Desengaño

I had a love/hate relationship with the Don Quijote class that I took as an undergraduate. Love because, well, what's not to love; and hate because as an undergraduate I was mostly put off by professors whose personalities were forces of nature. I could be as guilty of hero-worship as the next star-struck undergraduate being taught by the go-to authorities on their topics, by the laureates of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award and the Guggenheim and the MacArthur,  but my heros were often not the usual ones.

The one lecture in that class that has stuck with me for a decade was the first of the semester. I remember much of what I learned in the class (although my reading of Quijote has matured considerably since then) but that first lecture is a complete unit in my mind's eye and ear. It walked us through the title page of the first edition of Don Quijote; as a college senior, I was astonished at how much detail and information my professor could pull out of a single page that came before what I then imagined as "the book" even started.

One of the themes of the course was the idea of desengaño. The word is often translated into English as disillusionment but it doesn't carry the same kind of negative connotation; it's a word with more neutral and wider possibilities that represents not a loss of illusion but an increased awareness, a lifting of the curtain from before one's eyes. It's an idea that comes from a very classically-constructed field of Hispanic literature (that's a nice way of not coming right out and calling it a bit outdated), and Otis Green is the scholar most closely associated with developing a vision of that trope within the classically-constructed canon. (Citing Otis Green is another way of not explicitly calling the framework old-fashioned.)

Imagine the desengaño that I would feel ten years thence — unexpectedly and by necessity becoming something of a book historian — upon opening Roger Chartier's The Order of Books to find this spread, a discussion of the title page of the editio princeps with special attention to the relationship between the author and patron named on the title page and the author and patron identified from within the pages of the book: the ultimate source of that lecture.

My the persisting memory of my inner Yale College senior was, if briefly, devastated by this realization that the best bit of that class was cribbed from Chartier, that I had stood in awe of my professor for something that he had not done. Of course, from the other side of the table I know better. Or, "better," because we all cite the scholarship of others when we teach; and when we teach undergraduates we don't necessarily give them the full chain of transmission. Because it would be disruptive to the flow of a lecture for information that won't be meaningful to 99% of them? Because we never expect that one of those students will grow up in her professional life to accidentally open the book that was our source? Because for the most part most of us don't draw so heavily upon a single piece of scholarship as the backbone of a lecture?

Of course, the evidence before me forces me to wonder whether that was actually ever what happened.

The class seems to have changed since then. Thanks to the dubious miracle of the internet and open-online education, I can go back and read a full transcript of the first lecture of that class, a lecture that no longer makes any mention of the shape of the title page or the dedication to the duke or the name of the printer. Perhaps it is appropriate that it should be a lecture on Quijote called up shockingly suddenly from the hazy memory of an undergraduate not yet professionally trained in the study of literature, that should make me question my own judgment, perception, and memory, and wonder whether the lecture occurred as I remember it or whether I myself somehow previsaged my later reading of another scholar's work.

Editors of the Book*

I had the chance to attend a workshop at the NYPL on the Complutense Polyglot, a multilingual bible composed in early sixteenth-century Spain. The workshop was led by a colleague I know from #medievalTwitter (and it was really nice to finally meet him in person this week) for two classes of students at Yeshiva University and Stern College. In addition to learning about the book, it was also a great opportunity to observe someone who is a very lively teacher and has developed an effective way of teaching history of the book for beginning-level students.

The really poignant thing, a completely unintended** and subtle irony of the talk was that one of the themes was the extent to which major institutional early modern library collections that are still intact even today in Spain are instrumental in being able to reconstruct the editorial process that created the Complutense Polyglot. Scholars are able to make determinations about what was read in conjunction with what else and which editors, based on what is known about their travel and living patterns, would have had access to what kinds of sources; and that says an awful lot. And here was the value of institutional library collections as collections being lauded in a library that is on the verge of dismantling its own.

***

*I briefly thought of entitling this post 'And the Word Was Made Flesh' but ultimately that seemed more kinds of inappropriate than kinds of appropriate.
**I'm reading a strange critique of the internationalist fallacy this week. More on this soonish.

