A good day for book-burning

It is rare enough to find a scholarly discussion of the destruction of books that rises above the emotional response our culture’s rationale demands of us. To have a set of four disquistions dedicated to ‘Bibliophobia’ — as Brian Cummings has titled his Clarendon Lectures that started in Oxford yesterday — is surely cause to celebrate, to sound the horns or to light the bonfire.

Let us first pause on the overall title for the series. Prof. Cummings played with various concepts in the opening section of his characteristically well-crafted and wide-ranging lecture: bibliophilia, bibliomania and bibliofetishism. He places bibliophobia in a natural binary opposition with bibliophilia, but if we think of other contemporary usages, we might use different terminology: those who hate not the Devil but the European Union and all its works call their own opponents Europhiles and themselves Eurosceptics. That is a rare case where a cabal has been able to choose a positive sobriquet for themselves, one which plays down their visceral dislike and presents their position as a reasoned and reasonable critique. And if the Europhobes are allowed to redescribe themselves, I wonder whether we should not talk, in this more intellectual context, of biblioscepticism. It is to Cummings’ purpose to talk of a phobia since he is providing, as he put it, not so much a history as an anthropology of the book (with requisite nods to Freud). But it also strikes me that his discussion is likely to lead us to a recognition of book destruction as elemental, certainly, and ritualistic most often but also rational — and, indeed, ironically affirmative of books.

His first lecture was entitled ‘Book-burnings’ and he did his subject proud. I have argued elsewhere that our emotive responses to book-burnings, conditioned by associations with both Kristallnacht and the subsequent mass incineration of humans, tends to overlook their futility — for each book burnt, several more can come off the printing press. So, it was pleasing to hear Brian Cummings stress that the association made between book-burnings and censorship is over-done. He moved us towards a clearer realisation of book-burnings as symbolic, in which the use of fire has connotations of both the purgative (and thus the punitive) and the festive.

Cummings’ particular focus was on the sixteenth century, with much space given to Martin Luther’s contribution to the history of book-burning, here presented as a riposte to the more ambitious attempts to destroy his own work by the pope’s agent, Girolamo Aleandro. That focus also, of course, invites comparisons between the information technology revolution through which we are living and the one which Luther harnessed to such earth-shattering success. However, in questions afterwards, I proffered the suggestion that the coming of age of book-burnings came not with print but with paper. Anyone who has consulted the re-mounted fragments of Cottonian manuscripts damaged in the 1732 fire will have seen how flame can distort, shrink and make translucent sheets of parchment, without necessarily managing efficiently to destroy it or even make its text illegible. Paper, on the other hand, while it might have to wait for 450 degrees Celsius (not Bradbury’s Fahrenheit), is more effective material for the fire. But even then, as was implicit in my comment and as two separate people mentioned to me afterwards, the other physical aspects of the book could also affect its perishability: in particular, its binding. Early modern images of biblioclasm often show a whole bound volume being thrown into the flames, as in Le Sueur’s wonderfully anachronistic image of St Paul at Ephesus (one which Cumming had as his opening image, using the National Gallery copy while I  have concentrated my attention in the one in the Louvre). Yet, if one wanted to speed up the burning process, one would presumably tear a book from the wood, leather, metal and other materials that had been designed to protect it: in other words, a process of destruction by tearing apart would proceed the conflagration. Or, to put it another way, the book would already have been maimed and died before its inwards were consigned to the flames. Of course, many printed books circulated and were sold unbound; others were mere pamphlets — when Luther in December 1520 threw the bull of excommunication on the fire, the pope had little chance: such an ephemeral printing would burn easily. Yet, of course, the reformer did not destroy the pope or his bull; there were available far too many other copies of Leo X’s words to make that possible. And this is the way in which print makes book-burnings all the more futile: a technology based on paper makes the destruction of the individual object easier, but also makes the individual one of a collective most often too large to be eradicated utterly.

The culture or cult of biblioclasm by flame, then, is an activity inherited by the Reformation period from earlier centuries, when a volume would necessarily be unique but when fire would be less efficacious as a method of destruction. This is to reinforce Cummings’ point that the symbolic and ritualistic, rather than the ruthlessly practical, are central to the practice of book-burning. I would take it further: there is a pitting in battle of two conceptions of man’s uniqueness in the activity of consigning a codex or a scroll to flames. The burning pyre is witness to the Promethean myth, the idea that humanity, among all the creatures, has mastered the secret of fire, so that it need not merely be fleed (like animals from the burning forest) but could be controlled and deployed. Meanwhile, the manuscript which is to be consigned to that fire is testimony to the classical belief in the miracle of human communication that goes beyond the spoken and can be persuasive even when it is a plethora of inky flecks painted on animal skin. But if this is a battle, who wins?

