Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century: Ideas and Materialities c. 1650–1850 (Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World) 1837650160, 9781837650163

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Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century

Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World Series Editors James Raven Cristina Soriano Mark Towsey This series presents innovative studies focused on the history of knowledge transmission from c.1650 to c.1850. Books in the series address a wide range of artefacts and activities supporting texts, textual culture and textual networks and their role in the transfer of ideas across geographical, linguistic, social, ideological and religious boundaries. In promoting explicitly global or transoceanic perspectives, the series explores how far western European periodisation of ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ maps onto processes of social, cultural, technological and intellectual change across the globe. The series publishes ground-breaking transnational studies of script, print, material culture, translation and communication networks that transform our understanding of the social history of knowledge in this critical period of change. The editors welcome proposals and preliminary enquiries from prospective authors and editors for monographs and closely-curated edited collections. We are happy to consider both conventional and Open Access models of book publishing. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to one of the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor James Raven, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, [email protected] Professor Cristina Soriano, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, [email protected] Professor Mark Towsey, Department of History, University of Liverpool, [email protected] Dr Elizabeth McDonald, Commissioning Editor, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, [email protected]

Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century Ideas and Materialities c. 1650–1850

Edited by James Raven

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2024 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2024 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 83765 016 3 hardback ISBN 978 1 80543 232 6 ePDF

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Chinese astronomers at the Beijing Ancient Observatory with instruments brought by Jesuits (installed in 1644). Tapestry, c. late 17th century, Beauvais Manufactory. Getty Museum Collection © J. Paul Getty Trust Cover design: Abi Hood

In memory of Joseph P. McDermott, generous friend and scholar of East and West

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xii

Notes on Contributors

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1 Introduction James Raven

1

Part One: Knowledge and Reception 2 Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History: James Petiver’s Museum 17 Richard Coulton 3 ‘Useful’ Translations in the Milanese Enlightenment Alexandra Ortolja-Baird 4 Monsters, Myths and Methods: The Making and Global Reception of a Norwegian History James Raven

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5 The Lettres chinoises and its Shaping of Contrasting Perceptions of China Trude Dijkstra

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6 An American Reception of Clarissa: Erotica and Youthful Reading at the Salem Social Library Sean Moore

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Part Two: Images and News 7 Travelling Images: Exchanging, Adapting and Appropriating Illustrations for a History of England Isabelle Baudino

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8 From Charts to Cartes: Translating Graphs across the Channel in the Late Eighteenth Century Jean-François Dunyach

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Contents

9 The Printing Press and Colonial Newspapers in the Lesser Antilles 198 Francesco A. Morriello 10 Newspapers and Atlantic Revolutions: The Circulation of the Gaceta de Madrid in the Spanish Caribbean Cristina Soriano

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Part Three: Multiple Diffusions 11 Cross-Cultural Circulations and Orientalist Knowledge: Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale and its Editions Despina Magkanari 12 The Diffusion of the Qur’an in Private Libraries, 1665–1830 Alicia C. Montoya

243 269

13 The Unexpected Dynamics of Christian Text Transmission in Colonial South Asia and Myanmar Graham Shaw

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14 Robert Morrison at the End of the Enlightenment: Collecting Books in Early Nineteenth-Century China Cynthia Brokaw

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15 Conclusion 365 James Raven Select Bibliography

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Index

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Illustrations 2. Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History Fig. 2.1.

Specimen of Selaginella exaltata (Kuntze) Spring collected by Archibald Steward from New Caledonia (Darién, Panama), 1690s, Natural History Museum (London), Sloane Herbarium, HS 157, fol. 8. Item 533 in Musei Petiveriani. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum. Photo: Charles E. Jarvis

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Table 2.1.

Object acknowledgements in Musei Petiveriani by global region

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Table 2.2.

Social composition of acknowledgees by occupation

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Table 2.3.

Repeated rhetorical tokens of acknowledgement

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3. ‘Useful’ Translations in the Milanese Enlightenment Fig. 3.1.

Fig. 3.2.

Frontispiece from Lettera Critica del Chirurgo Brambilla (Milan: 1765). © The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, *69.F.119, Titelblatt

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Frontispiece from Delle progressioni e serie. Libri due del P. Francesco Luino (Milan: 1767). © The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna: 302.151-C, Titelblatt 49

4. Monsters, Myths and Methods Fig. 4.1.

Fig. 4.2a.

Title-page openings of Det første Forsøg paa Norges Naturlige Historie (Copenhagen, 1752–53), Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens (Copenhagen, 1753–54) and The Natural History of Norway (London, 1755). © The Royal Library, Copenhagen

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Pull-out engraved dual image of the Soe Orme in Det første Forsøg paa Norges Naturlige Historie, vol. 2 (Copenhagen, 1753) and of the Seeschlangen in Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens, vol. 2 (Copenhagen, 1754). © The Royal Library, Copenhagen

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Illustrations

Fig. 4.2b.

Engraved dual image of the sea worm placed opposite to page 196 of the second part of The Natural History of Norway (London, 1755) © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; Wren Library, Grylls 23.177

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6. An American Reception of Clarissa Fig. 6.1a&b. Pickering’s Vesuvious booklist, recto and verso. Catalogue Books Shipt on Board the Vesuvious, 7 Feb. 1772, Pickering Family Papers, MSS 400, box 9, folder 1. © Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA 132–3 Fig. 6.2.

Contract for the sale of captured African-British troops. Col. Pickering account current with Marshall of the Admiralty, 10 Dec. 1779, Pickering Family Papers, MSS 400, box 9, folder 1. © Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA

135

7. Travelling Images Fig. 7.1.

Fig. 7.2.

Fig. 7.3.

George Vertue, Portrait of Richard I, the Lionheart, 1734. Etching and engraving on paper, 28.8 x 19.1 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum

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James Smith, Portrait of King Richard I, 1733. Engraving on paper, 37.4 x 23 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum

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Rois et Reines d’Angleterre from Bernard de Montfaucon, Les monumens de la monarchie françoise, vol. 2 (1730), p. 114. 48 x 29.7 cm. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Diderot, Lyon [shelf mark: 228.2]

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8. From Charts to Cartes Fig. 8.1.

Fig. 8.2.

William Playfair, The Commercial, Political and Parliamentary Atlas, London, Debrett, 2nd edn, 1787. Via Wikimedia, image in the Public Domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:1786_Playfair_-_20_Chart_of_the_National_Debt_ of_England_ (from_3e_edition,_1801).jpg

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William Playfair, Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, Paris, Barrois, 1789. Via Google Books, image in the Public Domain: https://www.google.fr/books/edition/ Tableaux_d_arithmetique_lineaire_du_comm/ vUcOtVnx3KgC?hl=fr&gbpv=1 185

Illustrations

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11. Cross-Cultural Circulations and Orientalist Knowledge Fig. 11.1.

Fig. 11.2.

Title page of the original edition of the Bibliothèque orientale (Paris, Compagnie des Libraires, 1697, infolio). © Rostock University Library, CIa-2

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Title page of the first volume of The Hague edition of the Bibliothèque orientale (The Hague, J. Neaulme & N. van Daalen, 1779, in-quarto). © Rostock University Library, CIa-3(1)

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Table 11.1. Editions of Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 262 14. Robert Morrison at the End of the Enlightenment Fig. 14.1.

