AUTUMN TERM

LECTURE 1. Course Overview & How to Argue Historically

LECTURE 2. Scholastic Philosophy and the Medieval Cosmos

LECTURE 3. Renaissance Challenges

LECTURE 4. Philosophical Reformers

LECTURE 5. Experimental Philosophy/The Place of Isaac Newton

LECTURE 6. Alchemy, Matter Theory, and Chemistry

LECTURE 7. The Enlightenment

LECTURE 8. The Spirit of Improvement and Specialised Science

LECTURE 9. Natural History, Natural Philosophy, and Mathematics in the 1700s

LECTURE 10. Making Sense of the Earth: Life and Geology

SPRING TERM

LECTURE 11. Science, Religion, and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century

LECTURE 12. Darwin and His Place in the Sciences

LECTURE 13. Laboratories and Universities

LECTURE 14. The New Physics and Engineering

LECTURE 15. The Social Sciences

LECTURE 16. Origins and Facets of Twentieth-Century Biology

LECTURE 17 Industry and the Expansion of Science

LECTURE 18. Twentieth-Century Politics of Science and Technology

LECTURE 19. Calculation, Modelling, Simulation, and Artificial Intelligence

LECTURE 20. Review

Download it and check it out.

Cartographies of Time

I also just recorded an in-depth interview with Niksa Spremic of Exeter College, Oxford, on Croatian history and Catholicism, which should be up later tonight. For now, I’m knee-deep in Persian texts, phone calls, and (later this afternoon) an Amartya Sen lecture. With Timothy Snyder coming to give a talk on his Bloodlands tomorrow, it’s a good time to be in Oxford.

Tim Snyder

Your Humble Narrator …

Who am I? I’ve outlined a bit about myself on the about page, but a few more details. I’d describe myself as a historian, but one acutely interested in what recent (mostly 20th century) history has to tell us about policy choices and potential trajectories in the early 20th century. I became acutely interested in history as a discipline in high school, when I was blessed with a wonderful teacher who introduced me to George F. Kennan’s writings on containment. For the impressionable young boy, Kennan served as an example that there was a way to marry intelligent historical analysis with sobriety about current events and statecraft. I’ve tried to follow my own instincts about what’s interesting since then, but there’s been some aping of the world that Kennan and other mid-20th century statesmen-cum-authors found themselves in and, in part, reimagined with new postwar institutions. While an undergraduate at Princeton, I became quite interested in German history, later became more attracted to Russian and Soviet history, and, as of late, seem to find myself more and more attracted to countries and regions with even more obscure languages and questionable human rights records: I carried out some of my recent Master’s dissertation work on Afghanistan (learning the language and hanging out with some Afghan students in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, although I have not been to Afghanistan yet), specifically Soviet development efforts in the country in the 1980s. I’m still figuring out what to do with myself when my time at Oxford University comes to an end this July, but I hope to find a way to hack it between academia, studying bizarre regions of the world, and policymaking.

Your humble narrator in Stalin's personal armored train car, Gori, Georgia (March 2010)

What Am I Doing?

This is, in part, where this site comes in. Beyond using it as a base for my personal aggrandizement. Most broadly, I want to develop an online space to hold conversations about recent history, good books, and the relevance of the past to present policy and political discussions. Speaking with friends from a variety of academic disciplines at various universities, I sense a dissatisfaction with the armies of, on the one hand, professional pundits writing books one year on Pakistan, the next year on Libya; and on the other hand, the occasional wunderkind authors, often coming out of international relations, appearing on the national news shows and marketing a solution to hard policy problems — but ultimately lacking the depth and insight that only comes with extended exposure to a culture and civilization, an interest governed less by publishers’ timetables than by inherent passion. Some academic programs, like Yale’s Grand Strategy courses, and some television series, like Harry Kreisler’s Conversations with History, have managed to successfully marry an interest in current events with more in-depth insights into history, literature, language, place, and civilization. If I can manage, in a series of postings, analyses, and conversations with others, to do the same, I’ll be satisfied.

Podcast!

To get a bit of content out there for this first post, I’d like to clue in readers to a podcast that I worked out with a friend of mine, John Raimo, a scholar of 20th century modernism in British and German literature. As part of a joint reading project on John’s blog, we together read through Anthony Grafton’s and Daniel Rosenberg’s Cartographies of Time, a lavishly illustrated and highly intelligent history of the timeline and other ways mankind has used to visually depict the passage of time. If you think that timelines in the format we know them today have always existed, think again: there’s a complex, surprising, and visually jaw-dropping history of how we got to this point. Check out Saul Steinberg’s 1970 Calendar, which I think partly reflects American liberals’ attitudes towards the country’s future throughout the post-1932 era:

Neat, no? You can read some of our written commentary over at John’s site, but at the conclusion of the project, we also taped a podcast together — one that I hope can serve as a model for some of the discussions I’d like to arrange in the coming month and a half at Oxford and going ahead into the future.

Download the podcast here.

The current issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly starts with a terrific letter from President Shirley Tilghman praising our German department. She described the multiple international networks that the department has woven, from the long-established program of summer jobs in Germany and the summer language program in Munich to the exchanges that bring German professors and graduate students to Princeton, place our students at Humboldt University in Berlin and engage students from Harvard and Berkeley as well in a four-cornered exchange. Thanks to these new programs and the new forms of electronic communication that sustain connections once people return to their homes, “the intellectual boundaries between Germany and Princeton have all but disappeared,” Tilghman wrote.

