John Nichols, Binding directions for Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, vol. 3, 1790
Friday n° 40, July 19th, 2019
“The plan of this Number was suggested by a valuable collection of Letters that passed between Mr. R. Gale and some of the most eminent Antiquaries of his time, which had been presented by his grandson to Mr. George Allan of Darlington. This gentleman, with the indefatigable diligence which distinguishes all his pursuits, transcribed them all into three quarto volumes, and communicated them to Mr. Gough, with a wish that in some mode or other they might be made public.”[1]
John Nichols, in: Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, No. 2, part 1, General preface (1781).
When in 1781 the learned printer and editor John Nichols printed the first of three parts of Reliquiae Galeanae as the second volume of his Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, this marked a point which is seldom observed and communicated as detailed as in this case: the point where references to a certain body of information, in this case the learned members of the Gale family, are no longer a private phenomenon but are taken up by an institution.
Institutional
connections
The quote given above does in itself not convey any sense of an institution at work here: All people referred to are mentioned as individual persons without any affiliations clearly visible. By having a closer look at the matter however it becomes clear that the Society of Antiquaries served as the common denominator uniting them all.
Roger Gale (1672–1744) had been, together with his brother Samuel Gale (1682–1754) among those who re-founded the Society in 1717/18 and had been acting as its first vice-president, while Samuel had been its first treasurer (for 21 years, until 1739/40) – and it was their letters that formed the “valuable collection” reprinted by Nichols. George Allan (1736 – 1800) , who had acquired these letters, had for long carried out his antiquarian interests privately in his native county of Durham when he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1774, so that he at the time No. 2, part 1 of the Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica went off the press had been a member of that illustrious body for seven years already. Richard Gough (1735–1809), to whom he had communicated the papers, had been elected into the SAS already in 1767 and since 1771 served as its director.
Now Gough also had been a follower of the work of William Stukeley (1687–1765) since his studies at Cambridge, who had been a close friend of both Roger and Samuel Gale, had also been one of the re-founders of the Society of Antiquaries, and in 1739 had married their sister Elizabeth Gale as his second wife. Moreover, Gough was a close friend of John Nichols (1745–1826), the printer, to whose major journal, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, he contributed frequently, as well as developing editorial projects with him (such as, for instance, the Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica). This was nothing accidental also, as Nichols’s printing house had served the Society of Antiquaries as its official printer since 1736. Nichols himself was only admitted as a fellow into the Society in 1810, but throughout his career avidly pursued antiquarian interests and printed corresponding publications.
Leaving the
family circles…
The only one falling out of this raster is Roger Gale’s grandson, Henry Gale (1744–1821), who, like his father Roger Henry Gale (1710–1768), does not seem to have shared the antiquarian interests of his ancestors. When – as I detailed here recently – Roger Henry Gale sold at least some of the books his grandfather and father left him in 1759, he obviously still kept the manuscript letters of his father and uncle, which his son Henry Gale could then, at some point after his father’s death, present to George Allan. In the fourth generation counted from Thomas Gale, the first and major learned member of the family, virtually all the materials needed for references to him and his sons had left the narrow circles of family ownership and had become dispersed among institutions, collectors, and other private owners. With the family displaying no interest in frequently referring to its learned predecessors, this would now likely be the point in time at which structural forgetting would set in. From the perspective of Thomas Gale, one of my protagonists, this unfortunate event took place a good sixty years after his own death in 1702.
…and passing
into institutional channels
At this
point, the letters came – via George Allen and Richard Gough – into one of the
publications printed by John Nichols, changing the medium the information
incorporated in this body of correspondence circulated in and, at least
potentially, offering them to a wider public. The Society of Antiquaries itself
cannot be credited with having initiated this development though, as Nichols’
publication was a commercial enterprise devised by Gough and him, and not
commissioned by the corporate body as such. But it provided the necessary
platform to connect the relevant actors responsible for putting Roger and
Samuel Gale’s correspondence out in print, and it supplied them with a motive
to do so. As Nichols in 1790 put it in the General Preface to the complete
version of all three parts the 1781 issue had been the first of:
“Among the various Labours of Literary Men, there have always been certain Fragments whose Size could not secure them a general Exemption from the Wreck of Time, which their intrinsic Merit entitled them to survive; but having been gathered up by the Curious, or thrown into Miscellaneous Collections by Booksellers, they have been recalled into Existence, and by uniting together have defended themselves from Oblivion, Original Pieces have been called in to their Aid, and formed a Phalanx that might withstand every Attack from the Critic to the Cheesemonger, and contributed to the Ornament as well as Value of Libraries.”[2]
ohn Nichols, Antiquities in Lincolnshire, General Preface (1790).
Fighting Oblivion
This was exactly what Roger and Samuel Gale had aimed at in re-founding the Society of Antiquaries: fighting oblivion, and rescuing as many vestiges of bygone times as possible; in 1726 Roger Gale had written to John Clerk that in the meantime they had succeeded in that “a great many old seals, ruins, and other monuments of antiquity have been preserved from oblivion, and the danger of being intirely [sic] lost in a little time”[3], and Samuel Gale had in 1712 addressed Thomas Hearne (1678-1735) in a letter as that “[t]he Learned World is indebted to you for your sedulous Preservation of so many antient [sic] Monuments which otherwise in a little Time must have utterly perished.”[4] The remaining question is whether they achieved these goals, and if they did, for which period of time.
To which
effect?
I would doubt that the institutional framework within which these references were now made and within which information about the Gale family circulated contributed little to rescuing them from becoming structurally forgotten. The communication circuit Nichols’ publication created via the audience it targeted was larger than the family or even the Society of Antiquaries as a whole, but it still remained a limited number of persons who took an interest in such matters. The predominant media products for the circulation of reference to the Gales – Thomas Gale first and foremost – since the middle of the 18th century were dictionaries, as I already hinted at; and even within their circuits there was no escape from becoming structurally forgotten. Even if scholars would were so lucky as to have an institution to care about their memory after their death, to really preserve that memory it needed a special kind of institution, which the Society of Antiquaries unfortunately was not.
[1] Nichols, John (ed.):
Bibliotheca topographica Britannica. No II. Part I. Containing Reliquiae Galeanae;
or miscellaneous pieces by the late brothers Roger and Samuel Gale. In which
will be included their Correspondence with their learned Contemporaries,
Memoirs of their Family, and an Account of the Literary Society at Spalding.
Printed by and for J. Nichols, Printer to the Society of Antiquaries: and Sold
by All the Booksellers in Great-Britain and Ireland, London 1781, General
Preface, p. [i].
[2] Nichols, John (ed.):
Antiquities in Lincolnshire; being the third volume of the Bibliotheca
Topographica Britannica. London: Printed by and for J. Nichols, 1790, General
Preface, p. [i].
