Of Nuance and Algorithms: What Conceptual History Can Learn from Topic Modeling

by contributing editor Daniel London

Intellectual historians may be familiar with two general approaches toward the study of conceptual meaning and transformation. The first, developed by J.G.A. Pocock and elaborated upon by Reinhart Koselleck, infers the meaning of a concept from the larger connotative framework in which it is embedded. This method entails analyzing the functional near-equivalents, competitors, and antonyms of a given term. This “internalist” approach contrasts with Quentin Skinner’s “contextualist” method, which lodges the meaning of a term in the broader intentions of that text’s author and audience. Both of these methods tend to entail close, “slow” reading of a few key texts: in a representative prelude to his conceptual history of English and American progressives, Marc Stears writes, “It is necessary… to read the texts these thinkers produced closely, carefully, and logically, to examine the complex ways in which their arguments unfolded, to see how their conceptual definitions related to one another: to employ, in short, the strategies of analytical political theory.”

But what about the seemingly antithetical approach of topic modeling? Topic modeling is, in the words of David Mimno, “a probabilistic, statistical technique that uncovers themes and topics within a text, and which can reveal patterns in otherwise unwieldy amounts of material.” In this framework, a “topic” is a probability distribution of words: a group of words that often co-occur with each other in the same set of documents. Generally, these groups of words are semantically related and interpretable; in other words, a theme, issue, or genre can often be identified simply by examining the most common words pertaining to a topic. Here is an example of a sample topic drawn from Cameron Blevins’ study of Martha Ballard’s diary, a massive corpus of 10,000 entries written between 1785 and 1812:

gardin sett worked clear beens corn warm planted matters cucumbers gatherd potatoes plants ou sowd door squash wed seeds

At first glance, this list of words might appear random and nonsensical—but here is where a contextual and humanistic reading comes into play. Statistically, these words did co-occur with one another: what could the hidden relation between them be? Blevins labeled this set “gardening.” Her next step was to chart this topic’s occurrence in Ballard’s diary over time:

Screen Shot 2016-04-13 at 09.30.25

Clearly, this topic’s frequency tends to aligns with harvesting seasons. This is somewhat unsurprising, but note the significance: through mere statistical inference, a pattern of words was uncovered in a corpus far too large to be easily close-read, whose relation to one another seems to bear out both logically and in relation to real-time events.

Another topic produced by Blevins’ algorithm, which Blevins provisionally labelled “emotion,” looked like this:

feel husband unwel warm feeble felt god great fatagud fatagued thro life time year dear rose famely bu good

This might appear even more of a stretch, but Blevins quickly discovered that occurrences of this topic matched particularly “emotional” periods in Ballard’s life, such as the imprisonment of her husband and the indictment of her son.

These two examples encapsulate the three major features of topic-modeling techniques. First, they enable us to “distantly read” a massive body of texts. Second, they reveal statistically significant distributions of words, forcing us to attend humanistically to the historical relations between them. Finally, and most importantly, these topics emerge not from our a priori assumptions and preoccupations, but from “bottom-up” algorithms. While not necessarily accurate or reflective of the actual “contents” of a given corpus—these algorithms, after all, are endlessly flexible—they are valuable, potentially counterintuitive humanistic objects of inquiry that can prompt greater understanding and generate new questions. Practitioners of topic-modeling techniques have studied coverage of runaway slaves, traced convergences and divergences in how climate change is discussed by major nonprofits, and tracked the changing contents of academic journals. They have scanned the content of entire newspapers, and charted changes in how major public issues are framed within them.

While these applications only hint at the possibilities for topic-modeling for historians in a variety of fields, a growing number of practitioners are considering the implications of this technique for historians of ideas—with results that are already surprising. Ted Underwood examined the literary journal PLMA for insights into transformations in critical theory over the twentieth century, finding that articles associated with the “structuralist” turn were appearing earlier, and were associated with different sets of concepts (“symmetry” rather than “myth” or “archetype”), than has been assumed. Michael Gavin has brilliantly compared “rights” discourse in 18,000 documents published between 1640 and 1699, detailing the frequency with which different concepts (“freedom,” “authority”) and institutions (“church,” “state”) occur within this discourse. Topic-modeling enables him to distinguish what made 1640s “rights talk” different from 1680s talk, as well as the overlap between discourses of “power” with those of “rights”:

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Topic-modeling does not find the “best” way to analyze text. The algorithms are malleable. It does not take word-order or emphasis into account. It does not care about motive, audience, interest, or any of those pesky “external” contexts that Skinnerians see as essential to understanding conceptual meaning. On the other hand, “internalists” will nod appreciatively at the concerns that structured Gavin’s study of “rights” discourses. Which terms co-occur when a particular keyword is invoked? Which points of connections are made between keywords? Which words and concepts appear to be central, and which are more peripheral? Which words tend to be shared across keywords, and which remain site specific? They can also agree with a more general premise behind Gavin’s study: that concepts are defined by the “distribution of the vocabulary of their contexts.” The next step is to agree that these distributions can be compared mathematically. Once you agree there, we’re in business.

Topic-modeling is, like the field of digital humanities more generally, in the phase of development which Kuhn would have called “normal science”: developing and testing methodologies that derive from established disciplinary questions and paradigms, shoring up the tool’s reliability for more adventurous work to come. For this reason, much of topic-modelers’ current work could fall into the “so-what” category. Yes, we know people gardened more in the summer, and that a king would appear frequently in the same texts as “rights” and “power.” However, conceptual historians should not be so quick to dismiss topic-modeling as a gimmick. If letting go of conceptual blinkers and generating new theories and findings is important to us, we should be willing to let go of some of our own.

Reading for Pleasure and Shelf-Satisfaction: The Reading Sheffield Oral History Project

by guest contributor Elizabeth Ott

Debates about the proper function of public libraries—what readers they should serve, what kinds of reading they should promote, what sorts of books should stock their shelves and (perhaps most importantly) how those books and shelves should be paid for—have dogged discussions of public libraries since their first inception. These debates have never been politically neutral, yet they have been particularly charged in recent years, as conservative economic policies have forced the closure of many libraries around the United Kingdom. In this climate, libraries, librarians, and library users are charged to articulate what value public libraries offer to offset the cost of their operation.