Sunday’s New York Times, by contrast, brought with it a very different story: that of how universities around the country have found it necessary to eliminate foreign language programs. The State University of New York at Albany found itself in the headlines not long ago when its administration decided to eliminate majors in French, Italian, Russian, Greek and Latin — a decision that seemed particularly unfortunate for a university that promises students “The World Within Reach.” Louisiana State University; the University of Maine; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and Winona State University have announced similar decisions.

Lisa Foderard, The Times reporter who compiled this precise and informative article, attributed the program closings to financial stringency, quoting administrators who claim they have no choice: “After a generation of expansion,” she explained, “academic officials are being forced to lop entire majors.” True, in the he-said-she-said vein typical of the Times and other media outlets nowadays, she cites a few professors of European languages who object to the cuts. But nowhere does she ask if the claims of financial exigency really hold water.

I can’t help wondering if politicians’ claims would have been received with equal credulity. Across the country, after all, administrators have claimed again and again that humanities departments have burdened their budgets. In fact, as Christopher Newfield has shown in “Unmaking the Public University,” many humanities departments earn more in student tuition money than is spent on their salary and research budgets. They actually cross-subsidize other departments that carry out more expensive research.

Often less creditable concerns explain why the knife falls where it does. Humanities departments can be seen as easy prey: They are relatively small, and in many cases they lack outside support, thanks to the abuse that culture warriors have hurled at them for years. Sadly, many Americans don’t see the point of studying foreign languages at all, since the world seems to have learned English. I wish everyone could speak, as I have, with a veteran of the Iraq war who has done house-to-house searches at night without the benefit of a competent interpreter.

More important, the bigger picture is missing — the picture you see if you look at the elite private and public institutions. In many of these schools, language departments are doing quite well. Ambitious colleges and universities are actually opening new programs — for example, new majors in Arabic — while maintaining the old standbys, because all languages and literatures present intellectual challenges and rewards, many of them are vital for students concentrating in quite different fields, and it’s never clear in advance which of them will suddenly prove of practical importance.

Many institutions have more in mind. All elite schools have realized that the old mercantilist vision of the university economy — one in which each university tried to be self-sufficient and competed with all the others to draw the best faculty and students — is obsolete. No single university — not Oxford, not Cambridge, not Harvard, not Berkeley — can afford to entice all the professors it would like to have on its faculty or attract and support all the students who would profit from its offerings and enrich its communal life. And no university can prepare students for life in this century’s workplaces without giving them international experience. In a few years, as Jeremy Adelman, director of Princeton’s Council for International Teaching and Research, recently remarked to me, savvy students will be choosing not which university they want to attend, but which network of universities they want to join.

So all of us are making links and finding partners. Foreign language departments have been at the leading edge of this movement for decades, and at places like Princeton they will continue to exist, developing everything from language programs in Beijing to exchanges of researchers.

When universities close their language and literature programs, they’re making powerful implicit statements. They’re showing, in public, that they don’t see either the value of studying foreign languages and cultures in depth or the practical importance of having experts in foreign cultures lead the way in developing worldwide networks. In essence, they’re giving up on being universities, in both the best traditional and the best contemporary senses. It is essential, for our democracy and our culture, that these fields don’t become the preserve of a tiny elite.

Neighbourliness at the Warburg Institute

Anthony Grafton talked about the fight to save the Warburg Institute (see too his article with Jeffrey Hamburger in NYRB and Anna Somers Cock’s article). The trail for the interview on the Book Show notes that “Aby Warburg’s research interests were eclectic and his cataloguing distinctive. Rituals of the Renaissance might sit beside the rituals of the American Hopi Indians in a system he described as neighbourliness.”

I was fascinated by the idea of neighbourliness and when I followed up on Anna Somers Cocks’ article I discovered that Aby “collected books and photographs and arranged and rearranged them according to his ideas of how a library could aid creativity by virtue of the “good neighbourliness” of books: that if you went to a shelf for one book, there should be related subjects close by, so that you were led spontaneously into making new connections. Thus, in the Warburg Institute’s library today, books on secret codes are near emblem books, books on heraldry, the art of memory and short hand.”

Anthony Grafton and Jeffrey Hamburger point out that:

A visionary scholar, Aby Warburg was obsessed with cultural exchanges of all kinds and in all periods, and tinkered throughout his life with new ways to frame and display visual images, in order to reveal their interconnected meanings across time and space (he saw the vital importance of moving images, for example, long before most scholars). His unconventional tool for studying this shifting web of historical relationships was a picture atlas that remained in perpetual flux, and to which he gave the name Mnemosyne, or memory. (The project was unfinished when he died in 1929 and never published, though scholars have attempted to reconstruct versions of it.) For Warburg, cultural memory involved more than the stale invocation of tradition; it demanded heroic struggles with the forces of historical oblivion.

Information about the Warburg Institute Library can be found here and this is a link to the Gateway to the classification scheme.

Libraries of the Literary

In a second interview on the Book Show there was a great link to the collections of literary figures. Craig Fehrman discussed his research into lost libraries. His Boston Globe article provides an introduction to some of the ideas discussed in the Book Show.

Craig points out that:

An author’s library, like anyone else’s, reveals something about its owner. Mark Twain loved to present himself as self-taught and under-read, but his carefully annotated books tell a different story. Books can offer hints about an author’s social and personal life. After David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, the Ransom Center bought his papers and 200 of his books, including two David Markson novels that Wallace not only annotated, but also had Markson sign when they met in New York in 1990. Most of all, though, authors’ libraries serve as a kind of intellectual biography. Melville’s most heavily annotated book was an edition of John Milton’s poems, and it proves he reread ”Paradise Lost” while struggling with ”Moby-Dick.”