Daniel Vrooman (1818–95), Map of Guangzhou (1860). PD 1996. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, London Missionary Society map collection, item in the Public Domain

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Fig. 14.2a&b. Three Worthies Meet the Immortal and Talk about the World, Newly Cut (Xinke sanxian yu xian tanshi 新刻 三賢遇仙談世), cover page (14.2a) and page 2b (14.2b). RM c.500.y.2(4). Courtesy of the Morrison Collection, SOAS Library

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Table 14.1. Categories of titles in the Morrison Collection

334

The editor, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements Chapter 4: Support from a British Academy/Leverhulme Research Grant (SRG19\190747). Chapter 5: Support from the Society of the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) 25th Anniversary Fellowship and the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust Fellowship. Chapter 7: The generosity of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, and the expertise of its staff, during a Visiting Fellowship in the summer of 2017, enabling access to and study of the archival material analysed in this chapter. Chapter 12: The European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement no. 682022.

Notes on Contributors Isabelle Baudino is Senior Lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and a researcher affiliated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités), and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, and at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. Her PhD dissertation examined the transformation of history painting in Britain at the time of the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts. Current research interests centre on eighteenth-century visual culture, with studies on eighteenth-century art institutions and the social uses of paintings and book illustration in, among others, Études Anglaises, Dix-Huitième Siècle and The British Art Journal. Her Eighteenth-Century Engravings and Visual History in Britain was published by Routledge in 2023. Cynthia Brokaw is Professor of History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. A scholar of late imperial Chinese history, she specialises in the history of the pre-modern Chinese book. Her Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods is a study of a rural publishing industry, its distribution networks and its impact on book culture in south China. She has also co-edited two essay collections on Chinese book history, Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (with Kai-wing Chow), and From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008 (with Christopher Reed). Richard Coulton is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London. His research explores discourses and practices of natural knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain, with a particular interest in horticultural and botanical networks. He has published on topics including the cultural history of tea, the apothecary and collector James Petiver, the professional and intellectual lives of commercial nurserymen and the prosecution of book theft in eighteenth-century London. His Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World (with Markman Ellis and Matthew Mauger) was published by Reaktion Press in 2015. His current focus is the

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Scottish naturalist James Cuninghame, the first European to collect extensive botanical material in China. Trude Dijkstra is Assistant Professor in the History of the Book at the University of Amsterdam. Formerly at the Warburg Institute, London and the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, her research focuses on the history of the book, medical history and intercultural encounters. Following a doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam on Chinese religion and philosophy in Dutch printed works, her first monograph, The Chinese Imprint. Printing and Publishing Chinese Religion and Philosophy in the Dutch Republic, 1595–1700, was published in 2022 as part of Brill’s Library of the Written Word Series. Jean-François Dunyach is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Sorbonne University, Paris. He specialises in the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in a cross-Channel and cross-Atlantic perspective. His publications include Histoire de l’Écosse (Paris, Humensis, 2023), Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne (Paris, Humensis, 2021), Sous l’empire des îles, Histoire croisée des mondes britannique et japonais (with Nathalie Kouamé, Paris, Karthala, 2020), Scots and Empire: Enlightenment and Imperialism (edited with Allan Macinnes, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 2018) and The Enlightenment in Scotland: National and International Perspectives (edited with Ann Thomson, Oxford, Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, 2015). Despina Magkanari was appointed Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and at St Petersburg State University (Joint Postdoctoral Fellowship) in 2020, with a Ph.D. in History and Civilisations from the EHESS-Paris. She is a project member of PRC Philology and Interculturality (CNRS, France – Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan) and COST Action – Islamic Legacy. Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean (1350–1750), with research interests in knowledge production in a global and cross-cultural context, the transnational history of oriental studies and the history of scholarly practices. Her book on Eurasian circulations and the emergence of Turcology is in progress. Her postdoctoral research project concerns Julius Klaproth and the circulation of orientalist knowledge in the early nineteenth century. Alicia C. Montoya is Professor of French Literature and Culture at Radboud University, The Netherlands. She is the author of Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (Paris, 2007), Medievalist Enlightenment:

Notes on Contributors

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From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge, 2013), and the co-editor of several volumes, including Women Writing Back / Writing Back Women: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era (Leiden 2010), Lumières et histoire / Enlightenment and History (Paris, 2010) and La pensée sérielle, du Moyen Age aux Lumières (Leiden, 2018). Between 2016 and 2022, she was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded MEDIATE project (Measuring Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe, 1665–1830). Sean Moore is Professor of English and a former Dean of the Honors College at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Awarded Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newport Mansions and the Library Company of Philadelphia, among others, he was also a Fulbright Scholar to the Republic of Ireland and the recipient of many academic awards. A PMLA author, he has served as editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies. His most recent book is Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1731–1814 (Oxford University Press, 2019). Francesco A. Morriello holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge and a Master’s degree in Religion from Harvard University. He has held a Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library and was the recipient of the 2014 Barry Bloomfield Award from the Bibliographical Society. His research focuses on print and book history and the movement of information in the early modern period. His monograph Messengers of Empire: Print and Revolution in the Atlantic World was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She was formerly Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London and a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Researcher at The British Museum and University College London. She holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, and recent publications include ‘“Chaos naturae et artis”: imitation, innovation, and improvisation in the library of Sir Hans Sloane. Parts 1 & 2’, Library and Information History (2020, 2021) and ‘Encoding the haunting of an object catalogue: on the potential of digital technologies to perpetuate or subvert the silence and bias of the early-modern archive’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2021).

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James Raven FBA is Life Fellow of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust, Professor in the Department of Humanities, NTNU Trondheim and Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Essex. His books include What is the History of the Book? (Cambridge, 2018); Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (London, 2014); and The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (London and New Haven, 2007); his edited Illustrated History of the Book was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Graham Shaw retired as Head of the British Library’s Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections in December 2010 and is now Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Over the past forty years he has published widely on the history of printing and publishing in South Asia from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. His latest publication is Subaltern Squibs and Sentimental Rhymes: The Raj Reflected in Light Verse: An Anthology Compiled with an Introduction, Notes and Glossary (Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2021). Cristina Soriano is Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), received the 2019 Bolton-Johnson award by the Conference of Latin American History and the 2020 Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book about Venezuela, awarded by the Venezuelan Studies Section of LASA. She is currently co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence and working on a new project on the effects of imperial transitions in the island of Trinidad.

