The Materiality of Early Modern Political Texts

Advances in digital technology have distanced twenty-first century scholars from the materiality of texts and the practical realities of printing and book production. I now access most of the texts I study via a screen. There are obvious benefits to this, virtually all the early modern printed texts I need are available via resources like EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), so I no longer have to travel to specialist libraries to read them. Yet, being of an age that I can remember life before EEBO, I am also conscious of what is lost as a result of the shift to digital consumption. The orange dust on my clothes from carrying a pile of old books to my desk at the British Library is something I can live without, but the wealth of information that could be gleaned from handling the book as a physical object - its size, weight, quality, appearance - is much harder to intuit through a screen.

Our second Experiencing Political Texts workshop was designed to explore these issues by focusing on the materiality of early modern texts. Practicalities meant that we were also confronted with the pros and cons of the digital in our own experience of the workshop. Owing to the threatened UCU strikes, Part 1 took place in person in York on 24 February, while Part 2 (which I will discuss in my next blogpost) was broadcast via Zoom on 28 March. While there are definite advantages to being able to hold a workshop digitally, the engagement with participants - just like that with texts - is richer and more satisfying in person.

I left York buzzing with ideas, but will restrict myself here to just three: the experience of texts by non-readers; ephemerality versus durability and the role of text in securing longevity; and the notion of hidden texts - and more especially hidden political messages within texts.

The title page of John Lilburne’s pamphlet Regall Tyrannie Discovered (EEBO).

It was Sophie Smith who raised the point that texts are experienced by those who do not read them as well as by those who do. This idea was especially resonant because Sophie's paper followed Rachel Foxley's on Leveller and Republican texts, which had already led me to reflect on the information conveyed on title pages - which would have been accessible in booksellers shops or on barrows to people who did not buy or read the full work. Rachel focused on John Lilburne's Regall Tyrannie Discovered, the title page of which is particularly striking. It consists of dense, closely printed, type which sets out the argument and structure of the work. In this regard, it reminded me of the frontispieces to works like Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the Eikon Basilike, which convey the argument of the text in visual form. On the surface, these images are more engaging and might seem more appealing than dense type, and yet they require careful reading and interpretation. Lilburne also offered a textual equivalent of the author portrait that prefaced many early modern texts, listing his other works and offering a summary of the key events of his life.

An example of the Hugo Grotius medal from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, the reputation of an author - and an understanding of their main arguments - was often accessible to those who had never read that author's works. Niccolò Machiavelli was a case in point for the early modern period. Sophie showed that John Case's Sphaera civitatis was partly inspired by his concern that early modern citizens might derive their understanding of politics from Machiavelli (whether or not they had read him). By updating Aristotle's account of politics, Case's aim was to convince them to abandon Machiavelli as their guide. Charlotte McCallum's close reading of 'Nicholas Machiavel's Letter to Zanobius Bundelmontius' which appeared in the 1675 edition of his works, explored how Machiavelli could be drawn upon to advance arguments specific to English politics in the 1670s. Machiavelli was not the only figure whose reputation extended to audiences far beyond those who actually read his works. Ed Jones Corredera reminded us that the same is true of Hugo Grotius whose image was used to advertise air travel in the twentieth century and to celebrate individuals committed to advancing peace - via the Grotius medals, one of which was awarded to Winston Churchill in 1949.

Holy Trinity Church, York. As well as these surviving examples of early modern box pews, this church also has many tombstone inscriptions, not all of which are still visible. Image Rachel Hammersley.

The second theme I drew from the papers concerned the ephemerality versus the longevity of texts. This idea was brought into focus by Katherine Hunt's paper which began with the line from George Herbert that writing in brass is more weighty, durable, and permanent than writing with pen and ink. As Katherine's paper demonstrated, the reality is that writing in brass could be just as ephemeral as print. As anyone who has wandered around a church will know, inscriptions on tomb stones can become worn over time. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of supposedly ephemeral texts (broadsheets, chapbooks, pamphlets) that have survived since the early modern era. Sometimes this occurs as a result of them appearing in a Sammelband collection (a group of pamphlets bound together because they all relate to a particular issue or affair). Jason McElligott discussed a couple of Sammelband volumes held at the Marsh Library in Dublin. He demonstrated why such collections are so valuable to scholars, owing to their ability to reveal how particular works were read and understood at the time.