Social Reading

The catalyst for writing this post was Joseph Esposito’s discussion of Bob Stein’s taxonomy of social reading. I liked Joseph’s point that “social reading is as much a part of a work as the text of the work itself”. I think the Warburg discussions and the exploration of lost libraries are celebrations of the social dimensions of text.

Photo Credits

A Neighbour’s Barn

Bookshelf Project 1

I had a professor at Appalachian State as an undergrad who was a full on footnote fanatic. The class I took from him was on Abraham Lincoln, and those of us who wrote papers for Dr. Haunton were terrified of his reputation for carrying one’s work to the library, and physically checking the citations. Apparently this reputation carried beyond his classes as well, as I had an assistant professor tell me once the Haunton had done the same thing with his dissertation during the interview process! The fear instilled in me that semester of messing up a citation stuck with me for the rest of my days.[1] The lowly footnote is the anchor of legitimacy for one’s work because it constitutes the trail of primary and secondary work that forms the genealogy one’s production.

At the same time, the footnote, and also the endnote, acts in a manner that reminds me of Marx’s insight into commodity fetishism. For Marx, the danger of the commodity form in part is its ability to mystify the social relations that underpin capitalism by giving capital the appearance of a relationship among things. The commodities of the historians’ trade are bits of archival data, ideas, theories, prior arguments, traces, physical manuscripts, etc. And, the work we produce, engaging these historical commodities, appears ideally under the aegis of the single-authored monograph, published by an academic press for an audience of tenure reviewers. The single-authored monograph acts as its own sort of fetish, hiding the collaborative relationship that exists across time (and in many cases long stretches of time) and between the various practitioners that produce the commodities to which we apply our labors.  This is particularly true in the case of archival materials, whose very existence depends on an unknown series of social relations that produced their preservation.

As any good student of historiography knows, the process of production of historical knowledge is essentially remix labor. We take was has already been written, interrogate primary sources, and produce “new” readings of the past. We are remixers from start to finish. The single-authored monograph (or journal article) mystifies our dependencies on collaborations across time, with people we likely don’t or may not ever have the possibility of knowing, by presenting our work as acts of singular creativity. Sure, the acknowledgements section of a piece of work recognizes an author’s immediate debts to supporters, reviewers, readers, etc. But, that section does nothing to reveal the fundamental fetishism of seeing single-authored work as singularly creative.

Finally, it’s the intention of most every historian I’ve had contact with that their work become a part of this commodity chain, that it be read and incorporated directly into the flow of new historical production. Granted, we all want credit in the space of the lowly footnote for that which we’ve produced, but we are still writing to be remixed again. Academic history is precisely the type of creativity that marks the internet age and remix culture, even if it’s much more ploddingly and less self-consciously ironically produced.

I think that this fundamental nature of historical work argues for the Creative Commons licensing of academic history as a disciplinary standard. CC licenses do not forfeit all intellectual property rights, but they do legally formalize the process of production in which we academic historians engage. CC licenses reveal from a legal perspective the dependencies that the fetish of the single-author monograph mystify, and give explicit permission for future use. Further, the true enemy of historical work is the closed archive. Historians have long been advocates for making the archival patrimony/matrimony of humankind freely available. But, when it comes to our professional production, we trade in that commitment to freely available sources for a self-serving publication process that puts the shared labors of historical commodities behind walls and in silos (a process overdetermined, it should be said, by the demands of tenure and promotion). The very possibility of our work depends on the existence of an archival commons and remix of our predecessors, and yet we all too often perform acts of enclosure in the last instance.

Creative Commons is explicitly designed to allow creators to ‘stand on the shoulder of their peers’ and ‘collaborate across space and time.’ Could there be a better descriptor of academic historical work?

Anthony Grafton explores the art of the meal @ Cabinet Magazine. 

On 18 July 1573, the Venetian Inquisition summoned Paolo Veronese to answer questions about the Last Supper that he had painted for the Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. In Veronese’s magnificent image, Palladian architecture frames the central scene, while Hogarthian servants and soldiers talk and scuffle in the foreground. The extras who give the painting its life and color provoked dry, precise queries: “What signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?” “What signify those armed men dressed in the fashion of Germany, with halberds in their hands?” “And the one who is dressed as a jester with a parrot on his wrist, why did you put him into the picture?” Veronese did his best to satisfy the inquisitors. The figure with the bleeding nose, he explained, “is a servant who has a nose-bleed from some accident.” The jester with the parrot “is there as an ornament, as it is usual to insert such figures.” As to the halberdiers, he offered a more theoretical explanation:

It is necessary here that I should say a score of words. … We painters use the same license as poets and madmen, and I represented those halberdiers, the one drinking, the other eating at the foot of the stairs, but both ready to do their duty, because it seemed to me suitable and possible that the master of the house, who as I have been told was rich and magnificent, would have such servants.

read more

The Independent reports that Pope Benedict will make “the first general apology” for clerical abuse when he meets thousands of priests from around the world at the end of the Year for Priests.

The Pope has praised the Meter Association, the group founded by Fr Fortunato Di Noto to combat paedophilia.

Benedict XVI will create a Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation, to be led by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, reports John Allen.

The internet has led to increased conformity and “the decline of critical spirit”, Pope Benedict has said (video).

