Some of the most disturbing scenes in literature have been evoked through imagery of the eyes. They mirror the soul, they express love and loathing, joy and sadness, courage and fear, and encompass so much of what is human in us. Yet with their precious complexity comes a dreadful vulnerability. King Lear has one of the most shocking scenes in drama when Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out by Cornwall. In the Japanese ghost story, The Eyes! The Eyes! a young man dares to stay the night in a derelict temple with a decaying Shoji screen believed to be impregnated with the eyes of evil spirits. The next morning only his eyes are found wrapped in a dirty rag. The blue eyes of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel flame red with a horrible vindictive look, and in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre Rochester’s violently insane wife Bertha is “like a foul German spectre, a vampire, with fiery red eyes”.

I recently came across a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German writer, composer and painter, who was an early exponent of this kind of imagery. In Der Sandmann of 1816 he portrayed a folkloric figure who sprinkled sand in the eyes of mischievous children to make them sleep when they wouldn’t go to bed. Nathanael, a child and the main protagonist, associates the Sandman with a mysterious character called Coppelius who regularly visits his father to conduct alchemical experiments. The essence of the story is Nathanael’s progression into mental illness, born of a naturally unstable mind and exacerbated by the stories of the Sandman as a child.

E.T.A. Hoffmann, based on a self-portrait reproduced in Ludwig Zacharias Werner, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass (Berlin, 1823). 10706.b.41.

While the other examples I have given relied on graphic scenes for their effect, apart from one such description at the start of the story the threat to the eyes is maintained by Hoffmann more obliquely, and competes with other strong motifs such as mechanical devices and laughing. For example, when Nathanael is discovered hiding in the room where Coppelius is carrying out an experiment, he is referred to by Coppelius as ‘eyes’ rather than a boy: “‘Augen her, Augen her!’ rief Coppelius mit dumpfer dröhnender Stimme … ‘Nun haben wir Augen – Augen – ein schön Paar Kinderaugen’.” (‘”Eyes here! Eyes here!” cried Coppelius with dark roaring voice … “Now we have eyes – eyes – a beautiful pair of children’s eyes.”’)

Nathanael hiding during Coppelius’s experiment; drawing by Hoffmann, reproduced in Ludwig Zacharias Werner, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass

But his one explicit example is strikingly frightening, particularly as it involves children, whose only half-formed minds struggle to rationalise the fear they experience. Their nanny tells them that if they won't go to bed the Sandman will come and throw sand in their eyes. Their eyes will bulge, drip blood and fall out. They will be taken away to the Sandman’s own children who live in a nest and have curved beaks like owls which they use to peck at and eat children's eyes. The hard vowels in German reinforce the image – “damit picken sie der unartigen Menschenkindlein Augen auf”.

The eyes motif is sustained throughout the story. Clara, Nathanael’s fiancée, has eyes that “springen in Nathanaels Brust wie blutige Funken sengend und brennend” (“spring into Nathanael’s breast, burning and sizzling like bloody sparks”) and, when their love fails and Nathanael becomes infatuated with Olimpia, whom he has only seen at a distance through a telescope, she is finally revealed as merely a mechanical doll which ends up shattered on the floor, its eyes lying randomly amongst the remnants of the wooden corpse: “Nun sah Nathanael, wie ein Paar blutige Augen auf dem Boden liegend ihn anstarrten, die ergriff Spalanzi … und warf sie nach ihm, daß sie seine Brust trafen”. (“Now Nathanael saw a pair of bloody eyes lying on the floor staring at him, which Spalanzi seized and threw at him, hitting him in the chest.”)

Hoffmann’s use of eye imagery creates powerful pictures in the reader’s mind and helps to sustain the brooding menace of the Sandman throughout the story. Sigmund Freud was so impressed by it that he wrote an essay, Das Unheimliche (‘The Uncanny’), wherein he interpreted it as a fear of castration. The story has become an important work as an early 19th century example of the horror short story genre.

Trevor Willimott, former Cataloguer, West European Languages

We live in an age of increasing demagogery and gesture politics; but like most features of our over-excited media culture this too has its predecessors.

