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02A - Concepts in Research
Ellerman, Evelyn, Relating Theory to Practice in Colonial Book Culture
Any theoretical and historical construction of indigenous writing in colonial situations must account for the contexts and actions of all those concerned in that writing, not just those of the writers themselves. It must examine how such variables as personal and professional motivation, opportunity, and choice; models, influences, and interventions, whether direct, or indirect; educational, familial, and experiential background; and existing cultural and economic infrastructure affect what people do and how successful they are in doing it. If such a framework is to have any validity for the history of book culture, it must therefore be based on detailed descriptions of individual colonial situations, and be expressed without value judgements. This is especially the case when considering the key roles played in the genesis of indigenous literatures by colonial administrations, missionaries, colonial universities, and metropolitan literatures.
This paper presents part of such a framework. It outlines factors to consider when discussing the impetus to indigenous literary production. What prompts the choice to write at all? What prepares, enables, or encourages the writers? What hinders or supports the process? Only when we consider the full range of actors, actions, and the contexts that underpin literary innovation during colonialism, do we begin to understand colonial book history. In order to clothe these proffered theoretical bones I shall focus, during the presentation, on examples taken from English-language indigenous literatures of the South Pacific region and on the post-war period. However, I shall make frequent mention of other colonial settings in which the framework can be applied.
Black, Fiona A.,
Geographies of the Book Revisited: Frameworks for Analyses
The context of geographic space is critical in human interactions with cultural and technological environments. “Geographies of the book” form an increasingly visible component within book history scholarship. However, to date, the majority of research in this area has consisted of case studies. While these can be valuable, there has been no substantial theoretical discussion of frameworks for geographic analysis since the author’s discussion of geographic information systems (GIS) at SHARP 1997, published with two colleagues in the first volume of Book History. Since then, the author, and other colleagues involved in the History of the Book in Canada project, has made extensive explorations in spatial analysis using tens of thousands of records, developed from archival evidence, relating to members of the book and allied trades within the context of their cultural, religious and economic spheres. Reflecting on this experience, the author now considers the question: How might we further engage the geography of the book in a way that forms a meaningful contribution to the discipline of book history at a theoretical as well as at a practical level? The paper examines the culture of print from several spatial perspectives, providing examples from research on Canada, a nation moving from colonial to postcolonial status in the 19th century. Factors at the confluence of business history, demography, and print culture are analysed. The paper contributes new knowledge based on sustained historical research, and custom-designed databases. It discusses the wider implications of spatial analysis by exploring a variety of frameworks that help conceptualize “geographies of the book”.
Kallendorf, Craig W.,
Virgil in Print: Production, Distribution, Consumption, Power
Although this paper makes use of enumerative and analytical bibliography, it will primariy interest scholars who trace the connections between the history of the book and cultural history in general. Using the early printed editions of the Roman poet Virgil up to ca. 1850, I shall argue that the production, distribution, and consumption of this newly enlarged corpus of books provides a material basis on which to analyze the way in which power was both constructed and challenged in early modern Europe.
I refer to the corpus of books under analysis here as 'newly enlarged' because I have been able, through traditional bibliographical research and access to new computerized data bases, almost to double the number of editions recorded in Giuliano Mambelli's Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane (Florence, 1954). I shall summarize what I have found here in table form, but I am more interested in analyzing how misapprehensions about production, for example, lead to confusion about consumption: the gross underreporting of 18th century French editions in Mambelli, for example, obscures one of the key differences between the classicism of German elites, whose affinity for Greek is reflected in relatively fewer editions of Virgil, and that of the French, which draws much of its distinctive character from the influence of Virgil. Substantial new information is also available now about the distribution of these early printed books. Using this information, I shall trace how the movement of this form of cultural capital, especially between eastern and western Europe, both constitutes and reflects the realities of economic, political, and intellectual power. Then I shall move from production and distribution to consumption, arguing that the commentary of Charles de la Rue (1643-1725), for example, was printed dozens of times over several generations throughout Europe because it was easily appropriated by the governments of the Ancien Régime, while that of Thomas Cooke (1703-1756) was printed only twice because its lack of sympathy for Aeneas and Augustus made it threatening to the powers that defined themselves as the heirs of imperial Rome. The presentation is designed to provide specific information about how books anchor one author into early modern cultural history, but it is also designed to provide a paradigm for cultural materialism that can be transferred to other times and places.