[3] Roger Gale to John Clerk, 26
April 1726, Bodleian Library MS Top Gen D 74, pp. 178–186; here p. 185.
[4] Samuel Gale to Thomas Hearne,
London 15 November 1712, Bodleian Library MS Rawl Letter 15/16 (Letters to
Thomas Hearne Vol. 15–16, Letters G–T), p. 11.
Camden’s Britannia and Anglica Normannica with manuscript additions by Thomas and Roger Gale in Thomas II Osborne’s sales catalogue for the spring of 1760
There is an update for this post!
Some of the information in this post has become outdated by later research. Please also visit this post here.
Friday n° 39, July 11th, 2019
Thomas Gale
sired Roger Gale, and unto him passed on his books as he deceased, and Roger put
them to good use, and all was well. Roger Gale sired Roger Henry Gale, and unto
him passed on his books as he deceased, and Roger Henry put them on the market,
and all was not so well anymore.
And that’s where today’s story begins. As I have already indicated in another post, Roger Gale (1672–1744) relied rather heavily on the library and notes he inherited from his father Thomas Gale, except from those volumes which Thomas Gale himself donated to Oxford and Cambridge. Roger Gale could use them very well, as they suited his own interests in Antiquarianism, which he pursued besides his political career as MP and Commissioner of the Excise and his duties as an estate proprietor in Scruton, Yorkshire. I did not know until now what became of these books when Roger Gale himself died in 1744 and passed his estate on to his son Roger Henry Gale (1710–1768), who did not share in the learned interests of his father.
Books on Sale
But ploughing diligently through heaps of auction catalogues I think I may now have assembled enough clues to bring a bit of light into the matter. For in his catalogue for the first half of 1760 the London bookseller Thomas II Osborne (c.1704–1767) advertised quite some books which were explicitly described as being heavily annotated by the hands of Thomas and/or Roger Gale:[1]
p.
12: “338 Herodotus, Gr. & Lat. cum multis addition. MSS. in margin. a
T. Gale, 1l 11s 6d Francof. 1608”
p.
27: “735 Camdeni Britannia, cum addition. MSS. in margine a Tho. Gale, 1l
1s Lond. 1607”
p.
27: “736 [Camdeni] Anglica Normannica, &c. cum multis addition. MSS. a
Roger Gale, 1l 1s Francof. 1602”
p.
27: “732 Matthaei Westmonast. Flores Histor. cum multis addition. MSS. in
margine a Viri Erud. Gale, 1l 11s 6d Francof. 1601”
p.
42: “1272 Vetus Testamentum juxta Septuaginta, Gr. cum multis additionib.
MSS. a Tho. Gale, 5l 5s Rom. 1587”
p.
51: “1570 Budaei & al. Dictionarium, Gr. & Lat. inferfol. in 4
vol. cum multis addition. MSS. per Gale, 3l 3s ib. [=Basel] 1565”
p.
51: “1593 Idem [= Gesneri Bibliotheca Universalis Tiguri 1545], 2 vol.
interfol. cum multis addition. MSS. per Tho. Gale, 1l 1s”
p.
52: “1621 Suidae Lexicon, Gr. cum multis addition. MSS. in margine a Gale,
2l 2s Basil. apud. Froben. 1544”
p.
186: “6374 Rawlinson’s English Topographer,[2]
2 vol. with MSS. Additions [by] Mr. [Roger, TW] Gale, interleaved, 1l 1s”
As these
had not been part of Osborne’s catalogues before,[3]
the sale must have taken place sometime around the second half of 1759, before
the first catalogue for 1760 went to the press, but after the second catalogue
for 1759 saw print.[4]
Now Osborne was notorious for on the one hand running the largest second-hand
book store in London, with a regular stock of some 14.000 titles, but also for
not being able to judge any of the volumes on his shelves for their content. He
nevertheless has been described as having a good intuition when it came to
valuing his stock.[5]
This lead him to label the nine volumes quoted above, all of which I take to be
coming from the library of the late Roger Gale, 17 £ 11 shilling in total, quite a heavy sum in 1760.
Books still on Sale…
Perhaps too heavy a
sum for his customers, for in 1761 he still had six of these volumes on his
list:[6]
S. 23: “586 Herodotus,
Gr. & Lat. cum multis addition. Mss. in margine, a T. Gale, 1l 11s 6d ib. [=Frankfurt] 1608”
S. 28: “741 Budaei &
ak. Dictionarium, Gr. & Lat. interfol. in 4 vol. cum multis addition. MSS.
per Gale, 3l 3s ib. [=Basel] 1565”
S. 28: “765 Idem [=Gesneri
Bibliotheca Universalis], 2 vol. interfol. cum multis addition. MSS. per Tho. Gale, 1l 1s
[Zürich 1545]”
S. 29: “794 Suidae Lexicon, Gr. cum multis addition. MSS. in margine a
Gale, 2l 2s Basil. apud Froben. 1544”
S. 31: “888 Camdeni Britannia, cum addition. MSS. in margine a Tho
Gale, 1l 1s Lond. 1607
S. 58: “1797 Vetus
Testamentum juxta Septuaginta, Gr. cum multis additionib. MSS. a Tho. Gale, 5l
5s Rom. 1587”
And,
surprisingly, Osborne now listed yet another title with manuscript annotations
by Gale.[7]
S. 26: “675 Idem
[=Platonis Opera omnia], Graece, cum var. Observat. Mss. in margine T. Gale, 2l
2s ib. [=Basel] 1534”
Moreover, the three titles which had been sold from the original list were
those featuring annotations by Roger Gale, which may indicate that Thomas
Gale’s notes did not spark so much interest amongst contemporary scholars as
had been expected:
p.
27: “736 [Camdeni] Anglica Normannica, &c. cum multis addition. MSS. a
Roger Gale, 1l 1s Francof. 1602”
p.
27: “732 Matthaei Westmonast. Flores Histor. cum multis addition. MSS. in
margine a Viri Erud. Gale, 1l 11s 6d Francof. 1601”
p.
186: “6374 Rawlinson’s English Topographer, 2 vol. with MSS. Additions [by]
Mr. [Roger, TW] Gale, interleaved, 1l 1s”
Together
these three volumes accounted for 3 £ 13 shilling, while the addition of
the annotated Plato was valued at 2 £ 2 shilling, so that Osborne still
had Gale-annotated tiles totalling exactly 16 £ in his books. Things eventually got better, though. In 1762 the
catalogue noted only three leftovers from the original list (which still
amounts to over 40% of it):[8]
S. 8: “239 Budaei & al. Dictionarium, Gr. & Lat. interfol. in
4 vol. cum multis addition. MSS. per Gale, 2l 12s 6d ib. [=Basel] 1565”
S. 19: “646 Camdeni Britannia, cum addition. MSS. in Margine a Tho.
Gale, 1l 1s Lond. 1607”
S. 44: “1380 Vetus Testamentum juxta Septuaginta, Gr. cum multis
additionib. MSS. a Tho. Gale, 4l 4s Rom. 1587
Value for Money?