When I was in Ravenna a couple of months ago, I facetiously commented on the mosaic of St Laurence in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia — ‘they shouldn’t allow those flames so close to the bookchest’.

St Laurence and his gridiron, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna

It occurs to me now that the proximity is the point: Laurence may be about to writhe in agony on the gridiron but his death will not be in vain because the Holy Book will survive — the bookchest holds four volumes, each of them carrying the name of the Evangelist who composed it. Both a manuscript, pre-paper, and a human body is made of flesh, but the book does not so easily become a dead thing. The adoption by the Church of the Martyrs of the technique of book-burning suggested a determination to demonstrate control not just of the methods of survival but also of the means of destruction that had been used against them. As Brian Cummings noted yesterday, all the Abrahamic traditions are religions of the book which have also histories of iconoclasm.

Pedro Berrugreute, St Dominic and the burning of Albigensian heretical books (El Prado, Madrid)

There is, however, something yet more in the combination of fire and parchment. The late medieval mythology of Saint Dominic credits him with many virtues, main among them his persecution of the Albigensians. In one scene, depicted in a painting of the 1490s now in the Prado by Pedro Berrugruete, the saint presides over the burning of heretical illuminated manuscripts, but among them happened to be one of his own books which, miraculously, jumps out of the fire. This tale tells of flames not being fully under human control: they are still a mystery, despite Prometheus. What is more, the flames have knowledge of what is worth saving — or, indeed, the flames are knowledge, consuming ignorance, and only that. In this myth or miracle, God (to whom The Book bears witness) is in the burning fire.

An error not to be exonerated

Yesterday evening saw me sitting in the gods, with the young people, at Oxford’s New Theatre for a performance of La bohème – an experience that made me rue how many years I have wasted not going to the opera. I think the last occasion I was in the New Theatre was when it was still under its old designation of the Apollo, for a production (like this one, by Welsh National Opera) of Richard Strauss’s Elektra. That, a quick internet search suggests, was a full two decades ago; what time I have lost! I fear that I have stayed away because I made what would be called a category error: I imagined opera to be a sub-set of theatre. I realised last night how wrong that was and how free from the constraints of the logic of plot or characterisation an opera could be, driven on by the dynamic of its music, with an orchestration as complex as any contrapunctual masterclass. I finally realised how opera could find its purpose in expressing the drama of emotion — how it can voice the heart’s strings.

But talking of category errors, I am not the only one to have laboured under a misapprehension. The programme for last evening’s performance included an essay by Adrian Mourby that begins engagingly:

Once upon a time in a city called Paris the gendarmes raided a nightclub and accused a poet of stealing the Mona Lisa. The year was 1911, poet [sic] was called Apollinaire and to get himself off the hook he fingered his disreputable boiler-suited friend, Pablo Picasso, for the crime. Both men were later released and exhonorated.

Now, from the context, we can surely assume that Messrs Apollinaire and Picasso had (on this occasion) the onus of blame lifted from them and so were exonerated. How could the author, or his copy-editor, have got the spelling so wrong that it begs the question how the programme received its imprimatur? How come they mangled the word into something which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,does not exist in our language? Is it because a Cardiff accent aspirate an ‘o’, I wondered? Or was it because they had been misled by some half-remembered crossword clue (let off, the old flame sounds like they got a gong. 10 letters)?

Of course, as I have noted elsewhere, even the  OED is not wholly comprehensive – wonderfully so. It cannot pretend to be au courant with every English usage. So might it be permissible to fangle anew the verb ‘exhonorate’? There are two problems with that: first, it can hardly be accounted a recent invention. Some ‘Hints for Teachers’ that appeared in The Classical Journal eighty years ago, in 1932, comments:

There are many Latin derivatives beginning with the combination “exh”-“exhaust,” “exhort,” “exhume.” Students of Latin know why the “h” is in these words. It is because they are derived respectively from haurire (haustum), hortari, and humare. But what would you think of “exhonorate,” “exhorbitant,” and “exhuberant” – three atrocities which I encountered in newspaper copy within a week?