Iraqi Christians have defied threats to erect a statue of Jesus modelled on the giant Christ the Redeemer in Rio.

An Italian group has accused Mgr Charles Scicluna of mishandling the case of an alleged clerical abuser.

A retired priest has said he warned Church authorities that Belgium’s longest-serving bishop was an abuser years before he resigned.

Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the New York Times, responds to criticism of the paper’s coverage of the Pope and the abuse crisis.

Christopher Hitchens provides an update on his campaign to arrest the Pope.

Historian Anthony Grafton says Pope Benedict is awaiting the St “Francis or the Angela Merici of our time“.

Joseph Bottum reflects on “the permanent scandal of the Vatican“.

Mark Lawson says the Pope and Catholicism “have become the evil force of choice” for novelists.

A new documentary traces the last days of Oscar Romero.

Marco Tossati discusses his controversial book-length interview with the exorcist Fr Gabriele Amorth.

And a Colombian cleric has won an international prize for the best “priestly anecdote” with the story of how he heard the Devil’s confession.

‘[The author] has also committed the considerable offence, which one would have thought the concentrated venom of reviewers would have killed off long ago, of herding all her notes together at the end of the book.’

The review appeared in History in 1939. Clearly, the tongue of reviewers, however spiteful, spits an ineffective poison.

And let us not be uncharitable: endnotes are not the worst. Even more infuriating are notes gathered at the end of each chapter. Nor are they the most unscholarly: that accolade should surely be reserved for the ‘author / date’ system which not only interrupts the text and often fails to provide enough citation to be usefully specific but also seems to arouse the spirit of Lethe, where the writer, their copy-editor and their publisher all forget to check that the full reference is actually included in the bibliography. Yet both styles seem to be gaining ground on the now old-fashioned footnote (it would be interesting to know what proportion of monographs use each system and how that changes over the years: does anyone have those figures to hand?).

Perhaps, though, we should remember that the footnote itself has not always been viewed with a kindly eye. Hilaire Belloc, in an essay curiously not mentioned in Tony Grafton’s The Footnote: a curious history, roundly rounded on the practice of freighting a page of text with the ballast of small-typed notes. A form of lying, he claimed, with Edward Gibbon accused of being its originator. His venom too was patently proven innocuous.

According to Anthony Grafton, there are two claims that remind readers of the possibility of forgery at work:

1. the claim that a writer had copied accurately every word of the ancient texts before him (how could readers know? is the assertion intended to put readers off the scent of something suspicious?)
2. the claim that a document was found in miraculous or extremely lucky circumstances (e.g. the High Priest Hilkiah just happened to find in the Temple for King Josiah the Book of Deuteronomy that had eluded all priests before him; Egyptian medical texts claim to have been found “under the feet of Anubis”, etc. — see my notes on Davies’ discussion of the Book of Deuteronomy re the book’s fraudulent provenance.)

Greece, 6th and 5th centuries b.c.e.

Solon and Pisistratus, Athenian statesmen, were suspected of interpolating lines into Homer’s Iliad to give Athens a more prominent role in the Trojan War than Homer had originally given that city.

Acusilaus of Argos, author of an account of gods, demigods and human heroes, claimed his source of information was a set of “bronze tablets discovered by his father in their garden.”

He thereby created one of the great topoi of Western forgery, the motif of the object found in an inaccessible place, then copied, and now lost, as the authority for what would have lacked credibility as the work of an individual. (p.9)

Ctesias, an historian who wrote a gossipy account of Persian history that regularly contradicted another famous historian, Herodotus, claimed to have superior sources. He claimed he had accessed and read the official archives of Susa.

He thereby enriched forgers with another of their favourite resources, the claim to have consulted far-off official documents, preferably in an obscure language.

Greece, 5th and 4th centuries b.c.e.

Public inscriptions declaring the rights and possessions of cities, and producing documentary evidence to support these claims, sprang up during an era of city-state rivalries.

Antiquaries compiled from local tradition, logical inference, and thin air full lists of their cities’ early rulers, their temples’ early priestesses, and their games’ early victors.

When such claims could be supported with a bit of padding out from details of ancient treaties and other documents, historians and orators would come to the rescue and find just the texts they needed to publicly quote in the inscriptions.

Temples were also in rivalry with one another, so the more records that could be “found” that supposedly demonstrated that gods themselves had visited them in the past, or that miraculous cures had been performed by their gods, the better. To meet the need appropriate historical inscriptions were found, and so were relics discovered that “proved” the cures.

The Peace of Callias. Mid 5th century b.c.e., the Greek Battle of Marathon hero, Callias, was sent to Persia to conclude a peace treaty. During the 4th century the stone monument claiming to be this peace treaty came under question. Suspicions were aroused by Theopompus who noticed that the script it was carved in, the Ionian alphabet, had never been used by the Athenians until the end of the 5th century. Anachronisms thus made their appearance as a tool for detecting forgeries.

Why the historian Thucydides preferred Oral Testimony. Thucydides is famous well known for asserting that direct oral testimony was always to be preferred by an historian to written testimony. This suggests, of course, that written records could not be interrogated and established in the same way oral reports could.

The irony here is that Richard Bauckham in his “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” uses this claim of Thucydides to assert that ancient historians (pre-Enlightenment characters) used more reliable evidence than (post-Enlightenment) moderns, and writes of “eyewitness testimony” as if it were something holy, unquestionable, raw experience — and writes at length about the “testimony” of holocaust survivors. So it is interesting to read Grafton’s take on Thucydides’ method here: written testimony could not be questioned the way oral testimony could. I can’t imagine Bauckham seriously suggesting that the gospel authors spent time “interrogating” their eye-witnesses.

