#early print

[Quipu with string cords wrapped in different colored threads. Cotton and camelid fibers. Wari Empire (AD 500 – 1000), probably, pre-Inka quipu. American Museum of Natural History, N° 41.2/7679. Photo, courtesy of the AMNH.]

Over the past week I taught Oroonoko by Aphra Behn in my early Brit Lit survey. Students were (understandably) horrified by the violence, slavery, and treatment of the indigenous South American people. We spent a lot of time thinking about Behn’s Eurocentric position and how she portrays the indigenous people as a kind of primitive Edenic society.

Behn writes:

“As we were coming up again, we met with some Indians of strange Aspects; that is, of a larger Size, and other sort of Features, than those of our Country: Our Indian Slaves, that Row'd us, ask'd 'em some Questions, but they cou'd not understand us; but shew'd us a long Cotton String, with se∣veral Knots on it; and told us, they had been coming from the Mountains so many Moons as there were Knots; they were habited in Skins of a strange Beast, and brought along with 'em Bags of Gold Dust; which, as well as they cou’d give us to understand, came streaming in...”

Behn seems to think nothing of this “Cotton String” with its knots, but she’s actually pointing to a complex accounting system that is often overlooked. These systems of cords and knots encode all kinds of information. Take a look, for example, at the Harvard Khipu Database Project, which has not only digitized images of the quipu, but also compiled the numerical data they present. 

[Item UR087, Museo Radicati, Lima, Peru -- photo available on the Harvard site]

Aphra Behn is so focused on the men’s appearance that she does not pay much attention to the cords and knots they have with them. The complexity of these systems wouldn’t fit terribly well with her depiction of them anyway. 

Here’s a short video about the archaeological excavation of quipu:

Reading Outside the Lines

Sometimes the best part of a book isn’t what the author wrote, but what the reader wrote on it. These marginalia entries make each book unique, so that this copy of Ludolph the Carthusian’s Vita Christi printed in 1498 becomes an even more interesting object. The book itself is not large, and is printed in extremely small type, and written on in even smaller script.

There are notes of some kind on nearly every page, in at least two languages, in different inks, and there are various drawings of hands, eyes, crosses, and flourishes. Our personal favorites in Special Collections, however, are the crying eyes that have been found on at least two pages. 

THIS is very cool! 

I hope Tether and her team will put out a transcription of the fragments. The article suggests these fragments might be from a version of the Vulgate that Malory used. (Tether says it’s “possible”. I would imagine quite a lot more work would need to be done to make that claim.)

There’s also a BBC article, but it has a lot less detail.

Tithes too hot to be Touched!

Sir Henry Spelman, Tithes too hot to be Touched. (1646)

Scenes from today’s research...

William Salesbury’s 1550 translation of Proclus’s description of the sphere of the world, which is taken from Elements of Physics:

The descripcion of the sphere or the frame of the worlde, right worthy to be red and studyed on, of all noble wyttes, specially of all those that be desyrousto attayne any perfecte knowledge in cosmography, or true descripcion of reagions, townes, or countrees, / set forth by Proclus Diadochus, and Englysshed by wyllyam Salysbury.

Fat volume

Composite books are objects that unite several books, usually because readers anticipated they would consult them at the same time. Textbooks used by students, both those in medieval and early-modern times, may hold four of five bound-together individual books. The fat volume seen here is a rarity because it presents no less than thirty individual books fitted in a single binding. They are German almanacs from the 17th century, held together by a plain paper wrapper which is stretched to the limit. Almanacs had a short half-life because the information they presented - rising and setting of sun and moon, hours of full tides, eclipses, church festivals - was time sensitive. You would normally throw the cheap productions out when their time had come. Not these, though. For some reason the reader who owned them decided to unite them into one hefty volume - creating a book that was nearly impossible to handle.

BBC - The Beauty Of Books. Part 2: Medieval Masterpieces