Often these articulations rely upon the rhetoric of moral improvement: reading becomes synonymous with education, a safe activity that guards against the dubious pleasures of modernity. The library itself is cited as a place of community-building, a neutral space of wholesome civic engagement. These lines of argument have the effect of casting public libraries in relation to a sense of time: either libraries are preserving a sense of the past, a golden moment in history when reading (usually figured as inherently superior to, say, television, the internet, etc.) was ubiquitous, or libraries are a gateway to progress, an investment in national advancement.

Jean Wolfendale, Sheffield Reader

Jean Wolfendale, Sheffield Reader

The tension between these two modes of articulating value in public libraries can be seen in a recent interview in the Guardian with writer Neil Gaiman. Gaiman’s interlocutor, Toby Litt, asks a series of leading questions, such as this one: “Isn’t the future of libraries dependent on not having gatekeepers who are scary, on libraries not looking ancient, and not being about distant, old knowledge?” This question is loaded with valuations of what is good (progress, youth, the future) and what is bad (history, age, the past). It is impossible to read it without jumping to a conclusion about the kind of library he is indicating: the scary gate-keeping crone who guards ancient tomes in a derelict Carnegie building whose sagging walls speak of years of civic neglect. Gaiman is largely uninterested in engaging this discourse, and instead uses the space of the interview to explore his own personal and imaginative interaction with libraries as a young reader. Nevertheless, his metaphor of the library as “seed-corn” which ends up titling the article, contributes to a progress narrative.

In this context, the Reading Sheffield project is delightfully radical. Though in many ways the project tropes the library as a preserver of history (the main page of the website invites readers to “be transported to Sheffield’s past. To a time without Google or Apple, a time when the world went to war and then re-built itself, a time when most children left school at 14 and most women did not work outside the home”), it significantly places no value whatsoever on reading as an improving activity, instead championing reading as an activity of leisure. Against the backdrop of a largely working class readership, Reading Sheffield is “a resource for anybody seeking to explore, celebrate, or promote reading for pleasure.”

At the core of the Reading Sheffield project is series of sixty-two interviews with residents who lived in Sheffield, England during the 1940s and 1950s, conducted over a two-year period by twelve trained volunteers. These oral histories of reading are fully transcribed and available on the website, along with embedded audio files. Interview subjects recollect how they accessed the library, when they first became readers, what they read, and how their reading intersected with their daily lives. These recordings have significant historical value as a record of reader activity—an aspect of reading history that’s especially fleeting and difficult to capture—and as markers of social history. In recounting their memories of library use, each interviewee also records detailed information about the culture of post-war Britain in which they read. Archival quality audio recordings of the interviews have been deposited with the Sheffield Archives and Sheffield Hallam University, in addition to being made available online.

One Sheffield reader mentions trips to the Hillsborough Library, which hosted a reading club group for young people on Wednesday evenings.

One Sheffield reader mentions trips to the Hillsborough Library, which hosted a reading club group for young people on Wednesday evenings.

Because of the average age of interview participants, the Reading Sheffield oral histories recall the privation of post-war England in the 1940s and 1950s. Readers reference the scarcity of paper, shortages of food, the sheer difficulty of visiting library branches when tram rides proved too expensive and a trip across town meant an arduous trek in both directions. The interview format prompts recollections along a defined pathway: when did you first learn to read? What were your first books?  Which library branches did you visit and how did you get there? What books did you own and what books did you borrow? This last question is one that particularly highlights the library’s function as a place of pleasure reading, as often interviewees make a distinction between the kind of practical books purchased for the home (bibles, trade manuals, school books) and the books vividly recalled from library visits: “Well the books from the library I think were all novels.”

Beyond its function as a repository of oral history, the project seeks to imaginatively engage with readers’ histories in a variety of ways—most interestingly through its Readers’ Journeys: “interpretive articles based on our readers’ interviews,” written by project team members, that may “not necessarily represent the views of the interviewees.” These articles attempt to match oral histories with the places and spaces they recollect, drawing out tangential narratives that emphasize the importance of libraries and library buildings in the social life of the community.

Sheffield, like many cities in the United Kingdom, has weathered threats of library closure. It was the site of community protests in 2014 over the planned closure of approximately 16 branch locations; these closures were only avoided through the use of volunteer labor, replacing professional and staff positions at many branches. Reading Sheffield, too, is built on the labor largely of volunteers, whose efforts to preserve community history in the face of erasure are commendable, as is their message that readers deserve a community space for shared pleasure, outside any system of utilitarian value.

Elizabeth Ott is Assistant Curator of Rare Books at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Libraries. Her doctoral work is on the history of subscription and circulating libraries in England.

What We’re Reading: April 9

Emily:

I had an ambivalent response to G.W. Bowersock, The Classics: A Subtle New View (NYRB)

Jonathan Freedland, Maggie and the Storm over Europe (NYRB)

Jonathan Downing, Prophecy and the Southcottian ‘Canon’ (Southcottian Studies)

Free Thinking: Evelyn Waugh (BBC Radio 3)

‘When I see blossoms spring’ (Clerk of Oxford)

Adam Schatz, How did we end up here?, on Islamophobia in Europe (LRB Blog)

CFP: History of Sexuality ECR Workshop, 26-27 July, University of Exeter

Mallory Ortberg, Texts from Young Werther (The Toast)

Madeline:

Jan Machielson, “A mother’s trials,” review of Ulinka Rublack’s The Astronomer and the Witch (TLS)

Stefan Bauer, “Matthew Parker: Origin Stories for Ecclesiastical Polity,” a report on the recent CRASSH/Corpus Christi, Cambridge conference on the archbishop (History and Theology)

Mark Empey, “Petitioning women to unruly women: warrants as a resource” (RECIRC Blog)

Peter Schjeldahl, “A Few Words about the Faux Rembrandt” (New Yorker)

Erin:

New York locals should not miss the book fairs this weekend at the Park Avenue Armory and St. Ignatius Loyola in particular. Hundreds of booksellers from all over the world will be hawking their wares in booths packed to the gills with books, letters, medieval manuscripts, modern literary manuscripts, ephemera, and photographs. Also, the people watching is top notch—the Armory in particular is a very special New York scene. I’ll say it again, don’t miss it!