An Ashkenazi Paleography Puzzle

I'm trying to write a book chapter for an edited volume on the readership and ownership history of a particular Hebrew manuscript that, through a fictional colophon, implicates ones of my translators in the creation of that text in an attempt to accrete his textual, cultural, and intellectual prestige to the text, a life of Alexander the Great. I am writing about the text and the colophon in my book, but this book chapter will be an opportunity to talk about the material history of the text and how and why an Alexander romance falsely attributed to a medieval Andalusi exile was of interest to early modern European readers, who obviously had the text copied, sold it, and circulated it.

There are five owners' marks, and I've been able to read and identify three of them: the two most recent and the one that is probably the oldest of the five. The two newest ones are stamps that are well attested and weren't that hard to sort out; the oldest is a mess — a colleague in a different field looked at it and asked me: "What makes you even think that's language?" — which, not to toot my own horn or anything, was a real triumph to both decipher it and identify it as the mark of a French book dealer with particular known interests in Andalusi work.

But I'm really stuck on the other two.

< self-flagellation > I hate that I'm stuck. I hate that I haven't been able to work this out on my own or with help from people I know. I hate that I"m asking for help in such a public way and feel like it will, in some substantial way diminish the final product, if I ever even get as far as finishing it. I know that asking for help isn't asking other people to do my own work — being able to read the marks is just a first step, obviously, and there would be loads left for me to do and of course I'd give credit where credit would be due — but I can't quite shake the feeling. < / self-flagellation >

I think that the second one might begin: "zeh ha-sefer shayach le-yosef" (this book belongs to Joseph) but I'm not even sure about that. But if anyone out there is more familiar with early modern Ashkenazi hands than I am and can make some sense of these, I'd be beyond grateful, would acknowledge you in an effusive footnote, and would be more than happy to send you a batch of cookies, too, if that's your thing.

So here goes. Click to enlarge:

Writing Surfaces

Parchment:

Papyrus:

Hebrew Incunabula at the Rosenbach Museum

This afternoon, I had an introduction to the Hebrew incunabula collection at the Rosenbach Museum here in Philadelphia. The museum is the historic home and (parts of the) book collection of the Rosenbach brothers, one of whom was an important book dealer and collector. The regular tour of the home, which I took the last time I visited Philadelphia, in 2009, is the most charming, literary historic home tour I've ever been on — and something I'd highly recommend. 

The building has a small exhibition of Samuel Yellin ironwork in the lobby; and the museum is the depository of Maurice Sendak's work, so all in all, it's a great place for representations of monsters and other gruesome characters. 

The hands-on tour was part of a series that is definitely for non-specialists, and I think I did a reasonable job of not being a pain in the patoot. Except about this book:

It is a Lisbon Bible — not the famous manuscript Lisbon Bible, but one of a class of printed Hebrew Bibles also referred to as Lisbon Bibles (kind of like Paris Bibles refer to a type of Bible, if that helps situate you at all); they were among the first books printed in the city of Lisbon and are considered to be one of the most skillful examples of early Hebrew printing.

This particular exemplar is particularly of interest to me because it appears to have traveled roughly along the same route out of the Iberian Peninsula as some late medieval/early modern books I'm working on currently and for we're missing about 200 years of ownership information. I'm definitely going to go back and sit with their registrar's file, at least to have some kind of comparandum in terms of the history of the books.

The type of binding is known as a box binding, which is more or less just what it sounds like. 

***

The woman leading the tour brought out a copy of the Bay Colony Psalter and asked one of the people to read from it to illustrate the way that the Puritans translated in a linear style (that is, word for word, without regard to the syntax in the target language, just like my medieval  translators did). I wish I had volunteered more quickly — he's actually holding one of the very few remaining Bay Colony Psalters in existence, and one of only three in the original sixteenth-century binding. (NYPL has one, too, though I don't know about the binding.)

And this is the first printed image of a matzah:

I'm a little disappointed that I have to write my book this year because I'm definitely not making use of the really amazing local collections; but since I know about them now, and since Philly and NYC are not that far apart, I can definitely think about using them as a really organic foundation for the next big project.

A History of an Institution in Bookplates and Annotations

Click to enlarge.