A Stone-cutter’s Literacy

Feast your weary eyes on this elegant funerary slab. It is to be found on the walls below the porticos of what is known as the Old Cemetery in the Alpine city of Bressanone / Brixen, between the parish church of St Michael and the Cathedral.

Memorial to Johann Riepper (d. 1539) in the Cimitero Vecchio, Bressanone

It memorialises the early sixteenth-century canon of the Cathedral, Johann Riepper, for whom there may or may not exist a portrait made in his lifetime, now in St Louis, Missouri. The inscription’s rendition of Roman capitals is masterly, with its use of nestling letters — see, for instance, ‘epistolis’, at l. 5 of the main inscription — and even playful (note the use, at the centre of the ‘scroll’ at the top, of an alternate M, with its arching final upright). This, though, is not the earliest use of this alphabet in the cemetery: while it records the date of 1539, one of its neighbours announces the year 1506.

Memorial to Canon Nicholas (d. 1506) in the Cimitero Vecchio, Bressanone

Nor is that the earliest sign of engagement with Renaissance humanist lettering in the vicinity: on the other side of the Cathedral (the south side) lie its cloisters, which are remarkable both for their range of mainly fifteenth-century frescoes and for the fact that many of the images are explained in painted texts. Here is one of them, in gothic lettering except for the g with its sharp angled neck and separated bowls, a sign of what I dubbed in my 2019 monograph (discussing examples from England) engagement with ‘humanist g-reform’.

Painted text in the Cathedral Cloisters, Bressanone, dated ?1463

These signs of acquaintance with developing Renaissance fashions in lettering may not surprise us in this Tyrolean location, when we remember that for over a decade its bishop in the mid-fifteenth century was Nicholas of Cusa, from 1450 until his death in 1464. It is not, though, on a sense of accomplishment that I want to concentrate but on this memorial’s quite striking slip. It may already have caught your attention as it did mine when I stood before it a fortnight ago: look at the first word on the scroll above the deceased’s head. It is meant to read ‘Gloria’ but the stone-cutter has provided two Os and two Rs, combining each of them together as a monogram and overlapping the curves of the O. This is highly unusual — if you know of other examples, please do give details in a comment.

In the absence of parallels, it seems to me that something else is going: the stone-cutter originally chiselled ‘Glroia’ and then had to correct it. There is a small detail which encourages me in this assumption: notice the difference between the two forms of R, the first with a longer diagonal becoming a tail, the second more restrained. The inscription below shows that the first form was the preferred one. The second, it seems to me, has been designed to fit the space available.

We can take this further: this was not the production of a moment’s distraction. If the chisel had begun to form R and the head behind the hand which held the implement had immediately realised the mistake, there would have been other remedies: given the nestling letters provided below, the O could have been carved smaller and placed within the arms of the preceding L. It is common practice for swiftly noticed mistakes to be resolved as work continues. As a result, they tend to look rather different, as this example from San Fermo in Verona shows.

Inscription on the lintel of a door in the south aisle of the Upper Church of San Fermo, Verona, dated 1528 – note the word ‘fecit’

In this Brixen case, it is much more likely that the error was only noticed when the word or the whole scroll had been completed. Yet, to provide ‘Glroia’ is not a minor mistake: it defies the basic expectations of word-forms in European languages. We can assume the stone-cutter’s mother tongue was a form of German, but ‘glr’ would be as odd a combination in that language as it would be to someone brought up in a Romance tradition or trained in Latin. Was this the result of a dyslexic moment? Perhaps, but there is another explanation: that the stone-cutter was not reproducing familiar words but was, instead, chiselling letters without conscious understanding. In short, the task this artisan was set tested the limits of their literacy.

This suggests a difference between those working in stone and those working on parchment: scribes were expected to be literate to a level of being able to engage with the text they were reproducing and to correct it when they found errors. Of course, if they made mistakes themselves, they had ways of making it right — erasure and rewriting for instance, or marking deletion by points placed below each letter. Jeopardy was rather higher for a worker in stone, an unforgiving surface where error stubbornly remains or, at the very least, leaves its mark. What is more, the mason was presumably employed rather for an ability in rendering a portrait in stone than for any reputation for literate skills.

My suggestion, then, is that while this monument looks the part, it is, in terms of its lettering, the work of someone more skilled in carving than in writing. In societies where only the minority were literate, we should not expect all artisans required to work with letter-forms to be fully conversant with the grammar of language. This has an obvious and important implication: for the stone-cutter to produce the inscription, there must have been a template which was intended to be followed, as it were, to the letter. Like Caravaggio’s St Matthew, the stone-cutter had the assistance of a guiding hand. In other words, this memorial is not a solitary effort: we can imagine a cleric providing detailed instructions, down to a layout of the letters, the stone-cutter chisels away and then another set of eyes — perhaps the same cleric or a colleague — checks what has been done, and in this case notices an egregious error. Just imagine the conversations that then occurred around it.

I focus on this particular example because it suggests a wider pattern. I am certainly not suggesting that this stone-cutter was particularly unlearned. On the contrary, my hypothesis is that the person was as literate as many others working in stone. We can find other cases of errors being made which at times might be signs of inattention but at others are more likely to be because the mason was challenged by the requirement to render words in stone. That said, what is remarkable is not that, on this occasion, such an obvious error was made but that such mistakes were not made more often.

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The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain — in one word

 

If you had to summarise your book in one word, what would it be? The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain has its official publication date on 2^nd May 2019. I have, then, been giving some thought to what my response to the question would be and I think the answer is: cosmopolitanism.