Rachel Foxley and Marcus Nevitt also touched on the contrast between ephemeral and more durable texts. In analysing Regall Tyrannie Discovered, Rachel was forced to confront the distinction between pamphlets and books. Lilburne usually produced pamphlets, but with Regall Tyrannie Discovered he was clearly aiming (not entirely successfully) to produce something more akin to a book. As Rachel noted, ephemerality versus longevity is one of several scales on which we can contrast these two formats. Though there are of course plenty of examples of pamphlets that have transcended their supposedly ephemeral status. Marcus noted the contrast between the ephemerality of a play performance and the more durable form of a printed play text - including its dedication - which could extend the life of plays and enhance the reputation of their authors.

The contents page of the 1675 edition of Machiavelli’s works - with the letter at the bottom. (EEBO).

Closely related to the theme of longevity versus durability is that of visibility versus obscurity, and a number of papers also touched on the idea of hidden texts. This was again brought into focus by Katherine's paper on brass inscriptions. I was intrigued by the pro-monarchy sentiments that were inscribed inside bells produced in 1641 and 1650. Was this a case of communities expressing their sympathy and support for Charles I in a way that was safe, precisely because the words could not easily be read? Other papers explored the notion of hidden texts - or hidden ideas within texts - in different ways. This might be a matter of the positioning of a particular text within a volume. Charlotte McCallum noted that in the 1675 edition of Machiavelli's works the spoof letter from 'Machiavel' was placed at the end of the volume (a fact that was reflected on the contents page). In some later editions it appeared earlier in the volume, and in some a manuscript note was added drawing attention to the controversial nature of the ideas contained in the letter. The letter, then, was made more or less obscure through the materiality of the volume - its positioning within it and the addition or removal of other paratextual material. This reminded me of the practice within the Encyclopédie of hiding controversial topics in obscure places. The life and thought of the English republican James Harrington, for example, is discussed in the entry for Rutland; the English county with which the Harrington family was associated.

Papers by Marie-Louise Coulahan and Lizzie Scott-Baumann offered a gender dimension to this idea of hidden texts. Marie-Louise presented her RECIRC project to us. One of the findings of this project is that while women rarely wrote overtly political texts, that does not mean that they did not engage in politics. Rather they had to find suitable vehicles for doing so. Petitions (such as that of the Mariners' Wives and the Gentlewomen's Petition) and prophetic writings were often used to make political statements. Similarly, both Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish wrote about their husbands as a way of expressing their own political views. It was noted too that correspondence by women is often undervalued as a political text. Where the correspondence of men is seen as important, that by women is often dismissed as mere 'gossip'. Lizzie took this notion of hidden ideas to a deeper level, exploring how the language used by Lucy Hutchinson and Anne Wharton in their poems addressed to Edmund Waller, served to subtly critique his behaviour and actions.

Image by Rachel Hammersley. Taken during the workshop with the Thin Ice Press.

Our workshop ended with us addressing the materiality of texts from a different direction. Helen Smith led a workshop with the Thin Ice Press. We were given the opportunity to type set a short sentence (which proved to be a very fiddly process) and then to print a poster of our own. This gave us all a new appreciation for the work done by early modern printers. It became apparent just what a monumental task printing a text was at that time, and it made the typographical errors that are common in early modern texts much more understandable. While I will continue to use resources such as EEBO and ECCO to read early modern texts, I left York knowing that the distance between my understanding and the practical realities of the production and consumption of early modern political texts had narrowed perceptibly as a result of the workshop.

