Hampton Court Palace

    

I spent my last full day in England at Hampton Court, the palace established by Henry VIII (having had lunch on Wednesday with a colleague who is a fellow of a college and holder of a professorial chair all founded by same). It was squatter, more compact and less capacious than I was expecting, but it was still pretty spectacular and a good day out.

There are a lot of pictures of stained glass and English gardens following the jump. Consider yourself warned.

A Good Bribe Gone Bad

I have two book reviews that are, at this point, seriously late. They may only be a little late by the standards of book review editors, who often have two-year-long queues of review backlog and appear not to really care when new reviews come in, but for my own comfort with deadlines and my desire to get things crossed off my to-do list, they are seriously late and need to get finished. By me.

So I brought both books to England with me with the promise that if I finished the reviews, I would allow myself the indulgence of mailing the books home rather than schlepping them along in my suitcase to Israel. It seemed a little like overkill but a bribe has to involve a real and desirable reward; and the promise of not having to lug two not insubstantial books — one a hardbound single-author monograph of typical length and the other softbound but a museum exhibition catalogue printed on luxuriously heavy paper — around with me seemed like a good one.

The only trouble is that it didn't work. In addition to my work in the libraries I came to visit, I have, with the exception of a few references that need checking when I get home, basically completed the last chapter of the book manuscript and written 1500 words of a 10k-word chapter for an edited collection that isn't due to the editors until February.

There's nothing like having less desirable tasks at hand to increase productivity. I guess I'll have to find some really unpleasant task to undertake that will make writing book reviews seem like the only thing worth doing.

Anybody have some stables that need mucking?

King's College Chapel and Cows

     

  

The Corpus Clock Chronophage

This is video of the Corpus Clock striking 11a.m. It is a mechanical clock outside Corpus Christi college that contains the largest clock mechanism of the "grasshopper" type, with the grasshopper-esque "chronophage" at the top of it being a clever play on the name and a way of demonstrating that type of clock movement. It's only accurate every five minutes at it sometimes pauses. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to photograph as it's behind glass.

Adventures in Observed Phonology

Some teenagers, some British and some not, participating in some kind of summer program that means they are all wearing identical t-shirts, are sitting near me in the cafe where I have decamped to work for the afternoon. (The cafe is air conditioned and the library is not.) One of the British teens is teaching the correct pronunciation of a new word to one of the foreign teenagers. It makes no sense whatsoever in an American accent, so try to imagine it in an estuary-English one: "Y-A-W-N. Yawn. It's 'yaw' like 'you're great' but with 'n' instead of' great.'"

Loss (Volumes 1-3, 6-9, 12+)

 

These are three of the four boxes of unbound material in the Israel Abrahams collection in Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies library. As you can see, in his handwriting on the spine of the boxes, there were at least eleven such.

Raiders of the Lost Arc(hive)

I told you this was an Indiana Jones movie.

Today was my day to go looking for a manuscript only to end up scrunching up my face and saying: "Nazis. I hate these guys!"

About half the archive that I am working my way through is here as expected. The other half isn't here because it was in London during the Blitz. As typical British understatement would have it, "enemy action in 1940 destroyed much of the collections."

It's a strange sense of being in a time warp. It's not that the books and papers aren't here because they are in London. They're not here because they were in London in 1940.

The Week in Links (The Driving on the Wrong Side of the Road Edition)

I suppose I should just accept the fact that castles and fortresses are used and reused over the centuries and damaged and rebuilt anew after each successive attack. But the news of the damage to the Krak des Chevaliers still makes me cringe.

Krak des Chevaliers Hit

An update on the destruction of cultural patrimony in another place and another war, twenty years ago:

Impossible to Turn the Page

Kosher Sushi in the (Ex-?) Ghetto in Rome:

Echoes from the Roman Ghetto

The Grammatical Diversity Project at Yale is documenting varieties of English diglossia:

Why 'Bad' Grammar Isn't

Although this was specifically written with students beginning the study of English literature in mind, it will be worthwhile to all literature and history students:

Advice for New Students of English Literature

Lawsuits and injunctions are flying to keep the NYPL from destroying its research library at the Schwartzmann Building:

Second Lawsuit Filed Against NYPL

As a fan and defender of bad literature, this blog post appealed to me:

The Boring, Ugly and Unimportant: Biases in Manuscript Studies

It turns out that I'm not the only one having issues in the archives of London this week. I guess I would have expected this sort of thing in Spain, but was surprised that it happens in the UK, too:

Surprises in the Archives

And finally, knit the Middle Ages!

Knit Archaeology Festival

Three Sites in Norwich

I. The Anglo-Norman Cathedral

GROWLTIGER'S ON THE LOOSE! (medieval version)

 

Full marks for effort, major deduction for execution, though.

Personally, even if my cat loved medieval history (he doesn't), I'd still actually put a picture of him on a "lost cat" poster. I mean, if you see a ginger cat wandering Cambridge, are you just supposed to go up to it and start quizzing it on the Battle of Hastings and call the number if it responds?

On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to the need to advertise the cat's proclivities, but really, if you need a pictures of medieval cats (and yes, I've just used the words "medieval" and "cat" in the same sentence, fully knowing the risk of reigniting the flurry of cat-print-on-manuscript pictures circulating) there are much better options available.

