Tag: History of Printing

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Intellectual history

The Lives and Afterlives of Persianate Print: The Case of the Tuzuk-i Timuri and the Tuzuk-i Napoleon.

By guest contributor Tiraana Bains

Intellectual histories of India, particularly of the decades and centuries following the mid-eighteenth century, are often histories of Europe’s India: India as it was imagined and understood or misunderstood by Europeans. Representations, discourses, knowledge forms, and ideas, fundamentally and largely, remain subjects featuring European protagonists casting their gaze elsewhere. Both apologists and critics of empire, colonialism and racism have, in radically different ways, placed the ideas and presumptions of Europeans at the heart of their analysis. India’s Europe, on the other hand, as the brief concluding comment in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires 1500–1800 (Harvard University Press, 2017) reflects, remains all too shadowy and peripheral to the history of ideas and knowledge formation. Contrary to such historiographical tendencies, non-European actors living under the blaze of the British empire and colonial rule, regularly, and even mundanely, fashioned historiographies and crafted histories of both themselves and Europeans. What follows is merely a fragment.

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Cover of a bilingual edition of the Tuzuk-i Timuri published in Calcutta in 1785
Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online

In the year 1890–1891, two editions of the Tuzuk-i Timuri, a venerable Persian text with a remarkable history spanning centuries and spaces as distant as Central Asia, Bengal, and Britain, appeared in the Bombay book market. Released by two different publishers and booksellers, the two lithographs were not quite the same. One of the two differed quite sharply from all preceding published and manuscript copies of the Tuzuk-i Timuri. Published by the Chitra Prabha Press, this text had appended to it another account: the Tuzuk-i Napoleon. In catalogues this curious text is variously listed as the Tuzuk-i Timuri wa Tuzuk-i Napoleon or merely the Tuzuk-i Timuri. Within a decade, the act of braiding together these two histories had been undone. The Tuzuk-i Napoleon had appeared once again, this time shorn of its ties to the history and exploits of Amir Timur or Tamerlane, as he was known in some early modern European accounts and, to an extent, still continues to be. Published in Kabul by the royal publishing house or chapkhana-i shahi and dedicated to the Amir of Afghanistan, Abd al-Rahman Khan, it appeared with the slightly more specific title of Tuzuk-i Napoleon-i Awwal or the Institutes of Napoleon the First.

 

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Title page of the Tuzuk-i Napoleon-i Awwal published in Kabul
Source: NYU Afghanistan Digital Library

The prominent Iranian émigré publisher, translator, author and bookseller Mirza Muhammad al-Kuttab Shirazi’s decision to juxtapose and literally bind together these two texts in 1891 undoubtedly offers an example of commercial flair in a bustling knowledge and print economy as well as yet another episode in a long and convoluted history of textual remaking and refashioning. The Tuzuk-i Timuri itself is an instantiation of an appendix, in all likelihood spurious and fabricated, gaining a longstanding significance of its own. An apparent Persian translation of a Turkish text, the Tuzuk-i Timuri or the “Institutes, Designs, and Enterprises” of Timur as it is often translated, seems to have first emerged in the seventeenth century, appended to the ostensible and equally fabricated autobiographical account of Timur’s life, the Malfuzat-i Timuri or Waq‘iat-i Timuri.  By the late eighteenth century, in Bengal and Britain, the Tuzuk-i Timuri had been refashioned yet again, reimagined as a constitutional text, deployed to debate governance and British imperium in the nominally Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. While an English translation of the text accompanied by the Persian translation of an apparent Turkic original appeared in Calcutta, newspapers in London noted parliamentary controversy between Edmund Burke and Warren Hastings over the apparent foundational principals of Oriental governance contained in the Tuzuk. Not unlike the Tuzuk-i Timuri, the appended Tuzuk-i Napoleon from 1891 was also a translation, broadly drawn from a text known as The Military Maxims of Napoleon.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

Importantly, Shirazi’s decision to place an account of Napoleon’s military and political exploits alongside and in addition to the Tuzuk-i Timuri indicates a distinct conception of history. While this juxtaposition of a fourteenth century Turco-Mongol figure who established dominion over large chunks of the Perso-Islamic world and beyond, and an eighteenth-nineteenth century Corsican-French personage is certainly redolent of a romantic view of heroic conquerors across centuries, the fact of their textual company and shared Persianate rendering is also evidence of the imbrication and entanglement of diverse histories, regardless of nineteenth century narratives of divergent civilizational paradigms to the contrary. The textual meeting, translation and entanglement of Timur and Napoleon is replicated in the unfolding of this Persian translation of Napoleon’s maxims. More straightforward word-for-word translations of the conditions in which Napoleon mastered the conduct of war are interspersed with anecdotes and examples drawn from histories closer home – those of ancient Iran and India, and wars fought between Ottoman and Safavid armies. Such acts of conjoining and incorporating such histories were hardly new at the dawn of the 1890s.

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Shah Alam II

A large corpus of Persian and South Asian vernacular material points to the remaking of categories and contours of knowledge through the appropriation and incorporation of European histories and, in turn, the reworking of such histories. An intriguing example is that of the Tuzuk-i Walajahi, a Persian court chronicle produced under the aegis of the Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ali Khan Walajah, in the late-eighteenth century. The opening pages of the chronicle announce, unsurprisingly enough, the Nawab’s relation to the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, whose deputy he was, nominally at least, meant to be. The invocation of the Mughal emperor was also, however, quickly followed by a declaration of the Nawab’s close ties to the British King George III, “a brother dear as life.” Moreover, deeper in the text one finds a detailed genealogical history not of the Timurid or Mughal dynasty but the kings and queens of England. The exposition concludes with a narrative of the reign of George III, an account that seems to have been a standard description in entirely different genres of Persian writing, including works of geography such as Bilgrami’s late eighteenth century Hadiqat al-Aqlim. In the nineteenth century, the assimilation of the Hanoverians and George III into a Persian textual corpus came to a head with the publication, in Bombay, of Firuz ibn Kavus’ Jarjnama or George-nama, an epic three-volume history in verse of the Hanoverians and the British conquest of India in the style of the Persian epic poem, the Shahnama.