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (NYRB Reissue with an introduction by Library of America editor Geoffrey O’Brien)

Ian Johnson, A Revolutionary Discovery in China (NYRB)

“Neglected Books Revisited” Part 1 & Part 2 (The American Scholar)

Michelle Dean, The Wreck, on Adrienne Rich’s feminist awakening (New Republic)

Carolyn:

Nathaniel Rich, An Amazon Without Certainty (NYR Daily)

Robert Mcfarlane, Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet Forever (The Guardian)

James Delbourgo, Art in the New Plutocracy (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Robert Kaiser, The Disaster of Richard Nixon (NYRB)

James Angelos, The New Europeans (The New York Times)

Jake:

Marshall Yarbrough, Objectively False (Full Stop)

Raishay Lin, ‘Last Lecture:’ Annette Gordon-Reed Traces Her Journey to Lawyer and Historian (Harvard Law Today)

Otto Vervaart, An Age of Lawyers and Literature (Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog)

Meg Miller, Ancient Church Resurrected in Ghostly Wire Mesh (Co.Design)

Amanda Hess, Who’s ‘They?’ (New York Times Magazine)

Daniel:

Jamil Zaki, How to Avoid Empathy Burnout (Nautilus)

Eyal Weizman, Calculating the Lesser Evil (Verso)

Timothy Shenk, Is it Time to Retire the Term Revolution? (Dissent)

Brian Goldstone, Justice for All (Jacobin)

William James, The Human Response (Lapham’s Quarterly)

Humanism in the Archives: The Case of Ellesmere MS EL 34 B 6

by guest contributor Elizabeth Biggs

I’m sorry not to have been at the Renaissance Society of America Conference in Boston this last weekend. In the spirit of that conference, I want to introduce you to a wonderful renaissance manuscript currently on the other side of the country. The Italian mid-fifteenth century Ellesmere MS EL 34 B 6 at the Huntington Library contains the satires of Persius and Juvenal copied in a particularly lovely early humanist hand on paper and parchment with at least three hands’ annotations from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. I want to use it, and its (possible) successive owners to examine possible networks of intellectual culture in the early Tudor period among those in royal service. There are also studies of the men who worked in royal administration under Henry VII and Henry VIII, but little appreciation of how connections made by those working for the king might feed into the larger networks of intellectual culture around them (Watts, “New Men,” 201-3). In this micro-study of one manuscript and its hints at possible connections of ideas and reading between individuals, I want to speculate about how one particular book traveled and was taken up in the intellectual world of administration.

EL 34 B 6 f. 9r showing John Gunthorpe’s dense annotations on the start of Persius’ Satire 5.

EL 34 B 6 f. 9r showing John Gunthorpe’s dense annotations on the start of Persius’ Satire 5.

The Juvenal manuscript and the biography of the man who first owned it emphasize the importance of administrative connections for early humanists, as many of them were also priests working for the king who knew and helped each other. John Gunthorpe was many things including dean of the Chapel Royal, canon of St Stephen’s, Westminster, and finally in retirement dean of Wells Cathedral until his death in 1498 (Reeves, 311-17). These church posts came in part from his distinguished career in royal service, as an ambassador under Henry VII, as a theologian and a lawyer who served on the Privy Council in the 1490s, and earlier as Keeper of the Privy Seal under Richard III. He can also be appreciated as a humanist who studied Latin rhetoric under Guarino da Verona in Ferrara in 1460, was a papal chaplain in Rome until 1465 and received his baccalaureate in theology at Cambridge. More generally, he helped to bring the Italian humanism of the mid fifteenth century to England. It was probably at Ferrara that he acquired the Juvenal manuscript and started to add his own dense notes to it, usually commenting on allusions and mythology in Latin, English, and occasionally in Greek, just as he is known in 1460 to have been copying and annotating Seneca (Reeves, 311).

Gunthorpe was just one of the highly educated priests whose humanist education, often abroad, allowed him to be used by the English kings Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII for their own needs as a councillor, ambassador, administrator, and senior churchman. Contemporaries at St Stephen’s, for example, included Christopher Urswick, and Henry VII’s Italian secretaries, Pietro Carmeliano and Andreas Ammonias, as well as the doctor Thomas Linacre later in his life. While Gunthorpe didn’t leave books to individuals in his 1498 will, he did use fellow royal servants and canons, including Richard Hatton, also a canon at Westminster and Wells who worked in Chancery, as his executors (Early Somerset Wills, 361). Hatton in his own will of 1509 called Gunthorpe his benefactor and endowed masses for Gunthorpe as well as himself. We need to see Gunthorpe not just on his own as a talented scholar, but also as part of friendship and patronage networks at the intersection of the church and royal service.

EL 34 B 6 f. 100v with the sixteenth century ownership inscription.

EL 34 B 6 f. 100v with the sixteenth century ownership inscription.

We know for certain that Gunthorpe owned this book because the handwriting of the first layer of annotations seems to match his handwriting in the surviving Bodleian manuscripts he owned, and also because a later sixteenth-century hand wrote on the back flyleaf “iuvenalis oli(m) gu(n)thorpi, welli quo(n)da(m) decani, nu(n)c a(u)te(m) heroni” (Juvenal once [the possession] of Gunthorpe, at one time dean of Wells, now that of Heron). Heron was interested in humanist works and clearly respected Gunthorpe as a humanist; the same hand also wrote in a book list on an earlier folio that includes several of Erasmus’ works including Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1503) and De Conscribendis (1522). In addition, the book list includes eminently humanist classical texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the letters and works of Cicero. Finally, Heron added a few annotations to Persius and Juvenal about the meanings of particular words, usually on folios that Gunthorpe had not commented on. Perhaps most interestingly, he copied on the first folio of the manuscript the short summary piece that appears on the title page of a 1505 Parisian Persius. As far as I can tell, the printed edition and commentary was not reprinted in England, and is not included in Early English Books Online, although the Bodleian owns a copy of the 1507 printing (Bodleian MS Douce 81 (3)). Heron had access to specialist commentaries and thought this brief introduction to the arguments of the satires was worth copying into his own manuscript copy, an intriguing interplay of print and manuscript in the sixteenth century.

EL 34 B 6 f. 15r Booklist on bottom third of page, and at the top, the third major hand in this manuscript, perhaps early sixteenth century.

EL 34 B 6 f. 15r Booklist on bottom third of page, and at the top, the third major hand in this manuscript, perhaps early sixteenth century.