Those titles together totalled only 7 £ 17 shilling now, slightly below 50% of the original list’s value, but that was due to a change in mind concerning the most heavily priced item on the list, the 1587 Septuagint with Gale’s additions. Having for two years not sold it for the originally estimated 5 £ 5 shillings, Osborne cut down the price by 20% and offered it for 4 £ 4 shilling now.
How much of a premium was accorded Gale’s annotations by Osborne can for the first time be seen directly in the 1762 catalogue, too, as it listed after n° 239, Guillaume Budé’s (1480–1540) Greek-Latin dictionary,[9] a comparable item: “240 Idem, absque addition. MSS. 10s 6d Basil. 1563”,[10] which was thought to fetch only about one fifth of that which once belonged to, and was written in by, the dean of York. Gale’s notes thus seem to have served, at least for this particular item, to quintuple its value – a bit over the top, I’d say (but obviously not worth changing, this price stayed the same). An unknown scholar’s annotations for the third copy on the list only served to raise the price by 4 shilling sixpence. A similar, but not as drastic, case is Conrad Gesner’s (1516–1565) Bibliotheca Universalis,[11] which in the 1759 catalogue was 1l 1 shilling with Gale’s additions and 10 shilling sixpence without, or half the price.
Perhaps the price cut for the Septuagint also influenced the estimate put to yet another Gale title to appear on the list in 1762, this time annotated by Roger Gale, bringing the total up to four items totalling 8 £ 2 shilling:[12]
S. 199: “7109 Knowledge of Medals, with MSS. Observations and
Additions by Roger Gale, 5s 1715”
Patterns of Sale vs. Patterns of Reference
What becomes visible here is an interesting pattern of Osborne’s in putting his annotated Gale volumes on the market, although these conclusions need to be taken as preliminary, as the evidence is a bit shaky; not all of Osborne’s catalogues have survived.[13] But from what I have seen and related above, it looks like as if Osborne had not first of all not put ‘Roger Gale, Esq, lately deceased’ or something the like on the title page of his next catalogue when he purchased the books, but had rather been content with having them encompassed by “And of several other Eminent Genlemen, lately deceased”.[14] As Thomas Gale in 1760, when the sale would begin, was dead for 58 years, and his son Roger also for 16 years already, this seems quite sensible. Their deaths would not have been fresh in the memory of the contemporaries anymore, and thus their names would probably only have drawn a very limited circle of customers. This might also have been caused by the dimensions of the sale, which I don’t know. Only the annotated volumes are easily singled out, as other volumes which might have belonged to father or son Gale are not marked in the catalogue and thus not identifiable.
But even the nine annotated volumes Osborne put on sale between 1760 and 1762 will in all likelihood not have been all that Thomas Gale had annotated and left to his son, or that Roger Gale had annotated with his own hands. Which tempts me to think that only a part of the library had been sold, perhaps to make room, and not everything, for instance no manuscript volumes. And from the adding of new items each time others had been sold, it seems that Osborne had put some of them in store, and only offered them one after the other, although I’m not really sure what the reason for this would have been. From the rather long drawn-out sales processes it does not look like as if he would have spoiled the market in releasing too many at once. For in 1762 the story was not yet at its end.
When Osborne announced that
from now on his catalogues would employ a new system to make better accessible
to his customers in 1766, two old acquaintances showed up again:[15]
S.
12: “434 [Budaei] Idem [=Constantini & al. Lexicon, Gr. Lat. 2 vol.], interfol. cum
addition. MSS. Gale, 4 vol. 2l 2s ib. [=Basel] 1565”
S. 15: “548 [Camdeni Britanniae] cum tab. geo. & addit. MSS. in
margine a J. [sic, =T.?] Gale, 1l 1s ib. [=London] 1607”
That is, if the second one, the edition of William Camden’s (1551–1623) Britannia,[16] is the same as noted in Osborne’s catalogues for the first time in 1759 as “735 Camdeni Britannia, cum addition. MSS. in margine a Tho. Gale, 1l 1s Lond. 1607”.[17] I must confess that I would rather take the “J.” in the 1766 catalogue as a misprint for “T.” than believe that the Baptist preacher and theologian John Gale (1680–1721) who never displayed any interest in historical geography had annotated a copy of the same edition of Camden’s work as his not-related namesake, the dean of York. Osborne’s catalogues were shoddy work more often than not, aiming at quick profit rather than at scholarly exactitude, and both Drs Gale were mistaken for each other sometimes, the more often the longer both were dead. Unless proven wrong by other sources, I will settle for this item to be that which I already know. Which leaves me with two of the nine Gale-annotated volumes put on sale by Thomas Osborne still being unsold six years later, one of them being the Budé dictionary which I already suspected to have been slightly overrated in accessing its price. Well, at least Osborne had managed to get rid of the Septuagint, although I don’t know how much it fetched in the end.
Remembrance,
fading
In 1759
Thomas Osborne did not think either Gale sr. nor jr. suitable as headline
figures to promote the sales catalogue for the upcoming year, although he had
just bought at least a part of their library. He did nevertheless account their
manuscript additions to some of the books he had acquired as increasing their
worth considerably, but realising this added value proved to be a quite long
drawn-out process in the course of which Osborne at least once had to correct
overly optimistic calculations. Taking these book market conjunctures as
indicative of the larger conjunctures in the scholarly community, at least for
the London of the 1760s I can say that Thomas Gale’s star had sunken, though
not yet disappeared. His son’s name obviously guaranteed a faster turnaround of
books annotated from his, Roger Gale’s, hand, although at lower overall prices
– what may be directly related to the lesser relative distance in time of
Roger, who was but 14 years dead in 1760, compared to Thomas, whose death had
befallen 58 years ago, to the catalogue’s readers. If this was the case,
though, obviously Thomas Gale’s scholarly achievements did not compensate for
the chronological distance, or only to a group of people too small to make much
of a difference. Which in turn might be taken to say something interesting
concerning the balance of different factors in social memories active in
processes of getting structurally forgotten, but this is something I’ll still
have to think about.