The publication of the Tuzuk-i Napoleon-i Awwal in Kabul marks another chapter in this history of translation, transmission and textual remaking. While the core of the Kabul text is the same as that of the Bombay edition, the introductory and concluding notes emphatically demonstrate its status as a document of state, articulating the Afghan state’s commitment to muscular state-making. In Bombay, the valence of a text such as the Tuzuk-i Timuri wa Tuzuk-i Napoleon would have been entirely different – merely one text among many. Another Persian history of Amir Timur’s life and exploits drawn from the famous Habib al-Siyar was even featured on the syllabus for a Bachelor of Arts degree at Bombay University. Meanwhile other histories of Napoleon had appeared in vernacular languages like Gujarati – booksellers and publishers in Bombay published books in several languages including English, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi and Sanskrit besides Persian and Gujarati. We are aware of the sheer range and diversity of texts printed in Bombay and elsewhere across British South Asia due to the legal requirement imposed by the British government that all publications be registered and catalogued (many of these government issued catalogues have been digitized by a team working at the British Library and constitute a rich historical source). The clear imprint of the hand of the British imperial state in the book business in Bombay notwithstanding, the stamp of the state is all the more pronounced in the case of books published in Kabul. This is partly due to the large number of books and pamphlets published by the royal publishing house that outlined the Amir Abd al-Rahman’s vision for Afghanistan as well as his achievements as sovereign. Amidst the heavy emphasis on a strong Afghan state, there are also clear indications of Kabul’s position in a broader nexus of Persianate circulation. As even a cursory search through NYU’s Afghanistan Digital Library shows, a range of texts originating in British India including agricultural treatises on the cultivation of tobacco and sericulture translated into Persian in Calcutta, circulated in Kabul.

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Photo of Carnac Road Bombay in 1881 by Lala Deen Dayal. Source: British Library.

Besides its obvious curiosity, what the publication of Tuzuk-i Napoleon and its companion text do demonstrate, not unlike the many other texts discussed in Nile Green’s seminal Bombay Islam, is the persistent vitality of Persian and Persianate literacy well past official British disavowals of the language and in spite of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute upon Indian Education” in the first half of the nineteenth century. The movement and translation of such texts also reveals geographies partly underpinned by institutions of colonial governance but hardly exhausted by the contours of political maps. Finally, they gesture to the work that still needs to be done to excavate, and take the ideas and practices of non-Europeans seriously. Examining how people with an allegedly limited sense of history chose to think about and even refashion and market histories of persons and spaces both far and near is an obvious place from which to continue this work.

Tiraana Bains is a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University. 

Categories
Think Piece

THE EDITORIAL AND THE POWER OF THE ARABIC-LANGUAGE PROVINCIAL PRESS

By guest contributor N. A. Mansour

Arabic periodicals are perhaps the greatest source for the history of the Arabic-speaking lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looking for Arabic primary sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be a minefield. Some archives are in warzones, others are chronically disorganized in under-funded archives, or in the worst cases, the sources simply do not exist. Periodicals survived through the aggregated power of steam, print, and colonial power: libraries across the globe subscribed to them, collected them, and many have since launched mass digitization projects. They are housed in comfortable libraries or even better, online, so long as you have an .edu login.

The story of the Arabic-language press is largely the story of Egypt and, even more specifically, of Cairo. Cairo also dominates much of the historiography of the Middle East and North Africa (see Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East). Egypt is painted in tones of exceptionalism: the first Arabic-speaking country in the Ottoman Empire to gain some semblance of independence in the 1820s, then the first in the Middle East to become a colonial project under the British in the 1880s. And Cairo was its founding city: an intellectual and cultural hub home to one of the world’s oldest universities, al-Azhar. And al-Waqa’i al-Misriyya (Egyptian Matters) was one of the first periodicals, issued by the khedival government for internal circulation amongst bureaucrats in 1828. Except Waqa’i did not have a wide reach and neither did its peers, notably al-Jarida al-‘Askariyya (The Military Journal) (1834) and Taqwim al-Akhbar ‘an al-Ḥawadith al-Tijariyya wa’l-I’lanat al-Malikiyya (A Summary of Trade News and Property Announcements) (1848–49). (For transliterating names, titles, and terms from Arabic, I used the standards known as simplified IJMES [International Journal for Middle Eastern Studies].) Except, the first major Arabic-language newspapers did not come from Egypt. Rather, the Arabic-language periodicals to have the greatest impact on the press as a genre of writing began as a provincialized enterprise, somewhat independent of traditional intellectual centers.

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Al-Ra’id al-Tunisi, July 24, 1861
(British Library)