02B - Japanese Print Culture as a Lens to Understanding Japan-US Relations, 1919-1952
Atsuhiko, Wada, Acquiring books from Occupied Japan: Examining Collection Building Efforts of North American University Libraries, 1945-1952
The aim of this paper is to clarify the activities of American universities in acquiring Japanese books from occupied Japan (1945-1952). Previous studies about the flow of books between Japan and the US have mainly focused on federal activities, like the Washington Documentation Center, or the activities of the occupation forces, such as gathering books for censorship. However there is little research about how several universities individually tried to acquire books from occupied Japan. This paper focuses on Stanford University (the Hoover Institute) and the University of Michigan, which both established agents in occupied Japan, as well as looking at other universities' unique programs to build up Japanese collections during this time period. This paper will also introduce some of the people and organizations behind these activities on both Japanese and American sides – as well as their motivations in this complicated love-hate relationship with the Japanese book trade.
Wertheimer, Andrew, Japanese Language Reading in America's Concentration Camps, 1942-1946: Reflections on Reading from "How to Raise Goats" to Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" in Five Bunko
During World War II the United States government sent all (nearly 120,000) ethnic Japanese living in the West Coast states of California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona into concentration camps. Most of the attention has been given to the two-thirds of detainees who were American-born citizens, but this paper is part of the first study to examine the reading interest of the immigrant generation as well as the Kibei (second-generation Japanese Americans who spent time in prewar Japan). This paper relates the story of how their Japanese language books were confiscated, censored, released, traded, sold, and some collected in “camp” libraries. The paper then asks what did they read, and tries to contextualize and deconstruct Japanese American reading interests based on literary tastes of Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras Japan, as well as their American experiences.
Asato, Noriko, Washington's Japanese Reader and the Shaping of Japanese American Identity, 1919-1927
In 1921, Japanese immigrants in Washington State published a series of textbooks to teach their native language to their children. This was the first set of Japanese language textbooks created in the contiguous United States. They were concrete expressions of the immigrants' views of America and Japan. Japanese language schools in America beforehand had used textbooks created by the Japanese Ministry of Education (for Japanese citizens). Washington's textbooks were created in response to the Americanization movement that followed World War I and the particular attack on Japanese language schools by activists who wanted to stop Japanese immigration and also limit the rights of Japanese Americans. This paper analyzes these textbooks to explore what aspects of Japanese heritage, and American citizenship the Issei wanted to convey to their offspring. She also explores how the books were printed and disseminated, as well as their impact on Japanese American identity.
02C - Women as Editors, Writers, Scholars 17th-21st Century
We are proposing a panel exploring the challenges and discoveries involved in central aspects of editing when women are engaged with early modern literature as editors, writers, or scholars: when, for example, scholars edit the works of early modern women writers; or when scholars investigate the history of the first generations of women scholars and editors of this period.
Our goals include the delivery of papers that respond to the following sets of questions and that, we hope, will stimulate discussion on the same or related topics.
Are there gender differences in how the work of women writers is stored, accessed, locatable; What particular research and editing skills are being developed to address these differences; What advice do we have for the next generation of editors of women writers of the early modern period?
Editing Decisions: How have gender differences (of both the writer and the editor) affected decisions about copy text, modernizing, what to include in an introduction; Does Jerome McGann's argument that editors should give less attention to the "author's final intentions" and more to the "historically developing institutions of literary production" suggest new contexts for situating "new" (usually women) writers; How have editing practices developed for editing Shakespeare served when editing women writers of the early modern period? Disseminating edited texts: How is locating a publisher affected by gender difference (of both writer and editor); What kinds of requests, corrections, additions are being asked by publishers of women's writing and by women editors; What kinds of marketing approach are successful; What kind of audience do publishers seek? The engendering of the community of scholars of early modern literature: what was the relationship between the official, academic institutions and the non-affiliated (independent) female scholar; what was the benefit accrued to male and female scholars and authors from female editing?
Hurley, Ann, The Challenge of Editing Without an Author in Working with Two Plays by Elizabeth Polwhele
I am currently involved in editing two mid-17th century plays by the female playwright Elizabeth Polwhele, about whom we know absolutely nothing. Hence writing an introduction to these plays poses a particular challenge, especially given the traditional emphasis on the author’s biography, literary background and possible intentions that are the usual stuff of such supplementary material. I quite concur with critics who argue that the editing practices developed by an esteemed generation of editors to account for Shakespeare’s texts are not always transferable to the work of other early modern writers; Polwhele’s plays are a case in point.
The two plays, a tragedy, The faithful virgins, and a comedy, The Frolicks, or the lawyer cheated, were written early in the Restoration and exist in manuscript. One was printed by Cornell in the 1970s, is no longer in print, and handled the author question with a series of intriguing biographical conjectures but reached no certainty and did not apply that reasoning to an understanding of the text. By concentrating on some of the material properties of the manuscripts, rather than on the, in this case missing, biographical author, and particularly by applying insights provided by some of the ancillary material that Polwhele includes (a dedicatory letter and implied reference to the actress Margaret Hughes), I hope to show that attention to the developing institutions of literary production, and especially to Polwele’s astute awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of gender can supply useful access to these plays.