I appreciate that some might me to justify my use of that word. I employ the term in its general sense of involving people from different countries but, the remit of my book, with its cast-list which ranges from St Andrews to Rome and from Majorca to Milan, is rather narrower than the word’s little sense. My use of the concept cannot have the worldwide reach that cosmopolitanism has in present-day philosophy. I could defend my profligate deployment of the term by noting that Diogenes the Cynic, the first person on record to claim he was a cosmopolite, envisaged a world that did not include the Americas or Australasia. I could also point out that The Renaissance Reform draws attention to how humanists saw the British Isles as at the very edge of the world — but I could not claim that those humanists’ vision was so myopic that it stopped at the Mediterranean or that it was oblivious to cultures beyond Western Christendom. Indeed, the interaction of ‘the West’ (as defined by obedience to the pope) with Eastern Christendom impinges on the book’s discussion. Moreover, a sense of the edges of a civilization is intentionally at the borders of its coverage. All that said, The Renaissance Reform cannot pretend to be a contribution to the global Middle Ages. Perhaps, if I had my time again, I might replace ‘cosmopolitan’ with ‘Europolitan’ — a citizen of Europe (with the inclarity of its definition being productive) — except that I see that term has already been appropriated by a Swedish mobile phone company, and I would not want to infringe their copyright.

The emphasis on cosmopolitan in the book is a challenge. The theme of the work is the re-design of the manuscript book, in script and layout, promoted by Florentine humanists at the very start of the fifteenth century and its success among the British. That statement in itself is a provocation, since it is usually assumed that humanism reached England, at its earliest, in the reign of Henry VII and only found glorious summer under the sun of York and Lancaster combined, Henry VIII. In contrast, I insist that there was a sustained tradition of interest from the 1430s which should qualify to be called ‘the English Quattrocento’. This is not to say that the tradition was the sole preserve of roast-beef-eating English-born, or that it grew solely in English soil. On the one hand, there were many immigrants who were central to the promotion of the humanist agenda in England — with the most significant being not Italians but Dutch scribes. On the other, there were Englishmen and Scots who were active in the humanist reforms in their heartland of Italy. These Britons were part of a wider pattern of engagement which, I claim, was integral to the success of the humanist aesthetic for the book. I would go further and say that some were significant not merely in its propagation but in its construction. That is to say, this Renaissance reform originated with a coterie of Florentines but it gained its popularity through international collaborators. The leitmotif was cosmopolitanism at not just the edges of Europe but what was to Italian eyes its epicentre.

Oxford: Balliol College, MS. 310 fol. 32v — Letters of Leonardi Bruni, written in England by the Dutch scribe, Theoderic Werken (1449).

This assertion, for which I give evidence in the monograph and other recent publications, raises a question: why would non-Florentines or non-Italians adopt a script designed to be a local reaction against ‘gothic’ (that is northern European) influence? We tend to see in the humanist bookhand as immersed in a particular set of cultural co-ordinates: the legacy of ancient Rome with its physical presence in Italy (though not much in Florence itself), the humanists’ attempts to revive eloquence both textually and visually. Yet this — I hypothesise — was not primarily what other Europeans saw on the page when viewing a book in the new ‘Roman’ hand. Here, I take cosmopolitan to mean ‘the world’ not in a simple synchronic sense of how it is now but also encompassing its shared inheritance. The humanists, in developing their reform they turned to prototypes of the eleventh and twelfth century — to late caroline minuscule or ‘protogothic’ bookhand. Such prototypes were not, of course, Italian patrimony alone: caroline minuscule, emanating from north-east France and beyond, had been successful across Europe, and ‘protogothic’ had thrived near the shores of the English Channel. That is to say, what non-Italians saw when they looked upon the ‘new’ script, created in its very particular local circumstances, was an acknowledgement of a tradition in which they could see themselves as full partners.

The humanist reform, however, was not a single moment. The bookhand itself developed — in part, thanks to the intervention of ultramontanes. Equally, there was also a ‘second wave’ when, in the north-east of Italy in the mid-quattrocento, what we know of ‘italic’ was invented. That very name, foisted on the script by French and English, suggests its Italian origins, and it worked on viewers in a very different way from the ‘Roman’ hand, since there was not for this any historic precedent to which it returned. While the humanist bookhand was archaising, italic was archaising by metaphor. The result was that this later script’s international success worked differently and was, in its first decades, more dominated by Italians. In The Renaissance Reform, this is presented as a shift in cosmopolitanism but it could be configured otherwise: as a move from Europolitan to Italophile.

A royal letter of 1506, signed by Henry VII, written in italic by Pietro Carmeliano (private hands).

As will be clear from what all that I have said, the field of action for this cosmopolitanism is the page. In that sense, detecting it is akin to the sensitivity art historians show to the multiple cultural contacts that shape a Renaissance painting or miniature. In palaeographical terms, cosmopolitanism can stand as a conceit for digraphism or polygraphism. The Renaissance Reform discusses the movement between scripts, and the adoption of humanist elements in gothic scripts; it also muses on how far we can sense a conscious rejection of the reforms when a bookhand shows no humanist influence. I also invoke at one point the concepts of code-switching and code-mixing, but an implication of what I have just said is that, while these may be separate ‘codes’, they could announce, to some eyes, their shared origin, speaking of one graphic tradition that has ramified into many forms.

It could be legitimately said that the ‘some’ just mentioned are only ‘a few’. The Renaissance Reform is very clear that it is talking about a minority among a minority. Most of its characters stood out from the many who were born in the same village or town because these people were highly mobile across Europe. They also were the privileged because they were highly literate, in societies that were majority-illiterate. Cosmopolitanism — citizenship of this ‘world’ — was only for the select. At the same time, a theme that underlies this book is a sense that they themselves sensed their special status and that some were humbled by it. Some, I suggest, took it less as a badge of pride than as a spur to think on the poverty of their own literacy and, indeed, on the limits of their own cosmopolitanism.