The Literary, Library and Book market revolutions

By the fourth century b.c.e. educated people were aware that literary works by specific individuals carried distinctive styles and sets of concerns.

Canons of classic texts began to emerge as exemplars of the best in prose and poetry. Schools taught pupils to imitate these. A favourite school exercise was to give students an assignment of writing letters in the style of, and expressing the interests of, well-known authors. Some of these could easily have become accepted as genuine once they went into circulation.

According to Galen, the demand for texts from the literary masters in the canons soon outgrew supply. Libraries, schools, and wealthy individuals sought new and old works at great expense. Forgers produced hitherto unknown works (supposedly) by famous authors and sold those to the major libraries as well.

At public orations and dramatic performances audiences would as likely as not be being treated to forgeries. (p. 12) The famous names sold.

Libraries contained multiple copies of works by the famous playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and prose works by Plato, Hippocrates and Aristotle, but many of the titles attached to these names were outright forgeries.

Librarians reacted by compiling lists of what they judged to be genuine works in their collection, and other judged as spurious. Librarians and literary scholars devised various tests to attempt to determine which works were genuine and which spurious.

So, for example, at a time when there were 130 plays in circulation claiming to be by the playwright Plautus, scholars such as Varro judged only twenty or so to be genuine.

Sectarian rivalries to prove the greatest antiquity

Orphic and Pythagorean sects. Members of groups or sects such as these chose to live by authoritative texts of their so called founding masters who had supposedly lived in distant antiquity.

The need for ancient texts by such groups was met by those willing to make the effort to supply it.

Egyptian, Babylonian and Jewish pride produces more “proof texts”. After being conquered by Alexander the Great and ruled by Greek dynasties, scribes and priests from these peoples restored some of their cultural pride by managing to prove that their histories and famous texts showed that they were older and more prestigious in literary, philosophical and religious accomplishments than the Greeks.

These “proof texts” were meant to impress a Greek audience since they were written in Greek, although they claimed to have been translations of earlier texts.

The Jews, for example, produced a Greek version of the Bible, although they claimed it was a translation of an earlier Hebrew one. They went further, however. They also claimed that their Hebrew Bible was the very source of inspiration for those famous Greek philosophical ideas of Plato etc.

Epicurean, Pythagorean and Zoroastrian sects, not to be outdone, had to offer texts that could claim the same or greater antiquity than the Middle Eastern ones.

How to create a text with the glamour of divine authority

• It must appear to come from a respectfully distant historical past
• It could be written in the first person as if spoken by either

• a divine figure
• or one of his human companions
• or an authoritative interpreter of his teachings

• It should (unlike “normal” literary genres) preferably offer a variety of functions, instructing in both methods of worship and daily life conduct

Forgeries of this kind abounded, and the methods used to detect them grew in sophistication as the complexity of the forgeries became ever more baroque. (p. 15)

Not questioned by Grafton, but surely entitled to the question, is the traditional scholarly dating of the Pauline epistles and the canonical gospels. Scholars who rely on internal evidence only to say that Paul wrote in the 50′s or the gospels were written not long after 70 c.e. seem to me to be leaving the door wide open for the trap Grafton warns against here. Surely external evidence — when we can see OTHERS first knew of these texts — should surely carry much more weight than it currently does. But to be this careful, it would mean ascribing the letters of Paul — and all the gospels — to the second century! Oh no – impossible – . . . . That would change EVERYTHING! Yup! Especially if we can see how they so conveniently met the “timely needs” of those others! Woops . . . .

A sophisticated forgery classic: the Letter of Aristeas

Date: probably 2nd century b.c.e.

Purpose: to explain the origin of the Greek version of the Old Testament or Jewish Bible, the Septuagint, the LXX.

Contents:

1. Librarian of the Egyptian Alexandrian library, Demetrius, writes to his king Ptolemy Philadelphus “about acquisitions policy”. He points out that the library lacks a copy of the “Books of the Laws of the Jews”, and that the only extant ones are in Hebrew and of inferior quality since they have not had royal warrant to guarantee their accurate transmission.
2. The king responds giving Demetrius permission to ask the Jewish high priest, Eleazar, to send 6 representatives from each of the twelve tribes of Israel “to prepare a perfect, official translation.”
3. The letter defends the ritual codes of the Jews in the Law, explaining that these are all allegories for deeper philosophical conduct and are not meant to be interpreted literally. The ethical standards of the Book are praised.
4. The letter concludes with the acceptance of the new translation by all the Jews at Alexandria.

Evidence of forgery:

The Demetrius in question was never the librarian of the Alexandrian library under Ptolemy Philadelphus (who disliked him). Grafton cites Pfeiffer, History, 100-101 for other errors as well, but I have not yet had a chance to consult this.

Sophistication of the lie:

The author uses the methods that Alexandrian critics had developed to correct texts and detect fakes to make his own text seem all the more credible.