Nevertheless, I do hope these folks find their cat.

The Humanistic Pose

"Is my 'Humanism' really a pose? Do I pretend tolerance to gain a hearing? This has never been charged against me. But what of my own consciousness? Does my own self charge me?

“Partly. Humanism is, I concede, sometimes an affectation. One restrains oneself.

“But only partly. If it be sometimes an affectation, it is always an effort. Perceiving other people’s intolerance, or rather, perceiving that intolerance is natural, one asks: What of my own intolerance? It is just as natural to me as to other people’s to them. What then? I must overlay the natural by the artificial, for the artificial is the truer, not to myself, but to a cause higher than myself. This cause is the cause of all against the one. Truth is not natural, it is artificial, artificial in the good sense. A child is not naturally truthful. He is naturally self-indulgent. Humanism is an artificial process against self-indulgence, and self-indulgence, though natural to each, is unnatural to all.

"Humanism is a pose, but a pose of grace.”

 

Quoted from Israel Abrahams, unpublished papers, Southampton Hartley Library MS 116/58 AJ 172/E.8

Day Two at the London Metropolitan Archives

When I returned to the London Metropolitan Archives today, I found some references to the manuscript collection, but nothing relevant to the provenance of the manuscript I'm interested in. At this point, I am comfortable saying that it may never have existed; and that if it did ever exist, it no longer does.

I found a very late (1918) letter that was sent along with a historical manuscript, entitled Toledot Yisrael, describing the circumstances under which it was found (under a rock during the shelling of Jerusalem!!) and donated to the library. Unfortunately, there was nothing earlier along those lines, and certainly nothing like this from the pre-Neubauer period, before the 1886 catalogue that contains the entry for my manuscript was published.

One interesting thing is that in the early 20th century, the library was willing to send manuscripts out on loans to other libraries (that, of course, all vouched that they had suitably safe and fireproof places to store them).

There were a number of other somewhat interesting letters in this folder. I'll hold off posting them for now for a really mundane technical reason, though, namely I'm on a ridiculously slow internet connection.

'Frankweiler' is a Jewish Name, Right?

I met with the LSJS library volunteer today, and she gave me permission to tool around in the librarian's files that were in the library proper (but not in the archives in the back), and so I did that while she was taking a class.

To paraphrase Sheldon Cooper: Explain to me an organizational system in which fountain pen refills and Maimonides in a desk drawer is valid.

All of the drawers and files were disorganized and just full of bills, invoices, random correspondence, books, pamphlets, labels that look like they might have been from dinky museum exhibitions. Some of it was tenuously in chronological order.

Indiana Jonesing

I arrived in London today not having been successful in making contact with the librarian at the London School of Jewish Studies, where I am hoping to track down the early European provenance of a manuscript I'm working on. It was held for a long time as part of what was formerly Jews' College London, originally a rabbinical college and institution of higher education founded by Moses Montefiore. As the college fell into disarray, its associations with the University of London and SOAS were terminated, and the library was in such a shambles that it sold off its Hebrew manuscript collection, which had originally been assembled by one of the early chief rabbis of England. It's not clear what happened to the library's records for those manuscripts once the collection was broken up.

The librarian finally emailed me this morning to tell me that the manuscript I want records for was never owned by JCL. I was prepared to go in with my iPad and argue that this catalogue entry and this insignia in the manuscript say different. (Only I was planning to be more polite than that.)

 

I arrived at the time that the librarian had indicated, only to discover that she'd had to leave due to a death in the family. The problem was that nobody else in the school could tell me anything about the library. The girl at the reception desk took me to the library at the suggestion (by phone) from a library volunteer that she look at a few card boxes on the librarian's desk. No luck. I do have to say, though, the periodicals in this library are catalgogued well, in detail, and many times over in many places.

The receptionist told me she really couldn't let me into the room, but then relented and let me walk up and down the hall while she watched, and then left me to it with a sort of wink and nod.

It's a disaster zone:

It might not look so bad in the pictures, but the boxes and folders contain odd conglomerations of different types of documents: accession records, random periodicals, invoices, correspondence; and very little of it pre-dates the second world war (actually maybe that's part of the problem?).

This floorplan was the only evidence I found of the manuscript collection even having existed. To be fair, I was shuffling quickly and haphazardly, because I didn't want to get caught and kicked out (since I really wasn't supposed to be in there.) It's not an ideal way to work in a disorganized collection with zero finding aids.

Rule number one in handling archives, rare books, and manuscripts is that you must wash your hands when you're finished, especially before you touch your eyes, because you never know what kind of schmutz, arsenic, or bugs you might have gotten on your hands.

I found a book that contained conservation records for print incunables (close, but no cigar!), that had a mummified spider resting on the first page. There was far more wildlife in this hall than one likes to find in a rare book collection.

 

 

And my hands have never, ever been this dirty walking out of a library.

I'm almost ready to accept that I'll never have anything extra-textual that will help me situate this manuscript. I find it to be an infuriating state of affairs because it's not like it's information that was burned by the inquisition or lost sometime in the late Middle Ages: It's been discarded by an institution that doesn't appear to care about its own history or its cultural/religious heritage. It's such a shame.

I have to go argue with a librarian.

Further bulletins as events warrant.