It’s not obvious who this Heron is. No one with that surname appears in Erasmus’ letters, so he doesn’t seem to have been active in scholarship himself during the early sixteenth century. There are a couple of Herons who were writing classically inspired verse under Elizabeth I, and previous readers at the Huntington have suggested that either of them might be our Heron. I’m skeptical of this suggestion because around seventy years would then separate Gunthorpe’s death and the writing of the book list and the inscription. The assumption that Heron must be someone who wrote in a humanist style, even if much later, is problematic given that Erasmus was a popular author. In addition the book list seems earlier to me, given the mix of titles and the presence of material from the 1505 Persius edition. Certainly, the presence of De Conscribendis provides the absolute earliest possible date that the list could have been written, although it could also be much later in the sixteenth century. By that point Gunthorpe himself had been dead for well over twenty years and many of his colleagues at Wells, at Westminster and as humanists would also have died. Yet there was enough memory of his status as a scholar that Heron wanted to commemorate his ownership of this manuscript. The question we really should be asking is how was a book owned by one humanist remembered as having been connected with Gunthorpe for at least a generation? I want to suggest that it wasn’t the sorts of humanist networks or patronage ties that have been the focus of study that maintained the manuscript’s remembered connection with John Gunthorpe but quite possibly the institutional ties of royal service and the church patronage that royal service still opened up under the early Tudors.

EL 34 B 6 f. 1r with the summary from the 1505 edition of Persius on the right-hand side.

EL 34 B 6 f. 1r with the summary from the 1505 edition of Persius on the right-hand side.

As mentioned above, Gunthorpe’s will did not mention his books, save one bequest to his old Cambridge college. Unless he had already disposed of his books, it would have been the executors’ task. We know that both Wells (where he died and was buried), and St Stephen’s had libraries of their own, including some classical works alongside the working liturgical books and law books. St Stephen’s certainly received a variety of books from canons and former canons, and was careful to identify them as associated with the relevant benefactor. It’s not completely out of the question that this Juvenal remained associated with Gunthorpe because it remained in the library of one of his former homes until it was acquired by someone with an interest in its contents. This is by no means anything more than a very tentative identification, but in 1535 a Dr. John Heryng was appointed as a canon of St Stephen’s, Westminster by Henry VIII, possibly as a reward for his work on Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon or his work on the theology of the new Church of England. We really don’t know much about him and his interests, nor do we know what books he owned. Yet like Gunthorpe, he was a canon of both Wells (from 1543) and St Stephen’s, and in royal service. It may be pure coincidence that Heron, whoever he was, wanted to memorialize Gunthorpe as dean of Wells at least a generation after his death. Yet, I think it is worth at least considering that, in this manuscript, we are looking at continued humanist thought and humanist interests among the traditionally-trained priests who worked for the early Tudor kings. If John Heryng were the man who wrote the inscription and the book list in the 1530s or later, then a man that we would not otherwise have encountered as a humanist was using the networks of royal service to advance his literary interests.

Elizabeth Biggs is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of York. She is researching Stephen’s College, Westminster, from 1348 to 1548, as part of a larger AHRC-funded project on St Stephen’s Chapel from 1292 to the Blitz in 1941. Her work focuses on the people who worked at the college, donated money and lands to the college, or who knew it through its presence at the heart of the medieval Palace of Westminster. She can be reached on Twitter and via email.

What We’re Reading: April 2

Emily:

Lord Byron and the Hebrew Melodies (In Our Time, BBC Radio 4)

Jake McAuley, They were rescued as kids in WWII. Now they want to help today’s refugee children. (Washington Post)

Daniel Hope, My mentor Yehudi Menuhin (Guardian)

Ferdinant Mount, Lumpers v. Splitters: How to Build an Empire (LRB)

Robert Macfarlane, Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever (Guardian)

Jake:

Joe Patrice, Judge Admits Trial by Combat Is Available in New York… Then Declines to Order It (Above the Law)

Chris Jones, Assessing the Damage at Palmyra (Gates of Nineveh)

Space Archaeologist Finds Potential Viking Site in Canada (The History Blog)

Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne, Weary professors give up, concede that Africa is a country (Washington Post)

Daniel:

Irving Howe, Liberalism and Socialism (Dissent)

Ed Pavlic, Race and the Intimate Tangle of American Experience (Boston Review)

Matth Ray, The Pragmatics of Doubt (Lingua Barbara)

Frank Furedi, The Spectre of Democracy (Spiked)

Ross Wolfe Zara Hadid: In Memoriam (The Charnel House)

Dispatches from the Republic of Letters

The Republic of Letters is knit together not only by virtual connections, but also by interactions in the flesh! As March draws to a close and we look ahead to spring and summer, here are a few events, workshops, exhibitions, and programs which the JHIBlog editors look forward to participating in, or wish we could attend.

Are there events around the world that we’ve left out? Please share them in the comments! And if there’s an event you’re attending that you’d like to report on for the blog, we always welcome pitches from guest contributors. You’re welcome to get in touch.