Littera antiqua as a cosmopolitan enterprise

One advantage of teaching palaeography at King’s College, London, this year — apart from the enthusiastic and inquisitive students, of course — is that it is a short hop to the Eurostar. So, having introduced the groups to the delights of textualis yesterday morning, I am now in Paris to speak at the conference. Its title is L’Humanisme à l’épreuve de l’Europe (XV e. -XVI e siècles) and my topic is ‘The Renaissance of littera antiqua: a cosmopolitan enterprise’. At the risk of forfeiting what suspense there might be to my paper, let me share with you one small part of what I will discuss.

Littera antiqua, otherwise known as Roman hand or humanist minuscule, is famously an invention of Florence, c. 1400. Poggio Bracciolini (my old friend) and his colleagues called their innovation ‘ancient letter’ because they saw themselves reviving a script older than what had recently been fashionable. They insulted that fashion by labelling it not just modern but also ‘gothic’. That term implied that the contemporary bookhands, with their compressed, uniform-looking script, were an imposition on Italy by barbarian foreigners who knew no better. Poggio and those who encouraged him wanted to liberate their countrymen from this tutelage, and looked back to the scripts that preceded gothic to find a style of writing they considered more legible and more elegant. In this way, the humanists’ campaign had an element of local pride, of asserting an Italian-born cultural identity against the invasion of northern European habits.

The humanists’ nomenclature has stuck, and with it also some of the assumptions that underlie it. In particular, littera antiqua, like the other forms of script that the humanist came to promote, has been seen as an Italian product which was sometimes exported in the years after its invention and then slowly adopted in countries beyond the Alps, by the barbarians themselves. Thus, it is considered a safe assumption that a manuscript in a fine humanist minuscule was manufactured by an Italian, unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary. Sometimes there is, in fact, such contrary proof, for it is known that there were some non-Italians who adopted the humanist scribal habits, even in their homeland. So, for instance, Poggio tutored other copyists in the new style and these included one Frenchman, with whom his master was pleased — and his ability to emulate Poggio’s hand was so successful that it has sometimes proven difficult to distinguish one from another.

The ‘good French scribe’ is thought of as the exception, and in Florence, this has some truth. A. C. de la Mare’s seminal listing of seventy-two Florentine humanist scribes includes only eight who were non-Italian. That, though, does constitute a proportion of over one in ten. I have, previously in print, extrapolated from the data provided by Albert Derolez for a larger group of humanist scribes active across Italy and shown that the proportion there is one in six. It would, in other words, seem that in the city of littera antiqua’s birth, the engagement of foreigners in the humanist agenda was below the average.

There is one city which is certainly known to have been highly cosmopolitan and that is Rome. Elisabetta Caldelli, in a rich survey of scribes in the papal city, has drawn attention to the fact that about half of those whose identities we know were visitors, often long-term residents, from other countries. Caldelli’s figures, however, range across all scribes, not just those who adopted humanist practices. It would be plausible to assume that those who came from ‘gothic’ cultures would continue to deploy that style in which they were originally trained, and so that a lower proportion wrote in littera antiqua. In preparing my paper, I investigated her data further, organising those with a stated origin by geographical areas as they would have been contemporarily defined, and identifying the usual style employed by each of the copyists, both Italian and non-Italian. Of Caldelli’s 138 scribes, I find that 126 can be defined by national origin (my figures and designations differ slightly from hers; she organises them by modern countries). Of those, it becomes clear that only a minority — a third — of the total list were expert in littera antiqua, but that, of that minority, exactly half were non-Italian. Here is the information in detail:

	All scribes	Scribes of littera antiqua
German	26	7
Netherlandish	17	8
French	15	4
Spanish	3	1
Scottish	2	1
Bohemian	2
TOTAL	65 out of 126 scribes (51.5%)	21 out of 42 scribes (50%)

[Data extrapolated from E. Caldelli, Copisti a Roma nel Quattrocento (Rome, 2006)]

Naturally, these figures need to be used with caution: they are based on named scribes, and not all were ostentatious enough to announce their identity. More did so in the Quattrocento than in previous centuries, but still only a small proportion of manuscripts have a revelatory colophon. It may be that scribes from afar were more likely to state their nationality, though I must say that I know of several non-Italian scribes active in Italy who did not feel the urge to do so. It is also the case that the figures make Rome exceptional, as Florence also was: nowhere else in the peninsula could claim to have a community of humanist scribes that was so cosmopolitan.

Even with those caveats, there is a very striking implication of these figures. The usual assumption, as I have said, is that a manuscript in littera antiqua should be taken to be by an Italian hand until proven otherwise. If, though, a volume hails from Rome, that assumption is patently not sound: it is equally likely that it was by a foreigner. That said, it is not always easy to localise a codex to a particular city and, that being the case, it raises further complications. In most places, only a minority of humanist scribes were non-Italian but the proportion was rarely negligible and, that being so, is it legitimate to continue to hold the traditional assumption? More broadly, is it not time to reconceptualise the history of the impressive pan-European success of littera antiqua?

This, as I have said, is only one small part of my talk and, in describing to you, I have glossed over some of the interesting features: I have not mentioned the split between nations; I have also left aside the issue of humanist cursive and of its most elegant sub-type, the italic bookhand (the proportions are strikingly different from the ones I have just outlined). There is more to say — but, then, I do need to leave some revelations fresh for the conference audience.

 

How codicology helps – a tale from the Upper Library of Christ Church

The work on the manuscript catalogue of Christ Church, Oxford is drawing close to its completion. Small finds, however, are still being made and it is one of those I want to share with you.