However, it is not an error that had to wait for newspapers to be invented. To give one example, in Richard Grafton’s Chronicle — I have used the 1569 edition [STC 12147] — the author talks of Edward IV’s anxieties, saying ‘his minde and phantasie, was not clerely exhonorate or dispatched, of all feare and inward trouble’ (p. 715). The spelling generally in that passage reminds us that we are dealing with a period before any strict standardisation, but might Grafton’s spelling of the (now obsolete) adjective suggest that the route ‘exonerate’ took into the English language from Latin picked up on its way some French influence, with the ‘h’ imitating the pronunciation of the verb exonérer?

Whatever the precise trajectory taken by the term in its early years in English, Grafton himself was not consistent in his usage: just a few pages on from the passage quoted, he used ‘exonerate’ (p. 720), and others among his contemporaries employed that spelling which has become the accepted form. And with good reason, for the second and more significant problem with deviation from ‘exonerate’ is that it suggests also a change of meaning. As the American Willis Ellis, the author of the ‘hint’ quoted above, went on to note ‘”Exhonorate” would mean (if it meant anything) “to deprive of honor”‘ – the spelling seems obviously to announce the Latin noun ‘honor’ (our ‘honour’) as its root. Indeed, there is a late Latin verb, albeit a fairly rare one, ‘exhonorare’ which means ‘to dishonour’. In other words, if the French poet and the Spanish painter were ‘released and exhonorated’ that would suggest that they had been let go but not let off — they walked from the prison cell, but not without their honour somewhat compromised, poor chaps.

The point is that we all read new words most days: some so confuse us that we glide over them in blissful igorance, some we come to grasp by bothering to learn from a dictionary, while others we can grapple to comprehend by using knowledge we have already — we understand them through cognates or by intuition based on etymology or by mentally pronouncing terms we may have only heard spoken. The opera programme’s ‘exhonorated’ probably came about through the corollary of the last of these processes: whether direct or repeating another’s error, it presumably originated as a phonetic attempt to record in writing a heard word, ‘exonerated’ — except, of course, it perpetrates two slight mispronunciations. What makes that process a problem is that, as we each use the range of techniques to make sense of the words before us, the shifting of a term to a spelling that suggests another root is liable to cause miscomprehension.

We should, then, delight in the variety of usages that our language allows — but always accept that there are limits and there are errors. The question, of course, is how to know when something is a permissible alternative and something simply an unacceptable mistake. I do not intend to attempt a full answer to that, and will confine myself to drawing out a comment implicit in the example I have just given: that is that common usage can surely not be reason sufficient on its own either to prescribe or, indeed, to proscribe. Let me end, instead, with a plea and a suggestion. First, the plea is to on-line dictionaries. In trying to understand how this error came about, I typed in ‘exhonorate’ — the Free Dictionary on-line immediately directs the viewer to ‘exonerate’, without explanation. The OED, on the other hand, simply returns a ‘no entry found’ notice. Would it not be more helpful if both noted that mis-spelling as such and so helped those in error to mend their ways?

Finally, the suggestion. We can know ‘exonerate’ is more likely to be correct than ‘exhonorate’ if we think of their etymology — we know ‘onus’ and we know ‘hono(u)r’ and we understand what the prefix ‘ex’ does to a term. The origin of both the real and the cod word would be Latinate, but that does not mean it is beyond understanding — we all live with Latin, even when we imagine we are solely speaking English. Delving into a word, unearthing its history and, indeed, watching the tergiversations it has taken on its path to its place in our modern language enriches our understanding of our quotidian vocabulary. So, we have had a history of the world in a 100 objects; is it not time to have a history of English in one hundred words?

In Our Time: more outtakes

L’esprit d’escalier – the art of thinking, as you walk down the stairs, of the bon mot you should have said in the drawing room. Or, in this case, the studio. On Thursday, after recording In Our Time, we were escorted down in the lift, but since then it is as if I have been on a staircase where the steps are never-ending. I am continually conjuring up in my mind the things that should have been said. So, here are some more ‘outtakes’ from the programme on Caxton and the printing press.