Image by Rachel Hammersley. Taken during the workshop with the Thin Ice Press.

Translating Cultures: Ideas and Materiality in Europe, c.1500-1800

Courtesy of the pandemic, during October I 'attended' two conferences in two different countries (the United States and Germany) without leaving my study. While I have attended various virtual conferences over the last eighteen months, these were the first hybrid events to which I have been invited. There is, of course, much that is good about this shift - not least the fact that reducing our international travel is better for the environment and that events that include a virtual dimension are more accessible for those with caring responsibilities. The fact that we have all been forced to get to grips with online platforms such as Zoom during the pandemic means these events tended to work more effectively and run more smoothly than the occasional attempt at hybrid events I attended in the past. Nevertheless there are, of course, trade-offs. In one sense it is good that I could attend these events while still fulfilling my duties as a teacher, Director of Research for my School, and a mother. But whereas when one attends a conference in person other duties recede into the background for a couple of days, this time I had to intersperse listening to conference papers with other activities, including transporting my daughter to football training and holding office hours with students, making it difficult to immerse myself fully in the topic of the conference. As Adam Smith would have recognised, there is a cost involved in switching from one activity to another.

Nonetheless both conferences provided much food for thought. In this blogpost, I will comment on just one of them: the latest in a series of workshops led by Thomas Munck and Gaby Mahlberg, and held at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel Germany, involving a group of European scholars interested in cultural translation. Since this was the fourth time we have met as a group it was very much a case of pulling together strands of thought that we have been working on for a while, with a view to producing a joint publication. All the same, the papers generated some new ideas for me.

Ironically, given how long we have been thinking about cultural translation, one observation I had was about the limits of what we can know. This was brought directly to our attention by Thomas Munck in his paper: 'Untranslatable, unsellable, unreadable? Obstacles, delays and failures in cultural translation in print in early modern Europe'. Thomas's starting point was why some authors and works are not translated despite exploring potentially interesting and relevant topics. As an example he highlighted the case of the Scandinavian thinker Anders Chydenius, who wrote on popular eighteenth-century topics such as population decline, free trade, and freedom of the press, but whose works were not translated from Swedish into other European languages. Thomas identified various reasons why works do not get translated: what is written could be difficult to convey in another language; there might be conceptual barriers to translation - in that the ideas expressed may be considered out of bounds in other contexts; the works might be deemed boring and therefore unsellable; or there could be fears that they would be censored either pre- or post-publication. In addition, other members of the group noted that the existence of Latin editions can be seen to render a translation unnecessary. The difficulty for us as historians of the early modern period is in determining what the reason or reasons were in any particular case. Other papers brought up specific examples of this. Gaby Mahlberg noted that there is evidence that both a French and a Latin translation of John Toland's Anglia Libera were planned, but there are no extant copies - meaning either that the translations did not materialise or that no copies survive. We do not know which is the case, even less why. In his paper on the French translations of Thomas Hobbes's works, Luc Borot raised several related questions: why some works by Hobbes were translated but not others; why parts of some works were translated but not the whole work; and why some translations flourished while others floundered. Even, as in the case of Hobbes, where extensive correspondence between author and translator exists, we can often do little more than speculate on the whys and wherefores.

Paul Rycaut, after Sir Peter Lely c.1679-80. National Portrait Gallery NPG 1874. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

While there is a lot that we do not know, there is also a great deal that translations can reveal, not least about the preoccupations of the translator, printer or their audience. Ann Thomson's fascinating paper on translations of works about the Ottoman Empire highlighted several examples of translations being used for purposes that were different from - and sometimes even at odds with - the intentions of the original work and its author. One such example is the seventeenth-century French translation of Paul Rycaut's work The Present State of the Ottoman Empire. His account was designed to highlight the benevolent nature of the rule of the Stuarts in England - and at the same time to condemn the rule of the Puritans during the 1650s as being more like oriental despotism. The references to the Stuarts were, however, cut from the French translations and instead the 1677 version used Rycaut's book as a vehicle for discussing the situation of Protestants in France. Similarly, Luisa Simonutti's paper shed light on the manuscript translation of the Doctrina Mahumet which is held among John Locke's papers in Oxford and clearly contributed to discussions about toleration among his circle.