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Introduction James Raven

T

he chapters in this volume share the conviction that the acceptance and influence of ideas is importantly related to the modes of their conveyance. Thirteen contributors examine how the material production and circulation of different textual objects affected the ways in which information and knowledge were formulated, transmitted and received in different parts of the world between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The chapters address connected concerns: the relationship between developing textual forms and the subjects of publication, the origins and effects of changing operations of long-distance communication and the consequences of differing modes of reception. The physical and communicative forms by which ideas reach their listeners and readers, in all their great variety and in so many different locations, can reinforce, qualify, question and undermine ideological confidence and trust. That materiality (which might be loosely but not exhaustively termed ‘media’), the conditions for it and the deciphering and discursive practices that proceed from it, present, filter and influence the reception of messages and knowledge. Effects range from supporting and questioning conviction to exposing or complicating falsity and propaganda. The unfamiliarity of material forms of books, pamphlets and the like to recipients in newly accessible regions of the globe added to the problematic and unpredictable manner in which knowledge was received (a complexity involving materials coming to Europe as much as from Europe). The two hundred or so years covered by this volume were years of recurrent European wars and revolutions. The conveyance of ideas and information took on unprecedented importance. Profound social, religious, cultural, economic and technological change accompanied conflict and disorder and the formation of new habits of mind associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism. It was also a period of unprecedented

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overseas exploration and invasion, of brutal conquest and enslavement and of a re-evaluation of the human. The technological advances brought increasing possibilities for knowledge transfer and exchange between peoples in different parts of the world, many of whom, for better or worse, were in contact with each other for the first time. In promoting an explicitly global perspective, contributors to this volume reassess long-standing scholarly paradigms that have shaped Eurocentric interpretations of the period, including the importance ascribed to the development of a republic of letters and of a public sphere, to an invention of the self and to a reading revolution. As a consequence of this evaluation, we might also explore how far western European periodisation of ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ maps onto processes of social, cultural, technological and intellectual change in other regions of the globe. The materialities at issue in this volume comprise not only the physical forms of texts but the relationship of these to the technological, political and social circumstances of their creation and reception. As conveyors of thought, texts travelled in many and often developing types, from prestigious volumes in richly decorated bindings to quickly composed and printed newspapers. An increasing range of carriers enabled books and other types of print and manuscript (including letters) to enjoy wider distribution and deeper social penetration. Other agencies developed over this period, such as bookshops, book clubs and lending libraries, furthered the circulation of books, pamphlets and periodicals as well as contributing to the means of financing publications and to their material form. The changing appearance and construction of these books and tracts contributed in varying ways and at different paces to the creation and shaping (and sometimes diminution) of audiences and expectations. Outside Europe, an even greater range of material textual forms existed, many, the result of centuries of production and evolution. All presented important contrasts, appreciated in varying degrees at the time, to the increased diffusion of texts from the ‘West’. Moreover, the relationship between those physical forms and the communicative modes associated with them increased in complexity over these two hundred years. The design of the text and the nature of its container affected, for example, its access, diffusion and likelihood of interception or control, and even its translation and critical review; while the particular demands from sellers and readers or the manner in which copyright was exerted or seizures of materials made (among other responses) influenced the subsequent shaping, quite directly, of books, tracts, periodicals and newspapers. How exactly these media and communicative forms evolved and how they conveyed and altered ideas in different communities in different and connected parts of the world during

Introduction

3

a period of exceptional change and increased global trade, travel and proselytising is the subject of this volume. Although these issues are common to all the chapters of this volume, the chapters are also arranged in three sections. The first section (Knowledge and Reception, Chapters 2 to 6), offers greatest attention to textual objects, objectives and space, and to the processes of creation and circulation. In Chapter 2, Richard Coulton considers the developing interest in the material collection of natural knowledge, its conveyance across a global network and the capacity of print for mediating such ‘crowd-sourced’ understanding. In Chapter 3, Alexandra Ortolja-Baird explores the different means, methods and outcomes of translation. In Chapter 4, James Raven combines study of the publication and overseas reception of natural history with the translation, picturing and perception of the exotic. In Chapter 5, Trude Dijkstra extends the perception of the exotic, or the ‘other’, through the European reading of the Chinese world by means of a materially and paratextually filtered development of genre; and in Chapter 6 Sean Moore furthers understanding of the fusion of genres in the context of transatlantic book traffic and the unexpected consequences of differently practised reading. The second section (Images and News, Chapters 7 to 10) develops the analysis of design and the different aspects of time and the speed of production and transmission. In Chapter 7, Isabelle Baudino extends earlier examples of image-rich texts in a study of international transpositions of engravings that further interrogates temporal perspectives. In Chapter 8, Jean-François Dunyach investigates innovatory printed graphics in similar transnational transit; and in Chapters 9 and 10, Francesco Morriello and Cristina Soriano move focus to the Caribbean, one British and French, and the other Spanish and South American, to consider the effects of time and distance in one of the evolving and archetypal printed products of the period, the newspaper, The third section of this volume (Multiple Diffusions, Chapters 11 to 14) attends to the further extension of social and geographical reach in which, in particular, the promulgation and clash of religions proved the catalyst for different unions of ideas and materialities. In Chapter 11, Despina Magkanari revisits the European production, circulation, rediscovery and validation of Oriental knowledge. She analyses the different networks and actors presenting differently arranged and published texts based on new contacts, travels and the collection of Islamic and Central and East Asian manuscripts and artefacts. In Chapter 12, Alicia Montoya re-examines the literary system, intellectual and material, sustaining a new pan-European diffusion of the Qur’an. In Chapter 13, Graham Shaw explores the complex fusion of different modes of literary production employed by Protestant

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missionaries in South Asia and the expectations of their reception in which the transmission of ideology was as much dependent on materialities as upon the attractiveness (or coercion) of the message. In Chapter 14, Cynthia Brokaw examines the material and intellectual diversity of the book-collecting efforts of a Protestant missionary to China in the context of the history of Chinese book collecting in Europe and what it reveals about the state of Chinese book culture and development of Western sinology. Although the arrangement is not strictly chronological, with several contributors ranging over the full period, the opening study focuses on the late seventeenth century and the later chapters on the early nineteenth century. Together, these studies examine shifting exchange across geographical, intellectual and emotional boundaries. Together, these chapters allow consideration of different modes and vehicles for the interchange and circulation of ideas and knowledge in comparative perspective. Each provides an overview of the current state of research relevant to their particular case study, with contributors drawn from a wide disciplinary, regional and generational range, opening up new approaches and pointing to new agendas. The definition of knowledge exchange and, with it, the concept of translation extend far beyond the linguistic, central though this is to the reproduction and circulation of ideas. As the following chapters demonstrate, exchange and translation encompass material forms that range from typography, orthography, the redrawing, reproduction and repositioning of images and mise en page, to physical binding, transport, shelving and cataloguing. And, as a global study, all these elements engage with the ways in which books and print operated as an obvious instrument of intellectual enquiry, colonial expansion, religious coercion and persistent communal self-identification and historical evaluation. All contributors to this volume contend that we need to challenge current spatial and temporal assumptions about such encounters by understanding the particular perspectives of readers, producers and agents in different parts of the globe. This adjustment requires an appreciation of how both metropolitan and remote cultural, political and economic realities and exigencies interacted and interfered with the circulation of texts and the mediation of ideas. Such ambition benefits from recent and diverse foundations, and the following chapters build upon pioneering studies (almost all European) which examine how ideas travelled, were translated and, in their different ways, were received between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.1 Notable among this suggestive scholarship are essays collected 1 Notable among these contributions are Louisiane Ferlier and Bénédicte Miyamoto (eds), Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s