The Ottoman government, ironically enough, set the precedent for a private press, partially because they funded one of the first major private periodicals in the most unlikely of places: the province of Tunisia, which was only nominally under Ottoman control by the mid-1800s. Al-Ra’id al-Tunisi (The Tunisian Pioneer) was launched on June 22, 1860 as a weekly newspaper, with support from Maltese printing enterprises and one Mr. Richard Holt, based in Tunisia. An official governmental paper, it was founded with the explicit goal of being a newspaper for the general public, with news deemed useful by the head of the provincial council. It was also vehement in its dedication to “spreading truth.” Al-Ra’id quickly emerged as a soapbox for commentary on local, regional, and even global news. It originally included a lengthy section for qism rasmi or official news, alongside an equally long qism ghayr rasmi, a section for unofficial news. However, the official news component became steadily less present, especially because the only distinction between the official and unofficial news was its source. Both sections covered political news, where the provincial government selected what went under the heading qism rasmi and the editor Sa’id Hamid Burq al-Qawafi was responsible for the remainder of the paper; that is the qism ghayr rasmi. But al-Ra’id took yet another step away from its governmental connections and thus, another step towards becoming “private:” it ran opinion pieces under the unofficial news platform. For example, the March 26, 1872 issue of al-Ra’id discusses the provincial council’s annual budget at excruciating length. This might not seem extraordinary, but it was not until a decade and a half later that the opinion piece—or perhaps, the editorial—would securely be featured in the vast majority of Arabic-language newspapers. Al-Ra’id actually appears to have been one of the first Arabic-language newspapers in the Arabic-speaking world to run opinion pieces, before its contemporary, the Beirut weekly Hadiqat al-Akhabar (The Garden of News), which only adopted opinion pieces in the late 1860s. The September 25, 1860 issue of al-Ra’id had addressed the ministers of the Tunisian province on Tunis’s political isolation and the necessity of finding some way to counter it.

But that does not mean al-Raid al-Tunisi was both pioneer and trend-setter. Subscriptions to the newspaper went from being regional, from the province of Tunisia itself as far afield as Alexandria and Beirut in 1860, to purely provincial by 1862. It is therefore unlikely that al-Ra’id al-Tunisi influenced other Arabic-language newspapers to begin publishing editorials or opinion pieces (Al-Ra’id al-Tunisi, July 24, 1861). It also does not exactly de-centralize Egypt, even though it clearly indicates that intellectual production aimed at the general public through the press was not unique to Egypt and predated Egypt’s rise as a print hub. Rather, the honor of decentralizing Egypt goes to a Lebanese Muslim living in the Ottoman capital.

 

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Ahmed Faris Shidyaq, date unknown.
Photo credit: https://ajdadalarab.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/  (أحمد-فارس-االشدياق)

Ahmad Faris Shidyaq founded al-Jawa’ib (The Answers) in 1860 in Istanbul, another unlikely Arabic press center. After all, Istanbul did not have the historic weight of Cairo or Fez as a center of Islamic learning, the bulk of which was done in Arabic and divided between different corners of the Muslim world. (That said, an argument can be made that Istanbul was a center for Islamic learning, primarily in the field of logic and rational sciences [see El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century].) But Shidyaq himself was intersectional by nature. He had familiarity with Maronite theology, the faith into which he was born in Mount Lebanon, before he converted to Protestantism, then to Islam, and he was fluent in several languages, including French and English. Al-Jawaib was not only modelled on the European newspapers Shidyaq would have been exposed to while in Paris and England (where he was associated with the short-lived Paris-based Arabic-language newspaper ‘Utarid), but took inspiration from Shidyaq’s time in Malta and Egypt working closely with Arabic printers (see Alwan). It took several years for al-Jawa’ib to break away from a strictly news-based model—divided into internal and external news—and adopt the editorial, but when it did in 1865, the editorial was used, not simply to act as a soapbox on pertinent political issues, but to forge al-Jawaib’s political identity as a major force of pan-Islamism and Ottomanism (al-Jawa’ib, October 2, 1872). Shidyaq’s Ottomanist leanings are not surprising: he was originally invited to Istanbul at the behest of the Ottoman sultan. Nor is his pan-Islamism astonishing, premised more on Muslim solidarity than political unity (which in many instances ideologically served Ottomanism). However, it is significant that Shidyaq used the press to convey his political stance and that he specifically used the editorial to do so, placing it front and center on the first page of every issue.

But again, we face the question of influence: did al-Jawa’ib really set the standards for format and style for the emerging Arabic-language press? Yes, Shidyaq is remembered as one of the founding fathers of the nahda—the Arab intellectual renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—and as the author of perhaps the first Arabic novel, Saq ‘ala Saq (Leg over Leg), published in 1855. But perhaps his legacy is better placed in al-Jawa’ib. The paper had tremendous reach (see Al-Jawa’ib’s subscriptions rates, indicate where newspapers had marketing agents, for September 16, 1861; May 19, 1868; March 7, 1877) and was cited across Arabic newspapers for both its opinion pieces and the original news telegrams it published. And yes, there is a high possibility the notion of an editorial came itself from the influence of the European press, but al-Jawa’ib demonstrated to Arabic-language journalists that Arabic readers would read editorials. The editorial ultimately defined the Arabic newspaper, distinguishing it from the majalla, the journal or magazine, the likes of which emerged in Arabic in the mid-1870s as a genre dedicated almost singularly to objective knowledge, or ‘ilm, until the early twentieth century. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the genres flipped, with more emphasis on news in newspapers and the majalla becoming a major site of critical thought and political debate.

But back in the mid-to-late 1800s, Cairene periodicals were rather stagnant, still largely centered on those established during the 1820s through the 1840s. They were essentially governmental papers intended for internal distribution amongst the various branches of the Egyptian khedival government. But the Egyptian press would soon emerge as a major force, with distribution across the Arabic-speaking world. But contrary to the historiography, the ‘provincial’ press would remain unprovincial. Arabic-speakers as far afield as Singapore and Argentina would not simply look to Egypt and the sheer volume of periodicals it produced, but would also contribute to the global Arabic press market, changing the center of Arabic-language intellectual history as they did.

N. A. Mansour is a Ph.D. student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on Arabic-language intellectual history. She is working on a dissertation on the history of the Arabic-language press. 