[1] Osborne, Thomas: A catalogue of the
libraries of that learned antiquarian Edmund Sawyer, Esq; (Late one of the
Masters of the High Court of Chancery;) And of several other Eminent Genlemen,
lately deceased; Containing many Thousand Volumes of the most approved Authors
in all Languages, Arts and Science. […] Which will begin to be sold on the
first day of January 1760, and continue selling for one year, (the lowest
Prices printed in the Catalogue, without any Abatement, and for Ready Money
only) at T. Osborne’s in Gray’s-Inn. Where may be had Money for any Library or
Parcel of Books, Prints, or Manuscripts. Catalogues may be had of the
Booksellers in all the chief Cities and noted Towns in Europe, and at the Place
of Sale. N.B. To be disposed of, some curious Manuscript Sermons of an eminent
Divine, lately deceased, which will be warranted Originals, [London],
[1759/60]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Document Number:
CW3316875388.
[2]Most likely this title: Richard Rawlinson: The english topographer: or, an historical account, (as far as can be Collected from Printed Books and Manuscripts) of all the pieces that have been written relating to the antiquities, natural history, or topographical description of any part of England. Alphabetically digested, and illustrated with the Draughts of several very Curious old seals, exactly Engraven from their respective Originals. By an impartial hand, London: printed for T. Jauncy at the Angel without Temple-Bar, 1720. The manuscript additions thus would have to be of Roger Gale’s hand, as Thomas Gale was 18 years dead when the book appeared in print.
[3] Cf. the 1758 catalogue: T.
Osborne, J. Shipton. The third part of a catalogue of the large and valuable
stock of bound books of T. Osborne and J. Shipton, (the Partnership being
amicably Dissolved) Which will be sold by auction, In the Great Room up One
Pair of Stairs, at the East End of Exeter-Change, on Monday the 6th of March,
and be continued every Evening, exactly at Six O’Clock, till Saturday, March
the 25th. The books may be viewed on Wednesday the 1st of March, and every Day
after, from Ten to Two O’Clock, till the Day of Sale. Catalogues may be had of
the Booksellers of Oxford, Cambridge, and Eton, at T. Osborne’s in Gray’s-Inn,
W. Shropshire’s Bookseller in New Bond-Street, and at the Auction-Room. Price
Six-Pence. The Fourth Part of this Catalogue, containing a curious Collection
of Books, Prints, Drawings, &c. by the most eminent Masters, will
positively begin selling on Monday, April 3d, and the following Evenings.
[London]: n.p., [1758]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Document
Number: CW116632955.
[4]This is however a bit difficult to determine exactly, as only one catalogue each from 1758 and 1759 has been accessible to me so far.
[6] Osborne, Thomas. A catalogue
for the year 1761, of the libraries of the Hon. Augustus George Egerland, The
Learned and Eminent Physician Dr. George Hepburn, of King’s Lynn in Norfolk;
Dr. Edward Hody, Physician to St. George’s Hospital; and many other Gentlemen,
lately deceased; containing many Thousand Volumes of the most Scarce and
Valuable Books, in all Languages. Great Numbers on Large Paper, bound in
Morocco and Russia Leather, and other rich Bindings. […] Which will begin to be
sold this day (the lowest Prices printed in the Catalogue, for Ready Money
only) and will continue daily selling ’till the First of January 1762. At T.
Osborne’s in Gray’s-Inn. Catalogues may be had at all the Chief Cities and
noted Towns in Europe, and at the Place of Sale. Where may be had Money for any
Library or Parcel of Books, Prints or Manuscripts, [London] [1761. Eighteenth
Century Collections Online, Gale Document Number: CW3325362744.
[8] Osborne, Thomas. The first volume of a catalogue of the libraries of the Rev. Mr. Dongworth, of Durham, Dr. Green, of Spalding, Henry Anderson, Esq; of the Temple, And many other Gentlemen, lately deceascd; Consisting of Near One Hundred Thousand Volumes, Of the most Scarce and Valuable Books,) Prints, Books of Prints, and Manuscripts, In all Languages, Arts and Sciences: Great Numbers on large Paper, most elegantly bound in the richest Bindings. Which will begin to be sold this Day (the lowest Prices printed in the Catalogue, for Ready Money only) and, for the Conveniency of Gentlemen abroad, will continue daily selling ’till the First of January 1763. At T. Osborne’s, in Gray’s Inn. Catalogues may be had at all the Chief Cities and noted Towns in Europe, and at the Place of Sale. Where may be had Money for any Library or parcel of Books, Prints or Manuscripts. The most valuable Manuscript Sermons of the late Reverend Mr. Dongworth are to be disposed of. [London]: n.p., [1762]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Document Number: CW3316649518
[9] Guillaume Budé et al.: Lexikon
Hellēnorōmaikon, Hoc est, Dictionarivm Graecolatinum : supra omnes editiones
postremo Nvnc Hoc Anno Ex Variis Et multis praestantioribus linguae Græcæ
authoribus, commentarijs, thesauris & accesionibus, non duntaxat
allegationum, sed etiam plurimarum uocum simplicium auctario locupletatum,
illustratum & emendatum, Basel: Henricpetri 1565.
[11] Conrad Gesner: Bibliotheca
vniversalis, siue catalogus omnium scriptorum locupletissimus, in tribus
linguis, Latina, Graeca et Hebraica: extantium et non extantium, ueterum et
recentiorum in hunc usque diem, doctorum et indoctorum, publicatorum et in
bibliothecis latentium, Zürich: Froschauer 1545.
[15] Osborne, Thomas. A catalogue
of a farther part of the stock of T. Osborne, Bookseller, in Gray’s-Inn. Vol.
IIId, for the year 1766. (The lowest Prices printed in the Catalogue, for ready
Money only.) Which will be selling every day (Sundays excepted) to the First of
January 1767. Containing the largest most curious and valuable Collection of
Books, in all Languages, Manuscripts, Prints, Books of Prints and Drawings,
that have been exposed to Sale for many years […] Many of the Books are on
the larger Paper, being the Libraries of the following Gentlemen, and many
others deceased, Viz. Dr. James Sherrard, and his brother the Consul at Smyrna.
The Hon. Adm. Lestock […]. Wm. Eyre, Esq; Serjeant at Law. The Hon. Gen.
Murray. Mr. Alderman Dickenson, Chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means.
The Rev. Mr. Bryan, Editor of Plutarch, at the Recommendation of Dr. Hare,
Bishop of Chichester. Dr. Monk of Walthamstow. Samuel Berkley, Esq; one of the
Benchers of the Hon. Society of Gray’s-Inn. As likewise, the Rev. Mr. Noble,
Afternoon Preacher to the said Society. […] The Catalogue is made in a New
Method, so that any Person, at any Time, may find out any Book, &c., they
may want. […] Vol. 3. [London], [1766]. Eighteenth Century Collections
Online, Gale Document Number: CW3306652960.