Introduction

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together by Lise Andries and her fellow collaborators on the ‘Cultural transfers between France, Britain and Ireland’ project, which examined the ideas of French translators (and translators from the French) in transforming texts ‘in order to give their readership what they were supposed to expect’. This project developed from work by Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows, Edmond Dziembowski and others addressing what ‘transfer’ actually meant within the ‘circulation of knowledge’ between Enlightenment France and Britain.2 In turn, both sets of essays drew inspiration from the understanding of a dynamic concept of transfer advanced, also collaboratively, by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner for Franco-German contexts.3 The contributors to this volume revisit these earlier investigations about the way in which changing media affected the circulation and reception of ideas, but the following chapters also qualify and challenge certain assumptions about the relationship between ideas and forms and expand radically the geographical and social range of such history. The physical construction of texts from paper to type and engraving, their critical apparatus and paratextual features, their coverings, their modes of travel and advertisement, the manner of their collection and the changing contemporary perception of all of these things (among numerous material aspects and conditions) have been noted and integrated within numerous earlier studies, but for most, such concerns were subsidiary to the principal aim of a ‘history of Innovations, 1688–1832 (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2020); Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg and Stéphanie van Damme (eds), Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2018); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 Uppsala Studies in History of Science 35 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson Publishing International, 2009); and Ian Maclean, Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden: Brill 2009); approaches to a transnational history of the book are suggested in Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (eds), Books without Borders, 2 vols. (London, 2008); I.R. Willison, ‘Centre and Creative Periphery in the Histories of the Book in the English-Speaking World and Global English Studies’, Publishing History 59 (2006): 5–60; I.R. Willison, ‘Towards an Agenda for Imperial and Post-Imperial Book History in India and Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa’, Publishing History 60 (2006): 21–9. 2 Lise Andries, Frédéric Ogée, John Dunkley and Darach Sanfey (eds), Intellectual Journeys: The Translation of Ideas in Enlightenment England, France and Ireland (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), p. 2; Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows and Edmond Dziembowski (eds), Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010). 3 Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (eds), Transferts: les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe–XIXe siėcles) (Paris; Éd recherche sur les civilisations: Paris, 1988); cf. Michel Espagne, Les Transferts: culturels franco-allemand (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999).

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ideas’ rather than a more broadly social understanding of the European ‘Enlightenment’ or of the construction of a ‘Republic of Letters’. Conversely, the hugely increased interest in ‘book history’ (and the even more casually used ‘print culture’) has not always bridged material with ideological historical scholarship. The fundamental concerns of what, for all its contestation and redefinition, is still known as the ‘Enlightenment’4 are embedded in the following collaborative history: the investigation of reason, the senses and the condition, improvement and history of humanity, the probing and disambiguating of the divine, personal belief and institutional religion, the nature and purpose of language, the promotion of science and scientific method, and the exploration and classification of the natural world. Debate compared past with present and sought both conjectural and heuristic understanding of progress, toleration, justice, liberty and (among many other concerns) the evaluation of constitutional government and the separation of Church and State. At the same time, intransigent religious and secular authorities and new forces of reaction wielded both sword and pen. From the beginning of this period, ‘discovery’ was the watchword. Writers agonised about the merits of ancients versus moderns and the application of natural and rationally explicable law. By the end of this period, millions of printed words were devoted to intrinsic rights, progress and economic self-interest, with fierce and derivative debate (and no little moral panic) about Republicanism and emancipation, as featured (with notable transnational cross-contacts in print and publishing activity) in many of the following chapters. Above all, knowledge itself became the central object of pursuit and thus the means for its creation and circulation –what we now might style media and mediation – became the subject of fascination and concern. As featured in all the case studies in this volume, agents of knowledge and information transmission convey a sense of rarefied intellectual ferment, but also of the questioning and destabilising of accepted norms at humbler levels of social communication and discussion. In contrasting and mythologised European representations of China, certain elite fiction adopted reports of apparent Confucian accommodation of Christianity, but this was countered by more widespread and negative European representations of the Orient. To give another example from the following chapters, the subtleties of intentional assimilation (or ‘acculturation strategies’) 4 The term ‘Radical Enlightenment’ – essentially principles (sometimes adopted teleologically) of full individual liberty and freedom of thought and expression for the individual and the press, even embracing democracy and sexual and racial equality – is also employed critically by several of the contributors to this volume.

Introduction

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seemed lost on later missionaries to South Asia who carried with them a determined faith in the efficacy of their own printed and totemic artefacts, born, it would seem, of a simply historicised understanding of the triumph of the press in early modern Europe. The different communities of savants and clerics and of the intrigued but relatively unlearned jostled in the burgeoning literary infrastructure of these centuries. As the volume of European printing soared, so expanded new spaces for reading, conversation and the borrowing of tracts and books. Across Europe and later in North America and distant territories, bookshops, coffee shops and differently evolving forms of library accompanied escalating activity in reviewing, journalism, editing and printed and other public responses from readers. Interactions increased and became more complex, but the consolidation of literary forms with distinctive material as well as textual identities such as chapbooks, small tracts, newspapers and learned periodicals also increased and entrenched the demarcation of readerships. In all cases, the textual objects, the places in which they might be read and the differently created readerships contrasted but also interacted then (as now) with very different non-European products, traditions, institutions and practices. More broadly still, much recent debate has focused upon the impact of social media on knowledge production and dissemination. Anxiety about ‘fake news’ has prompted questions about the ownership of and control over media forms, about the pace of innovation and about differential access to new modes of messaging and the methods of retrieval of information and knowledge. Concerns have increased about educational and social inequalities, about social and political polarization and about changes, both beneficial and deleterious, to reactive behaviours. Those experiences and discussions have heightened interest in the exact means by which knowledge and information (and ‘misinformation’) is created and exchanged and how its impact relates to changing technologies. We are increasingly asked to reassess connections between what we read, view and hear, and how that is transmitted. We are engaged anew with consideration of the medium and the message – of the relationship between the generation of ideas and the precise methods and effects of their dissemination. And the degree to which such knowledge is ‘exchanged’ is a moot point, as, again, are the divisions in readerships encouraged by different material textual forms. It is also the case that few histories of the influence in this period of print and books, whether primarily bibliographical or intellectual, have attempted non-European comparisons and perspectives. Among the most

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obvious exceptions are transatlantic book histories,5 in turn built upon foundational studies in historical transatlanticism.6 Even the much-visited transatlantic perspective, however, is often bounded by linguistic and national difference. As yet, for example, scholarship from English-speaking regions has not fully benefited from continuing French and Hispanic research in transatlantic book-trade traffic and connections.7 Above all, South and East Asian and particularly Chinese comparative studies in book history are relatively unadvanced, despite important pioneering studies in 5 Including Michael Winship, ‘The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams (eds), Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution and Consumption in America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 98–122; Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Leslie Howsam and James Raven (eds), Books Between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, 1620–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 6 Notably, Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario 20 (1996): 19–44; Jack P. Greene, ‘Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World’, in Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 17–42, Nicholas Canny, ‘Writing Atlantic History, or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America’, Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1093– 114; and collections of journal articles in ‘The Nature of Atlantic History’, Itinerario 23: 2 (1999); ‘Forum: The New British History in Atlantic Perspective’, American Historical Review 104: 2 (1999): 426–500; and ‘Oceans Connect’, Geographical Review 89: 2 (1999). Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 7 The French Atlantic is studied in Robert and Marianne Cornevin, La France et les Français outré-mer, de la première croisade à la fin du Second Empire (Paris: Tallandier, 1990); Jean Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, des origins à 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991); Alain Saussol and Joseph Zitomersky (eds), Colonies, territoires, sociétés: l’enjeu français (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996); Philippe Haudrère, Le grand commerce maritime au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); and Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003 and new edn, 2008); while active work on the Hispanic Atlantic such as Martha Patricia Irigoyen Troconis, La Universidad Novohispana: Voces y enseñanzas clásicas (Mexico City: UNAM, 2003) and more recently on the Hispanic book trade by Manuel Suárez, Dinastía de tinta y papel. Los Zúñiga y Ontiveros en la cultura novohispana (1756–1825) (México: UNAM-IIB, 2019) and Manuel Suárez (ed.), De eruditione americana. Prácticas de lectura y escritura en los ámbitos académicos novohispanos (México: UNAM-IIB, 2019) are too little known by American and British scholars.