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Dispatches from the Archives

The New Bibliographical Presses at Rare Book School

by editor Erin McGuirl, and guest contributor Roger Gaskell

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The Rare Book School Replica Copperplate Press, in the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of  Virginia

In the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Printing Historical Society (1965), Philip Gaskell defined the bibliographical press as “a workshop or laboratory which is carried on chiefly for the purpose of demonstrating and investigating the printing techniques of the past by means of setting type by hand, and of printing from it on a simple press.” Just a few weeks ago, we had the honor and pleasure of inaugurating the bibliographical pressroom and exhibition space at the University of Virginia, in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Thanks to a collaboration between the University Library, Rare Book School, and the bookseller Roger Gaskell, UVa is now home to two bibliographical presses for use in public demonstrations, bibliographical instruction, and scholarly research. One is a common letterpress, used for printing text and images from type and relief blocks; the other is a rolling press, used for printing from intaglio plates. This is the first and only bibliographical rolling press, and it is a significant step for scholars not only of the history of printing, but also of the history of art, science, cartography, and other disciplines which rely on historical texts printed from intaglio plates, either exclusively or in combination with letterpress text.

Roger Gaskell, a scholar and bookseller, designed the new bibliographical rolling press, a replica based on the designs published in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in 1769. As an antiquarian bookseller specializing in natural history and science books, Roger has always been interested in the production history and bothered by the lack of rigorous bibliographical language for the description of illustrated books. In 1999, a fellowship at the Clark Library in Los Angeles allowed him to study intaglio plates inserted into letterpress printed books, and he formed the idea then that building a replica wooden rolling press was essential for a better understanding of the mechanics and workshop practices of intaglio printing. Six years ago, Michael Suarez invited him to teach at Rare Book School and over dinner, Roger pitched to Michael the idea that Rare Book School should commission the building of a wooden rolling press based on a historical model. Some years later they discussed this again. But what to build? A press based on the design published by Bosse in 1645? That has been done: there is a fine replica in the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam that is frequently used for public demonstrations. A copy of an existing press? Gary Gregory was doing this for his Printing Office of Edes and Gill in Boston. It was the inspired suggestion of Barbara Heritage to build a press based on the Encyclopédie engravings. By good fortune Roger had seen a surviving press of very similar design on display in the print shop of the Louvre in Paris some years earlier. This made the Encyclopédie the perfect source as its accuracy, as well as a number of constructional details, which could be verified by examination of a contemporary press. The Chalcographie du Louvre press is now in storage at the Atelier des Arts, Chalcographie et Moulage at St Denis to the North of Paris where Roger spent a day photographing and measuring, in preparation for his new press.

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Robert Bernard (b. 1734) after Jacques Goussier (1722–1799). Imprimerie en taille-douce, Développement de la Presse, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 7 (plates). Paris, 1769.
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The Chalcographie du Louvre press at the Atelier des Arts, Chalcographie et Moulage at St Denis. Photograph by Roger Gaskell.

The use of working replicas gives students and researchers access to the technologies of book production that shaped the transmission of texts and images. Traditionally, the production of literary texts has driven the development of bibliography, bibliographical teaching, and the bibliographical press movement. But it has also long been understood that the ability to print images in multiples was as revolutionary for the development of other disciplines, including medicine, science, technology and travel literature, as the printing of texts has been to religious movements and imaginative literature. At UVa and Rare Book School, students and researchers can now work with the two – and only two – printing technologies responsible for all book production before the nineteenth century: relief and intaglio printing. There we can develop the habits of mind necessary to understand the implications of the extraordinary synergy of mind, body and machine which shaped the modern world in the west. Presses like these were used to print engravings and etchings for collectors, popular broadsides and ballads, indeed all kinds of ephemera as well as printed books.

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Erin McGuirl, the rolling press, and prints in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, UVa

As a discipline, bibliography has been shaped by its leading scholars’ interests in English drama, poetry, and fiction, and in incunabula. Scholars working in the history of art and science, and anyone working with books on travel and exploration, are at a bibliographical loss – it’s hard to understand why an illustrated book came to be the way it is because bibliographical literature (with a very few exceptions) does not address the problems raised by printing in non-letterpress media. What’s more, this problem extends beyond rolling press printed matter and the handpress period and into twentieth century non-letterpress materials made on mimeograph, ditto, and Xerox machines. Much of the work by media historians is rightly viewed with skepticism by the bibliographical community, yet this community has not yet figured out how to think about printed matter that isn’t made from folded sheets of letterpress.

Printing is the work of the body as much as it is the work of the mind; it’s time to roll up our sleeves. Particularly in the absence of substantial archival records of rolling press printers and intaglio plate artists, we must get our bodies behind the press to confront the constraints of printing for books from intaglio plates. We need to print images and put them in books, we need to confront the reality of doing this in multiples (and probably also in debt), and in coordination with the production of letterpress text. Doing this work will make way for the kind of grounded thinking about print that makes for good scholarship.

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Megan McNamee, RBS Mellon Fellow & A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, pulls a print on the Rare Book School Copperplate Replica Press. 

Roger Gaskell is a scholar and bookseller, now living and working in Wales. He teaches The Illustrated Scientific Book to 1800 course bi-annually at Rare Book School, and teaches a regular seminar, Science in Print in the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Categories
Think Piece

Towards a History of Hebrew Book Collecting: A Review of this Year’s Manfred R. Lehmann Workshop in the History of the Hebrew Book

by contributing editor Yitzchak Schwartz

Last month I once again attended the Manfred R. Lehmann Memorial Master Workshop in the History of the Hebrew Book at the University of Pennsylvania. This is my fifth year attending the workshop and my second writing about it for the blog. As I wrote about last year, the workshop’s goal is to bring together scholars and professionals working in fields related to the Hebrew book to learn from senior scholars about their methodology and research. This year’s presenter was Joseph Hacker, Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Hacker’s research centers on the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the intellectual history of Sephardic and Eastern Jews.  At the Workshop, he discussed a newer project, on which he has published several articles, on the history of Hebrew book collecting. While there have been several important studies written on specific collections in the modern and early modern periods there is no history of the subject. Dr. Hacker’s project ties up many loose ends, synthesizes the extant scholarship and paves the way for scholars to begin drawing much broader conclusions about Hebrew book collecting and its evolution over time.