April 1 (New York): Interuniversity Doctoral Consortium Medieval Conference
March 31-April 1 (New York): The Max Weber Conference 2016—Democracy and Expertise
April 1 (New York): The EU Refugee Crisis and the Future of Europe
April 1, (Paris): Journée d’étude—Emine Sevgi Özdamar
April 4 (New York): The Politics of Emergency
April 4 (New York): Judith Surkis, “Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria” (workshop)
April 4 (Philadelphia): Alan Niles, ‘Posterity’s Domesticke Examples’: Memorial Culture in the Seventeenth-Century English Family Album (workshop)
April 4 (Cambridge, MA): Scott Mandelbrote, The Newton Project and the Development of a Digital Edition (lecture)
April 6 (New York): Matthew Kirschenbaum, Bookish Media (annual Fales Lecture, NYU)
April 6 (New Haven): Belinda Jack, “What Can We Really Know? The History of the Book versus the History of Reading”
April 7 (Paris): Recherche/Roman. Expériences de l’écriture
April 7 (Philadelphia): Trudy Rubin, The Relevance of Dreyfus in the Age of Isis (lecture)
April 7 (New York): Hannah Barker, “Slavery and Law in a Fourteenth-Century Genoese Colony”
April 7 (New York): Margaret A. Oppenheimer, “The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage and Money in the Early Republic” (lecture)
April 8 (New York): Duncan Kelly, “Michel Foucault as Historian of Political Thought” (workshop)
April 11 (New York): Isabel Gabel, “Causality and Scale: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Natural History” (workshop)
April 11 (Philadelphia): Daniel Balderston, “Borges in Love” (workshop)
April 12 (New York): Prince of Darkness: ​The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire (lecture)
April 13 (Cambridge, MA): Stephen J. Milner, Printing, Parchment, and Protein: The Bioarcheology of Harvard’s Books on Skin (lecture)
April 13 (New York): Brent D. Shaw, Bringing Back The Sheaves: Agrarian Life and Material Culture in Late Antique Africa (lecture)
April 18 (Philadelphia): Roger Chartier, “When Shakespeare Met Cervantes” (workshop)
April 21 (New York): Robert F. Wagner, Jr., Where Are You? A Panel Discussing New York’s Forgotten, Postwar, Three-Term Mayor
April 21 (New York): Katherine D. Harris, The Rise of the Literary Annual, Powerful Femininity, and Beautiful Books (lecture)
April 18 (New York): Anthony Grafton, “Christianity and Philology: Blood Wedding?” (Columbia Program in World Philology Lecture Series)
April 19 (San Marino, CA): Asif Saddiqi, The Dibner Lecture in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library
April 25 (New York): Mayanthi Fernando, “Unsettling the Secular” (workshop)
April 25 (Philadelphia): Michael Suarez, “William Hamilton’s Cabinet and Its Afterlives” (workshop)
April 25 (Cambridge, MA): Peter J. Scharf, “The Sanskrit Manuscripts at Harvard: Genres, Texts, Acquisition, and Access via a New Digital Catalogue” (lecture)
April 26 (New York): Iain Davidson, Iconicity, Conventions of Representation in Prehistoric Art, and the Modern Mind (lecture)
May 1 (Los Angeles): The Dover Quartet, Chamber Music at the Clark Library (performance)
May 2 (New York): Cathy Gere, Orphic Modernism: Some Thoughts on Epiarchaeology and the History of the Human Sciences
May 10 (New York): Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods (lecture)
May 13 (Cambridge): The State of ‘The State of Nature’ in the History of Political Thought: 2016 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History

Representing Material Evidence: The Catacombs in Print

by Madeline McMahon

bosio1632 frontispieceAntonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea was published posthumously in 1634. Bosio’s original manuscript, now in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, was finally brought to print by the Oratorian scholar Giovanni Severano. The book would have cost a fortune—it was over six hundred folio pages long and heavily illustrated—but it became enduringly popular (Simon Ditchfield, “Reading Rome,” 189). It covered much more than the underground world of the Roman catacombs for which it is now known. It detailed how the martyrs’ bones had been preserved by providence for future believers (book I) and discussed early Christian material evidence from construction sites as well as excavations proper in books II and III. But the vast majority of the visual evidence for which the book is so famous and the detailed analysis of that evidence in book IV were primarily the work of the editor Severano rather than Bosio (Ditchfield, “Text Before Trowel,” 346). Severano’s team of engravers recreated Christian sarcophagi, catacomb paintings, lamps, and inscriptions, often from multiple angles.

In the catacombs, as Jerome reflected dramatically in the fourth century, “So great is the darkness that the language of the prophet seems to be fulfilled—‘Let them go down quick into hell.’” How did one bring the catacombs to light in print—how did one depict the material evidence that was so often fragmentary but also charged with devotional meaning? Severano’s interests were clearly iconographical. His added fourth book addressed the typical representations of biblical figures and the symbolism used in the catacomb art. Iconography could both help and hinder understanding of early Christian art. It helped the engravers fill in destroyed or only partially visible carvings and paintings. Typically they did not call attention to it, but sometimes they did.

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 5.19.43 PM

Reconstructing a damaged wall painting, with a hypothetical restoration (p. 271)

Here, for example, they have taken the liberty of showing a corresponding figure in the orans pose on the other side of good shepherd where a piece of plasterwork had fallen off. But they have also taken care to show both their addition and the damaged area. Yet their expectations for iconography could also blind them, leading them to expect the instruments of martyrdom (p. 433) or subtly shaping their depiction of a bust-length portrait of Christ (p. 253).

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 5.18.40 PMThe way in which they depict text is especially fascinating in light of Severano’s attempts to depict and describe early Christian iconography. As he noted in IV.31, “the ancient Christians not only represented our Lord with various images, as we have seen, but his most holy name was expressed in different mysterious ways,” including the monogram (cifra) of the Chi-Rho (p. 629), comprised of the Greek letters Χ (chi) and Ρ (rho). Letters could function like images—to such an extent that Severano included the symbol in the book’s index under “X” rather than “C,” so that befuddled readers could learn what this common sign meant.

This awareness of text as image sometimes influenced the reproductions of epitaphs on sepulchers. Although many of the reproductions only imitated original inscriptions through their use of capital letters, Severano’s team occasionally reproduced visual elements in the text, such as the exaggerated size of T’s (probably referring to the association of the Greek letter Τ (tau) with the cross) in some (p. 300). As in the case of the praying figure on broken plaster, they also tried to indicate damage, either by replicating cracks in the stone or including ellipses in the transcription. While they frequently attempted iconographically based reconstructions of missing parts of paintings or imperfect sarcophagi, textual frammenti were left incomplete. In one instance, on a marble stone that was especially “worn out,” they simply confessed, “Il resto non si può leggere” (p. 400).

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A broken inscription and an inscription with exaggerated T’s (p. 151)

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 5.24.59 PMWhile even simple capital letters in a square are evocative of the material object they represent, there are a few instances in Roma sotterranea when Severano clearly felt that the script was integral to the artifact. One was a broken sepulchral inscription found by the Via Portuense catacombs—one of many fragments “from which one could not extract any sense” (p. 125). Perhaps its very difficulty made it necessary to reproduce with greater attention to the placement of the text on the stone. Text, with symbols like palms, doves, and the Chi-Rho, also features as part of the reconstructions of the sepulchers carved out in the catacomb walls. One page in particular includes an attempt to copy the curved, messy writing on an anonymous grave: “Rest in peace. Kalends of December” (Sabbato in pace KK decembris) (p. 214).