It involves MS. 486, the sole surviving complete witness to William Gager’s tragedy, Dido. It is very fitting that it should reside in Christ Church for not only was it written by Gager while he was a student at the foundation but its first performance took place in its Great Hall on 12th June 1583. That performance was a lavish occasion, intended to impress a visiting Polish prince, in the presence of the University’s chancellor, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester; both Philip Sidney and Giordano Bruno were probably in the audience. Yet, the close connexion of the manuscript’s content with Christ Church does not mean that it has continuously been resident in the House, as its members call it, since its production: it only arrived in the last decades of the nineteenth century, having been purchased at an Edinburgh book-seller’s. This has allowed speculation over its origins. The historian of sixteenth-century university drama, Frederick Boas, was impressed by the elegance of its presentation – there is no illumination but it is written in an italic book-hand with frequent pen-flourishing – and surmised it was a ‘fair copy’ of the play probably produced for one of the distinguished members of the audience at its performance. That led others to go further and suggest that the little codex is in the hand of the playwright himself, but J. W. Binns, who edited the tragedy and who, more generally, has done so much to enrich our understanding of early modern English learned literary culture, suggested that attribution ‘may be open to doubt’. He does not expand on that comment but I assume that what he had in mind was the contrast between MS. 486 and the secretary script on display in Gager’s autograph notebook, now in the British Library as MS. Add. 22,583.

More recently, another lion of early modern literary studies, Dana Sutton (and writing his name reminds me I owe him a response on another matter), re-edited the play in his edition of Gager’s complete works – which, with characteristic generosity of spirit, he has made freely available on-line. In his work, Sutton expresses confidence that the hand penning MS. 486 is, indeed, that of the author, but others have not been fully convinced. The recent catalogue of British Drama displays some caution saying at one point that it is ‘probably’ holograph and, at another, down-grading that to ‘possibly’. It is my contention, having spent time in both Christ Church and the British Library, that the hesitation is unnecessary – what follows vindicates Sutton’s identification and suggests also that we can, in all likelihood, take the date of writing to be close to that of the play’s performance.

First, on palaeographical grounds, it seems to me that the notebook and the copy of Dido are definably by the same person. Yes, they are written in different scripts but that is unsurprising from someone of Gager’s education – and, indeed, we can see him moving between scripts in another context: in the archives of Christ Church, the annual disbursement books include the signatures of those receiving payment and Gager appears there frequently. For the year 1577-78, his signature oscillates between a humanist-influenced and a secretary scripts. What is more, even without that evidence, there are enough similarities of letter-forms, particularly on the capital letters, but also on forms like the short final s, to be certain that the scribe of both manuscripts was the same, in the notebook writing at greater speed, in the Dido with more concern for presentability. There are, I am afraid, no images of the BL manuscript available on-line, but here is a picture, provided by Christ Church’s ever-helpful Assistant Librarian, Cristina Neagu, of the opening of MS. 486:

Oxford: Christ Church, MS. 486, fol. 1

You will also notice from this image one codicological feature – the handwriting is even but on an unruled page, with the only ruling being the single bounding line on each side, forming a rectangle in which the text-block sits. What a photograph like this cannot reveal is that there is also a distinctive watermark in the paper. It is not fully legible and does not appear in the standard compilations of watermark sbut its central motif is a pair of weights, with a flower above and a horizontal scroll below, apparently reading ‘LAMAIN’.

Watermarks, even when we can be sure of their place and date of production, can only give us a terminus ante quem non for their use, but what, it occurred to me, this watermark might do is prove the manuscript’s proximity to Christ Church if we could show that other volumes produced there used the same paperstock. It was with that in mind that I checked the Disbursement Books where Gager’s signature appears, but they are on paper (as they record, supplied by the Oxford stationer and binder, Richard Garbrand) which regularly have a water-jug or ‘pot’ watermark. There is, however, another manuscript which is of identical paperstock to MS. 486 – and that is Gager’s notebook. Furthermore, that notebook, which includes parts of the Dido and, a few pages later, has notes dated to September 1583, has the same pattern of ruling as MS. 486. In other words, Gager had a sheaf of paper from the same stock and prepared in the same manner, some of which he used in the eventful year of 1583 for his own drafts and some for the ‘fair copy’ of his tragedy. Not only does this confirm the identification of him as the scribe of both, but it makes it highly likely that MS. 486 was, indeed, written in Christ Church around the time that the stately tragedy was being performed on a temporary stage erected in the Hall.

I should emphasise the limits of our evidence: the codicological details do not absolutely demonstrate a precise date of use of the paper for MS. 486; all they can do is provide suggestive evidence. I will also admit a slight scepticism about Boas’s suggestion that the copy was made for one of the guests at the performance: if it were, it was notably understated, without any attempt at coloured decoration; and, if it were, it has survived remarkably well, with no marks of ownership or damage from use. It is perhaps more likely that it was kept safe – perhaps by the author himself.

The lesson, in conclusion, that I would like to draw is not a new one and should be familiar to any scholar of manuscripts and their contents: if we are to eke out of what sits before us all possible information, we have to take account of every detail, however insignificant it may at first appear. As I have said before, the law may not care de minimis, but we must do.

Danae Suttoni plurimas gratias, or Polydore Vergil on the net

That indefatigable scholar, Prof. Dana Sutton, clearly had a busy summer. He has both been updating his very valuable ‘Analytic Bibliography of on-line Neo-Latin Texts‘ and adding to its main source, that is, his own ‘Philological Museum‘ of editions he provides of Renaissance Latin works. It would be hard for any student of early modern England to avoid using this significant and continually expanding repository. For one thing (as Jim Binns taught us some time ago), a sixteenth-century Englishman wanting to publish a text in the learned language of Latin would usually look to the continental presses, rather than to those in Westminster or London: it is axiomatic that, in terms of printing, England was a backwater, with texts using the new technology regularly an import like the paper on which they were produced. This means that Early English Books On-line is not the quick short-cut to the text for many works written by Englishmen; the database, originally designed to put on the web those items listed in the Short-Title Catalogue (up to 1641), necessarily overstates the insularity of our forefathers by under-representing their ability to compose in our civilization’s lingua franca. There is a supplementary reason why Prof. Sutton’s Museum is a place all early modernists must visit: many of the works it contains have no critical edition and, when they do (as with, for instance, Andrea Ammonio’s Carmina of 1511), Sutton has a sharp eye for their failings. The Museum, in other words, is no side-show; it is the main act.