Dr Hacker’s workshop traced the history of Hebrew book collecting from the early middle ages to the two decades after World War II using an extremely diverse array of source material. He argued that while the Talmud speaks of batei midrash, houses of study, there is no explicit record of these having been places where books were kept for public use. The first recorded public collections of Hebrew books are in the medieval Islamic world, contemporary with the emergence of the madrassa as a center or textual learning among Muslim elites. For example, in his twelfth century historical work Sefer HaQabbalah Abraham ibn Daoud states that the powerful Jewish vizier of Granada Samuel Hanagid (993-1056) maintained a room of books where others could come to read and copy.  Paralleling the term madrassa, such collections are referred to in medieval and some early modern texts by the term midrash, meaning a place of learning. References to midrash are scattered throughout the medieval period in historical works, rabbinic texts and various other kinds of sources that Professor Hacker has collected material from in the course for this and other projects. He argues that the existence of such centers for study and copying calls into question a popular argument, popularized by the codicologist and book historian Malachi Beit-Arie’ that Jews never had a parallel institution to the Christian scriptoria. Dr. Hacker argues that for all intents and purposes these centers were effectively the same thing even as there are fewer examples, especially during the early medieval period.

Collections of Hebrew books began to take on larger proportions during the early modern period, when they began to include printed books. Dr. Hacker demonstrated the existence of communal collections in many major Spanish and Italian Jewish communities based largely on censorial and inquisitorial records. They consisted of volumes of Jewish sacred texts (liturgy, Talmud, Bible and commentaries on all three) as well as works on philosophy, medicine, grammar and more esoteric subjects. At the same time, Christian hebraists began assembling much larger collections of Hebrew manuscripts. The earliest hebraists, many of whom had ties to royal courts that were already collecting Eastern texts forged relationships with Eastern Jews and bought manuscripts from them at a time when they had already begun to replace their manuscripts with printed books. Eastern Jewish communities remained very protective, however, of specific manuscripts held special communal or spiritual value. By the mid-eighteenth century, many Jewish collections of manuscripts had been purchased by hebraists and by the early nineteenth most of the great hebraist collections had been absorbed into state collections such as the bibliothèque nationale and the British and Bodleian libraries. Dr. Hacker ended the workshop by discussing Jewish attempts to form comparably large and encyclopedic institutional collections in the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century by institutions such as YIVO in Vilna, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. They all succeeded to various degrees but, when it comes to manuscripts, Dr. Hacker argues, the Hebraists had two centuries earlier succeeded in developing very accurate criteria for determining importance and authenticity and had bought out the best stock. As a result the most important manuscript collections remain those of European national rather than Jewish institutions.

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By אסף פינצ’וק – The National Library of Israel, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14181732

The relatively recently formed collections of institutions such as the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem are an exception to the rule, Dr. Hacker argues, in that they were formed without the legacies of Christian Hebraists and amassed encyclopedic collections despite the destruction of Jewish communal libraries during WWII

Another important and as-yet only partially-told  story that Dr. Hacker’s presentation touched upon was the effect of WWII and the Holocaust on European collections of Hebrew Books. It is well-known that the German efforts to destroy the Jewish intellectual legacy harmed many of Europe’s most important Hebrew book collections. I was unaware, however, of the extent to which those collections that survive only do piecemeal. For example, Dr. Hacker cited scholars who have written about the YIVO and Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums collections who conclude that much of these collections were lost. Many Hebrew books were also destroyed in fires to state libraries in Eastern Europe caused by combat and bombing such as one that gutted the Warsaw Library, which had previously held a collection that included many unique manuscripts. Importantly for intellectual historians of Judaism, Hasidic mystical texts seem to have been some of the greatest casualties of this destruction. Dr. Hacker presented original research on the fate of several important dynastic collections of Hasidic courts, most of which were completely destroyed during the war and that all contained original, unpublished texts.

One consequence of Dr. Hacker’s research that I found particularly intriguing was that it suggests just how hard it is to be certain as to the complete contents of any collections or even of all the genres a given collection might have contained. Dr. Hacker’s work is based on a twofold approach of working back from contemporary collections and mining the entire corpus of related texts to piece together historical collections. When discussing early modern Jewish collections, for example, he made particular use of censorial records but  also cited various contemporary texts in many languages. Dr. Hacker pointed out that in several Italian communities, censorial records showed complete absence of prayer books while in others complete absence of Talmudic manuscripts. He suggests that these communities may have simply decided not to turn in those genres to censors, perhaps because they used them on a day-to-day basis and concluded that their temporary absence would be too great an obstacle to the community’s functioning. Similarly, the inventories of personal collections that Hebraists and some Jewish collectors made up were often survive in only one version and may or may not reflect the final state of collections or even their entire scope. So while Dr. Hacker’s research compellingly outlines the evolution of Hebrew book collecting, the source material it uses for the early modern period at least would not give researchers a conclusive picture of the kinds of books in these libraries. Dr. hacker’s research thus seems to me to present a methodological red flag against researchers making arguments from absence in censorial or inquisitorial records.