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Tombs with inscriptions (p. 214)

Although Severano’s appreciation of script was not as sophisticated as his understanding of early Christian iconography, the two are not unrelated. As William Stenhouse has shown, earlier contemporaries of Bosio and Severano had begun to contextualize classical inscriptions and reproduce them to scale, differentiating between different kinds of writing. They had even made attempts to reconstruct fragmentary inscriptions. In many ways, Roma sotterranea follows these trends more closely in its engravings of catacomb paintings than in its reproductions of Christian inscriptions and epitaphs. Nonetheless, there were certain instances in which image and text were treated as one. The inhabitants of “Underground Rome” had envisioned Christ in many guises—as a Good Shepherd, as an Orpheus, and even as collections of letters. Their own writing was part of the material evidence that Bosio encountered, and these textual objects became part of a new one when Severano brought the book to press.

What We’re Reading: March 26

Emily:

Amia Srinivasan, Under Rhodes (LRB)

‘This doubtful day of feast or fast’: Good Friday and the Annunciation (A Clerk of Oxford)

Tom Crewe, Aubade Before Breakfast: Balfour and the Souls (LRB)

Eric Weitz, Weimar America? (Common Dreams)

Sarah Scullin, Making a Monster (Eidolon)

Claire Potter, The Unfinished Agenda: Women’s Education in the 21st Century (Claire Potter)

Nakul Krishna, Seeing Like a Sociologist, on Indian sociologist MN Srinivas (Caravan)

Denis Donoghue, Ireland: ‘A Terrible Beauty Is Born’ (NYRB)
Sadhbh Walshe, The Sisterhood of the Easter Rising (NYT)

Jennifer DuBois, MFA vs. CIA (Lapham’s Quarterly)

Madeline:

Martha Howell, “The Amazing Career of a Pioneer Capitalist,” discussing the history of capitalism and Jacob Fugger (NYRB)

Jenny Uglow, “Rome: Beneath the Ruins” (NYR Daily)

Erin:

Arnold Hunt, Eye on Posterity (TLS) [Reviews of three books on Samuel Pepys & his library]

Luc Sante, The Art of Nonfiction No. 9 (Paris Review)

Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: a history of lesbian life in America (Columbia University Press, 1991)

Mark Boonshoft, Recently Digitized Early American Manuscript Collections, March 2016 (NYPL)

Tim Husband, Living By Their Wits: Card Games in the Middle Ages (In Season, the blog of the Cloisters Museum)

Carolyn:

Martha Howell, The Amazing Career of a Pioneer Capitalist (NYRB)

Andrew O’Hagan, Imaginary Spaces: Ed Devlin and the Psychology of the Stage (New Yorker)

Arielle Bernstein, Marie Kondo and the Privilege of Culture (Atlantic)

Cynthia Haven, Joseph Brodsky, Darker and Brighter (The Nation)

Jake:

Peter Konieczny, Why Medieval Torture Devices Are Not Medieval (Medievalists.net)

Ann Satterthwaite, Local Opera Houses through the Ages (OUP Blog)

Karl Steel, Language Deprivation II: Past Babel and the Communal Care of Culture (In the Middle)

Seth Gannon, The Borges Memorial Non-Lending Library of Imaginary Books (The Paris Review)

Kassia: A Bold and Beautiful Byzantine Poet (Medieval Manuscripts Blog)

Daniel:

Chip Rowe, Top 10 design flaws in the human body (Nautilus)

Stephen Akey, The Value in Selective Reading (The Smart Set)

Lawrence P. Glickman, Free Enterprise vs. Socialism (Dissent)

Adam Goodheart, The Last Island of the Savages (The American Scholar)

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Shuffle Along and the Lost History of Black Performance in America (New York Times)

Opinion Polls in International Perspective: The Case of West Germany

by guest contributor Sonja Ostrow

One can hardly open a newspaper without being inundated by graphs and charts offering up the latest poll numbers on presidential candidates. Almost as prominent are poll results covering attitudes toward everything from religion to home ownership. While public opinion research is typically thought of in conjunction with election cycles, it is more broadly integrated into the fabric of modern life. As Sarah Igo has observed, it has become one of the chief ways we know ourselves as citizens and as humans.

Still from Welt im Bild reel from August 28, 1953.

Still from Welt im Bild reel from August 28, 1953.

Igo was writing about the United States, but the trajectory of polling in other countries teaches different lessons about the collection and dissemination of knowledge. The history of public opinion research in West Germany in the first few decades after World War II makes clear how national polls have an outward-facing function: not only do they inform people (and their governments) about themselves, they have also provided a methodology for demonstrating national change to concerned foreign observers.

Rather than being conceived primarily as a way to forecast election results, empirical opinion research in postwar West Germany was prized as an innovative method for assessing denazification and democratization. Unlike in the United States, where historians like Igo have identified a persistent obsession with “the average,” in West Germany, public opinion polling was intended to illuminate the extremes of public opinion, the potential threats to a nascent democratic state. Especially in the 1950s, West German opinion research was as much about projecting an image outward into the rest of the “free world” as it was about developing insights that would make governing at home more responsive and effective.

In the wake of World War II, Allied political leaders and their social-scientific advisors were convinced that empirically-grounded survey research would help them to assess and, eventually, to shape the political cultures of former enemy lands. Survey units trailed the combat branches of Anglo-American forces in Italy in 1943 and in Germany in 1945, and began polling residents on issues including access to food, living conditions, radio habits and preferences, and political stances. While public opinion polling was already an entrenched part of the political culture in the United States and England, it was World War II that facilitated the spread of public opinion research worldwide.

The earliest German surveys were conducted under the auspices of Allied occupation forces, who only gradually convinced Germans that they were neither Communist spies nor agents of punitive denazification procedures. But native West German opinion research institutes quickly emerged in the western zones. Following in the rhetorical and methodological footsteps of Americans like George Gallup and Elmo Roper, these institutes—most notably the EMNID Institute in Bielefeld and the Institut für Demoskopie at Allensbach—loudly argued that their surveys, each of which unearthed the opinions of a statistically representative sample of roughly 2,000 Germans, would aid in the establishment of a democratic political culture by facilitating communication between government and governed and granting a voice to those who would otherwise have none. What is more, they claimed that their methods were inherently democratic, since polled subjects were selected based on their fulfillment of statistical criteria, and the opinion of each statistical citizen held equal weight.