What has happened in recent months is that Dana Sutton’s has been turning his attention to Polydore Vergil, that humanist from Urbino who spent most of his adult life away from his hill-top hometown, swapping its sunshine for the more sullen skies that hang above London. He is surely best known for his monumental Anglica Historia, though his name is also associated with encyclopaedic De inventoribus, now available in the edition by Brian Copenhaver in that indispensable series, the I Tatti Renaissance Library. In addition, he was the author of a collection of adages – clashing with Erasmus over which of them should be considered the ‘inventor’ of that genre. What is more, as Dana Sutton is reminding us, he was the author of several dialogues, four of which appeared together in a Basel edition of 1545 but which, as Sutton suggests, were most likely composed at various earlier dates. All of them are now available in the virtual exhibition rooms of the Philological Museum, complete with foonotes (mainly identifying citations), translations and introductions. His painstaking efforts may not be enough to establish Vergil as an innovative dialogue-writer – their style is, in some ways, old-fashioned, sitting in a tradition of Christianising classicism that stretches back beyong Battista Spagnoli (Mantuanus) to Poggio Bracciolini – but their interest lies, in part, in their ‘ordinariness’.

The editorial work on these texts allows them to stand alone as witnesses to Prof. Sutton’s assiduity, but, in addition, as is shown in his introduction to Vergil’s Dialogus de Patientia, they form part of a wider vision of the reign of Henry VII which he has already outlined elsewhere in his Museum. He gives it fuller expression here, opening by saying that ‘in most studies of the introduction of Humanism into England, there is one figure who inevitably fails to receive the credit that is his due’ – and that is the new king himself. In this interpretation, Henry, aware of the ‘new learning’ from his time in France and Burgundy, recognises the importance of training his own people in it, both for diplomatic and for propaganda purposes, and appreciates that until his countrymen have become better educated, he needs must rely on imported humanists, like Polydore Vergil himself. I summarise the argument because, in the footnote to his first sentence, Prof. Sutton  chides me (with great gentility) for exemplifying the lack of attention to Henry as introducer of the studia humanitatis to England. It is absolutely true that I have not given him that credit, and it is for one (to my mind) good reason: I do not believe he deserves it. I do not want to act like the sort of churlish reviewer for whom other people’s works are fodder to their own egomania; you can end reading here with my praise of Dana Sutton’s hyper-activity ringing in your ears, but if you believe my scepticism demands an explanation, you can read a very brief response in the following final paragraph.

To my mind, there is a cluster of difficulties to the interpretation I have just outlined. In terms of chronology, it post-dates the use of humanist fashions in English diplomatic correspondence and oratory, while also allowing the impression that there was a wholescale shift to Ciceronian rhetoric; in truth, many products of chanceries – across Europe and not just in this corner of the world – remained resolutely unreformed. In conceptual terms, the interpretation seems to me to misrepresent the power of ‘propaganda’ in the early sixteenth century – or, rather, its limitations. Many of the products of Henry VII’s so-called grex poetarum were not propagated to a wide public; they were more often intended for the delectation of those on the king’s immediate orbit, a reflection of a set of developing habits which defined ‘court culture’. That culture could, indeed, have diplomatic value, as transmitted back by foreign visitors to their governments but it was not about the moulding of ‘public opinion’ which we usually take to be the definition of propaganda. A good example of this is provided by Vergil himself. To reiterate a suggestion I made some years ago, it seems to me that if Henry VII had envisaged that it was a shrewd method of achieving propaganda to dispense with some excess wealth by furnishing the visiting papal diplomat from Urbino with a pension that would allow him the time to write a history of England, then he must have died disappointed. This was not just a function of the decades that it took to write the work; when it was produced, there seems to have been no sense of urgency from the government for projecting their ‘propaganda tool’ to their people or to the world. It was Vergil himself who sought to have it published, like so many English neo-Latin writers, elsewhere in Europe, and it was Vergil who provided manuscripts of the work, not for his English patrons, but for the duke of his hometown of Urbino. Guidobaldo was also, as we see from the excellent recourse provided to us by Dana Sutton, the dedicatee of the set of dialogues published in 1545: a few years later, and Vergil was back in his hometown. We do not need to presume that the dedication was a tactic specifically intended to smooth the way for his return, but it does seem that repeatedly in his English years the humanist made attempts to continue to be in good favour with his original lords. If Polydore Vergil perceived his Historia as propaganda, it was more as a display of his own genius then as the mouthpiece of England’s regime. And for King Henry, father or son, the very presence of the humanist was evidence enough of their royal generosity or magnificence in providing a pension, a process of remuneration which had the added benefit of encouraging a demonstration of loyalty by the author second-guessing what his patron might want him to say. To propagate a specific message to their people, though, a monarch knew they had weapons mightier than any neo-Latin pen.

Leonardo Bruni’s letters translated

Retreating – with what I consider to be commendable restraint – from the spring sunshine that is bathing the ever-breathtaking Rome, I have had chance to update the list of the lectures I have recently given. Any of you who cares to study it will notice that the latest addition was given this month and, indeed, explains why I have been forced to come to Rome in the middle of term. As I explained in the previous post, I was asked to speak at a conference at the École française, the theme of which was the networks which underpinned the development and circulation of humanist rhetoric; my particular remit was to talk about the diffusion of humanist miscellanies in England. All arch posturing aside, I did wonder whether I should have declined the invitation, falling as it does two weeks before teaching ends at the University of Essex, but I am very glad that I have made the trip. The conference was both a stimulating and a friendly event, and it is also included a presentazione of a new work which deserves to receive attention in those territories of the res publica litteraria which, when they are not discoursing in the Tullian tongue, are English-speaking.

