Postcard from Harvard VIII: what to do with a blank page

Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), fol. 259. Image from Cambridge University Library: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-INC-00000-A-00007-00002-00888/563
Here is my latest ruse to make you read: a page blank except for a running header of printed letters. It may well look familiar to you. Certainly, Bill Stoneman, the curator here in the Houghton, immediately recognised it is as from the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. The reason for its presence is explained at the preceding verso, where the text of the history of the ‘sixth age of the world’ ends. The printers make a virtue of having space left within the gathering and provide this suggestion:

Nuremberg Chronicle, fol. 258v – detail.
They propose that future generations will ’emend and add’ to their volume by inserting further records; the pages are there so that readers can write — perscribere possunt. Just over eighty years after the book was published, one reader took them at their word. Not any reader but Jean de Beauchesne, a French native resident in England who was responsible for the first pattern book of scripts printed in London.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 232.
Beauchesne takes the opportunity to use the blank space to demonstrate that he can certainly write and more than that: he delights in his virtuosity in mastering a range of bookhands, ending by signing himself in mirror script (elsewhere he describes it as ‘by the left hand’ which raises other interesting questions); he dates his interventions to 1575. It does not appear, however, that he is adding to a page in situ in the volume. I say this not just because the curve of the pages in the bound book would make it difficult to achieve as smooth a movement of the pen as he does, writing remarkably steadily free-hand. It is also because he does not employ the verso, suggesting that the intention was for the page to appear flat as a set of specimens for others to admire and to imitate.
Why, though, would he cut out a page from a printed book and use it like this? There is an obvious practical reason: the quality of paper is good, thicker than much that he would have probably have found from mills in action in his own time. This, in itself, may have attracted him to it. But I asked myself — or, rather, I asked the learned curators and former curators in the Library here (I am here following the sensible injunction of Bridget Whearty to include those who make our work possible in our narratives) — why Beauchesne would retain the printed book’s running header. He could, after all, have disguised its origins by excising the top, without substantial loss to his writing space. That he did not, I suggest, was central to his purpose. Beauchesne wants us to notice the printed letters, wants us to realise from what book they came and wants us to think upon those implications. So, Jean, I will follow where you lead.
The printers of the Chronicle expected readers to write in their copies, personalising them. We have learnt from excellent scholars like Harvard’s own Ann Blair (whom I take this opportunity to thank for stimulating conversations during my short stay here) that the printed book was often considered unfinished, intended to be completed by the interactions it encountered with its owners and readers. Something like this is happening here but, at the same time, Beauchesne is intentionally going beyond the future the printers envisaged for their volume. They expected historical records to be entered but he deploys the smooth page undirtied by print for another possibility: to demonstrate the ongoing efficacy of script. He makes print cohabit with script and, in effect, to cede its place.
The consequence of what I am proposing is that Beauchesne’s act is highly self-conscious. If so, then, we might wonder whether his choice of texts is similarly conscious. As you will see from the image above, he opens, in a grand textualis bookhand, with two lines which translate as ‘a man’s three fingers write and the soul labours; who does not know how to write thinks there is no labour’. This is a variation on a colophon found in earlier medieval manuscripts in which the scribe emphasises the effort involved in their work; some examples show that the usual wording talked of ‘the whole body labouring’ instead of ‘the soul’. Beauchesne repeats the statement by translating it himself into French, in the second sample presented in a littera antiqua that can rival print in its static appearance. What I think he is doing is placing himself in a long tradition of scribal practice, making the printed running header conscious that they are a mere youngster in the presence of this millennia-old skill.
I will push this further and suggest that the next choice of text is, similarly, as pointed as a pen’s nib. It is a passage from the Vulgate, the opening of Proverbs 4, where the father instructs his son to listen to his advice and to seek wisdom. It is a suitably moral message of the sort that often appear in pattern books. At the same time, written above Beauchesne’s signature, it places him in the role of the wise father. But who is his son? Could it be that the child that needs to learn, that needs to follow the paternal precepts, is print itself? Is the suggestion that print continually needs to learn from the sagacity of script?
You may feel this is an overly inventive reading, but the next quotation gives it, I think, some credence. It is another Biblical quotation, this time the famous passage that opens Ecclesiastes 3 – ‘To everything there is a season…’. In the context of the page’s original context, it would have been highly apt, as the histories in the Nuremberg Chronicle describe continual changes of fortune. In the folio’s stand-alone reuse, it gains extra significance. This is because the extract ends with verse 5 and any attentive reader would be expected to think over what comes in the following lines — and in verse 7, we have ‘there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak’. In the same vein, we may be encouraged to ask, is there a time to use script and a time to use print? Is print the future, or it is simply another season in the repeated tergiversations of time?
I am not suggesting that Beauchesne is proposing that there is a single reading for his texts — but I am arguing that he wants us to read his texts at the same time as reading his scripts, and that he is hoping we will consider the interactions between print and handwriting that he provides for us. He is by no means insensible to the ironies of his reuse and of the possibility that it may indeed be claimed that his art of handwriting has had its day. His final phrase, which in its brevity is intentionally ambiguous, acknowledges that: ‘Nil Penna sed Usus’. This motto is sometimes rendered ‘The pen has no force but is useful’, but one other way of translating it would be ‘The pen is nothing but when in use’. Beauchesne might, then, be acknowledging the limitations of his skill but, in the context of this page, I think he wants us also to take the advice not to let the pen run dry and so become useless. Even in the presence of print, Beauchesne is reminding us, script does not die.
And, in the face of a bravura performance of script, would any of us honestly dare to assert that the printing press is mightier than the pen?
Postcard from Harvard V: Bruni against the Goths gothicised
I realise that the tradition of the postcard privileges messages of few words. I note also that I have, in my recent posts, underachieved in that respect. This post is an attempt to rectify that. It comes without a description, for the manuscript discussed here has been well described in print by Laura Light. What I want to draw attention to is how this codex is witness to a humanist text escaping from the confines of humanist presentation and taking on another identity.
It is not unusual to have the work by a humanist copied in a gothic script. Indeed, the previous post discussed one such manuscript produced in England. The Houghton’s MS. Lat. 170 is a particularly pungent example of this habit for two reasons. First, while the copy of Bruni’s Ethics translation discussed last time is in a cursive script, this thin volume provides a case of the less common practice: a text written in a classicising style to be rendered into a textualis, that is a gothic bookhand needing to be produced with care and so at a slower pace. MS. Lat. 170 has suffered over time, mainly because of water damage, but it is clear that the scribe wrote with deliberation and a concern for detail, shown in particular with the frequent hairline strokes adorning the letters (look, for instance, at the h). The block of text is compact, with little space between the lines, in an aesthetic quite different from that promoted by the early humanists — the only similarity with their style of mise-en-page is the substantial blank borders around the text, which is, in fact, also to be found in the ‘pre-humanist’ circle of Coluccio Salutati. The illumination in this manuscript also shows no concession to the fashionable preference for bianchi girari initials. It is as if the scribe was unaware of the humanist agenda but that certainly cannot be true.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. lat. 170, fol. 18v
This brings us to the second point: the text that is being presented here. It is a work of Leonardo Bruni, the acknowledged doyen of the first generation of Quattrocento humanists; what is more, it is his history, De bello adversus Gothos — the Italians’ war against the Goths. Here we have an Italian scribe providing a humanist text that discusses the Goths but doing it in a style that the humanists would have described as ‘gothic’. Did the scribe enjoy the irony?
I see that the text above could not fit on a postcard, unless perhaps I used a tiny gothic script.
Postcard from Harvard II: a presentation manuscript from Pier Candido Decembrio