For me, the most interesting question Melvyn Bragg asked was one that was unscripted: did print increase the authority of the written word? Both myself and Julia Boffey gave answers to the question, pointing out the limited literacy rates and the continuing significance of the hand-written word. But the answer I would now like to have given would run something like this: the written word was in no need of having its authority improved, thank you very much. Print was not ‘the coming of the book’ – the book had arrived and had its feet well under the table long before the new technology was on the scene. On occasion, it had a mystique, a sacred aura to it which may even have been weakened by the products of the printing press, with the broadsides, the newsletters and the cheap prints making it difficult not to realise for what ephemeral purposes the written word could be used.

A separate issue that is going around in my mind is an heretical thought that I mooted in conversation with my fellow participants after the programme had finished. I mused whether Caxton’s engagement with print was a successful businessman’s retirement project. He was in his fifties when he began to show interest in the new technology. His first major publication in the Low Countries was his own translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s History of Troy, a text that, by his own admission, he had worked on intermittently for several years – it sounds very much like a pet pastime. His early printings may have made him suppose that his new-found hobby might be financially viable as well as enjoyable. But his choice of texts when he finally returned to his homeland, after his long career abroad, was not necessarily the most obvious ones from which to make money – perhaps his interest in the vernacular works was, in fact, a reflection of personal taste rather than any shrewd judgement of the market. That is not to say we should revive the erroneous image of him as a printer-scholar: it was clear that he did have an eye to what would be profitable, but those products were perhaps less often the vernacular texts in which he took a personal delight than the ephemeral prints he was commissioned to produce, or the sure-fire best-sellers of liturgical texts. An implication of what I am saying is that we may want to think further about how he considered the finances: did he see it less as a matter of making his fortune but, rather, as a way of spending some of the money he had already amassed. Of course, business acumen may not have deserted him: he may have allowed himself some self-indulgences – paid for by selling indulgences. In other words, maybe he worked to minimise any losses his personal predilections may have caused. And, perhaps for that very reason, he made a better fist of print as a business than others – like Gutenberg himself – who perhaps thought that it could be a source of wealth, only to find instead that it could be a fairly quick route to bankruptcy.

In Our Time: the outtakes

So, if everyone is allowed fifteen minutes of fame, I must now be overdrawn from the fame-bank to the tune of 25 minutes. I have just walked away from Broadcasting House where Richard Gameson, Julia Boffey and myself were discussing with Melvyn Bragg ‘Caxton and the printing press‘. Of course, there are, in fact, no outtakes from BBC  Radio Four’s In Our Time, as it is broadcast live — a fact that yesterday I was facing with equanimity until a friend pointed out that it has an average audience of 1.5 million (thank you, Jonathan). But it would be unnatural not to rewind in one’s mind what was said and, more importantly, what we did not have time to say. As I think any listener would have discerned, the participants all enjoyed the conversation and could not stop discussion afterwards, so in some way this is a little insight into what happens in the interview room over tea and croissants after the programme is done.

There is so much I would have wanted to say: I talked about Caxton working with a printing press in Ghent or Bruges and made the point that Bruges is a more significant commerical city than London in these years, but I did not have chance to expand that further. It would have been useful to explain more fully how ships from the Mediterranean travelling north might stop off at Southampton or London but there final destination was usually Bruges; that this traffic made the Channel and the North Sea a thoroughfare rather than a barrier; and that books crossing from the Low Countries to serve an English market were no new thing with print, since there were manuscript Books of Hours made in Bruges speculatively for potential owners in the British Isles.

We also talked about Caxton’s rivals printing in England — Theoderic Rood in Oxford, John Lettou and later Richard Pynson in London — as well as Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s protege and successor in Westminster. But perhaps we did not draw out clearly enough that Caxton is unusual for being English: in most countries, the first printer was a German, and in England the print market was dominated by immigrants, into the sixteenth century. This was not an entirely new phenomenon, as I explained in my chapter in The Production of Books in England edited by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, but the intensity of English debt to continental expertise was increased by the intervention of print.

That continental expertise was also increased by print’s preference for paper over parchment — here was a technology that helped make print possible, and that was known across Europe, with paper being used in England. But, apart from ten years at the end of the fifteenth century, there was no paper-mill in England: in other words, the vast majority of paper used in books was imported. That includes every page printed by Caxton. Without continental materials, there would have been no printing in England in the 1470s or 1480s. Nor was this a passing phenomenon: after the closure of that first mill, there was not another until well into Elizabeth’s reign and even then the import trade remained the main supply.