[16] William Camden: Britannia Sive
Florentissimorum Regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, Et Insularum adiacentium
ex intima antiquitate Chorographica descriptio, London: Bishop & Norton
1607.
Two Samaritan coins from the collection of Jacob de Wilde, depicted by Maria de Wilde in: Adriaan Reland, Dissertatio altera de Inscriptione Nummorum quorundam Samaritanorum, Utrecht: Thomas Appels 1704.
Friday n° 26, April 5th, 2019
I have
touched upon many topics in this blog so far, but gender has not been one of them
yet. Not because gender does not play a role in here but because it is – alas –
very hard to tackle which role precisely given the circumstances of my project.
How to find women?
First of
all, it suffers from the near-universal male bias in intellectual history,
history of knowledge, and history of science. Although there have been many
attempts to break this male gaze and to also focus on the roles of women in
academia for the past centuries, these studies are still isolated in so far as
they highlight particular individuals – and because none of these plays into
the circles of my protagonists, as far as I can see at the moment, I am a bit
lost there. All I can do is try to check my data for the more general patterns
of including women and their contributions into academic information circulation.
But as the history of knowledge and scholarship in the 18th, 19th
and early 20th centuries, which is where most of my sources and data
come from, most of the time just silently passed over female contributions of
all kinds, I only very rarely am able to substantiate the scattered findings in
my sources with more specific information which would point me to further lanes
of inquiry.
How to deal with those women found?
Second, there
are only scattered findings: my protagonists themselves have left only few
traces of their female connections, most of them pertaining to their family
life. This was not only their fault. Much of it is due to the ways in which the
source materials available today were produced, traded, and ultimately kept, which
were quite unconducive to transmit materials connected to women. The surviving
letters of all of my protagonists were not directly filed into institutional
archives at their death – which is where they are kept today -, but rather
passed on privately by inheritance and sale before being donated to or bought
by the institutions in possession of them now. While inheritance processes would
be favourable to conserving materials connected to women for family reasons, generally
spoken they are less favourable to preserve materials connected to women
outside of domestic affairs. One might well keep letters and documents dealing
with one’s female ancestors or relations, but might accord less value to such
materials dealing with female artists, or perhaps even with women engaging in
scholarly pursuits. The selections involved in selling the papers of a dead
scholar would, on the other hand, be less favourable to materials ‘only’
connected to his (as my protagonists are all male) domestic affairs and
relations, as they were for long, and sadly still are sometimes today,
considered of minor if any importance to scholarly matters. Autograph
collectors would prize letters from famous scholars to other famous scholars
but in general be less interested in those materials dealing with less
prominent figures, which in their eyes normally applied to women. In both
processes, inheritance and sale, some source materials which I would really
like to have at hand to provide me with information about the gender dimension
in my protagonist’s academic world are likely to have been deselected from
being passed on, and as both processes happened in the transmission of these
materials, sometimes more than once, this has geared the sources available into
a perspective which is hard to overcome.
With official
documents it is quite the same; the female contacts figure in these most
prominently in domestic matters (contexts such as birth, death, marriage,
inheritance) if they are in them at all. And not all documents of such interest
are still available.
From 1.838 to 74
But all
these restrictions and biased perspectives aside, what do I have got concerning
women so far? If I take a look at my database, the figures are not very
encouraging: Of 1838 persons in there (as of today), only 74 are female, or a meagre
4 %. Of these 12 modern-day female scientists have to be deducted, leaving me
with 62 women mentioned in my sources.
From 74 to
30
If I now also
deduce all those who only entered as historical figures, that is, wifes,
mothers or sisters of scholars from generations preceding my protagonists, I am
left with 30 women for which I recorded anything between 1650 and 1750. Compared
to 1128 men for which I have anything recorded for that period, the figure
dwindles down to 2.6 %.
This
imbalance is of course to be lamented from a point of view concentrating on historical
justice. It is quite clear that these numbers are likely not to be accurate in
terms of intellectual contributions. Those case studies that we have indicate
that women could be involved in academic intellectual production in various roles,
at almost each stage of the process, and that their contributions are not to be
seen as negligible. There surely is a lot of unacknowledged female labour that
went into the publications and discussions featuring my protagonists. But my
interest in this particular case of research is not so much in discovering or
restoring such female contributions, although this would be a fascinating topic
in itself. As I am trying to make sense of processes of structural forgetting
here, I take these heavily gender-biased data as a fact in its own sense, and a
noteworthy one at that.
Because I
have not consciously tried to avoid women in my research, the reason that their
presence in the database is so low is not due to my bias but to the source
material’s bias. The co-citation approach I am pursuing means that I collect
references to persons who are not my protagonists based on three criteria:
these persons are referred to on the
same page as one of my protagonists and/or one of his publications
these persons have contributed to a
publication cited on the same page as one of my protagonists and/or one of his
publications
these persons are necessary to
construct the relationships between other persons in the database.
From 30 to
3
The bias in the database now originates from the fact that women are, throughout my sources, almost completely blended out from categories 1) and 2). This results in most women who are in database being entered by way of category 3), that is, they are needed – as wifes, mothers, or sisters – to complete family relations between persons from categories 1) and 2). And while I am convinced that such relations played a vital role in the social formation of early modern academia, it is very difficult to reconstruct them without recourse to primal source material (if it exists), as secondary literature has much too often been silent about kinship ties of academics, too. And if they are acknowledged, this is seldom done in the form of giving concrete references to individual women, such as names, birth and death dates and other information which would come in handy for my purposes, but most often in the form of “X, who was married to the daughter of Y, …”.
So if I now
again deduce all women which only are referenced in my database via kinship
ties from the 30 women left for the century between 1650 and 1750, I am down to
three.
From 3 to 2
The three women who are actually being co-cited with my protagonists in my sources upon closer inspection narrow down to two, because one is the formidable and inescapable Madame Dacier (Anne Dacier, née Le Fèvre, 1654-1720). This is not to belittle her considerable achievements but shall only be taken to mean that she was part and parcel of the discourse about the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, and it was in that context that she was co-cited together with Thomas Gale and 53 other scholars in the October 1734 issue of the Journal des Savants (see here).[1] This rather heavy case of name-dropping does not serve to indicate any deeper connection between Dacier and Gale but rather testifies to both being part of the same epistemic community, in this case of the Anciens party. As this was a rather large community, shared membership only points to some shared assumptions and thus to a purely topical relation.