The opening leaf of Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Richardson 23, with the arms of Borso d’Este.
My second report from my new location involves a manuscript that is hardly unknown but which I could not resist making one of the first I studied. It is a copy of four texts by the Milanese humanist Pier Candido Decembrio, made under his guidance for presentation to the duke of Ferrara, Borso d’Este, in the early 1460s. Decembrio, cheer-leader for his city in its opposition to all things Florentine, has been an acquaintance of mine since my graduate days, for, in the late 1430s and early 1440s, he attempted to construct for himself an international reputation by presenting works and sending books to Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, as I discussed in my doctoral thesis. So, when I opened up this manuscript and saw before me Decembrio’s script writing the contents list, it had the sensation of a meeting with a familiar friend.
The humanist himself is not, however, the main scribe of this manuscript. As with some of those he made for Humfrey, he called on others to produce the volume but left enough evidence in the volume to show that oversaw its creation. As I explain in my description, his interventions here are multiple, correcting the whole text and adding annotations in some, using different inks for each level of accretion, suggesting he went over the manuscript two or three times. It provides us, then, with interesting detail about the mechanics of presentation — the desire to achieve an elegance which spoke of the cost involved being balanced by a need to personalise, not just in terms of the identity of the recipient but of the author as well.
Textually, this manuscript of importance for being the earliest known copy of his panegyric of his home city, De laudibus urbis Mediolanensis (a work first composed in the later 1430s but, apart from this codex, extant only in two later fifteenth-century manuscripts, in Milan and Brussels). That is a work which demonstrated his patriotism for Milan and his repudiation of Florence’s claims to pre-eminence, for in this panegyric he engages with the Laudatio Florentinae Urbis of Leonardo Bruni, a work which had already gained an international circulation, turning on its head its claims by a process of quotation and revision which, at times, comes close to creative plagiarism.
His expression of independence from Florence was expressed not only in words but in presentation on the page. He knew and acknowledged the reforms of the page promoted by Bruni’s friend, Poggio Bracciolini, but he by no means adopted it fully. In particular, he preferred a much smaller script than was fashionable in Florentine littera antiqua, and an example of this is on display not only in his own interventions but in the main script, which provides a notably compact block of text on the page. At the same time, Decembrio’s scribe here (identified as Gabriel Brepia) is more willing to accept some of the reforms than his commissioner. A key orthographical shift in Florence was the re-introduction of the digraph, demonstrating the presence of the diphthong (usually ‘ae’, sometimes ‘oe’). Here we see a contrast between Decembrio who continues to ignore it and his scribe who adopts a couple of strategies for marking the diphthong (a subscript mark, and a small loop before e). One wonders how far Decembrio condoned the transformation of his text in this detail, and whether he felt his work was succumbing to Florentine influence, even when it expressed its opposition to that city.

Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Richardson 23, fol. 12v – with Decembrio’s rubrication annotation at bottom left. Contrast his lack of digraph with the scribe’s writing of ‘quae’ at ll. 8 and 13.
The Houghton has helpfully digitised the whole manuscript and the iiif images can be viewed in Mirador. All I can add is a description of this important codex (with all the usual caveats about its draft status).
Postcard from Harvard I: a humanist manuscript owned by William Morris
Do not be jealous: I am spending a month in that other Other Place — Cambridge MA. I am doing so at the beneficence of Harvard’s Houghton Library as one of their Visiting Fellows. The result is that I have to sit in the elegant surroundings of their reading room, overlooking Harvard Yard, assisted by supremely obliging staff, spending my days poring over humanist manuscripts. Those of you who know me will be able to decide whether I consider this a hardship. Sometimes my blessings seem so many, I lose count.
As I will be having an intense time of study here, I am going to experiment with a new initiative. It will also act, I hope, as a sort of mark of gratitude to my hosts. Their collection is rich in humanist manuscripts — so much so that I will have more than enough to occupy me over the next four weeks — and not yet fully catalogued. Some received extensive discussion by Laura Light in her 1995 catalogue of part of the collection; for others, there are records in Seymour de Ricci and its supplement, and all humanist manuscripts are noted in Kristeller’s indispensable Iter Italicum. Many, however, do not as yet have published technical descriptions. As what I am doing while here involves producing such descriptions for my own private use, I thought I would share them with you.
In doing so, I must emphasise that each of them comes with a health warning. They are in draft form, and cannot be thought to be full or final. In particular, they spend more time on the technical details and the provenance of the manuscript than on identification of contents. Moreover, they occasionally cite works by brief title rather than giving the publication details — one rainy weekend, I hope to provide a listing of those (though they will probably all be familiar to you). In addition, I intend to provide an explanation of my conventions to help you understand more clearly the necessarily succinct paragraphs of the technical description.
I also need your assistance with this experiment. I have many draft descriptions of manuscripts in other repositories in my files and I have been thinking for some time of sharing them. I would like your feedback on whether that would be useful and, if so, in what format. For the time being, I will provide them as pdfs, but I am open to suggestions about how else they could be presented.

Cambridge MA: University of Harvard, Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 289, fol. 1 (Florence, s. xv2/4).
Following all those prolegomena, here is the first such description. It is of Cambridge MA: Houghton Library, MS. Typ. 289, an elegant manuscript of Athanasius in Ambrogio Traversari’s translation. There is a brief entry for it in the online Harvard catalogue. For some its principal interest may be in the fact that it was owned by William Morris, who himself was a scribe and illuminator, inspired by medieval manuscripts. In truth, this arrived late into his collection and was owned by him too briefly to have been a specific source for his practices. It is, though, an interesting witness to the texts it contains, as I hope this description suggests. There are also elements of its production and history which remain opaque — and any thoughts will be welcome.
A final plea: do provide your comments on whether this is a useful initiative or not. Your views will shape how it develops – if at all.
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