And I am sure I used the ‘b’ word live air: England was a backwater. Of course, in other of my studies, I am emphasising the contrary — the engagement of England in humanist activities suggests cultural proximity within a shared civilisation, not unbridgeable distance. But, in terms of print, and partly through Caxton’s idiosyncratic choice of texts, England was certainly at the periphery, with many of its leading scholars, like Thomas More or Richard Pace (let alone visitors like Polydore Vergil), preferring to have their major works printed on the European mainland.

What a good interview I could have given! But, then, if I had said all this, the programme would have had to have been so much longer, and consequently I would be in debt to the fame-bank to such a degree I would be as likely to go bankrupt as many early printers were — excepting Caxton.

Poggio makes it to the small screen

The phone rings and it’s the BBC. They want to know more about Poggio Bracciolini. Our humanist friend is not having a bad year: he has already gained some celebrity for being the man who unleashed Lucretius on an unsuspecting Christian world. Now, the travelling scholar who also ‘discovered’ Quintilian and other authors, the humanist who was at the vanguard of reviving the Ciceronian dialogue form, the scribe who designed the new ‘littera antiqua’, the script of humanism which is the progenitor of the typeface you are reading — this man of many parts is to appear on BBC4.

The title of the programme in which he is to feature is revealing: ‘The World’s Oldest Joke’. He is to enter the limelight not because of any of his achievements just mentioned but because he had a fine line in blue humour, as recorded in his Facetiae, the set of jokes and other tales that originated (he reveals at the end of the work) in the bugiale — the lie-factory that was the waiting-room in the Vatican where papal secretaries like Poggio would loiter in anticipation of an audience with the Holy Father. And Poggio’s humour proved infectious, some of his facetiae reappearing in vernaculars across sixteenth-century Europe. Indeed, as I have argued recently, this collection of tales that was a work of his old age became the best-known element of his oeuvre because of the intervention of an invention with which he could have only had brief familiarity: the arrival of print could help circulate one’s works much more quickly than the scribal activities in which Poggio himself had been immersed, but it could also re-shape and contort one’s reputation. Poggio was known in his lifetime for his dialogues with their moral message and was sometimes accorded the sobriquet of ‘philosophus’; but, though those works travelled across Europe in manuscript, they were not the ones that were first to reach the printing-press: it was the Facetiae that most often was printed in the first decades of the first information technology revolution. And so, Poggio the philosopher became a dirty old man.

There is, then, an enjoyable irony that where print went, the second information technology revolution follows. Poggio is about to receive, through the television screen, a much wider audience than he can usually hope to command nowadays: a name that would usually only be heard in the sedate surroundings of Senior Common Rooms will be projected into lounges across the country, not because of his scholarly achievements but because of his ability to make people laugh.

Some might conclude that this is nothing more than is to be expected of a medium that popularizes and so has to entertain more than it educates. But I find myself not sharing those thoughts — after all, humanists like Poggio consider that you could educate through entertainment, that you could play seriously. What strikes me, instead, is that the scholarly Poggio, the scribe, the moraliser, is as partial a picture as one that concentrates solely on his joke-telling. Should we not be intergrating them together to get closer to Poggio the man?

I put that as question because the answer is by no means clear-cut: I, who am so precious about separating the different elements of my life, am the last person to suggest that you need to know the whole person, even if that were possible. Most of us live out lives knowing others in part, not wholly — others and perhaps ourselves as well. That may be our tragedy, or maybe it is our survival mechanism. Poggio himself may have been frustrated that his Facetiae should feature so large in the world’s memory of him — or, rather, Poggio aged forty may have been crestfallen to hear a prophecy that a work Poggio aged seventy would compile might become remembered as his main achievement. Perhaps he too would like to have kept his different lives separate one from another. But, equally, this was a man who berated others for not so much living as ‘doing life’, someone whose earthy experiences influence his scholarship.

The lady from the BBC was enthusiastic about Poggio and finished our conversation by saying how he deserved a biography or historical novel about his life. (It is not a challenge to which I think I could rise: ‘Poggio, when you have quite finished with your mistress, write me a letter’, ‘Yes, my lord of Winchester’). Perhaps I should have asked her ‘which life?’ And, perhaps, indeed, that would be the greatest challenge — to do justice to the many facets and the changing character of this man, without imagining he was all of them all the time. Let us hope, that, if such a work did come into being, it could let us both see his skill in writing and hear his laughter.