the state administration, and obviously got one, for in 1832 he was deputy crown prosecutor in Vassy, and in 1834 in Soissons. So his ‘love of duty’ might well have been a move to explain why he had changed coats so quickly. But there must have been more than a grain of truth in it also; he never married, and his superior’s assessments stated things like “zeal: tireless.”[4]
Assessments from Solvet’s personal file, 1861
Did I mention forgetting?
So far, so good, and a not unremarkable career that Louis-Charles Solvet had already made at that point, being 39 years old by now. But there has not much been about forgotten scholars in the story so far, and I promised there would be. And in indeed there was a connection between the learning which had been produced by the likes of Reland, Braun, Gale, and Renaudot, and the life and times of Solvet. During the 1820s, when he was still a private secretary, Solvet had studied in Paris, graduating in 1827. He had turned his attention not only to law but also to a subject somewhat fashionable at the time, namely Arabic. Obviously he was quite talented, for having studied under Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) he had not only passed his exams with distinctions but a bit later, in 1829, also published a collected translation of Arabic sources which won some critical acclaim. With this work, entitled “Instituts du droit mahométan sur la guerre avec les infidèles”, ‘Institutions of Muslim law for the war against the unbelievers”, Louis-Charles Solvet had not only joined his two fields of interest. He also had commended himself for higher posts, as one French observer put it.[5] He really had, and his publication directly pinpoints for which kind of posts. When the French holdings secured on the North African coast in the wake of the first French intervention in Algier in 1830 were administratively restructured in 1834, Solvet successfully applied to be posted there. He was appointed judge for the French North African possessions.
Colonial aspirations
In Algier he settled into French colonial society, only that Algeria at this time still was no French colony. France only commanded some outposts. But some of the French in Algeria, as, for instance, a certain Louis-Charles Solvet, saw it as their mission to change this. In 1838 Solvet was listed on the title page of one of his publications as vice-president of the “Scociéte coloniale” of Algiers,[6] a position in which he campaigned for a more thorough French grip on the land. In the same year of 1838, he finally published a second translation, this time from Latin to French: An edition of Adrien Relands “De jure militari mohammedanorum contra christianos bellum gerendum”, which had been published among Relands collected dissertations in 1708.[7] Solvet’s version went as “Institutions du droit mahométan relatives à la guerre sainte” from the government’s press in Algiers, something official permission by the minister of war was necessary for. Solvet had applied for this successfully in 1837,[8] as his translation was intended to be something like a manual for French soldiers, to mentally arm them for the coming colonial war that French expansionists envisioned. They should know what to expect from a Muslim enemy.[9] Whether Reland’s very scholarly and sober philological commentary on Muslim legal provisions for the jihad might have actually been of any help in this case I would consider as highly doubtful.
Revolution No. 3
But Solvet not only claimed that in a situation such as his – and the French in general – in a foreign country faced with potentially enemy Muslims Reland’s commentary quite naturally resurged from his memory.[10] It really might have been yet one more stepping stone for his administrative career afterwards. For when in 1840 the war that Solvet longed for finally started, he in the wake rose to the post of counsellor at the royal court (in 1842). A position in which he, perhaps not too surprisingly given his former luck in such circumstances, survived his third revolution, that of 1848. Though no longer a royal counsellor he still had his judicial post, and in 1850 was accepted as chevalier de la Legion d’honneur. It is not entirely clear why, because his file has not survived in the records of the Legion, but from his personnel file it seems that his long-time services in the colonial administration were the reason.[11] The family actually had a stroke of luck there, for his almost twenty-two years younger brother Jean-Alphonse Solvet (1817–1896) also was dubbed chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 1880 for his services to the Paris magistrate as long-time secretaire général of the 7th arrondissement.[12]
Revolution No. 4 1/2
But back to Louis-Charles Solvet: The coup d’etat of Louis Napoleon in 1852 – which was not really a revolution – he survived, too, only to become president of the chamber of the imperial court of Algiers in 1862. He died in Algiers in 1868, which but deprived him of his chance to finally also survive the fall of the Second Empire.