Dr. Hacker’s work on the history of Hebrew book collecting is still in progress and the workshop left me with several important questions: One question I found myself coming back to again and again was about Dr. Hacker’s chronology: He sees the absence of records or explicit discussion of midrash-type spaces prior to the middle ages as evidence for the lack of their existence. However, parsing the evidence he cited for the development of the midrash in the medieval period I began to wonder: Dr. Hacker has found references to various important medieval figures such Samuel Hanagid and Isaac Abarbanel having maintained libraries. These references are generally made in the context of biographical (in Abarbanel’s case autobiographical) accounts of those figures. We have no similar historical texts from earlier periods that would tell us one way or another about libraries. Moreover, many scholars believe the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls  originally comprised a library for the sectarian residents of the Qumran settlement. Midrashic texts refer to a library as having existed in the Temple, demonstrating that the notion of a semi-public library was at the very least not alien to the rabbis of the Talmudic period. As a result I wondered whether the distinction between the midrash of the middle ages the beit midrash of the talmudic period really held weight.

Another question that Dr. Hacker’s work raised for me and several of my co-participants at the workshop was that since it looks only to collections of Hebrew books it awaits further research to explore the presence of non-Hebrew books in Jewish collections. What kinds of non-Hebrew books did early modern and modern Jewish collectors and institutions own? And what kinds of communities, based on the Hebrew books they had, tended to collect what kind of non-Hebrew books? How did these relations differ from location to location, between Turkey and Northern Italy for example? These are questions that could shed a great deal of light on the intellectual worlds of these Jewish communities. All of these questions make clear, to my mind, that Dr. Hacker’s work is laying the groundwork for many new and promising avenues of inquiry in Jewish intellectual history.

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Humanist Pedagogy and New Media

by contributing editor Robby Koehler

Writing in the late 1560s, humanist scholar Roger Ascham found little to praise in the schoolmasters of early modern England.  In his educational treatise The Scholemaster, Asham portrays teachers as vicious, lazy, and arrogant.  But even worse than the inept and cruel masters were the textbooks, which, as Ascham described them, were created specifically to teach students improper Latin: “Two schoolmasters have set forth in print, either of them a book [of vulgaria] . . ., Horman and Whittington.  A child shall learn of the better of them, that, which another day, if he be wise, and come to judgement, he must be fain to unlearn again.”  What were these books exactly? And if they were so unfit for use in the classroom, then why did English schoolmasters still use them to teach students?  Did they enjoy watching students fail and leaving them educationally impoverished?

Actually, no. Then, as now, school teachers did not always make use of the most effective methods of instruction, but their choice to use the books compiled by Horman and Whittington was not based in a perverse reluctance to educate their students.  Ascham sets up a straw man here about the dismal state of Latin teaching in England to strengthen the appeal of his own pedagogical ideas.  As we will see, the books by Horman and Whittington, colloquially known as “vulgaria” or “vulgars” in schools of the early modern period, were a key part of an earlier Latin curriculum that was in the process of being displaced by the steady adoption of Humanist methods of Latin study and instruction and the spread of printed books across England.  Looking at these books, Ascham could see only the failed wreckage of a previous pedagogical logic, not the vital function such books had once served.  His lack of historical cognizance and wilful mischaracterization of previous pedagogical texts and practices are an early example of an argumentative strategy that has again become prevalent as the Internet and ubiquitous access to computers has led pundits to argue for the death of the book in schools and elsewhere.  Yet, as we will see, the problem is often not so much with books as much as with what students and teachers are meant to do with them.

“Vulgaria” were initially a simple solution to a complicated problem: how to help students learn to read and write Latin and English with the limited amount of paper or parchment available in most English schools.  According to literary scholar Chris Cannon, by the fifteenth century, many surviving notebooks throughout England record pages of paired English and Latin sentence translations.  It seems likely that students would receive a sentence in Latin, record it, and then work out how to translate it into English.  Once recorded, students held onto these notebooks as both evidence of their learning and as a kind of impromptu reference for future translations.  In the pre-print culture of learning, then, vulgaria were evidence of a learning process, the material embodiment of a student’s slow work of absorbing and understanding the mechanics of both writing and translation.

The advent of printing fundamentally transformed this pedagogical process.  Vulgaria were among the first books printed in England, and short 90-100 page vulgaria remained a staple of printed collections of Latin grammatical texts up to the 1530s.  Once in print, vulgaria ceased to be a material artifact of an educational process and now became an educational product for the use of students who were literate in either English or Latin to use while working on translations.  The culture of early modern English schools comes through vividly in these printed collections, often closing the distance between Tudor school rooms and our own.  For example, in the earliest printed vulgaria compiled by John Anwykyll, one can learn how to confess to a fellow student’s lackadaisical pursuit of study: “He studied never one of those things more than another.” Or a student might ask after a shouting match “Who made all of this trouble among you?”  Thus, in the early era of print, these books remained tools for learning Latin as a language of everyday life. It was Latin for school survival, not for scholarly prestige.

As Humanism took hold in England, vulgaria changed too, transforming from crib-books for beginning students to reference books for the use of students and masters, stuffed full of Humanist erudition and scholarship.  Humanist schoolmasters found the vulgaria a useful instrument for demonstrating their extensive reading and, occasionally, advancing their career prospects.  William Horman, an older schoolmaster and Fellow at Eton, published a 656 page vulgaria (about 5 times as long as the small texts for students) in 1519, offering it as a product of idle time that, in typical Humanist fashion, he published only at the insistence of his friends.  Yet, Horman’s book was still true to its roots in the school room, containing a melange of classical quotations alongside the traditional statements and longer dialogues between schoolmasters and students.

By the 1530s, most of the first wave of printed vulgaria went out of print, likely because they did not fit with the new Humanist insistence that the speaking and writing of Latin be more strictly based on classical models.  Vulgaria would have looked increasingly old-fashioned, and their function in helping students adapt to the day-to-day rigors of the Latinate schoolroom were likely lost in the effort to separate, elevate, and purify the Latin spoken and written by students and teachers alike.  Nothing more embodied this transformation that Nicholas Udall’s vulgaria Flowers for Latin Speaking (1533), which was made up exclusively of quotations from the playwright Terence, with each sentence annotated with the play, act, and scene from which the sentence was excerpted.