That proposition might seem preposterous when I explain that the work in question includes a parallel translation in French alongside its Latin text but when the text is the epistolary of Leonardo Bruni, I think I can justify the assertion. Florentine chancellor, historian of his city, orator and reviver of Ciceronian Latin, Bruni was – and was acknowledged in his lifetime – as the pre-eminent scholar of the new studia humanitatis. His status was, in fact, demonstrated by a couple of quotations provided in a paper by Vera Tufano at the conference which I have just attended. Talking of Bartolomeo Fazio’s invective against his colleague (and, many would say, his better) Lorenzo Valla, she drew attention to Fazio’s assertion that his opponent was not worthy to be compared to Guarino da Verona and Leonardo Bruni, ‘the two lights and ornaments of Italy’. Those two figures, similar in age but so different in their intellectual formation and careers, were often coupled together by contemporaries, though their reputations were of a rather different construction one from the other. Some of Guarino’s writings, particularly his translations of Plutarch but also his orations, enjoyed a wide circulation, but he was better known for his status as a teacher – a status which, as I have recently argued, was shrewdly fabricated by himself and by his students. It might be said that Guarino was well-known for being well known, while Bruni spoke to audiences in all corners of Europe through his writings, his Laudatio Florentinae urbis, his Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, his historical texts and, more than anything, his translations, primarily from Aristotle but also from Plutarch and (as was demonstrated at the conference when Giancarlo Abbamonte spoke of Fazio) from Xenophon. And, what is to the point, integral to Bruni’s familiarity were his familiar letters.

Bruni himself, like his friend Poggio Bracciolini, took care late in his life to compile his personal correspondence into an epistolary, organised in eight books. Bruni’s death took place 570 years ago to the day, on 9^th March 1444; in its wake, Giannozzo Manetti supplemented  the epistolary with a further book of his former mentor’s last letters. In an elegant discussion which was part of the the presentazione, Stefano Baldassarri suggested we might muse on how far Manetti might have gone beyond simply adding to the letter-collection and consider whether he might also have edited Bruni’s Latin. However that may be, this nine-book edition had – as I mentioned in my own paper at the conference – a nearly immediate international circulation, one copy of it being made in London before the decade was done. The epistolary also appeared in print from the 1470s, but any ‘modern’ research on these letters turns to the seminal edition printed just under three hundred years after Bruni’s demise and which was the fruit of the labours of Lorenzo Mehus. That work was the basis for comments on revision compiled by F. P. Luiso at the beginning of the twentieth century, but not published until 1980, under the editorship of Lucia Gualdo Rosa. Yet, despite a plan involving Gualdo Rosa herself and Paolo Viti which saw the publication of a censimento of manuscripts of Bruni’s letters, and despite talk of a project based at the Scuola normale superiore in Pisa, there has not been a new critical edition of the Epistolae. It is one of those undertakings so large and so complex that its very importance becomes a barrier to its completion.

The new French publication is provided by Laurence Bernard-Pradelle, who has already established herself as a translator of Bruni with a 2008 collection of his works fit to stand alongside Paolo Viti’s parallel Latin-Italian volume of 1996. Her latest work does not claim to be the critical edition of the epistolario that we continue to await. Some might wonder, with the Mehus being available both on-line and in a recent reprint with an important introduction by James Hankins, what this new publication can add which will be of use to scholars. The answer is that the editor has consciously not based her work merely on Mehus but has taken into account that of Luiso and others, and incorporated the uncollected letters, the ‘extravaganti’, into her work (signifying their non-canonical status by the wise tactic of a typographical change, placing them in a smaller font size). What is more, she has added short introductions to each book, as well as a listing of manuscripts and an extensive bibliography, providing yet more scholarly value. In my judgement, in other words, we should apply Plato’s dictum that the best should not be the enemy of the good: let us wish for a fully critical edition but celebrate what we do now have, while the fairies who grant our wishes steel themselves for what even they will consider a bracing challenge.

The Palaeographer and the Philologist’s Stemma

I would like your advice (you, who are often so silent but who — I determinedly believe — are sitting there, shrewdly considering the prose). I have the not-unpleasant duty of breaking up term with a visit to Rome, to speak at a conference taking place in Place Navone — not, for sure, Piazza Navona, as this is at the École française. It is part of a series on ‘L’écriture latine en résaux’, with this event, organised by some impressive and strikingly young scholars, including Clémence Revest, concentrating on humanist works.

In my talk, I want to present in diagrammatic form some of the information about the relationship between manuscripts and so have turned to the established format of the stemma. Of course, it lacks some elements that philologist would consider a sine qua non; in particular, it does not trace the text back to its Ur-status or to its platonic form — there is no ‘x’ perching atop the tree here. What it gains, instead, though is some precision in dating: down the left-hand side is a set of years, with the manuscripts (most extant, some lost) aligned to that grid.

I should immediately admit that I am lucky: through a combination of philological and palaeographical knowledge, as well as circumstantial evidence, it is possible to be more definite about the date of a high proportion of these manuscripts than would be possible in most cases. Part of my paper will, in fact, be about how we can gain that precision and what it means for our understanding of the circulation of humanist texts. That said, there does remain some uncertainty about some dates – for instance, the copies of the ‘Virtue and Vice’ compilation listed at bottom right can only be dated tentatively and to a period of a few years rather than a specific date. One issue I have is how to demonstrate such tentativeness clearly in this tabular format. Should a different typeface be used? Should the lines of connexion be altered and if so, how?