Example:

1. he uses the allegorical method to “explain away” or justify the crude dietary and other ritualistic codes of the Jews just as other contemporary scholars had used allegory to rationalize the more barbaric and tasteless sections of Homer.
2. he discusses how the correct translations were arrived at in part through standard textual criticism — collating all the variant manuscripts and emendations available — to suggest the most scholarly methods of determining accuracy were used and to strengthen the credibility of his narrative
3. rather than just tell a narrative story about the negotiations between Demetrius and Ptolemy, he “quotes word for word” from Demetrius’ memorandum. Adding a touch of realism like this (a lie within a lie) enhances the credibility of his letter.
4. he writes for two audiences: for Jews of Palestine to demonstrate that the Greek translation is superior to their Hebrew version; for gentiles to demonstrate that the Jewish ritual laws are not meaningless but allegorical philosophical codes.
5. his motive is not money, but a desire to assert the spiritual authority of the Septuagint over the Hebrew bible.

Grafton comments that this forgery is one of the most complex to survive, but it is really but one example of a very large population. “The early Christians produced them by the dozen” (p.17)

Christian forgeries

Scholars have long recognized that 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, are forgeries, just as much as the Apostolic Constitutions. Their intent, of course, was to use the names of old authorities, and first person accounts, to attempt to settle doctrinal disputes within the church.

The more exotic the claimed origin, and language, the better

Publics could be more impressed if a document could be said to have originated in a foreign (holy — e.g. Egyptian, Etruscan) language, with an explanation that its Greek translation could only partially capture the full power of the original.

This was the case with the text of the demigod Hermes Trismegistus, which was in fact written in Greek for Greek reader, despite its claim to have had an Egyptian origin. It still impresses some people today, although it was originally a pastiche of Greek philosophical tags and poorly understood Egyptian sayings and traditions — but it seemed exotic and appeared to have had an Egyptian origin.

Another case was the “thunder calendars” of supposedly Etruscan origin. These explained the meanings of thunder on any given day of the year. The text claimed to have been composed word for word from primeval demigods, Tages and Tarchon. Its claim for Etruscan provenance was enough to persuade many of its value.

Augustan History (Scriptores Historiae Augustae)

This (4th century c.e.) is another classic sophisticated forgery that may have no other purpose than the amusement of its author (although it claimed to be a compilation of works of six scholars). To strengthen its claims for authenticity it even cited the very shelf-number of a non-existent text:

“the ivory book” containing a senatus consultum signed by the emperor Tacitus. It was in bookcase 6 at the Ulpian Library, where the “linen books” containing the deeds of Aurelian were also housed.

Nothing could have done more to enhance the credibility of this dedicated but self-mocking imaginary scholar, whose curiosity embraced even the smallest details of imperial lives and works — who ironically represented himself as admitting to Junius Tiberianus, the prefect of Rome, that “there is no writer, at least in the realm of history, who has not made some false statement. (p.19)

Forgery under the nose of the true author?

Would forgers even have dared to pass off spurious works under the very noses of the authors they were forging? It happened.

Galen is best remembered as a medical writer. He wrote a complaint that he could walk through the streets of Rome and see on sale books claiming to be by himself (Galen Physician) that he had not been responsible for at all. He went on to attempt to explain how readers could tell the difference between his works and the spurious ones circulating under his name.

But this is a point that those familiar with the letters of Paul know, although this comparison is my own, and not Grafton’s that I am inserting here. In a letter that is judged by many scholars to be a forgery itself, “Paul” warns his readers to beware of letters circulating that claim to be from him. So the idea of forgeries within the time and area of their namesakes was certainly a plausible one at the time. See 2 Thessalonians for discussion, and 2:2 in particular.

Galen was also a textual critic who wrote analyses of earlier medical works. In his preface to Hippocrates, On the Nature of Man, he addresses different views of the work, some that had argued the whole book was a forgery and others who had argued but a single line was an interpolation.

Galen argues that the first part of the work was genuine, but the latter part was certainly forged. His arguments:

1. the first part was referred to by Plato in Phaedrus, so had to have been in existence then
2. the second part contains anachronisms, such as technical terms for “unbroken” and “urines” that early Greek doctors never used but that were only otherwise used by recent medical practitioners.

Julius Africanus, Christian scholar and Roman librarian

Julius Africanus wrote a letter to Origen demolishing any hope of any thoughtful person accepting the story of Susanna as belonging to the original Book of Daniel — which it is attached to in the Greek, though not in the Hebrew version.

Again, his arguments are interesting for their “modernity”:

1. The Jews in the disputed text enjoy more freedom than was in fact the case during the Babylonian captivity
2. Daniel in the disputed text prophesied in direct speech, unlike the Daniel in the other text who spoke via angelic visions
3. The story was too silly to be a Greek mime
4. The story contains two crucial elaborate puns — in Greek — so it could not have been a translation from the Hebrew.

Conclusion

Anthony Grafton continues with a discussion of Jerome’s detection of forgeries, even in the supposed canon of Biblical works, and then moves into the Middle Ages, and on to the present day.

It is interesting to see that the tools or arguments used today for detecting forgeries were in use even in ancient times. It is equally interesting to see that the arguments that exposed forgeries then failed to persuade those who wanted to believe they had the genuine literature, just as much as the same tools today fail to convince any Mulder who “wants (or needs) to believe”.

Can recommend an earlier companion post to this one, Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Epistolary Fictions.

I am now the proud owner of number 167 of the hand-bound limited second edition of Anthony Grafton’s little booklet called Codex in crisis.

The colophon states amongst others:

Cover paper Neenah Classic Laid in Peppered Bronze

Text paper Mohawk Superfine in Bright White

Flyleaf paper Frazier Pegasus in Black

Codex in Crisis, an adaptation of Grafton’s article Future Reading. Digitization and its discontents, previously published in The New Yorker, is published by The Crumpled Press, who, as they state on their website, perish to publish. Their business model revolves around the production of ‘custom cut, bone folded, hand sewn pamphlets and books’ for the real bibliophile. And they are beautiful.