These institutes analyzed millions of survey responses each year, producing chart- and number-filled reports about the hopes, fears, and perceived realities of West German citizens. The surveys conducted by the institutes are notable for their variety: no topic, from cosmetics-buying habits to anti-Semitism, was off-limits. “Trend questions” were asked annually to trace shifts in opinion over the years. One recurring EMNID poll asked respondents, “Do you have the impression that we can count ourselves among the society of western peoples, or in your opinion are we still enemies as we were in the past?” In 1954, EMNID emphasized the increase in the number of respondents agreeing that “we belong completely” (23% in 1954, up from only 8% in 1951) on the front page of its weekly newsletter, the EMNID-Informationen (Issue 7/54).

In some cases, research institutes invited survey participants to compare themselves explicitly with other national subjects. EMNID, for instance, asked West Germans on an annual basis throughout the 1950s, “Do you have the feeling that Americans see us today primarily as friends, as strangers, or as enemies from the past?” The percentage of those stating that they were seen by Americans as friends grew from 19% in 1951 to 49% in 1954, while the percentage of those declining to answer the question shrunk from 22% in 1951 to 10% in 1954 (EMNID-Informationen 7/54). Both figures likely represent a shift not only in attitudes toward the United States, but in a willingness to answer questions touching on matters of geopolitical significance in uncertain times. But the question construction itself is worth considering: why would EMNID ask people to see themselves through the eyes of another nation? In doing so, could the opinion research institute have helped propagate the idea that identity was only created through observation from the outside? Other historians have elaborated on the theory that national identity is brought to the fore at moments of encounter which bring one’s own unique background into sharp relief. Empirical opinion research helped to systematize and “scientize” such moments of encounter and comparison.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, co-founder of the Institut für Demoskopie, Allensbach on the cover of Der Spiegel (October 1953).

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, co-founder of the Institut für Demoskopie, Allensbach on the cover of Der Spiegel (October 1953).

The Allensbach Institute, through its publications and the tireless work of its co-founder, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, fostered this notion more assertively than did EMNID. How else to understand the decision by the Institute to publish a compilation of its opinion research for an English-speaking audience? Noelle-Neumann and her husband introduced the 1967 publication of The Germans: Public Opinion Polls 1947-1966 with the observation that “This is not a portrayal of the Germans based on second or third hand reports; it is the nation’s own description of itself” (The Germans vii). The Neumanns described this self-assessment of the German people as a useful corrective to the assumptions of foreign observers. “The editors feel … that the most fruitful attribute of this publication is the fact that it disproves, or at least casts doubt on, stereotype judgments of a nation by its neighbors. The Germans, on account of their role in world politics over the past century, have at times been exposed to collective repudiation, more than any other nation, with the inevitable consequence that the entire population was identified with small ruling groups … only the self-portrayal of groups in the form of poll results can project a picture that is comparatively objective” (ix). The authors presented opinion research as the means by which Germans clarified their identities to themselves and to international observers. They also noted the public opinion research would be impossible in anything other than a democracy—thereby resting their case that there could be an lingering concerns about West Germany. The Germans was thus a multi-leveled vindication of the postwar West German public, and a clear attempt to sever that public from any continued association with National Socialism.

Sarah Igo, and, more recently, Jill Lepore, among others, have brought to life the biases and assumptions that often shaped the carrying out and reporting of polls. Yet in practice, historians frequently continue to refer to poll results as stable sources for understanding popular experiences of history. Of course, in many cases poll results do provide insights that would otherwise be completely unobtainable; yet they can never stand completely on their own.

The polling institutes that emerged in West Germany after 1945 were themselves quite aware of the malleability of polls. The Allensbach Institute led the charge in identifying, publicizing, and even exploiting biases contained within certain question formulations. Noelle-Neumann commented in a letter exchange with another researcher that the results for one survey on anti-Semitism in West Germany had to be understood in context: the questions in the survey had been crafted in order to evoke higher levels of anti-Semitism to gauge possibility rather than everyday attitudes – again, they were searching for the extremes rather than the average (Noelle-Neumann to Diedrich Osmer, 26 Jan. 1954, Korrespondenz mit Instituten, 1951- , Archive of the Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt). Noelle-Neumann observed in a later address at a global congress of opinion researchers that question construction remained the crux of her work. Despite the attention paid to the accuracy of various sampling methods—the debate between those favoring random versus quota sampling raged throughout the 1950s—she argued that question construction that was more likely to prompt enormous shifts in responses.

However, for Noelle-Neumann and other opinion researchers, this element did not make polls any less “scientific.” And as Anja Kruke has shown, for the media outlets that were increasingly hungry for “news” of any sort, the subjective aspects of polls did not make them any less desirable.

In the second half of the twentieth century, there were also frequent attempts to develop comparative studies of European nations based on opinion polls. Such projects were made easier by the spread of the American Gallup Institute into Western Europe through partnerships with extant native institutes. For example, EMNID became Gallup’s West German affiliate in 1955, and in 1962 the institute carried out the polling in West Germany for a study on opinions about a European community, commissioned by the Press and Information Office of the European Community. European integration proceeded in tandem with the Europeanization of public opinion research. At the forefront was West Germany and West Germans, whose views on rearmament, anti-Semitism, and refugees, among other topics, were (and remain) a pressing concern for those within and beyond German borders.

Sonja Ostrow is a PhD Candidate at Vanderbilt University and a Review Editor at H-German. Her dissertation examines the use of empirical opinion research to measure and influence political change in Germany after World War II.

Sadie P. Delaney: Our Lady of Bibliotherapy

by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri

The debate over whether reading is good or bad for your health is as old as the habit itself. In The Anatomy of Melancholy reading and scholarship sometimes cause, sometimes cure, Robert Burton’s depression; the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired a Wertherfieber, causing young men in Germany to dress and act like Werther, possibly to commit suicide like Werther, and with other novels it contributed to a public health debate in Germany over the consequences of reading. Robert Darnton’s “First Steps Toward a History of Reading” cites J.G. Heinzmann, who in 1795 wrote that reading caused “susceptibility to cold, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, haemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria, and melancholy.” On the other hand, in 1812 Benjamin Rush advocated strongly in favor of reading in Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Disease of the Mind. Departing from the exclusive prescription of the Bible, he wrote that “when there is no relish for the simple and interesting stories contained in the Bible, the reading of novels should be recommended to our patients.” The power of reading binds together the fate of the body and mind, and transforms them both—if you ever took duality for granted.