For example, Polwhele entrusts the second of her two plays to a powerful male figure, Prince Rupert, a relative of the Stuart court. While she does not say so explicitly, it is clear that female power is also at play as the manuscript of that play appears to have belonged at one time to the family of Margaret Hughes, Prince Rupert’s mistress and one the first female actresses to appear on the Restoration stage. Moreover, the dedicatory letter appended to that play quite clearly offers clues as to how to market the manuscript. There is also evidence that Polwhele was more knowledgeable about the production and performance of her plays than she chooses to disclose. Finally, contextualizing this material in the gendered practices of other female playwrights of the early Restoration also allows me to demonstrate that when the author function is removed, other equally intriguing insights into early modern play writing can indeed emerge.
Gibson, Jonathan (co-author Wright, Gillian), Early Modern Women in Manuscript: Editors, Publishers, and their Complaints
In 2005 Manchester University Press published Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, an anthology which I had co-edited with Jill Seal Millman, and to which four other scholars had also contributed. This paper will discuss a number of the methodological and ideological issues which emerged from our work on this volume. These will include the location and selection of texts and authors; the pressure to reconcile academic and commercial priorities; the difficulties of adequately editing early modern manuscript material in a contemporary print format; and the gendering of annotation practice. Manuscript material is notoriously difficult to locate; and writing by women in manuscript in the early modern period may not readily conform to the categories and priorities of modern academic publishing. Another problem we encountered while planning the anthology was how to accommodate our own preference for privileging and foregrounding the manuscript text to the author-based structure often deemed necessary to market an anthology in the contemporary academic world. We hope that an account of how we addressed these difficulties will be instructive to future editors of early modern women’s writing.
Goodblatt, Chanita, Engendering the Canon of Early Modern England: Percy Simpson and Evelyn M. Simpson
Dame Helen Gardner has written of Percy Simpson and Evelyn M. Simpson that "their marriage was one of the most remarkable partnerships in the history of scholarship." For just as Evelyn Simpson entered into her husband's work on the Oxford edition of Ben Jonson's corpus, so did Percy Simpson become directly involved with her critical and editorial work on John Donne's prose. Indeed, one can well argue that it is the very juxtaposition of Percy Simpson's career with that of Evelyn Simpson's which provides a fruitful context for examining the intertwined issues of how twentieth-century scholars engendered the canon of early modern English literature, and how this community of scholars was itself en-gendered within changing cultural and academic circumstances.There has lately been renewed, though independent, interest in both these scholars. Ongoing work on the projected Cambridge edition of The Works of Ben Jonson has focused the attention of the editorial team on Percy Simpson's Oxford edition. At the same time, Suzanne Gosset devotes the introduction of her provocative essay, "Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?", to Evelyn Simpson. Drawing out the dual connotation of her question – referring to a woman editing a male author and to a woman editing a male editor – Gossett uses Simpson's career to delineate particularly feminist issues in twentieth-century scholarship on the early modern period. Whether it is the recognition of the benefit accrued to male scholars and authors from female editing, or the acknowledgment that the "romantic and professional may commingle," or finally the questioning of "the authority of a central intentionalist and implicitly phallic text," Gosset aptly (though very briefly) demonstrates that Simpson's career enacts these issues, which resonate with intellectual and cultural meaning.
In my paper I would like to realize two main goals. First, I will look closely at these two careers in order to raise essential questions about the twentieth-century creation of the corpus of early modern English literature. The primary questions pertain to: the need for establishing an authoritative text; and the definition of a particular conception of authorial intent and literary development. Secondly, I will examine the process by which editorial decisions were made, by both Percy Simpson and Evelyn M. Simpson, in their work on Jonson and Donne. Here the primary questions pertain to: the definition and instantiation of editorial authority; and the institutional (academic) recognition and support of a non-affiliated (independent) – and not by chance – female scholar.
02D - Emblem Books: Text and Image
Under the sponsorship of the Bibliographical Society of America this session seeks to present an international panel consisting of three scholars of Emblem Books. Sponsorship of a SHARP session by the BSA recognizes the common purpose of the two societies. The papers examine emblem books in relation to a broad range of questions, including Literary Annuals as Nineteenth-Century Emblematic Forms; Emblematic Versatility as a Strategy of Jesuit Self-Representation; and The Esoteric Emblems of Michael Maier.