The contents itself are equally inspiring. Anthony Grafton, who is Professor of History at Princeton University, and is a specialist in the field of Renaissance and Reformation studies and Historiography, published amongst others, books on The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Codex in Crisis concentrates on the history and development of the book as format, medium and conceptual idea. Grafton spook about his book during an interview held with him about a week ago as part of the Historisch Café (historical café) series organized amongst others by Athenaeum bookstore in Amsterdam. The talk was entitled ‘Would Erasmus use Google’, and focused on the book and its relationship to the accelerated world we live in today in which changes are going faster than we could ever have imagined before. Referring to his previously published article, Grafton talked about how he holds The New Yorker in high regard, jokingly calling it one of the last magazines where they actually read what they publish and where they work with a whole lot of smart and alert people.

Grafton’s main focus is on how the situation for books and reading texts has changed the last years. This shift has had some major implications where at the moment the newspaper is dying in the US and staff is being sacked en masse in US publishing industries. The world of publishing and bookselling is in uproar: only a few major players survived; Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and Borders, that’s it, and Borders is almost bankrupt. Simultaneously we are seeing the rise of eBook readers. As Grafton remarks, they are only getting better and better. But their development will be like the codex to the scroll. We won’t get rid of the old format just like that, but Grafton does foresee a development in which the main thing we are going to be reading in the near future is electronic text. This will bring major changes, not only in reading but also in our consciousness.

Referring to an UK eBook survey, Grafton remarks that scholars spend on average 8 minutes with an online article. The online medium is very well amenable to what is called power skimming: your eyes just scan the text and don’t really process. We get lots of information, but we have no clue.

In the US the bookstore has been driven out. Grafton’s surprise at seeing so much bookstores of all shapes and sizes in Amsterdam makes him to conclude that their must be more of a reading culture in Europe than in the US. The decline in reading culture has been going hand in hand with the rise of a gaming culture, where according to Grafton every male under 30 in the US plays games for at least 2 hours a day. This effects not only their way of reading but it is also a form of competition in time spend for leisure.

Grafton also sees the changes taking place within the library itself. In the library nobody reads books anymore, it is increasingly filled with fast computers. And a café.

The new kind of reading is an interactive way of reading. Students still read intensely says Grafton, but the level is lower than two generations ago. The GI bill generation, which transformed the universities and made them radically more democratic, saw the rise of Catholics and Jews in universities, who came to college because they now could. There are real changes to be seen, says Grafton, in current student and university culture. He claims that for instance Jakob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien is simply found to hard to follow for students nowadays. And that’s a worry. The students do write better according to Grafton, but they don’t read as well anymore.

 When asked what he is aiming at with his book, Grafton responds his goal was to state his worries but also his exhilaration about the new possibilities for the book. The idea of the universal library, which is never going to happen of course, was what Google and its comrades promised to create. But one of the first problems was that there were not an estimated 30, but 100 million books in the world. Another problem is that although you can find a lot of content via Google, you can not access it all. It is searchable, but that does not mean it is all available. In this way Google could be seen as a live catalogue. They are fast and at the same time incredibly secretive. This explains Robert Darnton’s stance in a recent article in The New York Review of Books. Darnton, whom Grafton calls an eloquent and brilliant guy, is currently head librarian of the Harvard libraries. But he is also a diplomat. Harvard library is digitized by Google, but what Google will not do is guarantee that it will never charge any money to have access to the books. That is why Harvard is breaking off their deal with Google: they want the guarantee of free content. This is another reason why we will never have an universal library since not all the libraries are or will be working together with Google. And what about the books that Google is not interested in: Third World country books for instance. Those cultures are neglected. If it will be anything, it will be a universal Western (plus Russian) library.

Grafton is however a huge enthusiast of digitizing books and the possibilities this offers for research, information retrieval and teaching. The thing that worries him though is again the reading. Online reading is interactive, and thus distracting: you move in irrational paths. In a novel on paper there are no links, no distractions. Will you still have writers that write these kinds of static, thick books if people don’t read these books anymore? Writing will change with reading. But, history has shown us also that no system of publication was capable of ruining every kind of book writing production.

What about the analogy of history? Johannes Trithemius said that the printed book was going to ruin writing; only copying is really reading, reading means reading aloud and printing was going to destroy that contemplative and meditative form of reading. But forms of Benedictine writing and reading survived and even improved in the print world. And as it survived the move from script to print so Grafton hopes it will also make the present shift.

But do we still write just as well? Look at the rising use of emoticons. Emails are shorter and shorter. The online medium is not suited for that. The email isn’t the letter. The scroll still exists, as does the manuscript, but they are not what they were. Grafton’s aim is not to be totally reactionary and he does also see a lot of good coming from online forms of communication. The rise of political blogs and interactive communication is wholly good and its influence on politics is great.

The book is an incredible easy and convenient system. Links are nothing; they are ephemeral, where footnotes are a rich standard. After a year more than half of the links are no longer working. This is a big problem, without upkeep electronic texts don’t survive.

Grafton concludes by stating that notwithstanding the current developments, more books are being published and sold than ever before. But nobody is reading them.