Did I mention my theses?
This is a story which seems to be a good proof for my general thesis that there is nothing like an innocent reference. If one refers to one’s predecessors, one does that for one’s own benefit, otherwise one would not do so. In the case of Solvet it is clearly visible how he applied his talents and crafts to make those references which fitted the social and political climate of the France of his times, allowing him to rise through all mutations of the French state to the rather high post he held in the end, and gratifying him with seeing his colonial visions fulfilled during his lifetime. It is highly probable that he had picked up his knowledge about Reland during his Arabic studies in 1820s Paris, most probably from his readings of George Sale’s (c.1696–1736) translation of the Coran, as he himself claimed later.[13] A couple of years later in North Africa, he took the opportunity to establish those connections between him and these scholars and their publications which would benefit him, and successfully so.
Solvet’s signature from his 1865 request to continue on his post.
The morale of it all (if there is one)
Now the point of the whole story is that notwithstanding all acclaims which his publications got during his lifetime, today Louis-Charles Solvet has plunged even deeper into oblivion than Reland whom he used to advance his career. Perhaps this became already visible in 1865, when his secretary Pierry filed two requests to the Keeper of Seals, the French minister of the interior, to elevate Solvet from his 3rd grade rank of Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur to the 2nd grade rank of Officier. Pierry explicitly mentioned Solvet’s scientific activities on a par with his contributions to the colonial administration. The superimposed note on the second request only reads: “Spoken with Mr. Lent. Respond negatively.”[14] And although I do have some ideas of why that would be so, I am not sure yet – and neither if there is a morale to the story or not. So feel free to decide that for yourself, and please keep me posted! I will.
[1] Archives Nationales, Paris, LH/2533/33, Dossier du Jean-Alphonse Solvet, p. 5.
[2] Archives Nationales, Paris BB/6 (II)/396, Ministère de la justice: Notice individuelle 1861, 1859, Etat des Services: „Cause de la cessation du service: revolution de 1830 et officii amator mei, ut non raro accidit.“
[3] Archives Nationales, Paris, BB/6 (II)/396, Ministère de la justice: Notice individuelle 1863, Etat des Services: „Cause de la cessation du service: Officii amator mei, ut non raro accidit magna rerum commutatione”, signed Ch. Solvet, Algiers, July 15th, 1863.
[4] Archives Nationales, Paris, BB/6 (II)/396, Ministère de la justice: Notice individuelle 1861, Renseignements confidentiels: “Zèle: infatigable.”
[5] G. T.: 10. Instituts du droit mahométan sur la guerre sainte avec les infidèles, ou Extraits du livre d’Abou-l-hoçain-Ahmed-elKodouri, et de celui de Séid-Ali-el-Hamadani, traduits de l’arabe en français; par Ch. SoLvet. In-8° de 4o p. Paris, 1829; Dondey-Dupré. in: Bulletin general et universel des annonces et des nouvelles scientifiques, publie sous la direction du baron de Ferussac, 13, 09/1829, pp. 11-12; p. 12.
[6] Solvet, Louis-Charles: Voyage à “la Rassauta” [en Algérie], lettre à M. A… député, Marseille 1838, title: “vice-président de la société coloniale d’Alger”.
[7] Reland, Adrien; Solvet, Louis-Charles (transl.): Institutions du droit mahométan relatives à la guerre sainte. Dissertation de Hadrien Reland, traduite du latin en francais par Ch. Solvet, Algier: Imprimerie du Gouvernement 1838; Reland, Adrien: Hadriani Relandi Dissertationum miscellanearum pars tertia, et ultima, Utrecht: Broedelet 1708.
[8] Archives Nationales, Paris, BB/6 (II)/396, Secretariat du Government des possessions francaises dans le nord de l’Afrique to the Minister of War, August 12th, 1837.
[9] Reland, Adrien; Solvet, Louis-Charles (transl.): Institutions du droit mahométan relatives à la guerre sainte. Dissertation de Hadrien Reland, traduite du latin en francais par Ch. Solvet, Algier: Imprimerie du Gouvernement 1838, p iii: “enfin qu’elle contribuerait à faire mieux comprendre les préjugés et le genie des peuples que nous avons a combattre.”