And for those who believe in the transformative power of reading, now and throughout history, Sadie Peterson Delaney (1889-1958) is a modern hero. Reading’s health benefits were not a theoretical pursuit for her, but a matter of will. As the chief librarian of the Veterans Administration Hospital and a “Pioneer Bibliotherapist,” she ensured it had a positive influence on her patients.

Delaney in 1950, receiving an honorary doctorate from Atlanta University. Wikimedia Commons.

Delaney in 1950, receiving an honorary doctorate from Atlanta University. Wikimedia Commons.

Bibliotherapy, the idea of reading certain books for their healing purposes, is not new: Diodorus Siculous tells us that the Egyptian King Ramses II inscribed “House of Healing for the Soul” over the entrance his library, and lived to be ninety. Religions of the book—Islam, Judaism, Christianity—incorporate a notion of bibliotherapy into the reading of sacred texts. Institutions like the York Retreat in England, a Quaker-run asylum, prescribed sacred texts, but Benjamin Rush’s more wide-ranging reading recommendations were influential over the course of the nineteenth century in American asylums, including the Hartford Retreat, the Bloomingdale Asylum, the McLean Hospital, and the Friends Asylum. But the word “bibliotherapy” was only coined in an Atlantic Monthly article from 1916.

Since then, above all thanks to the work of women like Sadie P. Delaney, there has been a rise in the body of bibliotheraputic writing and research that would make an immense resource and library for the historian of reading practices if gathered together in one place. The practice connects the efforts of library and medical professionals alike. Both feature reading lists and their application to case studies: bibliotherapy is applied to children in order to change their attitudes towards race, class, and disability; it’s applied to those whose parents are divorced or who have experienced abuse; it’s applied to adults who suffer from alcoholism or post traumatic stress disorder. A dissertation has been conducted on the effects of reading Zhuang Zi’s fables on stressed Taiwanese college students (“the results show the beneficial effects”); another dissertation applies a “bibliotherapy approach to preventing dating abuse in adolescent girls” through readings of Twilight, True Love, and You (2011)—an intervention that “did not demonstrate clear effects…. but there was some indication of change in attitudes regarding romantic myths and identification of controlling behaviours in relationships.”

Eleanor Frances Brown shows in Bibliotherapy and its widening applications (1975) how much of the widening application of bibliotherapy has been made possible by Delaney herself. In 1920, Delaney was assigned to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. She would have worked with African-Americans as well as immigrant communities of Italian, Chinese, and Jewish heritage. During that time—according to a profile on her life by Betty K. Gubert in the American Libraries journal—Delaney especially worked with building the library’s collections of books in Braille and Moon Point (another language for the visually impaired), learning both languages herself to better aid visitors to the library, and working with “juvenile delinquents.” The NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture houses the Sadie P. Delaney Papers, featuring correspondence from the time between Delaney and W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Booker T. Washington, and other black luminaries of the time.

Selected works by Sadie P. Delaney.

Selected works by Sadie P. Delaney.

In 1924 she was appointed chief librarian at the Veterans’ Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama. The library opened with two hundred books in 1925 and increased to four thousand volumes by the end of the year. Likewise, book circulation began at 275 and increased to 1,500, based on Delaney’s practice of getting to know patients on an individual basis and recommending books to them, creating circulation lists and pamphlets, holding a weekly radio talk, and establishing book clubs and other activities to connect readers with one another. She started debate clubs and stamp clubs, taught bookbinding and natural history, and installed “talking books” and projectors to display books onto the wall or ceiling for patients who couldn’t physically hold them. She continued her work with the blind, teaching no less than six hundred patients to read Braille and creating a special department for the blind at the hospital library in 1934.

Within a decade of her librarianship, there were around six thousand books in the Veterans’ Library collection, including a pioneering collection of books by and for African-Americans. Delaney saw her library as a tool for correcting the injustices of a segregated, unequal society. By including works about black soldiers, she could use books to help the veterans who were her patients “in [their] upward struggle to lay aside prejudice, all sense of defeat, and to take in that which is helpful and inspiring by the means of books.” Delaney wrote about the experience in a 1932 article for the Wilson Library Review, “The Negro Veteran and His Books,” which was also a rallying cry for the publication of more books by black people. Today, institutions like the Sadie Peterson Delaney African Roots Library carry on her important work in addressing racial injustice through access to education and to books.

Her innovations were recognized where it mattered, making their diffusion widespread: library schools in Illinois, North Carolina, and Georgia built links with the Veterans’ Hospital so that their students could train with Delaney. Veterans’ libraries across America studied and implemented her approaches. She collaborated with the Antabuse Clinic in Tuskegee to use bibliotherapy to treat alcoholism. The United States Information Service (USIS) profiled her and her methods, and distributed that information to no less than a hundred different USIS branches across 75 countries.

An illustration from the American Libraries profile of Sadie P. Delaney, 1993.

An illustration from the American Libraries profile of Sadie P. Delaney, 1993.

But at the same time, the greatest testimony to Sadie P. Delaney’s hard work and lasting contributions is the most frustrating and insulting of all: her ideas have diffused so widely that she is not credited enough by name. The New Yorker featured an article on bibliotherapy with no mention of Delaney at all. The free online course from the University of Warwick, “Literature and Mental Health: Reading for Wellbeing,” bears no mention of her efforts (yet). While she is a staple in articles by library and medical professionals, her recognition within popular culture and history is not nearly as extensive as she deserves—vast as her influence would be if traced within a twentieth and twenty-first century of reading. Histories of reading are much more likely to pay homage to the Frankfurt School than to cite the many decades of one woman’s applied generosity—her gift of time and accessibility in order to find the perfect book from which a person can grind a lens for looking at their own life. This is important in a time where algorithmic culture is beginning to bear more seriously on how people read, and it also is a way of linking reading history with politics, activism, and education. There is both a history of reading to be written of Sadie Peterson Delaney’s far-reaching contributions, and a model for reading history to be drawn from her deeply personal, richly emotional, systematically individualized approach to reading. It is a model that puts the huge scope of influence and lifelong struggles of the librarian in the central position that they deserve.