One other change I would like to make is to signify more clearly the place of origin of the manuscripts. This is the purpose of the circle at top centre-right, marking those manuscripts owned by Humfrey, duke of Gloucester and given by him to Oxford University (in these cases, all in 1444). As those who know my work might realise, the intention is to delimit, to enclose the influence of Humfrey, and so provide a corrective to the assumption that he is the fons et origo of humanism in England. A good example involves Oxford: Balliol College, MS. 310 which sits on this chart floating at centre left (under the year 1449), intentionally without links to other manuscripts here. It is a copy, made by Theoderic Werken, of Leonardo Bruni’s Epistolae in the final nine-book edition; it has sometimes been assumed that it derived from a lost manuscript owned by Humfrey and given to Oxford but as the duke’s last gift to the university took place in the first days of 1444 and as the edition of Bruni’s letters was only completed after the author’s death in March of that year, that is highly unlikely, to say the least. What is more, it seems that the manuscript was produced in London, rather than in Oxford. The issue, then, is how to signify such differences of place: should the information be organised into columns (here it would be Oxford, London and Canterbury)?

I would be interested in your comments on these issues. More generally, I would like to hear if you think this type of presentation of information, ordering the manuscripts not just by their textual associations but also by their date, has any merit. I look forward to hearing from you.

Finally, a short set of fairly commonsensical abbreviations:

s: = scribe

p: = possessor

BL = London: British Library

BnF = Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France

NLW = Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales

A surge in Surigone studies

There are some humanists who we can know were significant in their own day but who are little more than a name to us. Such is the case with Stefano Surigone, who was from Milan but who spent much of his career in northern Europe. He is sometimes mentioned by English scholars for the verses he wrote in praise of Geoffrey Chaucer which were printed by William Caxton. That moment in his career tends to be noted with little further interest in him or his other works. There are a few worthy souls who are exceptions — he is mentioned by David Carlson in English Humanist Books, Dan Wakelin has perceptive comments to make on him in an excellent essay in a volume which (ahem) I edited, Rod Thomson a few years ago found a letter mentioning him which suggests the status he held in English literary circles. And now Surigone has been given further attention in an article on the lively England’s Immigrants site, run by the University of York, by Holly James-Maddocks, who is doing exciting work on fifteenth-century English illumination.

What Holly’s article demonstrates is a feature of the book-producing community which provided one of the themes of my lectures last term: its cosmopolitanism. Surigone, the immigrant at work in Oxford in the 1450s could turn to a local illuminator, John Bray, to beautify the admittedly rather unprepossessing small volume he wanted to turn into a presentation manuscript. It might be added that Surigone’s career reflects another element of this cosmopolitanism: the movability of humans. In a society where the vast majority would never in their life travel more than a few miles from their place of birth, a few exhibited a Wanderlust which saw them criss-cross Europe. So, Surigone did not stay in England from the 1450s until his dealings with Caxton a few decades later: in the meantime, he had been to continental university towns including Cologne.

In his absence, though, or after his final departure, he was certainly remembered by some Englishmen with admiration. This is what is revealed by the letter found by Rod Thomson, in Oxford’s Corpus Christi College. It is by the College’s first President, John Claymond, and speaks of Surigone’s teaching. That leaves us with a possible explanation for why he is little-known to us. There survives the manuscript discussed by Holly James-Maddocks, and another of his poems, but beyond that there are few witnesses to Surigone’s literary output. Was it that his interest was more in educating the next generation than in providing posterity with evidence of his genius? And is it the lot of the inspiring teacher to be remembered only for a short while, and then forgotten?

Lectures on English Humanist Scripts

My new identities are causing confusion to more than just me, it seems, so let me begin with a double clarification. No, I am not teaching at the University of Exeter, and, no, I am not giving the Lyell Lectures.

Exeter has a fine cathedral and there are some very good restaurants. But it cannot claim to be England’s oldest recorded town, where the Norman Castle, second only to the Tower of London in size, is set on the foundations of a Roman temple. I am, as I have explained before, now an Essex man, based at the University whose postal address is Colchester, though its campus is closer to the attractive river-side village of Wivenhoe (something happened to the sense of direction in the early 1960s when the new universities were founded — witness also the misnamed University of Warwick[shire]).

That is not to say that my life is now confined to the East of England. Indeed, my existential uncertainty is not about who I am but where I am each day. I may be teaching in Essex but I also have long-standing commitments in Oxford, including giving a set of lectures on my research, beginning on Thursday 17th October. This series is generously sponsored by the J. P. R. Lyell Fund but is — to repeat — decidedly not this year’s Lyell Lectures. There are not really many grounds for confusion: after all, the Lyell Lectures are an annual event when a leading scholar invited by the Electors presents on an area where they are an acknowledged expert. If that was not enough of a give-away, there is also the fact that those for 2013 have already been given, by Richard Beadle, and the identity of the Lyell Lecturer for 2014 is already known: it will be the Rector of Lincoln, Henry Woudhuysen.

The Lyell Fund’s involvement in my forthcoming set of lectures is that they have supported much of the research that is their basis, and a condition of their grant to me was that I provide a series. I should add that they have been joined by others in funding the research: the Paul Mellon Centre, the British School at Rome (my second home) and, further back in time, the Neil Ker Fund of the British Academy all deserve the warmest thanks.

The lectures, then, are one result of my recent project which has been to focus my long-term interest in humanist palaeogrpahy by producing a catalogue of English Humanist Scripts up to c. 1509. That catalogue will be published in the series ‘The Handwriting of the Italian Humanists’, overseen by the indomitable Anthony Hobson; its previous volumes have been Tilly de la Mare’s classic survey of the scripts of Poggio Bracciolini, Niccolò Niccoli and others, and the detailed study of the master of italic, Bartolomeo Sanvito begun by Tilly and ably completed by Laura Nuvolini. That work will present, scribe by scribe, a detailed discussion of their practices. What these lectures allow me to do is to tease out and emphasise the arguments which run through the catalogue as an undercurrent. I will be emphasising, then, how we need to revise our chronology of the ‘spread’ of humanism and, more widely, to question the very concept of ‘spread’; I will be providing plentiful evidence for the cosmopolitanism of humanist book arts, in England but also in Italy; I will consider how and why scribes came to adopt a practice we identify as ‘Roman’ or Italian — and how they also, at times, dispensed with it. In the process, I will be present new characters central to the history of humanism in England who have not previously been mentioned: they will include England’s first humanist scribe and the person I like to consider Scotland’s first humanist. I hope to see you there.