With Anne Dacier thus deducted, only two women remain who are mentioned in a closer kind of connection to one of my protagonists. These two ladies are Maria de Wilde (1682-1729) from Amsterdam and Anna Waser (1678-1714) from Zürich. Both are not only mentioned in connection to the same of my protagonists, Adriaan Reland (who seems to become kind of inevitable within this project, too), but also by the same source: The June 1705 issue of the Acta Eruditorum (see here). The references were part of the review of Reland’s second treatise on the coins of the ancient Samaritans, the Dissertatio altera de Nummorum quorundam Samaritanorum of 1704 (see here for the whole review).[2] In fact, they were both mentioned together in the closing lines of the review:
“That those [coins] of Reland’s the most excellent maiden, Maria de Wilde, from her father’s[3] collection most elegantly depicted, as Anna Waser, great-great-grandchild of Caspar Waser[4], this posthumously most laudable man, those of Ott;[5] therefore our Reland has finished his little work with two poems in praise of de Wilde’s very excellent artworks, and what more could be remembered in Ott’s letter, will be set aside for another time and leisure.”
Acta Eruditorum 34, 06/1705, pp. 284-285.
Two Samaritan coins from the collection of Johann Rudolf Waser depicted by Anna Waser, in: Adriaan Reland, Dissertatio altera de Inscriptione Nummorum quorundam Samaritanorum, Utrecht: Thomas Appels 1704.
A familiar pattern…
The pattern visible here is a familiar one. Both “the most excellent maiden” Maria de Wilde and her obviously as praiseworthy fellow female Anna Waser contributed the engravings for Reland’s dissertation and Ott’s reply to it. Both were daughters of well-connected men in their respective communities: Jacob de Wilde, a collector of arts and antiquities of international renown, and Johann Rudolf Waser, city official and chief warden of Zürich’s Grossmünsterstift. Both excelled in painting and drawing and were given a good education in these crafts, and through their father’s contacts were introduced to scholars who then utilized their services for making their arguments. Although both of them were close contemporaries of Reland – Anna Waser was two years younger, and Maria de Wilde six years – they served as illustrators at a time when Reland had already advanced to a professorial post in Utrecht. This compares well to the biographies of other scholarly active women of the time, the most prominent example surely being Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Unlike Merian, Maria de Wilde ceased publishing with her marriage in 1710; while Anna Waser never married and advanced up to the post of court paintress to the count of Solms-Braunfels for three years, 1700-1702, before returning to Zürich where she quit painting around 1708 for unclear reasons.
…and an all-too familiar conclusion
Regardless of their achievements, apart from one scattered reference I have been able to find so far their activities were simply glossed over by contemporary academic publications which were written by men for men. A prime factor for being removed from circulation and thus becoming structurally forgotten obviously was gender. If you were a woman, your chances to be forgotten very soon were 25 times higher than that of a random male scholar of your age bracket.
Philip Sydenham to Thomas Hearne, Brympton St Every, 23 May [1725?] (Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters 15, f. 473-474)
Friday N° 24, March 22nd, 2019
I have been writing about the entanglements between lexicographical biographic memoralization and national ideas in my last post and had originally announced going further in this direction only in next week’s post. As I was in Oxford for archival research at the Bodleian library to consult correspondences I had not awaited to find anything in there fitting this thread of investigation of my sources. But sometimes one’s in for a bit of a surprise, and so I might try to connect some of my findings in these letters to the theme of national framings of knowledge.
Last week I
already observed that British dictionaries and encyclopaedias where going for
the national label early in the 19th century. This of course
provokes the question whether this was a new development, coming out of the
blue, or something which might be connected to longer-running
developments.
The introductory
clipping from Philip Sydenham’s (c.1676-1739) letter to Thomas Hearne
(1678-1735) points in the latter direction. In his letter, Sydenham complements
Hearne to his edition of the itinerary of John Leland (c.1506-552);[1]
the full passage runs:
“I hope y[ou]r publick Services for ye Honor & good of this Nation will receive publick approbation. this will be one m[anu]s[cript] to preserve & recover our old Noble Constitution many very valuable M[anu]s[cript]s deserv ye publick reading & encouragment & I hope y[ou] will proceed. ye more ancient ye more brave & Noble.”[2]
Sydenham
thus entangled the antiquarian pursuits of Hearne’s, who was an avid editor of
medieval manuscripts besides being librarian to the Bodleian library, with the
national “Honor” in two ways, on the one hand by the scholarly value of his
results and their potential of contributing to a better “publick” understanding
of the nation’s past, and on the other hand by linking this more directly to
the conditions for being a nation, to “our old Noble Constitution” to be
retrieved this way. While this way of searching the origin and the primordial
good laws of a community in the past was entirely in keeping with early modern
conceptions of how time and historical research operated, the appeal to “publick
approbation […] reading & encouragment” is somewhat more unusual and
already seems to point to later developments in constructing national
identities on a larger scale.
But
Sydenham had more to offer still. In the next paragraph, he directly linked
Hearne’s other professional activities, that as a librarian, both to the
advancement of learning in general – as was a fairly common topos – and – a
less common inflection –, to national honour also:
“I am glad [that] y[ou]r Library (=the Bodleian) is daily improving. it is so much for ye Honor of ye Nation, & interest of Learning.”[3]
The three
intersecting topoi of interest here, from the perspective of my project, are 1)
‘Fighting Oblivion’, 2) ‘Advancement of Learning’, and 3) ‘National Glory’. To
see how this affects my protagonists, of whom there has been no mention yet in
this post, I’ll have to take you to another of Hearne’s editions, the
development of which was indeed coupled to the Leland volumes Sydenham already
praised.
In 1716, Roger Gale (1672-1744), eldest son of Thomas Gale, approached Thomas Hearne in the same way as Sydenham would do nine years later, by complementing him on his just published Leland edition. The real aim of the letter was something else, though. Gale wanted to secure Hearne’s editorship for a manuscript in his possession, the Scotichronicon of John of Fordun (or Ffordun, c.1320-c.1386), which already had been partly edited by his father.[4] Hearne willingly accepted Gale’s offer of providing him with the manuscript and every assistance necessary for the edition and publication of the chronicle.[5] Both entered a long-drawn out process of working on the edition in which Roger Gale was constantly checking on Hearne to ensure the progress of the work, to provide him with colligations from other manuscripts, and helping him to gain enough subscribers for publication, he himself taking 20 copies.[6] When in 1722 the Fordun edition finally went to the press,[7] the Gale family was highly pleased with the result.