[10] Reland, Adrian; Solvet, Louis-Charles (transl.): Institutions du droit mahométan relatives à la guerre sainte. Dissertation de Hadrien Reland, traduite du latin en francais par Ch. Solvet, Algier: Imprimerie du Gouvernement 1838, p ii.
[11] Archives Nationales, Paris, BB/6 (II)/396, Extrait de la partie individuelle de Mr. Solvet, Conseiller à la cour d’appel de Alger, June 1850.
[12] Archives Nationales, Paris, LH/2533/33, Dossier du Jean-Alphonse Solvet, p. 7.
[13] Reland, Adrian; Solvet, Louis-Charles (transl.): Institutions du droit mahométan relatives à la guerre sainte. Dissertation de Hadrien Reland, traduite du latin en francais par Ch. Solvet, Algier: Imprimerie du Gouvernement 1838, p. ii.
[14] Archives Nationales, Paris, BB/6 (II)/396, Pierry to Mr. Garde du Sceaux, Algiers, December 12th, 1865.
Last friday I decided that my data model needed a bit more testing than possible by 31 out of 68 JSTOR entries retrieved by searching for “Relandus”. This week therefore was devoted to entering data – and having done that, I can definitely say at least one thing: I need a break. I hope I’ll make to the archive again next week. But before I’m off, are there any other results?
From 31 to 82
I projected to complete my first package of 68 JSTOR hits retrieved by “Relandus”, four which actually pertained to something else, so that made 64. And to see if this is representative data set I set up a search with the same parameters for “Braunius” to get articles related to Johannes Braun, which returned 67 hits. Looks like a good match, so I had a go at it. Deducing anything unrelated to entering data I spent roughly 35 hours this week on processing these results, which took me through all 33 remaining Reland hits and through the first 25 Braun hits (seven of which were related to something else, so 18 remained). Adding the 18 hours I did last week on 31 items from the Reland set, this makes 82 retrieved JSTOR items processed in 53 hours. On average this means that entering one JSTOR items took me about 40 minutes. This should be a bit disappointing as I only needed 30 minutes each for the first 31 and had expected the average time needed to sink rather than to rise. But to put this into the right perspective, the first 31 items netted me 93 references in total, or three per item. From the 51 items I processed this week however I made 343 references altogether – or 6.7 per item, more than twice as much as in the first part of the set. So I am not entirely unhappy with spending 30% more time per item to get more than 200% more results. In principle, at least…
Numbers, numbers, numbers
But first of all let’s take the counting one step further and see how working through this set has played out in numbers of database objects. In the course of working through these 82 JSTOR entries I added to the database:
Persons: 229; Publications: 169; Publishing Houses: 89; Institutions: 45; Web Sources: 13; and Families: 7.
In total: 552 new objects, or about 6.7 per item (yes, again…). And to put these numbers in perspective also, this meant a rise in each category by:
Persons: 28%
Publications: 30%
Publishing Houses: 39%
Institutions: 31%
Web Sources: 19%
Families: 17,5%.
Or, to put it simply, my database has just grown by more than a quarter in eight days. Sounds nice. But do these data tell me anything new?
(Dis)Connected references…
Not that much, I must confess, because I haven’t yet analysed them very thoroughly. But what is directly visible is, first of all, that from the point of the references the Braun set and the Reland set are quite distinct and share only a few interconnections, which is interesting.
Set “Relandus/Braunius” visualized by publications (green) connected to persons (red) by references
And while the Reland set contains more direct references to Reland himself (he’s the big red dot in the middle of the larger wheel), the Braun set contains those publications with more references at all (the two big green dots within the smaller wheel). Of course the comparison is a bit unfair because the Braun set is much smaller and not yet completely processed. But it points in the direction of disciplinary foci as the main cause for such divergences.
Set “Relandus/Braunius” visualized chronologically
Although an aggregated chronological visualization makes the impression of a continuous referencing pattern with ups and downs, in a more detailed view the three main clusters (1878-1908; 1918-1948; 1968-2008) break down into singular spikes and large plateaus.