Turning back to Codex in Crisis. Although I enjoyed reading the book very much, my critique of the book (or rather of the adapted essay) has to do with the, to my opinion, lack of truly opinionated argumentation from the side of the writer. I applaud his deliberation of all the different arguments pro and con the current development of the book both concerning its preproduction and mental conceivement, its birth as content depicted on a certain carrier (be it print, scroll or screen), its frequently simultaneous production or publication by a publisher, printer or the writer itself, its postproduction and dissemination into the world of reading and readers, and its consumption and role in communal coffee shops or social media sites, depicted in an amazingly concise stream of thoughts which is at the same time filled with anecdotal and detailistic reminiscences. One might even call me a big fan of this kind of overview writing, in which the scholar summarizes, analyses and distills main trends and developments, covers simultaneous occurrences and clears up conceptual difficulties.

Anthony Grafton does all this in his fine little booklet, but he does leave me somewhat expectant in the end. But maybe this has more to do with my own misperceptions and hopes that such an outstanding scholar may have the answer or may offer a clear path out of the problems that face the book in its present and future forms. But Grafton does not offer such an answer and of course he doesn’t, how could he, he is foremost a scholar and not a visionary and praise him for that. He is a historian, not a weather forecaster.

Another small comment has to do with the conservative stance his critique towards the new online book culture sometimes takes. Although he does downgrade his own critique frequently when considering the other side of the coin, his description of the (lack of) possibilities of the format of the weblog and his meager depiction of the possibilities that Open Access offers to the Humanities, strike me as a little outdated, but that might again be my own predisposition. But his conservatism in this respect does not annoy me in the way other writers and thinkers can, mainly because he gives clear examples and argumentations where, according to him, the main problems of the digital medium lie when compared to the past print situation. He only wants to preserve what is good in tradition in the middle of all this innovation going on. Grafton hopes the future will be a hybrid one, in which a laptop stands next to a pile of magazines and a stack of books, which the scholar can browse simultaneously accompanied by a nice coffee confined in one of the newly designed communal focused city libraries. This corresponds to Grafton’s feelings of melancholia towards an increasingly lost past (“It’s an old story, quiet and reassuring: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom”) but also to his excitement (though of course critical) about the new possibilities the digital world offers the book.

Codex in Crisis offers no question mark and no solution, only memories and hopes for a better future.

National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not To Read, Executive Summary (2007)

 Leah Price,  “You Are What You Read” NY Times 12/23/07

Anthony Grafton,  “Future Reading,” New Yorker 11/5/07

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Hamlet.doc?  Literature in a Digital Age,” Chronicle of Higher Education 08/17/07

Browse in the following:

Institute for the Future of the Book, mission statement 01/19/09

Garage Annex School for Book Arts homepage 01/21/08

On the Media (NPR) episodes on the publishing industry 11/23/07

DISCLAIMER: I had to read this book for a historiography class, so it wasn’t my idea, for one thing. Also, the point of the assignment was to learn as much as I could from skimming/reading really fast, so portions of the book were skimmed over.

The title of this book caught my eye because, as a history fan, I love a good footnote. Long dissertations on sources and people not directly relevant to the point at hand make for great biographies. By way of explanation: a footnote is when there’s a little number or parenthetic citation in a sentence, and the source is at the bottom of the page. An endnote is the same thing, only all the information is at the back of the book (more cumbersome as a reading aid, but still worth looking at in most good biographies). An explanatory footnote is a footnote that not only lists the source, but also some useful or interesting information (a mini-biography on this servant of Edward III, the full Latin text of the Magna Karta, a recipe, etc).

PLOT: Unfortunately, Grafton isn’t really interested in explaining his promised history of the footnote (I had to ask the professor for that), more in rambling on about how we can’t really know the truth or accuracy of anything, and other elements of post-modernist philosophy. Its really confusing, because he also isn’t big on grammar or specificity. Apparently there is a school of post-modernist thought that argues for obscurity in writing (as a way of emphasizing their theory that all meaning is defined by what other people think of what is written, not what the writer thinks he wrote). I didn’t understand that from the book itself, either, but again asked the professor and my Dad about postmodernism, and figured it out from there.

GOOD: To illustrate his philosophy about history writing, Grafton mentions many important figures in the field of historiography (the study of the history of writing history). So we are introduced to a lot of obscure but influential people like Leopold von Ranke (German historiographer, he argued for history as the study of facts as recovered from written sources, of which the best were eye-witness accounts, and of these the best were in state archives, because the state is the ultimate figure in history). These people are all important because their theories have profoundly influenced thought and scholarly practice in our modern society (Ranke, for example, invented the idea of a college seminar, where students do their own research instead of just listening to the professor talk about doing it, and writing their own research papers, etc). I’d never read a book that actually USED postmodern writing techniques, and to such a blatant extent; so that was enlightening…

BAD: …if really confusing. I wanted to learn more about the drift from marginal notes in Bibles to numbered verses to combining both elements in other areas of scholarship (Shakespeare’s numbered lines for example), and how all that evolved into Chicago style, MLA, etc. Instead, I found a jumbled mess of obscure people and even more obscure explanations of why they were important. The assignment for my class was to skim the book and grasp its basic meaning. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any points he might have been trying to make, or any narrative structure at all, even after reading twice or three times.

OVERALL: Not recommended. If a reader can’t make heads or tails of your argument, the book is pointless: which may be the point, but it isn’t worth 250 pages of monotony to figure that out.

In this issue, Anthony Grafton writes about the libraries of the past, and what they tell us about the books of the future. Here Grafton points to some favorite archives and historical resources.

Might be a good place to start browsing online resources.