First, it
represented a success in the endeavours of both Roger and his younger brother Samuel
Gale, who both had been founding members of the Society of Antiquaries in 1718,
in fighting oblivion. To do so represented a recurrent thread in their
discussions of all fields of research they were actively engaged in, and print
seemed a convenient way of doing it. When on February 25th, 1723, Samuel
Gale held a speech before the Society of Lincoln, he spoke about the benefits
of engraving:
“Give me Leave, Gentlemen, to Congratulate ye latter age on this Noble Invention, this Beneficial Discovery, and which alone seems to surpass all the great Things the Ancients ever did. Since eben the mouldring Fragments of theire proudest Structures, ye Temples of ye Gods, ye Statues of ye Heroes, ye Hippodromes ye Amphitheatres the Triumphal Arches, Aquaeducts, Military Ways, Baths, Colums, Medals, and Inscriptions, which yet, feebly beare up against ye power of corroding Time: even these Remaines I say of Athens, Corinth, and of Rome can be, and are now, only by this diffusive Art, triumphantly rescu’d from that total Havock, ye everlasting oblivion: Which a few more revolving years must inevitably bring on, and that of the Poet, then be too sadly verified: etiam periere Ruinae.”[8]
In 1726,
Roger Gale took recourse to almost the same words in a letter to John Clerk to
explain the purpose of the Society of Antiquaries, only with less rhetorical flourish:
“Besides the ½ guinea payd upon admission, one shilling is deposited every month by each member, and this money has been hitherto expended in buying a few books, but more in drawing and engraving, whereby a great many old seals, ruins, and other monuments of antiquity have been preserved from oblivion, and the danger of being intirely lost in a little time.”[9]
Second, it was connected to the advancement of
learning, which Samuel Gale not only connected to printing, but also to the
scholars who had been paragons of learning. At the end of his speech, he made
the connection quite explicit and directed it not only to the memory of the
past, but also to the future.
“These [engravers] are They who by an uncommon Genius have almost outdone Nature, and have given Life & Spirit to Good Men after Death, Who is there yet Beholds ye Aspects of the Great & Learned, and Burns not with secret Æmulation to imitate their High Example.”[10]
And this connection might have been the driving force behind Roger Gale playing the driving force behind putting the manuscript inherited and already partly edited by his father to the press through Thomas Hearne although it costed him time, labour, and money. Samuel Gale put this into words in his letter congratulating Hearne on finishing the Fordun edition, thanking him because:
“Ye Hon[o]r You have done my Father, in mentioning him so often in It, is a great Satisfaction to Me in particular […].”[11]
And thus the history of knowledge, scholarly biographies, and – following Philip Sydenham – national honour which could be derived from both seem to have become entangled in Britain already in the early 18th century. The question is only to what end?
[1] Thomas Hearne (ed.): Joannis
Lelandi antiquarii de rebus Britannicis collectanea ; Ex autographis descripsit
ediditque Tho. Hearnius,
6 vol., Oxford: Sheldon Theater 1715.
[2] Philipp Sydenham to Thomas
Hearne, Brympton St Every 23 May [1725?], Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters
15, f. 473. Orthography as in the original, ligatures in [].
[4] Roger Gale to Thomas Hearne,
London 24 July 1716, Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters 6, N° 14a, f. 311–312.
[5] Thomas Hearne to Roger Gale,
[Oxford 1716 – Concept, no dates], Bodleian Library, MS Rawls letters 6, N°
15a, f. 313–314.
[6] Roger Gale to Thomas Hearne,
London, 20 February 1722, MS Rawls letters 6, N° 35a, f. 355–357.
[7] Thomas Hearne (ed.): Johannis de Fordun Scotichronicon genuinum, una cum ejusdem
supplemento ac continuatione. E codicibus Mss. eruit ediditque Tho. Hearnius,
Oxford: Sheldon Theater 1722.
[8] Samuel Gale, Oratio Habita
coram Societate Lincolniensi vicesimo quarto Die Februarii Anno C. 1723,
Bodleian Library, MS Eng Misc E 147, f. 61, r.
[9] Roger Gale to John Clerk, [no
place] 26 April 1726, Bodleian Library, MS Top Gen d 74, pp. 178–186; p. 184.
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.
Monday, January 28th, 2019, for Friday No. 17, January 25th, 2019
Apologies first: This post took me a little longer than usual, I’m two and a half days late now. This is due to what I wanted to present here: The first two completed data sets for the tracking of processes of forgetting in the humanities from my project. And finishing the second one took me about 18 hours longer than I had planned. You never know what’s in the sources beforehand…
Data Sets
But now these two sets are done and ready to be presented – at least, a rough oversight of the yields of these collections. What I have done here is going through two journals, the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Savants, from 1700 until 1800 (well, in the case of the Journal des Savants until 1792). I went through two digitized Hathi Trust collections to be able to use fulltext search, so for everyone who’d like to check on my results, here you go: Journal des Savantsand Philosophical Transactions. The few missing issues were added using other similar Hathi Trust collections. I entered all issues bearing references to my four protagonists into my NodeGoat database, identified all persons co-cited with my protagonists in these instances as good as possible, and also all publications cited therein which gave me lists like these here.
December issue of the Journal des Savants, 1782, Reference to Eusèbe Renaudot and co-citations
To fully explore these datasets will take me some time still, but I do already have some preliminary findings to share.
First: Comparability
There is an obvious imbalance between the two journals regarding coverage of my protagonists. The Journal des Savants returned 117 issues with matches, while the Philosophical Transactions returned 8. Yet this is obviously caused by their asymmetric schedules: While the Journal des Savants appeared weekly from the start and monthly later on, the Philosophical Transactions appeared once a year, or once every two years. So to make for a better comparison, the Philosophical Transactions issues cover 12 years between 1744 and 1771, while the Journal des Savants issues cover 54 years between 1702 und 1789. And while the Journal des Savants data set includes about 4,5 times as much issue material over time, these individual issues are richer in both references and co-citations than the Philosophical Transactions issues are, although the exact factor still has to be determined. Overall, the Journal des Savants was definitely much more interested in the results of my protagonists over time than the Philosophical Transactions ever were. Not that much of a surprise, one might say, given that both journals were active in different areas of knowledge production and that the Philosophical Transactions were much more interested in natural philosophy than in what we would today call humanities’ research (as I already discussed some time ago). So please keep this in mind for the following visualisations.
Second: Visualisations!
The combined datasets in full extensions: The complete network of references from 1702 until 1789. Directly visible: Three of my protagonists, Thomas Gale (bottom left quadrant), Adrien Reland (bottom right quadrant), and Eusèbe Renaudot (middle of top half) do have their quite separate circles of references with a shared overlap in the middle. The full extension of the Journal des Savants dataset: The complete reference network from 1702 until 1789. Directly visible is a much weaker position of Thomas Gale (top right quadrant), and an enhanced position of Eusèbe Renaudot (bottom left quadrant). Full extension of the Philosophical Transactions dataset. Directly visible is that it is much smaller, contains less references to authors (therefore smaller red circles), and that there is no connection between a shared reference network of Thomas Gale and Adrien Reland on the left and a much smaller Eusèbe Renaudot network on the right hand.