Antonio de Guevara is a forgotten best-seller.  His Libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio / Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (1528), rewritten by him as Relox de principes / Diall of princes  (1529) is a fictionalised life of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161 to 180 AD), best known nowadays for his Meditations, written in Greek and rediscovered in 1558: thus Guevara’s work predates by thirty years the princeps of the Meditations, edited by Xylander in Greek and Latin.

Title-page of an early edition of Guevara’s Libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio (Venice, 1532). C.53.b.9.

So speaks the true Marcus:

The art of true living in this world is more like a wrestler’s than a dancer’s practice.  For in this they both agree, to teach a man whatsoever falls on him, that he may be ready for it, and that nothing may cast him down.  (Meditations VII.33)

The historical Marcus was responsible for fighting a campaign on the Danube. In Guevara’s account he is visited by a ‘Villayn of the Danube’, who tells the Emperor like it is:

The first year that I was consul, [Marcus recalls] there came a poor villayn from the river of Danubie, to ask justice of the senate, against a censure, who did divers extortions to the people.  And he had a small face, and great lips, and hollow eyes, his hair curled, bare headed, his shoes of a porkepes [hedgehog] skin, his coat of goat’s hair, his girdle of bullrushes, and a wild eglantine in his hand.  It was a strange thing to see him so monstrous, and marvel to hear his purpose [speech].  Ceratainly, when I saw him come into the senate, I wende it had been some beast in the figure of a man and after I had herad him, I judged him one of the gods, if there be gods among men. [...]

The peasant of the Danube addresses Marcus Aurelius. Illustration by Gustave Doré from Jean de La Fontaine, Fables … (Paris, 1867) 1872.b.29.

The Villayn’s oration runs as follows:

“An infallible rule it is that he that taketh wrongfully another man’s good shall lese the right of his own.  Regard ye romans, though I be a villain, yet I know who is just and right wise, in holding his own; and who a tyrant in possessing others’.  There is a rule, that whatsoever they that be ill have gathered in any days, the gods taketh from them in one day [...]

All ye Romans in your devices about your arms bear these words: Romanorum est debellare superbos, et parcere subjectis.  That is it pertaineth to Romans to subdue them that be proud and to forgive subjects.  But certainly ye may better say: it pertaineth to Romans to expel innocents and to trouble and vex wrongfully peaceable people for ye Romans are but destroyers of peaceable people and thieves to rob from other that they sweat for.

If my tongue hath offended you in any thing, I am here ready to make recompense with my throat.  [the Spanish says: he aqui me tiendo en este suelo para que lo pague mi garganta: see I prostern myself here on the ground so that my throat may pay the price] for in good sooth, I had rather to win honour, offering myself to the death than ye should have it in taking my life from me [...]”

The Villayn wins the day: he is made  a patrician and given a government pension.

Carlo Pincin has revealed the villayn’s debt to Marcolfus: both are unbowed in the face of authority and empire.

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies 

References

The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, tr. Lord Berners (London, 1546), chapters xxxi-xxxii, sigs N5v-O4r.  C.71.a.31.

Carlo Pincin, ‘Due note su temi spagnoli: Guevara lettore di Salomon et Marcolfus’, in Studi in onore di Remo Martini (Milan, 2008-2009), III, 153-66. Awaiting shelfmark; part of the article is available here

 

 

The autumn of 1900 was a productive season for the 51-year-old August Strindberg, returning to his native Sweden and to the theatre after a long absence. Within the space of three weeks he had written two full-length plays: Påsk (Easter) and Dödsdansen (The Dance of Death). The second, a pitiless study of a couple trapped in a poisonous marriage, is in accord with the popular image of Strindberg as a nihilistic woman-hater, and the contrast with the message of redemption and reconciliation conveyed by Easter is thus all the more striking. The British Library holds a copy of the first edition (Stockholm, 1901) at 011755.ff.12 (picture below).

Strindberg set the play in Lund, a university town in southern Sweden where he had lived while recovering from a protracted nervous breakdown. Born and brought up in Stockholm, he found the atmosphere of Lund deeply uncongenial, provincial and suffocating, and constricting for one used to the fresh sea air of the archipelago and Lake Mälaren. Worse still, he was not the only member of his family undergoing mental suffering at that time; his sister Elisabeth was committed to an asylum during his period in Lund. Brother and sister had been especially close, and it was with Elisabeth in mind that he created the figure of the ‘Easter girl’ Eleanora at the centre of his play, and gave her the name of his mother.