Set “Relandus/Braunius” visualized chronologically, close-up
… and the catch
Of course there is a catch. If this would be all there is to it, were would the challenge be? Well, the catch is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. If I perform the same search for “Reland” instead of “Relandus”, JSTOR returns 596 results instead of 68.
JSTOR hits for “Reland NOT Ireland”
And querying just for “Braun” is plain nonsense. Even with “Johannes Braun” it’s still tricky to sort out mishits. The same goes for “Thomas Gale”; “Eusebè Renaudot” works better, but returns a corresponding number of hits. Taken together these searches amount to about 700 or 800 real hits, roundabout ten times as much as I have now processed in eight days. And even if I chose to spent 80 days only working through those JSTOR results, this is only one platform of many to be queried. Which means am back from where I started. It will not work out like this. I have to find another way to deal with this. When I’m back from the archives.
After having postponed my visit to Groningen because first of all I would have had to go to Leeuwarden anyway, and second because of the sheer wealth of the Boeles family archive (someone out there searching materials to write a niece solid biography with?). This prompted me to first get a better grip on Johannes Braun as to know what I really would want to look at among Boeles’ papers – and after a not that successful visit to the Utrechts archive on that behalf (well, at least I know now what Braun’s heterodoxy was, he was suspected to be a Unitarian[1] and an enemy of the social order[2]) – I decided that this week should be used to test my data model a bit more thoroughly.
What’s to be tested?
The basic idea behind the model is that is shall be able to diachronically capture reception processes. Therefore I was intrigued by NodeGoat from the start, because this is a core feature of the program, and have kept using it to my great satisfaction since (thanks a lot, Pim and Geerd!) To be able to capture these reception processes I first introduced the object category of “publications” for everything which was intended to be published.
The “publication” category in my NodeGoat database
For tracking references more specifically than just by a global descriptor “Refers to” I then introduced the sub-object category of “Reference” which allows me to capture who is referenced, which publications is quoted (if any), and whether a journal or other serial source is referred to (if any). To be able to run co-citation analysis later on, each reference is assigned the page number on which it occurs in the original publication.
A publication with its references
I decided to keep references as simple as possible. This means they are basically singular: Each reference is made to exactly one person, up to one publication, and up to one journal. They are not unique as there may be two references containing exactly the same data, which can happen if someone is quoted with the same work more than once on the same page. While being able to capture most of the relevant details very well, admittedly this model is a bit prone to proliferate references whenever things get complicated. If, for instance, a person such as Adrien Reland is referred to with two editions of his book “De religione Mohammedica” (that of 1705 and that of 1718) in one sentence, in the language of the model this translates into two references to Reland on the same page, one to the 1705 edition and one to the 1718 one. Especially in cases where there are many people and works referred to on the same page, it can get quite tiresome to enter all these data.
Named Entity Recognition, 100% handcrafted
And this is due to the fact that I formulated this concept while working with 18th century learned journals, knowing for sure that none of the data I needed for my analysis was available in standardized linked open data. So while working with databases all the time, which supply me with the digitized images and texts and sometimes even allow for full-text searches pointing me to the references to be picked, entering the data and identifying persons, places, and texts remains work to be done by hand. As this is really nothing else than plain Named Entity Recognition, in theory it might be done automatically. But I suspect that I would need a fairly advanced AI to be able to process data from these source matters, as they abound with non-standardized orthography, obsolete name variants, arbitrary abbreviations, misspellings and even outright mistakes such as mistaken identities or confusion of dates.