Introduction

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relational publishing, communications and reading histories.8 An especially stimulating collection of essays assembled by Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo, focused on the brokerage and networks of scientific knowledge in the period 1770–1820 and notably on the Atlantic, South Asian and Pacific regions.9 The chapters which follow take certain cues from this research in the instrumental role of mediators and intermediaries, whether personnel (such as brokers, messengers, translators, missionaries, spies and entrepreneurs) or institutional, material and technological agencies (or, as Alexandra Ortolja-Baird puts it in Chapter 3, ‘this entanglement of press, translators, institutions and administration’). In remapping networks of knowledge exchange that link different parts of the world in increasingly dense and entangled systems of production and circulation, chapters in this volume revisit the promotion of and comparison of natural science, and also broaden the purview to other forms of knowledge production. In introducing themes that will be pursued by subsequent volumes in this series, contributors also address a wider period and probe underexplored and less-attended global regions and connections. What is clear is that in the two centuries between 1650 and 1850, different types of writing and printing enabled the long-distance transmission of knowledge in multiple and contrasting parts of the world. The expansion in the output and reach of books, as well as prints, periodicals and newspapers, with their concomitant impact, is one of the most significant features of these years of human history. There were, of course, regions where writing, let alone printing (in its various forms), was rare or even unknown. Knowledge was primarily exchanged orally and visually in numerous, sometimes nomadic, communities in great swathes of North America, Africa and central Asia, and also in many other regions, notably East and South Asia. But even in many parts of Asia, Europe and the Middle East where so much knowledge was imparted orally, written and printed texts were never far 8 Including Joseph P. McDermott and Peter Burke (eds), The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850: Connections and Comparisons (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015); Cynthia J. Brokaw and Peter F. Kornicki (eds), The History of the Book in East Asia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Peter F. Kornicki and Francesca Orsini, The History of the Book in South Asia (Farnham: Ashgate 2013); Geoffrey Roper, The History of the Book in the Middle East (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Caroline Davies and David Johnson (eds), The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Rasoul Aliakbari (ed.), Comparative Print Culture: A Study of Alternative Literary Modernities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 9 Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 Uppsala Studies in History of Science 35 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson Publishing International, 2009).

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away. Material and oral/aural modes of communication overlapped and cross-fertilised. In all the following case studies, whether of the collection of natural history in Scandinavia and North America, or the abridgement and translation of canonic publications in central Europe, or the transmission of news in the Caribbean, or the creation of texts in and about India, China and the Arabic world, spoken communication remained integral to both production and reception. Conversely, texts supported conversation and performative and recitative practices, from liturgies and sermons and Qur’anic Tilawah and Qira’at to communal instruction, lectures and scientific demonstrations. This entanglement underscores another feature of the following studies: the avoidance of the linear assumptions that all too often pervade histories of the Enlightenment world. Instead, attention is paid to resistances in space and time. The progress and ‘improvement’ to which so many writers aspired was not inevitable. The global encounters detailed below were often problematic and not uni-directional, however remorseless and effortless certain colonial expansion might have been regarded. Gaps and setbacks – if setbacks they really were – interrupt and complicate any easy account of discovery and advancement, ranging from reimagined pasts and recycled images of natural phenomena to the differential reception and collection of the Qur’an and to the rediscovery later in the period of what was known and discussed more than a hundred years before. Similarly questioned are assumptions about global comparisons in the processes and materials of literary production and the means of their communication. Take, for example, the history of printing in South Asia, which not only reassesses the relationship between script and print but in exploring the residual dominance of orality offers insights into interactions between texts, speech and the aural that are so often ignored in the history of European communications. Again, glib assertions about the efficiency and superiority of printing by moveable type (the so-called Gutenberg revolution) are strikingly challenged by histories of the printing technologies and the replication and storage of texts in East Asia and elsewhere. There is, in fact, a dual revisionism in play here: the avoidance of a primitivist historical take on non-Western societies and their interaction with the apparently more complex developing nations of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, but also the contemporary Enlightenment history of the often unexpected complexity of engagement. A notable example focuses on understanding that the magical powers of books and their ritualistic uses that were apparent (in various ways) to far-travelled missionaries might also be apparent in communities close to their original production. In different societies, by different means, material forms promote perceptions

Introduction

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of the power of texts; in addition to the words read and heard it is the way that the text is physically created and embodied – graphics, imprinting, engraving, inking, coverings, bindings, paper type and much more – that contributes to the effect on readers and listeners. Materiality effectively becomes animate. All this suggests that, whatever its current limitations in geographical reach, historical research in the social history of knowledge and the cultural contexts of intellectual, political and religious thought has constructively changed in recent years, much prompted by a repositioning of bibliographical study. Book history and the history of the impact of print have moved over the last quarter century from niche topics based around primary bibliographical research in noted collections, libraries and national archives to the mainstream of early modern and eighteenth-century research in history and literary studies. The study of the transmission of texts now brings together historians of science, ideas, religion and empire, as well as scholars working at the interface between literature and popular culture. Alert to past imbalances and further comparative possibilities (some enabled by advancing digitisation10), we are able to examine in new ways how the organisation of knowledge changed and the ways in which this organisation – including cataloguing, indexing and interleaving – affected modes of knowledge transmission and reception. Study of this organisation of textual transmission further questions how the movement of texts and ideas between public and private spaces is both facilitated and controlled. As modern parallels with social media confirm, the potential in new material forms of messaging for greater empowerment and subversion prompted new policing and political interventions. The further transformation we revisit is geographical: the expansion of Europe to attain global reach by the mid-nineteenth century, but also the concomitant development of other networks of commerce and military extending from the Americas, Africa and Asia. By trade, territorial acquisitiveness and adventuring, the emissaries of European rulers and governments, merchants, combatants, explorers and many others besides traversed the oceans and interior lands and rivers. Colonial and trade wars inevitably resulted, but so also did diplomatic missions, cultural and religious encounters and the transfer – efficiently or imperfectly – of diverse forms of knowledge. A greater appreciation of this diffusion has moved 10 Numerous digitization projects have enabled research underpinning the following chapters. All, however, also attest to the importance of the physical examination of texts, even though many online resources are now invaluable in identifying items and enabling basic textual and archival comparisons.