There was a third woman in Strindberg’s life who can be glimpsed in this character – his future wife, the young Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse, for whom he visualised the role. She had moved to Stockholm and been engaged to play Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Dramaten in 1899, and the other-worldly quality which she possessed led her to be cast as the Lady in the premiere of Strindberg’s To Damascus (picture left from Wikimedia Commons). Strindberg’s diary account of the dress rehearsal in November 1900 describes his growing infatuation with Harriet after a dream in which she was married to him and appeared dressed as Puck, and on 6 May 1901 the couple, aged 52 and 22, embarked on a marriage (his third) which would prove as ill-fated and tempestuous as any that he could have dreamed up.

There is no trace of foreboding in Easter, however; although the Heyst family has grave problems of its own, Eleanora’s freshness, honesty and spirituality have survived a spell in a mental asylum from which she has escaped to the home inhabited by her mother, her schoolmaster brother Elis, and their lodger Benjamin, a grammar-school pupil who is preparing for his examinations. Elis – touchy, bitter, suspicious and morbidly possessive of his fiancée Kristina – is a self-portrait, and the dark shadow which hangs over the household, like the sense of guilt and shame surrounding Strindberg’s father’s irregular union with the servant whom he belatedly married and his subsequent bankruptcy, is a result of Heyst senior’s actions. His dubious financial dealings have landed him in prison, and the family lives in dread of Lindkvist, the most threatening of their creditors.

The action, which spans the period from Maundy Thursday to Easter Eve and is accompanied by Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, sees the tension increasing when Eleanora innocently takes a daffodil from a closed flower-shop and falls under suspicion of theft despite leaving payment for it. Yet in spite of the ominous atmosphere which grows stronger and stronger throughout the three acts, the play unfolds in a landscape full of signs of the approach of spring after a harsh Swedish winter – the removal of the double windows, the putting aside of heavy garments, the song of chaffinches, and the repainting of steamers in readiness for the new season. When the (literally) shadowy Lindkvist finally appears, the ogre actually reveals himself as a kindly figure prepared to renounce his claim.

There is no easy resolution; as Lindkvist says, he cannot help Heyst to escape his punishment or Benjamin to pass his Latin examination: ‘Life won’t give us everything – and nothing gratis’. But the play ends in the sunlight of Easter Day as the family gathers with a new sense of forgiveness and hope, which, although there are constant Scriptural references, is equally applicable in humanist terms as a comment on the transformations which can be achieved through reconciliation and generosity of spirit. Appropriately, the British Library holds a translation by Stellan Engholm (Stockholm, 1935; YF.2012.a.23780) into Esperanto, a language conceived to promote international unity and mutual understanding.

Following its premiere at Stockholm’s Intima Teatern the play received many more performances, including a production in 2013 in New York, transposing the action to 1950s Harlem with an Afro-American cast.

And so, let us look forward with Elis, to ‘the Easter Holiday – five glorious days to make the most of!’

Susan Halstead, Curator Czech & Slovak studies      

Today being the first of April someone is probably going to try and make a fool of you, whether by making you act foolishly (trying to pick up the coin glued to the floor, bending to tie your perfectly-fastened shoelace) or by playing on your credulity with spoof news stories like the BBC’s famous spaghetti harvest – or the BL’s own unicorn cookbook.

A successful April Fool’s Day trick makes both joker and victims laugh; the victims are only temporarily fooled and appreciate the joker’s skill in catching them out. But in the late mediaeval literary genre of ‘Narrenliteratur’ (fool literature) the authors depict folly not as a brief moment but as a part of the human condition, identifying many different kinds of fools and folly in contemporary society.