Moving pictures!
A diachronic visualisation of the combined datasets in (something like) moving ten-year-averages for the time in which they overlap, 1740 until 1779. The Journal des Savants dataset in simple ten-year-averages from 1702 until 1789. The most interesting thing is that this dataset allows you to directly see the falling apart of a once shared reference network from the 1760s onwards. As this is precisely what I want to track and show in this project, I take this result for a preliminary proof of concept: It actually seems to work, if only within a certain framework as I already had supposed (cf. the combined dataset video where this does not become apparent). And, last but not least, the ten-year-average visualisation of the Philosophical Transactions dataset also, which directly allows to see the huge differences between both journals regarding my protagonists.
To preliminary conclude
This rather fast overview over my first two completed data sets conveys two messages, I think: First of all that a rather more thorough exploration in terms of statistics and metrics is necessary to put my preliminary findings on a firmer basis, and second, that – and these are my preliminary findings for today – my system and framework actually does seem to work. While this is great, it poses a lot of new questions as to the framing: Can both data sets be acutally merged together as I did in the combined visualisations? Or are they so different that such combinations are of no use? And if they are, where do these differences come from? Different perspectives on science? National and/or confessional framings, as might be indicated by the very different weights of the English and Anglican Cleric Thomas Gale and of the French and Catholic Cleric Eusèbe Renaudot in both sets? Or something in between, or something third?
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.
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.
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!
„So really the notion of forgetting on a societal scale is to suggest two things: first, that the collective representations held knowledge about the matter in general for all competent participants; and second, that the knowledge was progressively lost.“[1]
Paul Connerton: How Modernity Forgets, p. 47
Is there something like ‚Structural Forgetting‘? And if there is: what’s it like? People forget; you all know the feeling. But do societies forget?
The question if a community can be affected by the same phenomenon as an individual is first of all one of language. The metaphor is engaging and easily applied; but is it apt? If it is taken to indicate, albeit implicitly, a biologist similarity between communities and individuals and to construct communities as meta-organisms, it would be misleading.[2] The only way to make the association functional is to bring it to a functional level. Structural forgetting will only provide a useful analytical term if a functional analogy between individual human beings and communities in regard to storing information and providing for its disposability is proposed. Such a “prosthetic memory”[3] is long established and intuitively plausible. Communities do have mechanisms to store information that is not needed at the moment and to retrieve it again if needed. If such information becomes inaccessible, the process is analogous to individual forgetting.
But this is not yet a very distinct concept. How to craft this into an analytically useful tool?
Information circulation: any piece of information X circulates by being referenced
As individuals, we know that we have forgotten something when we become aware that there once was something we knew which is not accessible to us at the moment, wherever it may be. I know I once learned my Latin vocabulary, but more often than not I have to look up the words now. And as I do, I remember again. If I however would be charged with using them frequently – having a large stack of Latin sources on my desk to go through – they would stick again after a while. From a functional point of view, the heart of the matter seems to be the frequency with which information is recalled, or circulated. For each piece of information X such a frequency could, in theory, be established – if I cared to count me looking up a Latin phrase, for example.
Continuous referencing to any piece of information X: X is remembered
And this is no different from the situation communities are presented with. Information that is often recalled, which means that it is in circulation through media by being referenced, is present, is easily accessible – or, is structurally ‘remembered’. Elena Esposito has proposed a similar reading of Niklas Luhmann when she argued that remembrance equals a recursiveness of operations which holds pieces of information present through repetition. Repetition produces redundancy, and redundant information is what is remembered by the system.[4] Without going into systems theory now, let’s move on to the practical problems.
If remembering is a function of information frequency, forgetting can be rephrased as a function of information frequency, too – one that indicates X to be so infrequently referenced that its status changes from ‘present’ to ‘absent’ information. “Forgetting” is more adequately phrased as a kind of threshold then: If the frequency with which X is referenced is lower than Z, X is forgotten.[5] Oliver Dimbath has advanced the concept of “information half-life” in this context: Once the frequency of X being referenced drops to half of peak level, it is forgotten.[6] For any historiographical inquiry, this will be impossible to establish if not framed very carefully to certain regions, time spans, media, and groups – and even then be fraught with the imponderabilities of source loss.
Information circulation is complex: how to frame it?
Intermittant referencing pattern: X is forgotten
I would thus like to propose another criterion for labelling X as forgotten: X is (structurally) forgotten if the pattern of references to X becomes intermittent. That is, if we see a pattern of alternating phases of no references to X and X being referenced (no matter how the frequency within such phases is), X is only occasionally recalled and not readily present.
While this solves the problem of quantifying frequencies, it admittedly does not do away with the framing problem. How any piece of information X is referred to is dependent on the context in which this happens, and circulation of information is only a meaningful term if we can establish a circuit in which this happens. Steven Shapin already brought this up more than twenty years ago:
“Society – including the specialist societies of scientists – might properly be regarded as a distribution of knowledge, just as the very idea of knowledge depended upon the social relations of knowers.”[7]
So framing needs to be the next step. After having discussed about structural forgetting, of course!
[1] Connerton, Paul (2013): How modernity forgets. 3rd printing. Cambridge (UK), New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 47.
[2] Cf. Assmann, Aleida (2004): Vergessene Texte: Zur Einführung. In: Aleida Assmann und Michael C. Frank (Hg.): Vergessene Texte. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz (Texte zur Weltliteratur, 5), pp. 9 22; p. 15.
[3] Olick, Jeffrey K. (1999): Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. In: Sociological Theory 17 (3), pp. 333–348; p. 342.
[4] Esposito, Elena (2002): Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. Aus dem Italienischen von Alessandra Corti. Mit einem Nachwort von Jan Assmann. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, p. 24; similiar observations in Berger, Peter L.; Luckmann, Thomas (2010): Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit. Eine Theorie der Wissenssoziologie. 23rd printing. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, p. 166.
[5] Cf. Werber, Niels (2004): Vergessen / Erinnern. Die andere Seite der Gedächtniskunst. In: Günter Butzer und Manuela Günter (ed.): Kulturelles Vergessen–Medien, Rituale, Orte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Formen der Erinnerung, vol. 21), pp. 81–98; p. 84; and Groebner, Valentin (2014): Wissenschaftssprache digital. Die Zukunft von gestern. Paderborn: Konstanz University Press (Essay [KUP]), p. 103.
[6] Dimbath, Oliver (2014): Oblivionismus. Vergessen und Vergesslichkeit in der modernen Wissenschaft. Konstanz: UVK (Soziologie), p. 252.
[7] Shapin, Steven (1995): Here and Everywhere. Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. In: Annual Review of Sociology 21, pp. 289–321; p. 302.