Harris, Katherine D.,
Continuing the Relationship: Literary Annuals as Nineteenth-Century Emblematic Forms
In November 1822, London publisher Rudolf Ackermann sparked an entire phenomenon that captured the attention of middle-class women throughout England until 1860. He produced a volume of literature, the Forget Me Not, which was accompanied by beautiful, spectacular and specular images. Soon, other volumes (in many other countries) appeared in the same guise. This unique literary format, the literary annual, mimicked the tradition of the emblem – combining textual and visual subjects that reflected an ideal middle-class female reader.
Similar to the ekphrastic representation of Andrea Alciato's 1534 Emblematum Liber, the literary annual reproduces the format but divides the emblematic elements and process: the motto is included on the title page and represents the tenor of the entire volume; the illustration is first engraved and then verbally rendered. Initially, the annual was intended to offer instruction in morality and propriety, allowing readers to meditate on the visual and literary. (The ladies soon subverted this patriarchal control by finding strength in the annual's sentimental poetry.) And, like the Emblematum Liber, the early annual's pocket-sized delicacy allowed the book to be a portable reference of morality and propriety as well as an indicator of education, wealth, friendship or leisure.
I address the emblem's impact and influence on a later literary format and, consequently, a wide British, American and European audience, which audience was important in addressing, shaping and liberating generations of young women. I trace the literary annual's indebtedness to the emblem's spiritual and meditative purpose, using specific examples from Alciato's 1534 Paris edition and Ackermann's Forget Me Not in its initial years (1823-1830): the relationship between text and image, poetry and engraving continues.
Vaeck, Marc van, Emblematic Versatility as a Strategy of Self-Representation: Poirters' Emblematic Verses in the Dutch Version of the Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Jesu (Antwerp 1640)
In 1640 the Jesuit order celebrated its 100th anniversary, for which a large number of festivities had been planned. One of the most prestigious events was undoubtedly the publication by the Antwerp Officina Plantiniana of the Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Jesu. This impressive folio volume would become an icon of the Jesuit order at that time. Though the initiative was highly contested, the Jesuit order itself considered the volume to be a great success, and regarded it as a highly persuasive form of self-representation. A huge tome numbering more than a thousand pages, The Imago presents a chronological-thematic account of the history of the order, and contains a large number of rhetorical exercises, poems and emblems. These emblems were integral to the festivities of the Society's centennial, while simultaneously functioning as emblematic exhibitions ("affixiones") in the Antwerp Jesuit Church.
The Imago was published in the same year in Dutch, in a smaller (quarto) format, and in a slightly abbreviated version (though still extending to more than 700 pages), for which the Dutch verses in the emblems were written by Father Adriaen Poirters. The Dutch edition was published for the 'ongestudeerde gemeynte” (i.e. the public not acquainted with the Latin verse forms) and fit within a keen publishing strategy of the Society. Indeed, from 1600 onwards the Jesuit order made their editions available not only in Latin but also in the vernacular.
Poirters' Dutch texts have received minor attention from literary historians as they were later on recuperated within Poirters' poetic oeuvre. No research has been done as to how these texts made use of the emblematic tradition and how they realized the specific aims of the volume. In my lecture I will demonstrate how Poirters' verses exploit, in a highly rhetorical and persuasive way, the specific versatility of the reading techniques from the emblem genre. Precisely Poirters' highly versatile reading technique of the emblematic image functions as a successful strategy in representing the Jesuits' identity at that time.
Brafman, David, Alchemical Atalanta and Hermetic Hippomenes: The Esoteric Emblems of Michael Maier
Perhaps nowhere else in Baroque culture do the arcane visual symbolism of alchemy and the enigmatic images of emblematics find more astonishing union than in the Atalanta Fugiens of Micheal Maier (ca.1568-1622). Court physician of Emperor Rudolph II at Prague, Maier was a tireless apologist and transmitter of what he considered to be the wisdom of the ancient Hermes Trismegistos and its relevance to his own contemporary world. In his masterpiece, Atalanta Fugiens (1618), Maier uses the allegorical symbolism of emblem-literature and its popular moralizing currency to visually translate the ancient myth of the fleeing Atalanta and her ardent pursuer, Hippomenes, into a narrative cycle of alchemical emblems. This cycle culminated in a simultaneous proof of spiritual love and intelligent design of a Hermetic cosmos, a vision that had already found popularity among Renaissance neo-Platonists.