One of the best known works of this kind, and an early modern European bestseller, is  Das Narrenschiff (‘The Ship of Fools’) by the German humanist Sebastian Brant. Originally published in Basel in 1494, by 1500 it had already gone through 13 German editions. A Latin translation formed the basis for French, Dutch and English editions in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

Fools sailing to Narragonia, from a 1499 Basel edition of Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff  (British Library IA.37957)

Brant describes various kinds of fools who fill the eponymous ship on its journey to ‘Narragonia’, a land of fools. First among them is the pseudo-scholar who surrounds himself with books that he can neither read nor understand. His picture is one of the most famous in the book, and very popular with bibliographers (one hopes with a degree of self-deprecation!). Others include slavish followers of fashion, those consumed by self-love or pride, believers in astrology, and those who eat, drink or pursue sports and games to excess.

The book collector with his useless library

Some of the book’s instances of folly are still the subject of complaints (just or unjust) today: students who should be working hard but instead spend their time in dissolute pursuits, parents who set their children an bad example, people who waste time pursuing long, complex and futile legal cases. I always think that the fool who takes all the world’s troubles on his shoulders and falls under the weight [below] is a salutary example for todays’s overstretched workers.

 

Other examples are more firmly of Brant’s own time. He castigates those who mock God, fail to observe holy days or bring their hounds and falcons to church. He classes all non-Christians (and Christian ‘heretics’) as fools. And one of his earliest examples of a fool is the parent or teacher who spares the rod and spoils the child; the woodcut shows his children turning on each other as he sits blindly by:

 
If Brant’s book has a moral and didactic purpose, the pill is sweetened by his lively rhymes in ‘knittelvers’ form and the woodcut illustrations. Many readers no doubt simply enjoyed the book as an entertainment and, rather than seeing themselves in Brant’s ‘mirror of fools’  and mending their ways, identified the follies of their neighbours and felt smug.

 

The foolish parents who set their child a bad example

But like the successful April Fool’s joke, Brant’s examples can make us wise by making us appreciate our own gullibility. As he states his introduction, “Wer sich für eyn narren acht / Der ist bald zů eym wisen gemacht” (“He who recognises himself as a fool will soon become a wise man”).

So  if anyone catches you out today, just accept that it’s made you a little bit wiser.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections

 

On 28 March 1914 Tamara Karsavina, a legend of the Russian ballet, celebrated her birthday by dancing at The Stray Dog Café  at Number 5, Mikhailovskaia Square (today Ploshchad’ iskusstv,  ‘Square of the Arts’)  in St Petersburg. Also called an art-cellar, the café was in operation between  31 December  1911 and 3 March 1915. Its name was drawn from the romantic and at the same time ironic image of a poet or artist as a stray dog, created by one of the founders of the enterprise Mstislav  Dobuzhinzky.

The logo of the Stray Dog Café, from the cover of a tribute volume to Tamara Karsavina

The idea of a cabaret-club came from the actor and theatre director Boris Pronin (1875-1946), one of the noteworthy figures of the Russian Silver Age in art and literature. The founders of the Stray Dog Café (including writer Alexey Tolstoy, artists Nikolay Sapunov (1880-1912) and Sergey Sudeikin (1882-1946), and  theatre director and dramatist Nikolai Evreinov) aimed to synthesise visual and performing arts with literature and create a playful  atmosphere for participants and the audience.

The programme of the Stray Dog Café included poetry readings by such famous Russian authors as  Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Mikhail Kuzmin and Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as foreign guests like Paul Fort. The founder of the Futurist movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti gave a lecture there.  The audience was divided into two categories:  “artists” and “pharmacists” (those who didn’t belong to the bohemian world of creativity) and the price for an entrance ticket for the latter category was several times higher than for “artists-bohemians”.

The celebration of Tamara Karsavina’s birthday was documented in a number of memoirs. For example, Sergey Sudeikin recollected how this “goddess of air” moved around the stage in the middle of the hall between authentic  18th-century wooden sculptures of Eros placed on a wonderful blue carpet. Carefully selected musicians played old musical instruments. The intimacy of the performance was shared by fifty dance-lovers who paid 50 roubles per ticket.  At the end of evening, the heroine was presented with a memorable book made for her that included drawings, poems and dedications to the admired ballerina. Beautifully designed, this gentle book (held by the British Library at shelfmark Cup.410.f.519) is a unique artefact of the time, as the images below illustrate.