Starting from the other end of time
So what I did this week was trying to test the methodology and the model on a sample of a more recent variety of texts I also have to process, those that relate to my four main persons from today, or from not-so-long-ago (compared to the 18th century, at least). Starting from the other end of time I simply used JSTOR , with an advanced search set to “All content” and “Relandus” as search parameter. This returned 68 results, 53 of which I can with my JSTOR account access in full-text and 15 which I can’t. With what was left of the week after finishing all other tasks scheduled for these days I ended up with around 18 hours for a first go at these results. This took me through 31 of the 68, not quite 50% of the sample. The average time spent on each item was around 34 minutes, which I would consider as not too bad for the start. For the start because as in each new data set to be entered there were much more new identities to be identified than already known ones to be just related to the new items. These 31 items, most of which were journal articles from between 1883 and 2010, netted me a total of 88 new persons to be identified and added to the database along with another 11 new publications cited within the items. They also brought with them 23 new institutions such as the journals they were published in, and 25 new publishing houses. All in all, 31 items from the 68 search results netted me a total of 178 new database objects, or more than 5 per item (on average). Which means that it now takes me about 6 minutes to identify an unknown entity and add it to the database, at least in a form that I can work with. As related items usually share at least some of their entities – which is why they are related, of course – over time the percentage of new objects to be added to the database declines against those already known, which should speed up the processing. Well, I’ll know better next week after having gone through the remaining 37 search results…
And what about references?
One of the publications with richer reference profiles
But if references are the key relational feature of the data model, how many references did I get out of these 31 search result items? That’s the really interesting number, isn’t it? And it is… 93. On average exactly three useful references, but in this case the average is deceptive. The majority of these texts made only one reference at all, and then there was a smaller group counting between 7 and 11 references each. Which is of course due to some publications centring on a special field of inquiry, in this case studies of early modern orientalism and/or early modern Dutch academia, and others focusing on more distantly related fields, such as – in this case – linguistics or biblical geography. This is not bad as such, and already produces useful visualizations. But it also means that, on average, 11 minutes of work are necessary to generate 1 meaningful reference. So this might be a point to ponder again if the method as it is now is really suited to the project. Will it work out like this? Seems like a bit more testing is needed. Looks like next week has just got a new objective…
Sample of items, linked by references to other objects in the database
[1] Utrechts Archief, 17.36, Uittreksel uit de resoluties van de Staaten van Groningen betreffende de theologische geschilpunten tussen de Groninger professoren Samuel Desmarets en Jacobus Alting, 1669, en Johannes à Marck en Johannes Braun, 1681–1690, p. [3]: March 1st, 1689.
[2] Utrechts Archief, 17.36, Uittreksel uit de resoluties van de Staaten van Groningen betreffende de theologische geschilpunten tussen de Groninger professoren Samuel Desmarets en Jacobus Alting, 1669, en Johannes à Marck en Johannes Braun, 1681–1690, p. [1]–[2]: May 14th, 1686.
Friday N°2 plus one (Saturday), October 13th, 2018
First lesson learned
Regularly scheduled updates may become difficult once family matters have to be reckoned with. As I was on the road with the kids yesterday as promised centuries ago, I subsequently deliver my update today. And promise to be punctual from now on. But now let’s move on to the interesting things.
What’s new?
As I am following my trails into the 19th century – treading on unfamiliar terrain here, so moving on cautiously – I have recently stumbled upon two interesting Dutch figures and an even more interesting memory crossings. But let me start from the beginning: Last Wednesday I proposed that references are the building blocks for structural remembrance – or forgetting. But references do not just pop up and float around; they are made by specific people with a specific purpose each time. Which means that, to put it shortly, structural forgetting comes into being through mass omission: by references not being made, connections not being drawn, names not being dropped. And to be able to discern this, I have to make use of those – fewer – references that are still being made, and to use them like little spotlights in the dark: To draw clues about where to look next.
Now I had discovered long ago already a curious case of referencing and non-referencing of two of my protagonists: Adrien Reland (1676-1718) and Johannes Braun (Braunius, 1628-1708). While Reland had an entry in the ADB, the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Braun had none. Not very interesting, where it not for the fact that there was no reason to include Reland into the ADB while Braun might well have been. For the aim of the General German Biography was to collect the biographies of the most important persons from the German-speaking areas of Europe from the early Middle Ages up until the 19th century when it was written. Now Braun was born in Kaiserslautern in 1628 and lived there until the burning of the city during the Thirty Years’ War, after which the rest of the family moved to the Netherlands. Being of German extraction, he would have made good ADB material. Reland in turn was born in 1676 in De Rijp, north of Leeuwarden in Western Frisia, and had no German family background. So, why include one but not the other? For such selections are the stuff structural forgetting is made of. One referenced, one not; one remembered, one not. Unfortunately that question cannot be answered directly, as the ADB archive is missing since decades and we frankly do not know how those who were portrayed were selected. We do know from a number of examples, however, that the editors could be quite generous in determining the ‘German-speaking area’ from which the biographies were to be drawn. What to do now? Well, when questions cannot be tackled directly, do it in a roundabout way.