Among the holdings of the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute are the Landwehr Collection of Dutch Emblem Books and the Manly P. Hall Collection of Alchemy, Hermetica, Rosicrucianism, and Esoterica. The Manly Hall Collection contains not only a printed edition of Atalanta Fugiens, but an otherwise unknown contemporary French manuscript translation illustrated with contemporary hand-coloring. Maier’s adaptation of emblematics into an alchemical vision of moralizing truth will be examined, as well as its impact on the visual culture of emblem-books in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century.
02E - Topographies of the Book
Wögerbauer, Michael, Research on Book Culture 1750-1850 in the Czech Republic and the Topography of Book Trade in the Habsburg Monarchy
As in Central Europe in general, book culture in the Bohemian Lands has been mainly researched during the first half of the 20th century. In the communist period (1948-1989), very little research was done (exceptions are e.g. Karel Chyba, Slovník knihtiskářů Československu (1966-76), the studies of Zdenĕk Šimecek and some others). Thus, today's research on the history of book has to combine an interrupted and, in fact, historical tradition with the innovative perspectives, which were meanwhile developed in Western Europe.
The task of the lecture is to point out the political and historical context of research on book culture, which was mostly done in the first half of the 20th century. Reflecting this context helps us to understand some problems today's research has to deal with, e.g. the integration of the book in the narrative of a monolingual “national history” or the focus on single enterprises. Based on this reflection of the tradition of research, we can try to make some propositions for a more adequate, geographically and methodologically wider perspective on the history of the book in this Part of Central Europe. On one hand, the interrupted “positivistic” tradition has to be renewed, because a lot of basic information is still to be collected in the archives. This problem will be partly solved by the Prague part of the project Topographie des Buchhandels in der Habsburger Monarchie 1750-1850, organized by the Society for Book Research in Austria. On the other hand, it is necessary to view the book as the most important medium of modernization and means and target of the “national renaissances” of the peoples of the Bohemian lands as well as the Habsburg Monarchy.
Frimmel, Johannes, Topography of the Book Trade of the Habsburg Monarchy
The book trade was a largely ignored communication network for the heterogeneous multi-ethnic countries of the Habsburg monarchy and it is the aim of the research project "Topographie des Buchwesens in der Habsburger Monarchie” (Topography of the Book Trade of the Habsburg Monarchy) to study the regional differences and the cultural texture of this book/reading culture.The topographical survey of the book trade in various cities and regions is structured by a constant pattern of data collection. The time range is 1750-1850. Ideally, the following informations are collected in a database: Place, name of the firm, data on the firm's existence, activities of the firm (publishing, book-selling, book-printing, arts and music dealers, book-binding, lithography, circulating library, paper mills, type-founding...), biographical data of owners, predecessors, successors to the firms; headquarters, branches, and commission agents as well as further optional details: languages, kinds of products (periodicals, newspapers, almanacs, calendars, series, ...), special printing types (Hebrew, Cyrillic, and others). Furthermore, there is an index of sources and archive materials which facilitate further research, catalogues and bibliographies, as well as the literature on individual firms. The notes provide historical references, addresses, incidents of censorship, and much more. The print version offers general descriptions of significant firms, with references to the firms' histories, and to publishing production.
Through the material compiled it will be possible for the very first time to draw up a geography of the history of the book in large parts of the Habsburg monarchy. Additionally, comparisons with the book trade in other countries are facilitated. The topographical material recorded enables readers to find out about particular firms. On the other hand, a quantitative and analytical evaluation from various perspectives (ranging from cultural studies, economic history to general history) can be carried out. The rise in numbers of firms, in production in various languages, and in the production of periodicals can be compared with each other. Furthermore the rise and the dissemination of the new technology of lithography can also be traced.
The first step of the project will be a detailed printed documentation of the main capitals of the book trade in the Habsburg countries: Vienna, Prague, Pressburg (Bratislava) and Buda/Pest. The volume Buchwesen in Wien 1750-1850 (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2006) will be presented at the SHARP conference The Hague.
Pavercsik, Ilona, The Role of West-European Book Trade Relations and Hungarian Booktraders in the Development of an Important Hungarian Book Collection
Károly Eszterházy was one of the most important Hungarian book collectors of the Enlightenment who planned to found a university in his episcopal see, in Eger. Besides the foundation of a school and an observatory in the 1780s, he established a very significant scientific library. He had got a lot of help in developing his collection (even form the papal nuncio in Vienna), and he made his library open to the public in 1793.
The aim of this lecture is to research the origin of this library from the point of view of the booktrade. We give a brief summary of the developing bookselling in Hungary in the 1780s, the important foreign relations of Hungarian booktraders, and outlines the reasons why Eszterházy turned to the foreign traders since he got his books from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, often buying books on auctions. Leaning on archival research and concentrating on bookselling this approach means a new discussion of the subject.
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Last updated: 23 June 2006