Loeb Facing Page Translation
Terence. Phormio, The Mother-In-Law, The Brothers. Ed. John Sargeaunt. Loeb Classical Library.  New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920.  https://archive.org/details/L023NTerenceIIPhormioTheMotherInLawTheBrothers   

The vulgaria as printed crib-book passed out of use in the schoolroom after about 1540, so why was Ascham still so upset about their use in 1568 when he was writing The Schoolmaster?  By that time, Ascham could assume that many students had access to approved Humanist grammatical texts and a much wider variety of printed matter in Latin.  In a world that had much less difficulty gaining obtaining both print and paper, the vulgaria would seem a strange pedagogical choice indeed.  Ascham’s own proposed pedagogical practices assumed that students would have a printed copy of one or more classical authors and at least two  blank books for their English and Latin writing, respectively.  Whereas the vulgaria arose from a world of manuscript practice and a straitened economy of textual scarcity, Ascham’s own moment had been fundamentally transformed by the technology of print and the Humanist effort to recover, edit, and widely disseminate the works of classical authors.  Ascham could take for granted that students worked directly with printed classical texts and that they would make use of Humanist methods of commonplacing and grammatical analysis that themselves relied upon an ever-expanding array of print and manuscript materials and practices.  In this brave new world, the vulgaria and its role in manuscript and early print culture were alien holdovers of a bygone era.

Of course, Ascham’s criticism of the vulgaria is also typical of Humanist scholars, who often distanced themselves from their  predecessors and to assert importance and correctness of their own methods.  Ironically, this was exactly what William Horman was doing when he published his massive volume of vulgaria – exemplifying and monumentalizing his own erudition and study while also demonstrating the inadequacy of previous, much shorter efforts. Ascham’s rejection of vulgaria must be seen as part of the larger intergenerational Humanist pattern of disavowing and dismissing the work of predecessors who could safely be deemed inadequate to make way for one’s own contribution.  Ascham is peculiarly modern in this respect, arguing that introducing new methods of learning Latin can reform the institution of the school in toto.  One is put in mind of modern teachers who argue that the advent of the Internet or of some set of methods that the Internet enables will fundamentally transform the way education works.

In the end, the use of vulgaria was not any more related to the difficulties of life in the classroom or the culture of violence in early modern schools than any other specific pedagogical practice or object.  But, as I’ve suggested, Ascham’s claim that the problems of education can be attributed not to human agents but to the materials they employ is an argument that has persisted into the present.  In this sense, Ascham’s present-mindedness suggests the need to take care in evaluating seemingly irrelevant or superfluous pedagogical processes or materials.  Educational practices are neither ahistorical nor acontextual, they exist in institutional and individual time, and they bear the marks of both past and present exigencies in their deployment.  When we fail to recognize this, we, like Ascham, mischaracterize their past and present value and will likely misjudge how best to transform our educational institutions and practices to meet our own future needs.

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The Other Samuel Johnson: African-American Labor in the Vicinity of the Early U.S. Book Trade

by guest contributor John Garcia

Much of the pleasure of studying the economics of book publishing comes from the various minor personages who appear and disappear before the historian’s gaze. Sometimes patterns emerge from these fragmented discoveries, perhaps not enough for an article, but worth sharing as a provocation for others tilling similar ground. The anecdotes and interpretations supplied below represent a book historian’s contribution to recovery work in early African-American print culture. The study of early black print has benefited from new archival discoveries and interpretations, led in part by Cohen and Stein’s 2012 edited collection Early African American Print Culture. Rather than seek forgotten black authors or readers, or under-appreciated connections between print and racialization, I ask a set of questions that focus on the labors behind book culture in the early American republic: What happens in the vicinity of book production and consumption? Is there a black presence in the mundane life of making books (as opposed to writing, printing, or reading them)? How did African-Americans contribute to the various activities that support a printing operation or bookstore?

Focusing on activities occurring “in the vicinity” of book production directs attention to the still-unknown history of African-American labor, both free and enslaved, in relation to the early national book trade. Could indentured labor in a print shop allow enslaved persons a pathway to freedom? Was working for the book trade particularly amenable to emancipated African-Americans, even if they were illiterate?

Not long ago, while studying letters exchanged between Mathew Carey and his traveling agent Mason Locke Weems— the most successful American publisher prior to 1830 and the early republic’s most successful book marketer, respectively—I was given pause by the following query written by Weems in 1797:

“If you see my Sam (freed Negro) be so good as to tell him I want to employ him.”

This note was the first tantalizing clue I had ever seen about the presence of African-American workers in the print shops and publishing houses of Carey’s Philadelphia.

Samuel Johnson was a slave Weems had inherited as part of his father’s Maryland estate. Sam’s unusually literary name immediately brings to mind the famous English writer and biographer, and Weems may have personally chosen this name, given his own reputation as biographer and hagiographer of George Washington and others. Weems deserves credit for having freed Johnson—he elsewhere boasts to Carey of being an “early Liberator of my Slaves”—and he seems to have taken special care to ingratiate the ex-slave into the community of Philadelphia printers and publishers. Four years after receiving that first note from Weems, Carey paid Johnson twenty dollars on Weems’s account. Throughout the rest of the decade, Samuel Johnson appears in the financial records of Philadelphia publishers as a paid laborer, usually in the form of receipts bearing his mark. Johnson was illiterate.

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Receipt of payment from Mathew Carey to Samuel Johson, Nov. 26, 1801. (Account #6710, Matthew Carey Papers, American Antiquarian Society)

 

Although sometimes portrayed as an ideologist of slavery and nationalism—here I’m thinking particularly of François Furstenberg’s compelling reading of Weems in In the Name of the Father (2006)—surviving evidence of the relationship between Weems and Johnson suggests that the former went out of his way to treat his ex-slave as an independent agent in the world of print.