The title page of the book

Sargent’s portrait of Karsavina

Poem by Mikhail Kuzmin

Drawing by Sergey Sudeikin

A letter of congratulation from Nikolai Evreinov

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead East European Curator (Russian)

All the media assure us we are living in a new age of the beard.

A landmark in pogonology is the pioneer study A Barba em Portugal. Estudo de etnografia comparativa [The Beard in Portugal.  A Study in Comparative Ethnography] (Lisbon, 1925; British Library 10009.t.29) by  José Leite de Vasconcellos  (1858-1941).

                          José Leite de Vasconcellos (with beard). Image from Wikimedia Commons

      Title-page of Leite’s A barba em Portugal.

Leite (1858-1941) was a distinguished professor of Latin and Medieval French at the University of Lisbon and editor of the journal Revista Lusitana, but the bulk of his publications are ethnographic studies of topics such as the “figa” gesture: in this respect his work prefigured much 20th and 21st-century research on the body.  The figa’s opposite number in British culture is the V-sign, now sadly depleted to the single finger.

José Leite de Vasconcellos,  A Figa : estudo de etnografia comparativa, precedido de algumas palavras a respeito do ”sobrenatural” na medicina popular portuguesa. (Porto, 1925). Ac.3709.d.

Like many Portuguese men of letters (Júlio Dinis and Trindade Coelho  among them), Leite studied medicine although he practised for  only a year on account of his own ill health.

The chapters of A Barba em Portugal cover: The beard anthropologically, the making of the beard, beard forms and cuts, the beard through the centuries, the symbolism of the beard, and the beard in vocabulary and literature; in an appendix Leite edits the ordenances of the guild of barbers from the 16th century.

A selection of historical Portuguese beards from A Barba em Portugal

A habit which 21st-century hipsters seem not to have adopted is swearing on the beard.  The Cid did it, and Leite was told by an old man of A Beira that he had heard in his youth that in olden times the oath was “Juro por estas minhas barbas” [I swear by these my beards], accompanied by the appropiate gesture.  

Perhaps its time has come again, by my beard!

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies

                                
Ancient beard ideas for the hipsters of today? King Herod (left) and an Bronze Age figurine (right) from A barba em Portugal

In the late 1980s the famous Revolution Square in Moscow  turned into a huge market. But it was a ‘press market’ - only alternative publications were sold there in abundance, usually by elderly ladies. Most of them were quite politicised themselves and were selling only publications of a certain political standing, but some had a variety of publications on display representing a wide ideological spectrum. Our colleagues at the State Historical Public Library in Moscow started collecting documents relating to various political and public movements in 1989. They often went to Revolution Square themselves to buy materials, attended various meetings, and asked friends and relatives to bring ephemera to the Historical Library. Chris Thomas, at that time Head of the British Library’s Slavonic and East European collections, managed to secure an agreement with the Historical Library that they would also help us to create a similar collection. Through this source and via her wide network of friends in Russia who started sending materials to London, Chris managed to accumulate invaluable unique primary source materials on the era of Perestoika which started in spring 30 years ago.

Two examples of Samizdat publications

Now we can say that our collection of Russian ‘Underground periodicals’ or ‘Samizdat’, which should probably be called ‘Collection of alternative periodicals and ephemera’, comprises  over 2,500 titles produced in the Soviet Union during Perestroika and in the early 1990s. Apart from published, print and typewritten items, it also contains original photographs:

Although Perestroika officially finished with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian political life in the early 1990s was lively, vibrant and chaotic. This is perfectly reflected in the collections of ephemera relating to the coup of August 1991, the two referendums (1991 and 1993) and the Duma and presidential and local election campaigns of the early 1990s.

In autumn 2012 Laura Todd, a postgraduate student at the University of Nottingham, worked in the British Library for two months on the collections of Russian ephemera from the late 1980s and the 1990s. She documented this project in her blog. How proud we are to say that the collection has been now sorted, catalogued, properly preserved and housed (shelfmarks: HS.74/2113-HS.74/2117 and HS.74/2124) and is available for researchers. We would like once again to thank Laura and our colleagues in Collection Care  for completing this project. Now the collections look like this:

Although securely preserved in plastic sleeves and hidden in the vast climate-controlled basements of the British Library, these papers are waiting for their researchers to tell many stories of hope and despair from the first years of Russia’s post-communist era.

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead East European Curator (Russian)

The devastation caused by the influenza pandemic at the end of World War One is well known; what is less well known is that many parts of Europe were badly affected by diseases throughout the war. One of the first of these was an epidemic of typhus and relapsing fever which started in Serbia at the end of 1914 and killed upwards of 150,000 people in a population of around four and a half million.  Both diseases shared similar symptoms – a high temperature, rashes and constant itching - and were spread by the same means – lice. They were also highly infectious and often occurred together. While the exact start date of the epidemic was disputed, sources agreed that it ended in June 1915. Even in this short time the epidemic was still devastating in a small country where the diseases spread rapidly.

      Destitution and Disease in Serbia (New York, 1915) 08248.h.19.

The documents listed below are the key contemporaneous accounts of this epidemic. The differences in emphasis are dramatic, ranging from the appeal for assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation to Minkine’s more clinical account of the epidemic, and from the self-promotion of the Hunter and Strong reports to the critical soul-searching analysis by Serbian doctors in 1925, edited by Stanojević.  

Cover of Le Typhus exanthématique (Paris, 1915) F7/3088

In contrast to the first of these accounts to be published (that of the Rockefeller Foundation) where the Serbs were portrayed as helpless victims, by the time of the Stanojević analysis there was an active desire not just to understand the causes of the epidemic, but to prevent any future recurrences. The Hunter and Strong reports, published immediately after the war, emphasised the actions taken by their respective groups to relieve the epidemic, but without clear advice about what ‘weather-proofing’ was needed for Serbia to remain disease-free.

William Hunter, The Serbian epidemics of typhus and relapsing fever in 1915 (London, 1920) WF1/4919

The fact that the epidemic took place during a war, which made ascertaining the facts especially difficult, explained some of the differences between the accounts. These sources reveal why typhus was such a feared disease even after it was found to be preventable; in 1909 it was discovered that the disease was caused by body lice, although the cure was not known until after the war.  

Richard P. Strong [et. al.], Typhus Fever with Particular Reference to the Serbian Epidemic (Cambridge MA, 1920) X8/2016

In a parallel with the recent Ebola crisis, the international community was scared that the disease would spread. They realised that an epidemic was not just the concern of one country, but had global implications. A number of countries, particularly in Europe, implemented new and stricter quarantine laws in 1915, specifically citing the risk posed by Serbia.

Title page of Istorija srpskog vojnog saniteta (Belgrade, 1925) YF.2011.a.22007

Despite the dramatic and tragic losses, the typhus and relapsing fever epidemic taught some useful lessons. The epidemic was ended very quickly by the standards of the time. It was a good example of the international community coming together in a common cause, and it demonstrated a key principle in terms of epidemic management, namely that prevention was cheaper than relying on a cure that had not been invented.  

Tara Finn, the First World War Centenary Commemorations Team of Foreign and Commonwealth Office

References:

William Hunter, The Serbian epidemics of typhus and relapsing fever in 1915 (London, 1920).  Wf1/4919 [available online from PubMed]

M. Jeanneret-Minkine, Le typhus exanthematique (Paris, 1915).  F7/3088    

The Rockefeller Foundation, The relief of suffering non-combatants in Europe: Destitution and disease in Serbia (New York, 1915).  08248.h.19.

Vladimir Stanojević, ed., Istorija srpskog vojnog saniteta (Beograd, 1925).  YF.2011.a.22007

Richard P. Strong, ed., Typhus fever with a particular reference to the Serbian epidemic (Cambridge, Mass., 1920). X8/2016 [available online (copy from Harvard University) at https://archive.org/details/typhusfeverwith00zinsgoog]

Today people in some parts of northern Europe will see a total solar eclipse. Others, including those here in London, will see the sun partially obscured.

Eclipses are a source of excitement in our age. Hotels in the regions where today’s eclipse is total were no doubt booked up months ago by keen eclipse-hunters, as happened in 1999 when a total eclipse was visible in many parts of Europe. But although the science behind eclipses has been understood since ancient times, in the pre-modern age knowledge could be tempered with superstition even among scholars. For the less learned, eclipses, like other celestial phenomena, were sources of amazement and terror, interpreted as portents or omens of disaster. Perhaps this is why early witnesses claimed to see in such phenomena exaggerated images of mythical, divine or demonic figures.

The seven Capuchin monks who set out walk from Ober-Laibach (modern-day Vrhnika in Slovenia) to Loitsch (Logatec) on 28 January 1664 would not have been uneducated men, but when they witnessed that day’s partial solar eclipse, they saw in it a series of bizarre visions. They left an account of these, which the British Library holds in two different broadside versions.

1) Aigentliche Beschreibung der erschröcklichen Wunderzeichen, so seyn gesehen worden ... über ... Laibach ... den 28. Januarij 1664. Jahrs. (s.l., [1664]) 1875.d.4.(26)

 
2) Warhaffter und glaubwürdiger Bericht, eines erschrecklichen Wunderzeichen, so sich ... bey Ober-Laybach ... ist gesehen worden ... (Nuremberg, [1664]) 1875.d.4.(29)

On their journey the monks were alerted by a traveller coming towards them to the fact that the sun looked strange. Looking up, they saw on the sun’s face a tall, thin man followed by three smaller figures. Next a troop of infantry appeared, which gave way to two church towers. These were replaced by “two mighty black men on horseback” and a host of other riders, all shooting. At this the monks “began to sigh, pray and cry fervently to God for help” until the riders disappeared. Finally another rider appeared, this one “all white and light”, stronger and more terrifying than the first two, also leading a host of riders who almost covered the sun. These fought for a quarter of an hour, while the monks redoubled their prayers. After they vanished the sun “was blue in the centre and bloody all around the edges” and did not shine for some two hours.

Detail of 1875.c.4.(29) showing the sequence of visions described

After his dramatic description, we might expect the writer to offer some kind of interpretation of these fearsome visions, but he simply says “This was the moon which became lost in the sun” and ends his account. Clearly he understood the basic nature of the event the party had seen, yet he is no more interested in giving a scientific explanation than an allegorical one. The account thus seems caught between the worlds of belief in signs and wonders and of rational scientific knowledge.

But there is perhaps a rational explanation for the visions which the monks saw. Today we are always issued with firm instructions about how to view an eclipse safely, but our 17th-century travellers would have been looking directly at the sun, risking serious damage to their eyes, and certainly causing them to see spots which imagination could turn into visions.

 
Don’t try this at home: the monks’ highly dangerous eclipse-viewing technique. Detail from 1875.d.4.(29)

So if you are watching today’s eclipse, watch safely, and enjoy the reality of one of the sky’s most fascinating sights without the terrifying and harmful visions.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies

 

The jury is out about the question whether the remains exhumed in Madrid are those of Miguel de Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote (pronounced ‘QUICK sot’ in English).

The BBC’s Will Gompertz (picture below from BBC i-Player) came to the British Library  on Tuesday 17 March  to supplement the news item with a view of some choice early Cervantina.

In the picture we can see:  the princeps (Madrid, 1605), the English translation of Philips (1687), and an English version of Part 1 illustrated by Salvador Dalí (New York,1946).

I’m also reminded by this talk of the corporeality of Cervantes that there is no undisputed portrait of him.  The best document is what he himself says of himself in the prologue of the Novelas ejemplares.  Had there been a portrait in his book, he says:  

My friend might have written under it—‘This person whom you see here, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose, & silvery beard that twenty years ago was golden, large moustaches, a small mouth, teeth not much to speak of, for he has but six, in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other, a figure midway between the two extremes, neither tall nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very lightfooted: this, I say, is the author of  Galatea, Don Quixote de la Mancha, The Journey to Parnassus, ... commonly called MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA’.

  Don Quixote 12491.m.1, opposite 642

  Retrato de Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), de Juan de Jáuregui (1600).

When artists came to illustrate the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, they produced a portrait which to my eye resembles Cervantes’s pen self-portrait: author and creation combined.

But what can a man’s face or body tell us? What greater monument can any author leave but his works?

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic studies

References

The Exemplary Novels of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Translated from the Spanish by Walter K Kelly. London, 1881. 2504.a.16