A full list of the titles of these lectures is provided on this site .

David Rundle’s thesis on-line, or What Not to Say in a Viva

It was, if my memory does not deceive me, a bright and mild December afternoon in 1997 when I entered Oxford’s Examination Schools in white bow-tie and long academic gown, walked up the stairs that rise to the right of the entrance hall, then made my way across the small balcony that looks down upon the same hall, before entering a room where two distinguished scholars awaited me. They were Prof. George Holmes and Prof. A. C. de la Mare — and let us pause to remember those the world has lost, since they have both passed away in the intervening years. At that point, though, they were very much in good health and ready to begin my doctoral viva.

I remember their kindness to me: George opened the discussion by telling me what their recommendation would be, which helped dissipate any nerves I had had (though, equally, it did little to help me focus for the next two minutes — I wanted to be able to go out, cheer, and then return for the serious work). I also remember feeling cheated at the end of the two hours: is that it? can we not stay here for longer, even if the lengthening shadows suggest it is nearly sunset? When you have lived with a subject for five years and more, it is rare that you can find anyone who is as passionate about it as you are, so to have two learned specialists before you who had read every word of the thesis (my then partner had tried, but she fell asleep, leaving my father being the only other person who had suffered it all) and who at least have to appear interested in your work provides an opportunity you do not want to end.

What I replay most in mind, however, is a question they posed that was not related to the intrinsic quality of the work. ‘And what’, George asked, ‘about publication?’ I responded without a pause: ‘Well, I certainly don’t want to publish it as a book’. That, in retrospect, was The Wrong Thing To Say, a career-endangering failure to appreciate the developing dynamic — some would say the duty — to present one’s doctoral research to the world in a monograph. The worst thing is: I stand by what I said.

Appreciate the context: when I began my thesis, the usual expectation was that one would complete it and then move on, leaving the work available for consultation in the relevant university library. Only the exceptional should be put into print and, even then, some of the very best were not, as, indeed, was the case with one of my examiners — Tilly de la Mare’s tour-de-force of a doctorate, on Vespasiano da Bisticci, was never sent to a publisher and, until recently, could only be read by those who visited Senate House in London (it is now, though, available on the web at the excellent British Library ETHOS site).

I should, perhaps, have recognised the changes going on around us and that, by the late 1990s, there was already an increasing expectation that a thesis would see its way into bookshops, that more and more would follow a route once reserved for some of the exceptional, to the extent that being ‘outstanding’ now made one part of the crowd. Certainly, in the last decade, it has become a sine qua non of one’s academic credentials that one should be able to point to one’s doctoral research on the bookshelves — and so the assumption has become that, if a dissertation is not published, there must surely be something really wrong with it.

That dynamic, I would contend, is unsustainable, for two reasons. First, it has spiralled out of control: publishers have noticed the market (niche though it may be) and increased the number of theses they produce, to the extent that, now, university employers take as a sign of quality not whether your thesis is published but where it has been. These shifts have a tendency to be applied retrospectively so that a good thesis published a few years ago with a press now considered to be of dubious quality may be looked on with suspicion. Of course, the true test is not in where it is published — or, indeed, whether it is printed — but in the text itself, though that assumes people would have time to read the words before short-listing or appointing to a job. Bless.

The result of the spiral may well be that the smaller thesis-printing publishers will, over time, find their market dwindles. However, there is another factor that is making the dynamic not just unsustainable but obsolete. That is the increasing desire of institutions to host their alumni’s work on their websites. The number of theses now available  through those sites and through ETHOS means that the research is already available, in the original form of the dissertation. It would take the truly obtuse not to realise that, in this new paradigm, making a thesis available in print, even in revised form, will usually amount to otiose duplication.

When that realisation has sunk in, the consequences could be to the advantage of those who have recently received their doctorate. Rather than working away further on the same subject, they can graze in new pastures, developing their knowledge and their skills further. Not that they should never return to the work which saw their first steps in academe but, rather, that they should be able to revisit it later, recast and rewrite in the mature style they have developed in subsequent years.

None of what I have said, though, is intended to assert that anybody completing their doctorate should have taken the self-denying ordinance I did. I repeat: it was, in the objective terms of the job market, probably the most foolish thing I have ever done (and I have done a fair few). But, in my case, it was also the right thing to do. I had never envisaged my thesis becoming a book and, indeed, it was designed for different ends. It was intellectually ambitious, telling two stories at the same time, as a way of attempting to demonstrate my potential range. It was also overlong: an Oxford doctoral dissertation has to be under 100,000 words (including footnotes), unless you have a dispensation for an appendix of original material. I was granted an extra 50,000 words to provide a collection of manuscript descriptions. That added to the work’s usefulness but also would have made it a much less attractive proposition to a publisher.

Those manuscript descriptions have been on-line for some time now, and I am always grateful to scholars who contact me to say they have found them of value. It is time, I have decided, that they should be accompanied by some prose that is over fifteen years old. Today, I am uploading nearly the entirety of my thesis onto this site, for those who may be by some chance interested. I am doing it because a very few people have asked to see it, and it seems to me best, as I have gone to the trouble of turning old World files into pdfs, that it should be freely available. There is a disadvantage: with the hard-copy in the Bodleian, one signs the register of readers before consulting a thesis and that is not possible on-line. What I ask is if you do look at it, send me word so I know you exist. I am doing this, then, because it seems to me that the virtual world of the web is the appropriate half-light in which a thesis should appear. I am doing this so that it never need be published in print.

To access the chapters of the thesis, go the dedicated page on this website.