Enter the first Dutch scholar
Jacob Cornelis van Slee
I already knew from other inquiries that there was one author who had portrayed some early modern Dutch scholars for the ADB. Perhaps this would give something like a clue? And indeed it does, and this is where the first of the two 19th century Dutch scholars I announced above enters the stage. Jakob Cornelis van Slee (1841-1929), predikant in Deventer and part-time historian specialising in church history and history of knowledge with a local focus, wrote 205 entries. Most of them are about Dutchmen, and all situated within the history of church and theology – befitting a preacher, one might say. Now Slee accurately saw to it that he did not portray anyone born after 1648, the date of formal Dutch independence from the Holy Roman Empire. Which would provide good reason why he did not include Reland himself; that entry was written by Richard Hoche (1834-1906). But why did Slee not reference Braun, who was born before 1648, spent most of his life in the Netherlands, and was professor for theology at Groningen university? A question that becomes even more interesting as Braun was suspected of unorthodox views, accused of being a Spinozist, and Slee obviously had something of an interest for such people, having written a history of Socinianism in the Netherlands in 1914. And how came Slee’s connection to the ADB about? Well, as material about him is quite sparse, I am going to the sources next week and have a look at what’s left of his materials in the Stadsarchief and the Athenaeumbibliotheek Deventer. The hunt is on!
Exit Slee, enter a German scholar
Now to Richard Gottfried Hoche who wrote the ADB entry on Reland. Biographical information concerning him is even harder to come by, but he was director of a Hamburg gymnasium, then became head of the Hamburg education authority, and published some works about classical philology and Roman mathematics. He wrote 183 entries for the ADB, for the most part about philologists, teachers, and scholars from somewhere between the 16th to the 19th century. He most likely picked Reland because he also was a philologist, and Hoche had no problems in including Dutch philologists, no matter if born after 1648 (see for instance his entry on Jakob Perizonius (1651-1715), a close contact of Reland). Now Braunius was neither a teacher nor a philologist in the strict sense of the word, but he was a scholar with strong philological interests pertaining to biblical Hebrew. So Hoche could have included him in principle, but he did not. I did not yet find out if any materials from Hoche have survived, but this is on the list. And will not be forgotten.
Exit Hoche, enter the second Dutch scholar
Willem Boele Sophius Boeles
If Braun was not mentioned by both Slee and Hoche, perhaps this just to be taken as a sign that he was, already at the time, quite definitely forgotten? Perhaps this is the case. But at least one 19th century Dutch author did lose a few words about him, and that is the second Dutch scholar I promised. It is Willem Boele Sophius Boeles (1832-1902) who was president of the Leeuwarden Court of Law and part-time historian, specialising in church history and history of knowledge with a local focus (sounds familiar? Yes, he and Slee might make for a good comparison couple). He wrote zero articles for the ADB, but among his many publications there is a biographical compendium of the professors of Groningen university – where Boeles himself had studied law – from 1864 which, of course (this time), features Braun as the Groningen professor he was. Boeles later wrote about the history of Franeker university also, and about some individual scholars whose memory he wanted to keep alive. Slee had done the same for the Deventer Athenaeum, and for those individual scholars whose memory he wanted to be upheld. So Boeles will be worth a closer look too, to find out more about why 19th century Dutch scholars as these referred back to their predecessors in the way they did, and why and how Johannes Braun and Adrien Reland became tangled up in this. Work to do!
Mears, William, Auction Catalogue (title page snippet) (1723)