Further evidence comes from a letter Weems wrote to the Philadelphia publisher C.P. Wayne: “Dr Sir. Of the little monies of mine now in your hand, please pay my Freed Man, Samuel Johnson Esq., sixty dollars & forever oblige two of your very ob’t serv’ts. Poor Sam & his Quondam Sovereign, M.L. Weems.”

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Receipt of C.P. Wayne, Oct. 17, 1804 bearing Samuel Johnson’s mark (American Antiquarian Society)

On the verso of this letter, Wayne had Johnson sign his mark to acknowledge receipt of the sixty dollars. This large sum of money was for services Johnson performed in relation to Wayne’s publication of John Marshall’s five-volume Life of George Washington (1804-07), one of the most ambitious publication events of the decade. More evidence of Johnson’s labor can be found in the records of the female printer Lydia Bailey. In 1808, Bailey paid Sam $1.50 for “additional paveing in the yard in north alley” (Lydia R. Bailey Receipt Book, 1808-1824. American Antiquarian Society). This small sum, and the kind of labor expended to earn it, demonstrates that Weems was not exaggerating in calling his friend “Poor Sam.” Johnson undoubtedly took on the most menial, unskilled jobs from his Philadelphia employers.

Taken together, these documents give oblique information about the book trade’s reliance upon African-American labor. As early as 1797, Johnson seems to have frequently hung around the vicinity of Carey’s business. Johnson’s continued usefulness to Philadelphia’s printers is proven by the range of years (1801-1808) represented by the receipts. Illiterate men could perform valuable work in early U.S. print shops, binderies, bookstores, and paper mills, down to the mundane (but still necessary) work of building maintenance. These peripheral activities remind us that book historians should always consider the non-textual labors behind print culture that don’t end up on the page. Personal connections mattered as well, since it’s clear that Weems’s extensive contacts enabled Johnson to find employment and to be eventually paid. The men and women of the Philadelphia book trade comprised a close-knit community, as Rosalind Remer discusses in her 1996 book Printers and Men of Capital, and all three of Johnson’s employers had longstanding ties with Weems and with one other. This “network” of booksellers and printers kept Johnson involved, even though he couldn’t read the very books that his work helped to produce.

Samuel Johnson was likely an anomaly as a free African-American worker in the trade. My second example offers a glimpse into slave labor in a New York printing establishment. The records of the printer Samuel Campbell reveal 1790s New York as a city of print still rooted in the craft relations of the hand-press period. Campbell employed numerous apprentices, a practice documented by extant indentureship papers such as one contracted with a white boy named Alexander McLeod, aged fifteen, to learn the art of bookbinding. Also among Campbell’s papers is another indentureship for “Charles a negro man,” aged thirty-eight, to serve “after the manner of a servant.” Both contracts, for McLeod in 1791 and for Charles in 1793, reveal the different modalities of unfree labor used in early U.S. printing establishments.

How did Charles come to work for Campbell? A separate sheet of paper mounted to his indenture bears the signature of a previous owner, Casper Springsteen, who transferred the right to “bargain, sell, and dispose of” the slave to a relative David Springsteen, of Long Island, New York. On November 9, 1793, David Springsteen signed the papers that made Charles a servant of Samuel Campbell. The verso of the contract has a further note from David Springsteen directing Campbell to no longer consider Charles as the property of the Springsteen family after the expiration of seven years: “Provided the said Charles within named shall & do well and truly fulfill the written Indenture I do hereby remiss release and for ever quit claim unto the said negro slave & forgo any right of property over him.” Could this mean that Charles became a free man after termination of the indentureship? Unfortunately, the trail of evidence ends here, and I have not seen further mention of Charles in Samuel Campbell’s papers.

Campbell saw fit to use the same printed form for a black slave that he used for his white apprentices, even as the manuscript annotations and alterations made to Charles’s papers display his liminal status. As the property of another, slaves couldn’t legally bind themselves to an indenture, and yet his previous owner, David Springsteen, seems to have purposely inserted language endowing Charles with a provisional right to “fulfill the written Indenture” and work his way to freedom after a stated number of years. The difference between the contracts signed by Alexander McLeod and Charles, therefore, resides in different degrees of being bound to a master, with racial difference (in the case of Charles) calling for contractual finesse that was both emancipatory, in one sense, while also barring enslaved laborers from specialized training.

First of two indentures to Samuel Campbell, New-York Historical Society.
Second of two indentures to Samuel Campbell, New-York Historical Society.

Alexander McLeod also reminds us that free and enslaved labor existed in a continuum that included indentured white workers as well. McLeod was specifically assigned the craft of bookbinding, and successful completion of his apprenticeship would have prepared him for work in New York’s thriving book industry. Charles, on the other hand, had no specialized assignment in the world of print. That said, given Campbell’s extensive business (which included a New Jersey paper mill), it’s likely that Charles may have performed the kinds of odd jobs undertaken by “Poor” Samuel Johnson.

Does paving the sidewalk outside a printer’s shop merit inclusion in early African-American print culture? Emphatically yes, so long as we understand “print culture” as a cluster of practices and mediations that are not divorced from human labor. As Robert Darnton once argued in his essay “The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature,” the historical analysis of literate culture must be expanded to include all the agents—even illiterate ones—responsible for the book as a cultural artifact. The two African-Americans described in this essay teach us that the making of books could potentially set one man free or help another ex-slave maintain a livelihood, however meager. Both men worked in the vicinity of the early U.S. book trade, even though they were likely unable to read the printed matter that was the end goal of the businesses for which they worked.

John Garcia teaches humanities courses at Boston University. His research in early American book history has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography.