29 May 2025
Italian Connections Unearthed
Earlier in May we opened the exhibition Unearthed, The Power of Gardening at the British Library. The exhibition, of which I am a co-curator, explores and celebrates the social and political history of gardening in British history and how gardening can be a force for change. It has been a great opportunity to showcase some of the British Library’s botanical and horticultural treasures, and curating it made me think of Italian collection items that could well dialogue with some of the exhibits.
Trees
Planting trees is one of the most sustainable things that we can do for the environment, as they play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. The exhibition shows The Crafte of Graffynge and Plantynge of Trees, one of the earliest publications about planting and propagating trees, printed during the reign of King Henry VIII.
Title page of The Crafte of Graffynge and Plantynge of Trees (London, 1518. C.122.bb.42.)
I would have shown it next to L’architettura degli Alberi, a botanical drawing masterwork written and illustrated by landscape architects Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi over 20 years. It features 212 tree species hand drawn with and without foliage and with tables of seasonal colour variation. It has been defined ‘a Bible for tree lovers’ and is an essential tool for planning gardens and integrating trees in the urban landscape.
Pages from L’architettura degli Alberi (Milan, 2018) Awaiting shelfmark
The Garden City
Unearthed, The Power of Gardening looks at the pioneering ideas of Ebenezer Howard, who put forward the idea of garden cities in this 1898 book To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Howard wanted to create new planned communities across Britain that established a ‘joyous union of town and country’ and his ideas have influenced urban planning ever since.
Plan of an ideal garden city from Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London, 1898) 08275.i.25.
One of the most recent developments on the concept of garden city is Fitopolis, la città vivente, a book by neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, that envisions a future where cities are transformed into ‘living cities’ integrated with nature. Mancuso proposes a radical shift from current urban models, emphasizing the importance of incorporating plants and nature into urban spaces.
Fitopolis, la città vivente (Bari, 2024) Awaiting shelfmark
The Botanical Garden
The botanical gardens at Kew and Calcutta, as well as those of Mary Somerset, are described in a section titled Gardening and the global exchange, as places to display plant knowledge and the British Empire’s botanical advancements from the 18th century onwards. The map below shows how Kew Gardens originated as gardens of separate royal residences in Richmond and Kew, which merged at the time when it was produced, under the rule of King George III. The gardens continued developing to host the ‘largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world’.
The Royal Gardens of Richmond and Kew (1771) Maps.K.Top.41.16.k.2.TAB.
This made me think of the oldest surviving botanical garden in the world, in Padua. The first Orto dei Semplici (the garden of ‘simples’, where the simples are the principles derived from medicinal plants) was built in 1545 by the Venetian Republic, to grow medicinal and exotic plants, and to teach students at the University of Padua how to use them.
The 1591 book which describes L’Horto de i Semplici di Padoua comes from Sir Hans Sloane’s personal library. It illustrates the garden’s unique design, still unchanged nowadays, and lists all the plants included. The original design consists of a central circumference, symbolizing the world, surrounded by a ring of water. A square is inscribed in the circumference, divided into four units by orthogonal paths, oriented according to the main cardinal directions. This shape is a representation of the universe adopted since ancient times and recalls the scheme of the ideal city of the Renaissance.
L’Horto de i Semplici di Padoua, oue si vede primieramente la forma di tutta la pianta con le sue misure (Venice, 1591) 972.b.3.(1.)
These two examples show how the concept of ‘botanical garden’ can be interpreted in different ways. I hope this blog makes you want to visit the exhibition and think of how old and new foreign language books can tell many more stories around the theme of gardening.
Valentina Mirabella, Curator, Romance Collections
Unearthed, The Power of Gardening is at the British Library until 10 August 2025.
15 May 2025
Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages
The annual Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages will take place on Monday 9 June 2025 in the Foyle Room at the British Library in London. The programme is as follows:
11.00 Registration and coffee
11.30 Alyssa Steiner (London): Caught in the middle? Block books at the British Library
12.25 Lunch (own arrangements)
1.30 Jack Nunn (Oxford): Anthology making in an age of discovery: French maritime poetry in the print shop
2.15 Simone Lonati (Chichester): Public representation and interpretation of ‘monsters’. From the Monstrorum Historia to the dissemination of news during the English Civil War
3.00 Tea
3.30 John Goldfinch (London): Dr Rhodes, Dr Sloane and Dr Dee: a trail of catalogues and provenance
4.15 Yvonne Lewis (London): Languages for travel: John and Ralph Bankes in the 1640s and beyond
The seminar will end at 5.00 pm.
Attendance is free and all are welcome but please register in advance by contacting Barry Taylor ([email protected]) and Susan Reed ([email protected]) if you wish to attend.
Vignettte from Cornelio Desimoni, Nuovi studi sull’Atlante Luxoro (Genoa, 1869) 10003.w.4.
06 March 2025
Lidwina van Schiedam: Patron Saint of Ice Skaters and Chronic Illness
Our exhibition Medieval Women, in their own words, closed last weekend after a highly successful run (you can still find information about the topic and view some exhibition highlights here. Something that is also drawing to a close is the 2024-25 ice skating season.
What do these two things have in common? Well, one of the many ‘Spotlights’ in the exhibition was dedicated to Lidwina van Schiedam, patron saint of ice skaters and chronic pain. That too, is a peculiar combination, to say the least. Let me explain.
Lidwina (or Liduina, or Lidewy) van Schiedam is the most famous Dutch saint. Born in Schiedam in 1380, she lived there all her remarkable life until her death in 1433. When her father wanted to marry her off at the tender age of twelve, both Lidwina and her mother resisted. Lidwina even prayed to God to send her an illness that would make her unattractive to suitors. Whether you believe in divine intervention or not, her wish came true. In the winter of 1395, she was out ice skating with friends when she fell and broke a rib.
Lidwina falls on the ice, from Johannes Brugman,Vita Sanctae Lidwinae (1498). IA.48805 (as displayed in the Medieval Women exhibition)
The fracture resulted in an abscess which did not heal and she became increasingly ill. Eventually she became completely bedridden because of her pain. The pain also prevented her from eating and sleeping. She tolerated very little food, and legend has it that she survived on the Host alone. In modern literature this is sometimes referred to as ‘holy anorexia’. Initially, she resented her illness and pains but over time she came to accept them. She used her illness to develop her spiritualism and became a mystic and a healer. She reported having visions and out of body experiences. Following an investigation into her ‘eucharistic vision’, involving Christ taking the form of a host with five wounds hovering above her knees, the Bishop of Utrecht ruled in favour of Lidwina’s account and the veneration of Lidwina increased. She became known outside the bishopric of Utrecht and people flocked to Schiedam to see her for themselves and to seek healing.
The suffering Lidwina’s vision of Christ, from Johannes Brugman, Vita Sanctae Lidwinae
Lidwina died in Holy Week in 1433. A year later the Schiedam council built a chapel over her grave. In addition, attempts were made to canonise her, but the lengthy process was stalled by the Reformation, during which her chapel and grave were destroyed. Some of her relics were saved and after some travels they are now resting in the Liduina Basilica in Schiedam.
In the 15th century four lives of Lidwina were written. The oldest dates from 1434-1436, by Hugo van Rugge, a canon from the St.-Elisabeth monastery in Brielle. Around 1448 Thomas à Kempis wrote his Vita Lidewigis virginis using Rugge’s work. In 1470 the only title written in Middle Dutch appeared. Long believed to have been written by Jan Gerlachsz, a relative of Lidwina, it is now thought not to be by him, although no alternative author has been suggested.
The Institute for Dutch History’s Digitale Vrouwen Nederland database has an entry for Lidwina which mentions a document issued by the City Council of Schiedam on 21 July 1421. By that time Lidwina had been ill for 23 years and the Council had kept a record of her health in great detail. For instance, it lists what she drank in a week: one pint of wine, diluted with water, with sugar and some cinnamon. The original document is lost, but the text was copied by Johannes Brugman in his Vita Sanctae Lidwinae, from 1498 and so it survived. Brugman was a Dutch Franciscan travelling preacher, famous for his rhetorical skills. The phrase ‘To talk like Brugman’ has become an idiom in the Dutch language.
Johannes Brugman preaching, etching by Barent de Bakker, after a drawing by Hermanus Petrus Schouten (1782). Image from Wikimedia Commons.
In the 19th and 20th centuries interest in Lidwina grew. The works by Thomas à Kempis and Johannes Brugman were newly translated with commentary. In 1994 Ludo Jongen and Cees Schotel re-issued a translation and photographic reprint of the Middle-Dutch Vita prior, entitled Het Leven van Liedewij, de maagd van Schiedam.
Cover of Ludo Jongen and Cees Schotel, Het Leven van Liedewij, de maagd van Schiedam (Hilversum, 1994). ZA.9.a.5895(2)
In 2014 Uitgeverij Verloren published a volume containing two separate works: Een bovenaardse vrouw: zes eeuwen verering van Liduina van Schiedam (‘A supernal woman: six centuries of reverence of Liduina van Schiedam’) by Charles Caspers, and a new translation of Thomas a Kempis’ Vita, entitled Het leven van de maagd Liduina (‘The life of the virgin Liduina’).
Charles Caspers, Een bovenaardse vrouw: Zes eeuwen verering van Liduina van Schiedam. (Hilversum, 2014) YF.2015.a.25455.
Koen Goudriaan linked Lidwina to the Brethren of the Common Life, starting from the new insight that the oldest surviving Vita was not written by Brugman, but by Hugo Rugge, who was connected to the Brethern and that places Lidwina in that tradition. (ZA.9.a.10168)
And what about skating? That is nearly at an end. The last major competition in the 2024-25 season will be World Championship Distances in Hamar, Norway, from 13-16 March. Dutch skaters are at the top of the boards, having honed their skills for at least two centuries, looking from the painting of a women’s speed skating race in 1809.
Skating Race for Women on the city canal of Leeuwarden, 21 January 1809, by Nicolaas Bauer. Image from the website of the Rijksmuseum.
Jaap Eden was the first official world champion and over the last twenty years the Dutch have dominated the skating scene. I wonder whether Lidwina is lending a hand.
Hand-coloured photograph of Jaap Eden. Image from Wikimedia Commons
Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Collections
References/Further reading:
Johannes Brugman, Vita alme virginis Lidwine, ed. A. de Meijer (Groningen 1963) Ac.936.k/3.
‘Vita prior’ ed. Daniël Papebrochius in: Acta sanctorum Aprilis II (Antwerp, 1675) pp. 270-302
Thomas à Kempis, Vita Lidiwigis virginis, ed. Michael Johannes Pohl. Opera omnia vol. 6 (Freiburg, 1905) pp. 315-453. 3706.aa.6.
Thomas à Kempis, Het leven van de heilige maagd Liduina, translated by Rijcklof Hofman (Hilversum, 2014) YF.2015.a.25455.
Koen Goudriaan, ‘Het Leven van Liduina en de moderne devotie’, in: Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis (2003) 6, pp. 161-236. ZA.9.a.10168.
Ludo Jongen and Cees Schotel, Leven van Liedewij, een Middelnederlandse vertaling van de Vita prior, waarschijnlijk eerst rond 1470 vervaardigd (Hilversum 1994) ZA.9.a.5895(2). Also available online.
Ludo Jongen, ‘Uit het oog, uit het hart? Over twee heilige maagden: Lutgard en Lidewij’, in: Gouden legenden: Heiligenlevens en heiligenverering in de Nederlanden, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Marijke Carasso-Kok (Hilversum 1997), pp. 127-137. YA.1998.a.6022
Ludo Jongen, Heiligenlevens in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 46-53.
J.B.W.M. Möller, Sint Liduina van Schiedam: in de mystiek en in haar tijd (The Hague, 1948) 4823.h.6.
‘Afschrift, gedateerd 1451, van de Schiedamse oorkonde van 21 juli 1421 met een vidimus van Jan van Beieren’, in: H. van Oerle, ‘Tleven van Liedwy die maghet van Scyedam’, Ons geestelijk erf 54 (1980) 3, pp. 241-266. P.101/476
Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland (Huygens Instituut, Amsterdam)
19 February 2025
For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
On February 14, European Collections featured at Doctoral Open Day themed ‘Global Languages, Cultures and Societies’. Marja Kingma, Curator of Germanic Collections, delivered a presentation introducing PhD students from across the UK and beyond to navigating the collections and identifying resources to support their research. In the afternoon, our curators hosted a show-and-tell session, offering the students a glimpse into the Library's unmatched holdings from continental Europe. The selections ranged from a quirky bottle-shaped Czech book to a Russian glossy LGBT magazine and a modern illuminated manuscript from Georgia. Spoiler alert – love-themed curatorial picks proved crowd pleasers. For those who could not make it, here is a taster of what you might have missed.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections, Olga Topol and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Curators of Slavonic and East European Collections, turned the spotlight on minority languages and cultures, giving voice to the Evenks, Sakha, Kashubians, Silesians, and the Gagauz people of Ukraine. It was a revelation to many of the students to learn that Eastern Europe was both linguistically and culturally diverse, with a plethora of languages, ethnicities, and religious traditions across the region.
V. A. Dʹiachenko, N. V. Ermolova, Evenki i iakuty iuga Dalʹnego Vostoka, XVII-XX vv. (St. Petersburg, 1994) YA.1997.a.2298.
Marcin Melon, Kōmisorz Hanusik: we tajnyj sużbie ślonskij nacyje (Kotōrz Mały, 2015) YF.2017.a.20547. An interesting example of a crime comedy written in the Silesian ethnolect.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator of South-East European Collections, highlighted a groundbreaking work by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (‘Serbian Dictionary’), which proved very popular among researchers with an interest in linguistics.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (Vienna, 1818) 12976.r.6.
It was the first book printed in Karadžić’s reformed 30-character Cyrillic alphabet, following the phonetic principle of "write as you speak." The dictionary contained over 26,000 words and was trilingual, with Serbian, German, and Latin entries. It standardised Serbian orthography but also preserved the nation’s oral tradition. The dictionary’s encyclopaedic entries encompassed folklore, history, and ethnography, making it a pivotal text in both linguistic reform and cultural preservation.
Anna Chelidze, Curator of Georgian Collections, showed the students a contemporary illuminated manuscript created in 2018 by the Georgian calligrapher Giorgi Sisauri. The Art Palace of Georgia commissioned the work especially for the British Library to enrich our Georgian collections. The poem Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa ('Praise and Exaltation of the Georgian Language') was written in the 10th century by John Zosimus, a Georgian Christian monk and religious writer. It is renowned for its profound reverence for the Georgian language, employing numerological symbolism and biblical allusions to underscore its sacredness.
(Giorgi Sisauri), John Zosimus, Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa, (2018) Or. 17158
Sophie Defrance, Valentina Mirabella and Barry Taylor, Curators of Romance Language Collections, treated the students to some ... romance.
Sophie Defrance took a tongue-in-cheek approach to the theme by suggesting another way to look at (some) love letters with Le rire des épistoliers.
Cover of Charrier-Vozel, Marianne, Le rire des épistoliers: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, 2021) YF.2022.a.9956
The volume gathers the proceedings of a 2017 conference at the University of Brest on the expression, manners, and importance of laughing and laughter in 16th- and 17th-century correspondence, with examples from Diderot’s letters to his lover Sophie Volland, or from the exchanges between Benjamin Constant and his confidante Julie Talma.
Valentina Mirabella decided to revisit the Boris Pasternak’s timeless love story ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Turns out, the history of the novel’s publication in Italy was nearly as turbulent as the story itself! It was first published in Italian translation as Il dottor Živago in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Although an active communist, Feltrinelli smuggled the manuscript out of the USSR and resisted pressure against its publication. The demand for Il dottor Živago was so great that Feltrinelli was able to license translation rights into 18 different languages well in advance of the novel's publication. The Communist Party of Italy expelled the publisher from its ranks in retaliation for his role in the release of the book they felt was critical of communism.
Cover of the 34th (in the space of just two years!) edition of Il dottor Živago by Boris Pasternak translated from Russian by Pietro Zveteremich (Milano : Feltrinelli, 1959) W16/9272
Barry Taylor drew attention to the epistolary relationship and an electric bond between the Spanish author Elena Fortún (1886-1952) and the Argentine professor Inés Field (1897-1994) with the book Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (‘You know who I am: letters to Inés Field’).
Elena Fortún, Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (Seville, 2020) YF.2021.a.15259
Fortún was the author of the popular Celia books, which followed the heroine from a seven-year-old in well-to-do Madrid to a schoolteacher in Latin America. The books give a child’s-eye-view of the world. They were censored by Franco and the author was exiled, but the books have been re-published by Renacimiento of Seville in the 2000s. Fortún’s novel Oculto sendero (‘The hidden path’) published in 2016 is seen as a lesbian Bildungsroman.
Fortún met Inés Field in Buenos Aires. Now that both women are dead, critics feel free to read the correspondence through the prism of the Bildungsroman.
Ildi Wolner, Curator of East and South-East European Collections, explored the representations of love in art with Agnes’s Hay Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings.
Agnes Hay, Sex: 40 rajz = 40 drawings ([Budapest, 1979]) YA.1997.a.2586
Ágnes Háy is a Hungarian graphic artist and animation filmmaker, who has lived in London since 1985. Her unique experimental style of drawing uses simple lines and symbols to convey complex meanings and associations, and this booklet is no exception. Considered rather bold in Communist Hungary at the end of the 1970s, this series of sketches explores the diverse intricacies of gender relations, without the need for a single word of explanation.
Page from Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings [Budapest, 1979] YA.1997.a.2586
Susan Reed, Curator of Germanic Collections, shared a fascinating collection of essays examining aspects of the love letter as a social and cultural phenomenon from the 18th century to the present day.
Cover of Der Liebesbrief: Schriftkultur und Medienwechsel vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, herausgegeben von Renate Stauf, Annette Simonis, Jörg Paulus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) YF.2010.a.14652
The authors scrutinised letters from historical and literary figures including Otto von Bismark, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rainer Maria Rilke. The book ends with a consideration of how online messaging forms might transform the way we write love letters.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator of Baltic Collections, displayed a mysterious metal box containing a booklet in English and Lithuanian, some photographs, posters and letters.
Vilma Samulionytė, Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence (Vilnius, 2018) RF.2019.a.120
Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence is a moving tribute from the Lithuanian photographer Vilma Samulionyė to her grandmother, a Lithuanian German Elė Finkytė Šnipaitienė. When Vilma’s grandmother took her own life in her 70s, Vilma and her sister Jūrate decided to delve into the family history. Their research resulted in a documentary film, an exhibition, and an artists’ book. Along the way the sisters face taboos, one of them being a chain of suicides in the family.
The journey into the family’s German history and their post-war life in Lithuania left them with some unsettling questions. Who was Kazimieras and was he the reason why Ella Fink left her family behind? Throughout the story letters and photographs create a link between the family in the West and in the East, between the living and the dead.
We hope you have enjoyed this virtual show-and-tell of highlights in our European collections. We look forward to welcoming you to the next Doctoral Open Days in 2026!
11 February 2025
Medieval Women at the Press
One of the exhibits in our current exhibition Medieval Women: in their own Words is the first European printed book ascribed to a female printer. The printer in question is Estellina Conat, who worked with her husband Abraham printing Hebrew books in Mantua in the 1470s. The book is an edition of a 14th-century poem by Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi entitled Behinat ha-‘Olam (‘The Contemplation of the World’). It was printed around 1476 and in the colophon, Estellina states: “I, Estellina, the wife of my worthy husband Abraham Conat, printed this book”. (In fact she says she “wrote” the book since the Hebrew language had not yet settled on a word for the relatively new technology of printing.) She adds that she was assisted by Jacob Levi, a young man from Tarrascon in Provence.
Final page of Behinat ha-‘Olam (Mantua, ca 1476) C.50.a.5. (ISTC ij00218520) The colophon at the foot of the page names Estellina Conat as its printer
No other book from the Conat press survives with Estellina’s name in the colophon, and she has often been overlooked as the first woman printer in Europe, perhaps because she printed in Hebrew rather than in classical Latin or Greek or the contemporary European vernaculars more familiar to western scholars of early printing. Many sources still give the name of Anna Rügerin as the first woman printer instead.
Anna is named in the colophons of two books printed in Augsburg in 1484 (around 8 years after Estellina’s work!). She was part of a family of printers: her widowed mother had married the printer Johann Bämler, and Anna’s brother Johann Schönsperger, perhaps encouraged by Bämler, set up a press with Anna’s husband Thomas. After Thomas died, Anna appears to have taken over from him and printed in her own name editions of the historic German law book, the Sachsenspiegel and of a handbook for writers of legal and official documents entitled Formulare und deutsch rhetorica (Augsburg, 1484; IB.6605; ISTC if00245500).
Colophon naming Anna Rügerin as the printer of an edition of the Sachsenspiegel (Augsburg, 1484) IB.6602 (ISTC 00024000). Image from Wikimedia Commons, from a copy in the Bavarian State Library.
Another woman printer emerged in the 1490s in Stockholm. Anna Fabri, like Anna Rügerin, took over the work of printing on the death of her husband, a common pattern for female printers in the early centuries of the industry. In 1496 she put her name to the colophon of a Breviary for the diocese of Uppsala. Here she explicitly states that she completed the work begun by her husband. As in the case of Estellina Conat, no other book survives bearing her name.
Final Page of Breviarium Upsalense (Stockholm, 1496; ISTC ib01187000), naming Anna Fabri in the colophon. Image from a copy in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. The British Library holds a single leaf inserted in a copy of G.F. Klemming, Sveriges äldre liturgiska literatur (Stockholm, 1879) C.18.c.13.
We don’t know exactly what role Estellina and the two Annas played in the production of the books that bear their names, but it’s certainly possible that it was more than merely overseeing the work and that they were involved in the physical processes of the print shop. We know that nuns of the Florentine convent of San Jacopo in Ripoli worked as typesetters in the printing house associated with the church and its Dominican community, and a Bridgettine abbey at Vadstena in Sweden printed a Book of Hours in 1495, although their press apparently burned down soon after and was not restarted. The current BL exhibition also features woodcut prints made and coloured by another Bridgettine community at Mariënwater in the Netherlands. All this work carried on the long tradition of medieval nuns working as scribes, artists and illuminators (also richly evidenced in the exhibition), bringing it into the new age of printing.
A leaf from a music book for use in the Latin Mass, illuminated by nuns of the Poor Clares convent in Cologne in the late 14th or early 15th century. Add MS 35069
The 18th-century scholar of early Hebrew printing, Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, criticised Estellina Conat’s edition of the Beh.inat ha-‘Olam as unevenly printed, and scornfully suggested that it might be “the effort of a woman attempting something beyond her powers.” But as Estellina and her sister-printers show, printing was indeed within the power of women and they played a part in it from the early decades of the industry. Thanks to ongoing research, and publicity such as the Medieval Women exhibition, these woman printers and their work are ever more visible today.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/Further reading
Adri K. Offenberg, ‘The Chronology of Hebrew Printing at Mantua in the Fifteenth Century: A Re-examination’ The Library, 6th series, 16 (1994) pp. 298-315. RAR 010
Hanna Gentili, ‘Estellina Conat, Early Hebrew Printer’, in Medieval Women: Voices & Visions, edited by Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison (London, 2024) [Not yet catalogued]
Sheila Edmunds, ‘Anna Rügerin Revealed’, Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 2 (1999) pp. 179-181. 2708.h.850
Anabel Thomas, ‘Dominican Marginalia: the Late Fifteenth-Century Printing Press of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence’, in At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, edited by Stephen J. Milner (Minneapolis, 2005), pp. 192-216. YC.2005.a.12149
03 December 2024
“Rendez-vous at the British Library”: 6 December 2024
Two free events in the British Library Pigott Theatre (booking necessary)
Afternoon symposium: Collections in French at the British Library
Evening event: The World Library: William Marx, with the participation of French Ambassador Helene Duchene and Sir Roly Keating, CEO of the British Library, followed by a discussion with Artemis Cooper, F.R.S.L.
https://thebritishlibraryculturalevents.seetickets.com/tour/rendez-vous-at-the-british-library
French Collections at the BL - Illustration by Clo'e Floirat
To conclude a year of celebrations marking the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, enjoy an afternoon exploring of the wealth of collections in French at the British Library.
Listen to acclaimed author Michel Pastoureau, and renowned academics, writers, and translators talk about their current research and projects based on manuscripts and printed collections in French; hear Curators talk about their work, discover hidden treasures, and seize the chance to visit out of hours the newly opened Medieval Women exhibition!
The programme can be found here.
There will also be the opportunity to see two pop-up exhibitions in the Knowledge Centre: ‘Postcards for Perec’, curated by Linda Parr and ‘When Marianne and Britannia meet’, ] curated by Guillaume Périssol and Charlotte Faucher.
The talks will be followed by a separate evening event introduced by the French Ambassador and Sir Roly Keating, CEO of the British Library, with the chance to hear Professor William Marx, from the Collège de France, talk about ‘The World Library’, followed by a discussion with Artemis Cooper, F.R.S.L. - and a message from Kate Mosse!
The events are free, but booking is essential.
These two events are generously supported by the department of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation Department of the French Embassy, the French Studies Library Group, and Mark Storey, Friends of the Nations’ Libraries Trustee and book collector.
17 September 2024
Werther at 250 - an 18th-Century Bestseller
On Thursday 26 September the novelist, biographer and columnist A.N. Wilson will be discussing his new book The Life of Goethe with Emeritus Professor Paul Hamilton at an event in the British Library’s Pigott Theatre. Full event and booking details can be found here. Meanwhile, to get you in a Goethe mood, we take a look at the book that first brought him international fame.
September 1774 saw the appearance of the 25-year-old Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). Goethe had already become famous in Germany with his play Götz von Berlichingen, published the previous year, but the novel was to make his name throughout Europe.
Title-page of the first edition of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Leipzig, 1774) C.58.bb.12
The novel is mainly narrated in letters from the eponymous Werther to his friend Wilhelm. It tells the story of Werther’s doomed love for Lotte, a woman who seems to reciprocate his feelings but is betrothed to another man, Albert, as was her mother’s dying wish. When he realises that he can neither suppress his love for Lotte nor prevent her marriage, Werther leaves town to take up a post at court, but returns after a few unhappy months. Lotte and Albert are now married but Werther continues to visit Lotte, becoming ever more tormented by his feelings for her. After an emotional encounter where Werther embraces and kisses Lotte, she sends him away. Having already decided that only his, Lotte’s or Albert’s death can resolve the situation between them, Werther decides to kill himself. An afterword by the supposed editor of the letters tells of Werther’s suicide and its aftermath.
Werther at his writing-desk, engraving by J. Buckland Wright from a Halcyon Press edition of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Maastricht, 1931) C.115.s.26.
The novel was a huge success. It combined the time-honoured genre of the tragic love story with the contemporary cult of ‘sensibility’, featuring a protagonist who is guided entirely by his emotions. There were also titillating hints that the story was based on true events: Goethe had indeed drawn on his own brief infatuation with Charlotte Buff, who was engaged to his friend Johann Christian Kestner, and on the suicide of a colleague, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was hopelessly in love with a married woman. A pamphlet published in 1775 identified the ‘real’ locations and characters, albeit only by initials in the case of the characters. Nonetheless, the book’s fame brought some unwanted attention to these ‘originals’. Jerusalem’s grave even became a place of pilgrimage for Werther fans.
Pages from H. von Breidenbach, Berichtigung der Geschichte des jungen Werthers (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1775; 12547.a.20.) identifiyng the setting of the novel as a village near Wetzlar and the surname of Lotte’s father as beginning with B rather than S. (Image from a copy in the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg)
A French translation of Werther appeared in 1775 and translations into other European languages, including English (initially via the French version) in 1779, soon followed. As well as German, French and English, the British Library holds editions in Afrikaans, Danish, Esperanto, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
Title-pages of early French, English and Italian translations of Die Leiden des jungen Werther
The novel also spawned a wave of imitations, critiques, parodies, continuations and dramatizations, and was represented in other media. Illustrations of scenes from the story decorated crockery and playing cards, and a handbill from 1785 in the British Library’s collections (1850.c.10.(151.)) announces that “At Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Historical Wax-work ... Is to be seen the ... Group of the Death of Werter, attended by Charlotte and her Family.” Fashionable young men adopted Werther’s outfit of a blue tailcoat with a yellow waistcoat and breeches, although stories of a wave of copycat suicides while so dressed are almost certainly exaggerated. Werther’s name could even be used to sell unrelated works: a German translation of Isaac D’Israeli’s Mejnoun and Leila, a retelling of an Arabic story, was entitled Der arabische Werther (‘The Arabian Werther’).
Title-page of Confidential Letters of Albert; from his first attachment to Charlotte to her death (London, 1790) RB.23.a.18744. The work has been variously attributed to John Armstrong and Mary Eden
A popular form of ‘Wertheriad’ presented letters from other characters, such as William James’s The Letters of Charlotte during her Connexion with Werter (early English editions generally dropped the h of Werther) or The Confidential Letters of Albert. August Cornelius Stockmann’s Die Leiden der jungen Wertherinn (‘The Sorrows of the young female Werther’), although its title suggests a version with the gender roles reversed, similarly retells the story from Lotte’s perspective although not in epistolary form. However, the French novelist Pierre Perrin’s Werthérie (translated into English as The Female Werter) was the story of a woman tragically obsessed with a married man.
Title-page and frontispiece of Pierre Perrin, Werthérie (Paris, 1791) 1074.h.32. (Image from a copy in the Bayerische Staatsibliothek)
Another common theme in both poetry and art was Lotte mourning at Werther’s grave. The original story leaves her own fate uncertain, saying that her grief and shock at Werther’s death made her family fear for her life, and some continuations do indeed have her dying also, but the idea of her rallying at least enough to visit the grave was clearly irresistible.
Title page of Carl Ernst von Reizenstein, Lotte bey Werthers Grab (‘Wahlheim’, 1775) 11521.aa.14. (Image from a copy in the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg)
Illustrators were also fond of depicting the famous scene where Werther first sees Lotte as she butters and cuts slices of bread for her younger siblings. This was also popular with the parodists, and bookends William Thackeray’s famous satirical verses about the story.
Werther meets Lotte as she cuts slices of buttered bread for her younger siblings. Engraving by Daniel Chodowiecki. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
Despite (or perhaps because of) its popularity, many commentators criticised the work, and in particular Werther’s extreme emotions and his suicide. A popular riposte to Goethe’s work was Friedrich Nicolai’s Freuden des jungen Werthers (‘Joys of Young Werther’). Here Albert renounces Lotte, who marries Werther. Things do not at first go smoothly, and the remarkably tolerant Albert has to act as marriage counsellor, but Werther gradually becomes practical and responsible. The story ends with him and his family happily cultivating their garden in good Voltairean fashion.
Title page of Friedrich Nicolai, Freuden des jungen Werthers: Leiden und Freuden Werthers des Mannes (Berlin, 1775) 12547.aaa.8. (Image from a copy in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)
The economist Johann August Schlettwein wrote two pamphlets criticising Goethe’s work, one of which is couched as a letter from Werther, now suffering the torments of damnation, appealing to others not to follow his example. Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen, in his Das Werther-Fieber (‘The Werther Fever’) shows a family divided over the story – daughter Sibylle is dangerously obsessed, but the rest of the family consider Werther a fool (which I must admit was my own assessment reading the novel as an undergraduate!).
Title-page of Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen, Das Werther-Fieber, eine unvollendetes Familienstück (Nieder-Teutschland [i.e Leipzig], 1776) 12547.b.5. (Image from a copy in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)
Goethe would later distance himself from Werther as he left behind the wild enthusiasm of his youthful ‘Sturm und Drang’ works and embraced a more measured classicism. A revised version published in 1787 gave the editor more of a voice and made Albert more sympathetic, somewhat counterbalancing Werther’s emotionalism. But even after it had passed the peak of its popularity, Werther continued to be much read, and it inspired literary responses into the 20th century. Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939) is a fictional retelling of the real-life encounter between Charlotte Kestner (née Buff) and Goethe 42 years after the publication of Werther, while Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sorrows of Young W.) maps Goethe’s novel onto the story of a disaffected young man in 1960s East Germany. And in the 21st century the story has been reinvented as a graphic novel in a contemporary setting, Werther Reloaded.
Cover of Franziska Walther, Werther reloaded: nach dem Roman ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werther’ von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Mannheim, 2016) YF.2016.b.2045
250 years after its first appearance, Werther may no longer have the powerful appeal that it had at the time, but the novel still stands as a literary classic and a offers glimpse into a particular mindset that briefly held sway over romantically inclined readers in the late 18th century.
References/Further reading
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Les souffrances du jeune Werther, translated by Karl Siegmund von Seckendorff (Erlangen, 1886) 244.e.10.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Werter: a German Story, translated by Richard Graves (London, 1779) 12555.a.34.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werther, opera di sentimento, translated by Gaetano Grassi (Poschiavo, 1782) 012553.e.35.
Isaac Disraeli, Der Arabische Werther, oder Mejnun und Leila, eine romantische Erzählung für Liebende (Leipzig, 1804) 12618.a.45.
William James, The letters of Charlotte, during her connexion with Werter (Dublin, 1786) 1489.g.7.
August Cornelius Stockmann, Die Leiden der jungen Wertherinn (Eisenach, 1775) 12547.b.6.
“Diesem viehischen Trieb ergeben”: J. A. Schlettweins Kritik an Goethes Werther: Briefe an eine Freundinn über die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1775), Des jungen Werthers Zuruf aus der Ewigkeit an die noch lebende Menschen auf der Erde (1775), herausgegeben von Volker Hoenerbach. (Hamburg 2009) YF.2012.a.7890
Johann August Schlettwein, Werther in die Hölle (Frankfurt am Main, 1775) 8630.b.2.(5.) (A reissue of his Briefe an eine Freundinn über die Leiden des jungen Werthers with new introductory material)
Thomas Mann, Lotte in Weimar (Stockholm, 1939) YA.1989.a.3081
Ulrich Plenzdorf, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (Frankfurt am Main, 1973) X.908/27279.
Robyn L. Schiffman, ‘A Concert of Werthers’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 43, no. 2 (2010), pp. 207-222 P.901/754
Karol Sauerland, ‘Wertherfieber’, European History Online Website
A selection of other early responses, adaptations and imitations from the BL collections:
Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Prometheus Deukalion und seine Recensenten (Hamburg, 1775) 11746.c.35. (A satire on reviewers of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers)
Heinrich Gottfried von Bretschneider, Eine entsetzliche Mordgeschichte von dem jungen Werther ([s.l.], 1776) 12547.aaa.9. (A free adaptation of the original)
Man denkt verschieden bey Werthers Leiden. Ein Schauspiel in drey Aufzügen (s.l., 1779) 11745.c.1.
Edward Taylor, Werter to Charlotte: a Poem (Lonndon, 1784) 11632.d.49.(1.)
Jean-Marie-Jérôme Fleuriot, Le Nouveau Werther, imité de l’Allemand (Neuchâtel, 1786) 12547.c.8.
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins, The Victim of Fancy (London, 2009) YC.2010.a.15559 (Originally published 1786; French translation, La Victime de l’imagination, ou l’enthousiaste de Werther (Paris, 1795?) Ch.790/127.)
Eglantine Wallace, A Letter to a Friend, with a poem called the Ghost of Werter (London, 1787) 11632.h.16.
George Wright, The unfortunate lovers, abridged from the Sorrows of Werter ... (London, 1788) RB.23.a.8495
Sarah Farrell, Charlotte, or, A sequel to the sorrows of Werther ... and other poems (Bath, 1792) 11642.h.17.
Amelia Pickering, The Sorrows of Werter: a Poem (London, 1788) 1346.m.11.
Joseph Antoine de Gourbillon, Stellino, ou le Nouveau Werther (Paris, 1791)
Werter and Charlotte. A German story containing many wonderful and pathetic incidents (London, 1800?) 12611.ee.32.(4.) (A loose adaptation of the original)
Carl Phillip Bonafont, Der neue Werther, oder Gefühl und Liebe (Nuremberg, 1804) 12547.cc.11.
James Bell, Letters from Wetzlar, written in 1817, developing the authentic particulars on which the “Sorrows of Werter” are founded (London, 1821) 11851.c.7.
Georges Duval, Le Retour de Werther, ou les derniers épanchemens de la sensibilité, comédie en un acte, mêlée de vaudevilles (Paris, 1821) 11738.e.16.(10.)
An anonymous and undated poem beginning ‘Cold in this tomb the dust of Werter lies’ C.116.g.22.(2.)
05 June 2024
Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages 2024
27 September 2023
An Emblem Book without Emblems
You probably know what an emblem book looks like: a motto, a mysterious allegorical picture and a longer explanation in verse or prose. It’s had that form since Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber, first published in 1531.
Emblem from Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531) C.57.a.11.
In fact, Alciato’s manuscript didn’t have the pictures for which he became so famous: they were commissioned by his friend Conrad Peutinger.
This new acquisition is an adaptation in Portuguese of a famous pious emblem book, without the pictures.
Title page of Suspiros e saudades de Deos, exhalados e expostos em breves cantigos, reduzidos e imitados dos Afectos santos (Pia desideria) do P. Hermanno Hugo da Companhia de Jesus, pelo veneravel P. Fr. Antonio das Chagas. (Coimbra, 1830) RB.23.a.40412
The original was by the Flemish Jesuit Hermann Hugo (1588-1629): the Pia desideria were published at Antwerp in 1624, with 48 emblems by Boëtius à Bolswert.
In the words of the Emblem Project Utrecht:
Hugo’s Pia desideria contains emblems constructed on the basis of the three stages of mystical life.
In all it was reprinted 49 times, and 90 translations and adaptations of the Pia desideria were published in all the major European languages. Therefore, the Pia desideria was one of the most widely distributed, most widely translated and imitated religious books (not just emblem books) of the seventeenth century.
Complete with a picture of folly.
Emblem of folly from an edition of Hermann Hugo, Pia desideria emblematis, elegiis et affectibus, S. S. Patrum illustrate (Antwerp, 1529) 1019.g.40.
He (she?) wears the jester’s hat, rides a hobby-horse and – a clear sign of eccentricity – carries a kitten around in a handbag. Wisdom can only cover his eyes to avoid this unfortunate sight.
You’ll see that Chagas in his translation has rendered the motto and the poem and replaces the picture with a verbal description.
Non-visual version of the folly emblem from Chagas’s Suspiros
Emblem books without illustrations weren’t unusual, as Infantes shows. Nor was it unusual for Peninsular emblematists to draw on German Neo-Latin sources, the most famous example being Saavedra Fajardo and his debt to Julius Wilhelm Zincgref (explained in López Poza’s edition).
Fr António das Chagas (1631-82) was born António da Fonseca Soares. After an exciting life as a soldier and poet, he entered the Franciscan Order and destroyed his poems. In religion he enjoyed a reputation as a prose stylist.
This little book reminds us that an emblem book need not have pictures, and that Portuguese and Spanish authors were reading Germanic authors, provided they were Catholics and wrote in Latin.
Barry Taylor, Curator Romance Collections
References/further reading
Glasgow University Emblem site
Víctor Infantes, ‘La presencia de una ausencia. La emblemática sin emblemas’, Literatura emblemática hispánica. Actas del I Simposio Internacional (A Coruña, 1994), Sagrario López Poza (ed.). (A Coruña, 1996), pp. 93-109
Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Empresas políticas; edición de Sagrario López Poza (Madrid, 1999) YF.2010.a.32130
13 September 2023
The Slovenian Age of Enlightenment
The Enlightenment in Slovenian lands was initiated by a group of like-minded people who advocated the change of the linguistic and cultural practices of the time, which relied exclusively on the use of the Latin and German languages. The Slovenian educators believed that the national language could be used equally for religious and secular purposes. Guided by this idea, they produced a critical body of literature that not only preserved the Slovenian language but also paved the way for the development of a modern literary language.
Grammars, dictionaries, histories, textbooks, translations of religious and secular texts from Latin and German, the first newspapers, original plays and modern literary adaptations were the main means to save the Slovenian language and raise national awareness.
In 1768, the priest, grammarian and lexicographer Marko Pohlin (1735-1801) published Kraynska grammatika (‘Carniolan Grammar’), which started off this cultural movement.
The 1972 facsimile reprint of Marko Pohlin, Tu malu besedishe treh jesikov = Das ist: das kleine Wörterbuch in dreyen Sprachen = Quod est: parvum dictionarium trilingue (Ljubljana, 1781). X.950/9786. The original can be seen in the Slovenian Digital Library
Anton Tomaž Linhart, Versuch einer Geschichte von Krain und der übrigen südlichen Slaven Oesterreichs (Nuremberg, 1796). BL 1437.e.11. This is the second edition of Linhart’s History of Carniola and Other South Slavs of Austria, which was originally published in two volumes in Ljubljana in 1788-1791.
Anton Tomaž Linhart (1756-1795) was the author of the first authoritative history of the Slovene nation. He was also the first Slovene playwright and theatre producer, author of Şhupanova Mizka (‘Micka, the Mayor’s Daughter’) and Ta veşsęli dan, ali: Matizhek şe shęni (‘This Merry Day or Matiček is Getting Married’), an adaptation from Beaumarchais’s The Marrige of Figaro.
Valentin Vodnik, Pésme sa pokúshino (‘Trial Poems’) (Ljubljana, 1806.) Cup.401.a.15.
Valentin Vodnik (1758-1819) a poet, journalist and linguist was the editor, writer, translator and technical designer of the first Slovene newspaper, Lublanske novize (‘The Ljubljana News’). Modelled on the Wiener Zeitung and used for promoting Slovenian language, culture and identity, it was printed by Janez Friderik Eger in Ljubljana between 1797-1800. Vodnik translated European news from German and he also published local news from Ljubljana and Carniola. Lublanske novize was first published as a semi-weekly and later as a weekly.
'A Song About My Countrymen', the title of the first poem from Pésme sa pokúshino. From Slovenian Digital Library
Bartholomæus Kopitar, Grammatik der Slavischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten und Steyermark. (Ljubljana, 1808) 829.e.12.
Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844) a Slavist and national revivalist was the author of a scholarly and influential Grammar of the Slavonic Language in Carniola, Carinthia and Styria printed by Wilhelm Heinrich Korn in Ljubljana in 1808.
Pohlin, Linhart, Vodnik and Kopitar, among other Slovenian writers and scientists, were part of the cultural group named after their patron, Baron Sigismund (Žiga) Zois (1747-1819), a large landowner, naturalist and enlightened person. The group was united by their shared values of education and the promotion of Slovenian language, literature and culture.
Page one of Valentin Vodnik, Pismenost ali gramatika sa perve shole (Ljubljana, 1811) 1488.bb.8.
Vodnik’s Pismenost ali gramatika sa perve shole (‘Literacy or Grammar for the Elementary Schools’) contains an introductory part, and on eight unnumbered pages, a hymn entitled ‘Iliria oshivlena’ (‘Illyria resurrected’) in honour of Napoleon Bonaparte and the formation of the Illyrian Provinces as part of his French Empire from 1809 to 1814. During this period the Illyrian Provinces made economic and cultural advances felt long after the Austrians retook the territory in 1814. Vodnik’s Slovene language textbook also endured with the exception of its pro-French introductory parts.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator South East European Collections
Slovenian Enlightenment literature from Slovenian Digital Library:
Geschichte des Herzogthums Krain, des Gebiethes von Triest und der Grafschaft Görz (Valentin Vodnik, 1809)
Pismenost ali gramatika sa perve shole (Valentin Vodnik, 1811)
Dictionarium slavo-carniolicum. III partis a 1787/1798 manuscript by Blaž Kumerdej (1738-1805) a school teacher, philologist and educator
Svetu pismu noviga testamenta, id est: Biblia sacra novi testamenti ... ( A 1784-1786 translation of the New Testament)
Svetu pismu stariga testamenta id est: Biblia sacra veteris testamenti ... (A 1791-1802 translation of the Old Testament)
Glossarium Slavicum in supplementum ad primam partem Dictionarii Carniolici (Marko Pohlin, 1792)
Vadenje sa brati v' usse sorte pissanji sa sholarje teh deshelskeh shol v' zessarskih krajlevih deshelah (Reading textbook for schoolchildren, translation by Blaž Kumerdej, 1796)
Navúk k' osdravlenju te pluzhníze s' shelesnato solno kislostjo (Treatment of lung disease, 1804)
Mustertafel zur Aufsuchung krain : Wörter (Blaž Kumerdej, 1750-1800)
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