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the trajectory of book history, which had been largely framed by national and linguistic interests, to global connections and comparisons. Such geographical spread is especially germane to the period of this volume and series. During the eighteenth century, precise interactions advanced in bulk and complexity in the trade in books, translation, reprinting and the communication of news and regulations. The global context, so long overlooked, offers an important subject for new investigation. What are the political, cultural and social effects of knowledge transfer and global encounters? In understanding the transformation in the book trade and its social interactions we start with one critical development: changes to the form, shape and production frequencies of the actual ‘book’. ‘Book’ is itself a clumsy descriptor when ‘the history of books’ now routinely includes prints, newspapers and a variety of printed and manuscript forms. This awkwardness is the more so in a period when the European codex, the material book which has been the focus of most studies, so diversified in shape and substance. These changes affected production methods and schedules and distribution procedures and possibilities, but also the reading, valuation and perception of these objects, now including newspapers, periodicals and magazines, ready-bound ‘library’ series and other distinctive products of the press. In material form but also in design, typographical mise en page and imaginative construction, the message conveyed elided into other normally discrete forms such as written correspondence and small works of jobbing printing. Thus (of only a few more obvious examples) the increasingly popular novel spawned a genre of epistolary fiction, the play book became a separate more standardised production, the appearance of text in columns moved from bibles and certain works of scholarly explication to be the normative format of magazines and newspapers, and engraved plates were more regularly adopted in serials and books of instruction and scientific explication. In such ways, it is the purpose of this volume to interrogate these interactions between material form and conditions and intellectual developments between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Such an extended history, by case studies and comparative analysis of script, print, material culture and communication networks, aims to transform our understanding of the social history of knowledge in this critical period of change and in global terms. By meticulous and comparative study of interaction between writers, readers and texts of all kinds, from philosophical texts to everyday ephemera, we might explore the fuller social history of knowledge. These endeavours forge fresh connections between different research subjects, conceptual approaches and disciplinary frameworks

Introduction

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that have the potential profoundly to revise the transnational European and global history of communication. Here, the global, boundary-crossing dimension is fundamental and reflects some of the most exciting new work currently happening in book and media history.

PA RT ON E

Knowledge and Reception

2

Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History: James Petiver’s Museum Richard Coulton

O

n 27 November 1695, James Petiver (c.1663–1718) surely revelled in self-congratulation when he numbered among three members of the medical professions who newly ‘subscrib’d their Names and were admitted fellows’ at the annual meeting of the prestigious Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.1 A flourishing urban apothecary with substantial ambitions in natural history, this was for Petiver an intellectual and social achievement. To commemorate the privilege, he issued his first substantial venture in print, proudly supplementing his name on the title page with the qualifications ‘Pharmacop[ola] Londinen[sis] & Regiae Societatis Socio’ (‘Apothecary of London & Fellow of the Royal Society’). He also dated a postscript ‘Advertisement’ to 30 November 1695, the institutional anniversary on ‘the feast of St Andrew’ stipulated in the Society’s royal charter.2 The title of Petiver’s text was Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima, Rariora Naturæ Continens: viz. animalia, fossilia, plantas, ex variis mundi plagis advecta, ordine digesta, et nominibus propriis signata: ‘The first century of Petiver’s museum, containing rarities of nature: namely animals, fossils, plants, imported out of the various places of the world, classified by rank and distinguished by their proper names’.3 As its name 1 Royal Society, London, Journal Book, 1690–96, JBO/9, fol. 203. 2 ‘Translation of First Charter, granted to the President, Council and Fellows of the Royal Society of London, by King Charles the Second, a.d. 1662.’, The Royal Society, https://royalsociety.org/-/media/Royal_Society_Content/about-us/history/2012-­ Supplemental-Charter.pdf [accessed 11 Mar. 2021]. 3 James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima, Rariora Naturæ Continens (London: S. Smith & B. Walford, 1695) (trans. Richard Coulton). An online edition of a bound copy in the Library of the Netherlands Entomological Society, containing all

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portentously signals, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima lists 100 objects from Petiver’s collection of natural curiosities. Heralding the inception of a serial publication that ran to ten ‘centuries’ by 1703, Musei Petiveriani is at once singular and heterogeneous in its authorship, local and global in its means of knowledge production, the metropolitan scientist choreographing natural objects that have been ‘ex variis mundi plagis advecta’ by a wide range of actors. This chapter analyses the material, geographical and social features of Musei Petiveriani in order to exemplify the generative (if also potentially exploitative) cultures of global transaction with which Global Exchanges of Knowledge is concerned. The first section outlines Petiver’s purposes and priorities in authoring and distributing his publication, above all his commitment to acknowledging the many contributors to his ‘museum’ by name. The metaphor of ‘crowd-sourcing’ is adopted from the contemporary digital world to supply one means for conceiving the networked multiplicity of these collaborators. The second section outlines the bibliographical dimensions of Musei Petiveriani within the context of its ideological configuration of the museum as textual space. In the third section a critical and quantitative analysis of Musei Petiveriani particularises Petiver’s ‘crowd’. Who were its members, what did they collect and where in the world were they distributed? While the focus is necessarily on those whom Petiver names, the conclusion raises some pressing questions concerning how our reading of this crowd’s heterogeneity might move beyond the explicit commemoration of European travellers, to rehabilitate global contributions that Petiver seemed less inclined to acknowledge in print. Such an approach begins to make it possible to glimpse processes of cultural hybridity that Musei Petiveriani at once embodies yet also occludes from the historical gaze.

Crowd-sourced Collecting: Science in the Making James Petiver both epitomised and defied the conventions of London’s scholarly communities at the turn of the eighteenth century.4 Raised in the City (although briefly educated at Rugby School in Warwickshire), six parts and the two engraved plates comprising Musei Petiveriani (1695–1703) as a whole, can be viewed via the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), https://www. biodiversitylibrary.org/item/255668 [accessed 11 Mar. 2021]. 4 For a recent account of Petiver’s biography, his early life especially, see Richard Coulton, ‘What He Hath Gather’d Together Shall Not Be Lost: Remembering James Petiver’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 74 (2020): 189–211, https:// doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0012. See also Raymond Phineas Stearns, ‘James Petiver:

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he worked an apprenticeship to Charles Feltham, apothecary to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, between 1677 and 1685. By 1687, Petiver was established in business at the sign of the White Cross on Aldersgate Street (where he resided until his death in 1718), conducting medical consultations and trading as a retailer and wholesaler of drugs.5 An upwardly mobile man of the middling sort, Petiver excelled at leveraging his contacts and skills to construct webs of metropolitan intelligence and international correspondence. Through identifying the best suppliers, composing detailed instructions for his agents and managing the transportation of precious goods, he furnished his cabinet with natural objects harvested from across the world (as Europeans knew it). He greedily accumulated dried plants and preserved invertebrates from North and South America, Europe and Africa, continental Asia (from Arabia to China’s eastern seaboard) and the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. This collection functioned both personally as a magazine of global objects for study and professionally (in the case of botanical material) as a stockpile of potential novel medicaments to bring to market. It also comprised social capital with which he could advance his own status, secure the friendship of those he valued and prime new pipelines of exchange whenever a promising opportunity arose. Petiver’s knack for positioning himself strategically to advantage within networks of intellectual sociability earned him the patronage and friendship of Hans Sloane (among others), physician to the elite and Secretary of the Royal Society whose own collection ultimately inaugurated the British Museum.6 Sloane was to conclude in a posthumous tribute that Petiver exercised ‘great Pains to gather together the Productions of nature in England and by his Correspondents and Acquaintance, all over the World procured, I believe, a greater Quantity than any Man before him[,] […] many of them such as were not taken Notice of by any Natural Historian before him’.7 The physician had by then purchased his late friend’s books, papers and curiosities, doubling the size of his already impressive hortus Promoter of Natural Science’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 62 (1952): 243–365. 5 Katrina Maydom, ‘James Petiver’s Apothecary Practice and the Consumption of American Drugs in Early Modern London’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 74 (2020): 213–38, http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0015. 6 James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (London: Allen Lane, 2017); Alice Marples, ‘James Petiver’s “joynt-stock”: Middling Agency in Urban Collecting Networks’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 74 (2020): 239–58, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0013. 7 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St Christophers and Jamaica, 2 vols. (London: Hans Sloane, 1707–25), 2: iv–v.

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siccus that subsequently became a foundation deposit of the Natural History Museum in London. In no small part due to Petiver’s ‘great Pains’ the Sloane Herbarium now constitutes the world’s most extensive extant early modern botanical repository.8 Recent research has focused productively on these aspects of Petiver’s biography, not least by interrogating his manuscript corpus at the British Library and bringing it into dialogue with botanical and entomological specimens at the Natural History Museum.9 By contrast, there has been little scrutiny of Petiver’s energies as an author, yet print was integral to his methods.10 As well as contributing regularly to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (and the less rarefied Monthly Miscellany; or, Memoirs for the Curious), he was responsible for around thirty stand-alone publications. Despite modest resources, Petiver’s commercial nous equipped him to engage creatively with the book trade. His oeuvre employed a variety of strategies including self- and subscription financing, collaborations with the editors of periodicals, letterpress and copperplate printing and the serial issue of major works.11 The material characteristics of his publications imply the economic constraints he faced, appearing typically in formats requiring no more than a single printed sheet per copy, whether as folio, quarto or octavo pamphlets, or as single half-sheets. The typesetting tends to be tightly composited, while the physical quality of the product is often poor. Indeed, although a handful of ambitious projects (including Musei Petiveriani) were undertaken with respected booksellers, many of Petiver’s ventures were self-funded, often with restricted print-runs that seem to have accepted a limited readership. It was surely nonetheless of advantage 8 Katie Pavid, ‘Hans Sloane: Physician, Collector and Botanist’, Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/hans-sloane-physician-collector-botanist. html [accessed 16 Mar. 2021]. 9 See, for example, Richard I. Vane-Wright, ‘James Petiver’s 1717 Papilionum Britanniae: An Analysis of the First Comprehensive Account of British Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 74 (2020): 275–302, http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0014; Charles E. Jarvis, ‘“The most common grass, rush, moss, fern, thistles, thorns or vilest weeds you can find”: James Petiver’s Plants’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 74 (2020): 303–28, http://doi.org/10.1098/ rsnr.2019.0012. 10 Exceptions to this rule include Arnold Hunt, ‘Under Sloane’s Shadow: The Archive of James Petiver,’ in Vera Keller, Anna Marie Roos and Elizabeth Yale (eds), Archival Afterlives: Life, Death and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 194–222; and Charles E. Jarvis, ‘An Annotated Bibliography of the Printed Works of James Petiver (c. 1663–1718)’, Archives of Natural History, 48 (2021): 346–67. 11 See Jarvis, ‘Annotated Bibliography’.

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that this lightweight output could both be produced expeditiously and communicated practicably to distant correspondents, while remaining at a price-point suited to the pockets of not just monied gentlemen but his peers among tradesmen and merchants.12 Petiver’s works principally comprise catalogues of specimens that are sometimes accompanied by relatively unprepossessing engravings. He also printed directions for collecting and preserving natural history objects, intended to provision and expand his network of collaborators.13 Most frequently Petiver’s inventories detail his own collections, although some specify desiderata, extract lists from other naturalists or itemise observations from his own fieldwork. Musei Petiveriani, the first of Petiver’s three major works, publicly enumerates his most prized curiosities.14 It signals his scientific abilities, documents the global provenance of his cabinet and disseminates new knowledge about the world. Importantly, however, Petiver’s works index people and places as well as plants and insects.15 Explicitly acknowledging his collaborators by name, Musei Petiveriani was designed to bestow a mark of gratitude or favour upon patrons and dependents. Moreover, it set the standard for Petiver’s future publications, which advertise more than conceal the complex and various genealogies of his museum. The text does not just depose ‘ready-made science’ (as Latour puts it) in the form of abstract matters of fact – such as an attentive and systematic polynomial determination for a new species – but also exposes ‘science in the making’ through delineating and reinforcing the networked multiplicity upon which Petiver’s knowledge production was predicated.16 In an international environment of European aggrandisement that supported his regular acquisition of novel plants and insects, Petiver’s decision to publish little and often enabled him regularly to circulate official updates concerning his ever-expanding collections and to claim the kudos of priority in describing previously unknown specimens. As Elizabeth Yale 12 This argument springs in part from as yet unpublished work by Arnold Hunt on ‘James Petiver and the Book Trade’, presented at the Remembering James Petiver conference (Linnean Society of London, 26 Apr. 2018). 13 Charles E. Jarvis, ‘“Take with you a small Spudd or Trowell”: James Petiver’s Directions for Collecting Natural Curiosities’, in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Naturalists in the Field: Collecting, Recording and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 212–39. 14 His other major works were Gazophylacii Naturæ et Artis (‘A Treasure-House of Nature and Art’) (1702–11), a kind of illustrated recasting of Musei Petiveriani; and A Catalogue of Mr Ray’s English Herbal Illustrated (1712–15). 15 James Delbourgo, ‘Listing People’, Isis, 103 (2012): 735–42. 16 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 1–17.