‘Carte de Tendre’ from Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel Clélie. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Another adaptation between source text and translation was explored in Amelia Mills's excellent paper on Aphra Behn's translation of Paul Tallemant's Le Voyage de l'Isle d'Amour. Tallemant's work drew inspiration from Madeleine de Scudéry's 'Carte de Tendre', which appeared in her book Clélie, a Roman History; and Amelia showed us a beautiful copy of the original 'Carte de Tendre' (which survives in the Herzog August Bibliothek). The map was designed to demonstrate how suitors could find their way into the affections of women by travelling to one of three destinations: Tendre sur reconnaissance, Tendre sur inclination or Tendre sur estime. Tallemant reinvented Scudéry's map shifting the destination from tendre to amour - with its more erotic overtones embodying a male rather than a female perspective. In her translation of Tallemant's text, Aphra Behn moved the focus back to a female-centred vision and to the intellectual meeting of minds that had been behind Scudéry's original. As Amelia demonstrated, this was reflected in the translation of particular words with, for example, the French word 'plaisir' not rendered as the obvious English equivalent 'pleasure' but rather the less emotionally charged 'content(ment)'. In doing so, Amelia argued, Behn was very deliberately looking back to the decade of Scudéry and her circle, and suggesting that there was much that English women of the 1680s might learn from them.

In Behn's case the shift of tone and emphasis came largely through the translation of particular terms, but in many other cases it came instead through paratextual material. Alessia Castagnino talked in her paper about the translations of the Abbé Noël Pluche's work Le Spectacle de la Nature. She noted that the Spanish translation incorporated footnotes which were deliberately used to emphasise the work of Spanish scientists and to highlight the important contribution of the Jesuits to the advancement of global knowledge.

Footnotes were also used to shift the focus of James Porter's Observations on the Religion, Law, Government and Manners, of the Turks, which was discussed in Ann Thomson's paper. She noted that the edition of the French translation produced by the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel added a wealth of footnotes which developed the themes of toleration and the condemnation of prejudice and superstition. Thus a translation of a work that was originally intended to offer a balanced - even sympathetic - account of the Ottoman Empire, was used by the STN as a means of attacking Catholic intolerance. Another example of a printer influencing the reading of a work through the addition of paratextual material was noted in the presentations given by Mark Somos and his team, who are working on the Grotius census. As Ed Jones Corredera reminded us, the important series of works on republics published by Elsevier in the seventeenth century included often quite elaborate frontispieces that were the work of the printer rather than the author or translator, allowing the printer to stamp their own message on the text.

The interest of members of the group in the material form of the text also extended to how translations were laid out on the page. Many translations (including some of those discussed above) included additional notes. The 1677 French translation of Rycaut's The Present State of the Ottoman Empire went a step further in having such extensive notes that they had to be added at the end under the heading 'Remarques Curieuses', so as to avoid clogging up the page. This was not always a concern for translators, however. Asaph Ben-Tov mentioned Thomas Erpenius's Historia Josephi, which included both the original Arabic text and not one but two Latin translations all on the same page - a literal interlinear translation and a more Latinate rendering in the margin. As Johann Camman's handwritten comments on his copy of the text make clear, the work was used by Camman as a language-learning tool rather than for its substantive content. This was not unusual in the case of bilingual versions - Alessia Castagnino suggested that the same was true of the bilingual (French and Italian) edition of Pluche's Le Spectacle de la Nature.

Early modern translations, then, served a variety of purposes. The publication arising from the Wolfenbüttel workshops will explore many of these, and I look forward to seeing it come to fruition. At the same time, I am sorry that this means that there are currently no more trips to the beautiful Herzog August Bibliothek scheduled in my diary.