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puts it, the methodology of ‘exchange encouraged scholars to think of their work as never fixed and never finished. Instability and incompleteness came to mark the production and consumption of natural knowledge in both print and manuscript.’17 Musei Petiveriani fulfils this science-in-themaking approach through its open-ended documentation of an ever-accreting series of objects and data. Moreover, pragmatically managing such publications not only allowed Petiver to advance projects relatively rapidly, but also reinforced the representation of ceaseless scholarly sociability – through repeated public expressions of obligation to named individuals – that was so vital to sustaining his museum’s ecosystem of donors and correspondents. This was a deliberate strategy. If he established himself as a pre-eminent collector of global natural history curiosities, Petiver could procure for himself the highest degree of cachet within the leading echelons of Enlightenment natural philosophy. Yet his key technological innovation was far from elitist. Petiver deployed ordinary people as his functionaries, enthusing them with a confidence that natural history was a discipline in which they could participate by acting vicariously on his behalf. A productive analogy can be drawn with twenty-first-century digital crowd-sourcing, ‘a distributed problem-solving and production model’ dependent upon ‘outsourcing a function or activity of an organisation to a network of people in the form of an open call’.18 ‘Crowd’ in this sense means not the spontaneous mobile vulgus but, rather, a large body of people who voluntarily assemble for a common purpose (the ‘conventionalized crowd’ whose ‘behavior […] is expressed in established and regularized ways’.)19 In particular, business theorists have identified ‘micro-task crowdsourcing’ as an aggregating process to ‘engage a crowd to undertake work that is often unachievable through standard procedures due to its sheer size or complexity’.20 In these terms, Petiver assigned to his networked ‘crowd’ the relatively straightforward ‘micro-task’ of gathering specimens for transmission to him in London, where they formed a museum of a ‘sheer size’ and 17 Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 3. 18 C. Devece, D. Palacios and B. Ribeiro-Navarrete, ‘The Effectiveness of Crowdsourcing in Knowledge-Based Industries: The Moderating Role of Transformational Leadership and Organisational Learning’, Economic Research, 32 (2019): 335–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/1331677X.2018.1547204. 19 Herbert Blumer, ‘Collective Behaviour’, in Alfred McClung Lee (ed.), New Outline of the Principles of Sociology (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1946), pp. 165–222 (p. 178). 20 John Prpić et al., ‘How to Work a Crowd: Developing Crowd Capital through Crowdsourcing’, Business Horizons, 58 (2015): 77–85 (p. 79), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. bushor.2014.09.005.

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‘complexity’ that was necessarily ‘unachievable’ for a lone individual. Moreover, Petiver understood intuitively how to support ‘user engagement’ across this crowd by appealing to his collaborators’ ‘inherent personal interest’ in natural history, ensuring ‘goal clarity’ through scripting standard instructions and sustaining their ‘motivation to contribute’ by rewarding them with published acknowledgements.21 Print was Petiver’s essential lubricant for his crowd-sourced collecting machine and via Musei Petiveriani he applied it in earnest for the first time.

Musei Petiveriani: of Petiver’s Museum The Latin title of Musei Petiveriani performs a series of knowing manoeuvres enveloped in the language of learning. ‘Musei’, the genitive form of ‘Museum’, signals a material and spatial concept very much in transition at the turn of the eighteenth century, as the older meaning of a repository of objects for private study gradually gave way to notions of public accessibility and benefit.22 Petiver’s designation recalled printed precedents, too, above all Museum Wormianum (1655) by the Danish physician Ole Worm and Musæum Tradescantianum; or, A Collection of Rarities Preserved at South-Lambeth neer London by John Tradescant (1656).23 In similarly assigning his name as the proprietor of a ‘Museum’ he deemed worthy of a published catalogue, Petiver was claiming the heritage of internationally respected scholarship (Worm) and instructive spectacle (the Tradescants). While he did not operate his collection formally as a public display, in certain respects the text itself became Petiver’s ‘museum’ venue via which its author–collector postulated and reached an audience. The ‘impulse to textualize collections’, as Marjorie Swann describes such early modern catalogue making, was integrated with the practice of collecting, contributing to a dialectical interplay through which Petiver could locate ‘a nonproprietary audience to validate the noteworthy status of the collection and its

21 Triparna de Vreede et al, ‘A Theoretical Model of User Engagement in Crowdsourcing’, in Pedro Antunes et al (eds), Collaboration and Technology (Berlin: Springer, 2013), pp. 94–109. 22 Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds), The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 23 Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum, seu historia rerum rariorum (Ledien: Jean Elzevir, 1655); John Tradescant, Musæum Tradescantianum; or, A Collection of Rarities Preserved at South-Lambeth neer London (London: Nathanael Brooke, 1656).

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owner’.24 Musei Petiveriani at once beseeches and asserts public value for the private cabinets of curiosity in Petiver’s shop on Aldersgate Street. Petiver had begun his own herbarium no later than the early 1680s and soon began to cultivate the correspondence of anyone in whom he saw a potential gatherer of specimens. By June 1695, he had conceived the ‘centuries’ of his Musei Petiveriani, which he mentioned in writing to his kinsman and fellow naturalist William Sherard (1659–1728).25 The same letter reports that Sloane was then preparing the initial sheets of his Catalogus Plantarum quae in insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt (‘Catalogue of plants that grow indigenously in the island of Jamaica’), while the botanical Superintendent of Hampton Court gardens, Leonard Plukenet, was completing the lavishly engraved plates of his Phytographia (‘Images of Plants’).26 As Petiver knew, print was an increasingly respectable and powerful means for natural historians to claim the credit of public scholarship within the economies of intellectual exchange that structured the so-called Republic of Letters. Petiver wanted in. If he lacked Sloane’s or Plukenet’s connections to the royal and noble households of the quality, he would do it his own way by capitalising upon the quantity of his acquaintance among merchants and medical men. The first century of Musei Petiveriaini itemises 100 specimens from Petiver’s collection arranged into two broad groupings that align with his principal interests in entomology and botany: twenty ‘Insects, Shells, Fossils, &c.’, followed by eighty ‘Trees, Herbs, &c.’. 27 The former are organised into broad classificatory groups, such as butterflies and snails, while the plants in the second section are listed alphabetically by Latin name. Pre-Linnaean polynomials typically commence with a generic name that approximates to the modern family or genus determination, so this method partially arranges similar species together. Nonetheless, it is important to grasp that while the text demonstrates Petiver’s capacity as the natural historian who identifies and names these ‘rariora naturæ’, they are selected fundamentally as objects within his museum and only secondarily – if still vitally – for their scientific significance. While disseminating knowledge 24 Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 10. 25 James Petiver to William Sherard, London, 21 June 1695 [draft], London, British Library, Sloane MS 3332, fols. 126v–128r. 26 Hans Sloane, Catalogus plantarum quae in insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt (London: D[aniel] Browne, 1696); Leonard Plukenet, Phytographia, 4 vols. (London: Leonard Plukenet, 1691–96). 27 James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani centuria prima (London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1695).

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about previously unknown species is crucial to Musei Petiveriani, this is not a work of systematic taxonomy. Rather, it is one of deliberate curation: both of Petiver’s private museum and of his public status. Petiver ruthlessly exploited typographical possibilities to cram as much useful detail as possible into Musei Petiveriani. All 100 items are denoted with Latin polynomials in roman type. English commentary and bibliographical references (qualified with a question mark where there is uncertainty) are set in italic, with vernacular English names sporadically in black letter. Around two-fifths of the ‘century’ are designated by additional marks either ‘not to have been known before’ in natural history publications (an asterisk) or to be ‘new, or but doubtfully describ’d’ (a manicule). A similar proportion are acknowledged to have been contributed from specific people (twenty-five different individuals are named in this respect). An ‘A .’ indicates a specimen that is a ‘Native of England’ and is applied to eighteen of the twenty ‘Insects, Shells, Fossils, &c.’ and thirty-five of the eighty ‘Trees, Herbs, &c.’. Six of the plants are flagged as ‘Offic.’, indicating they are official drugs ‘of Medicinal Use in the Shops’: while Petiver’s study of botany extended well beyond the materia medica, he had self-evident intellectual and commercial interests in the pharmacological viability of both new and known species. Musei Petiveriani eventually comprised ten centuries across six octavos printed on single sheets over eight successive years. The first (issue 1) and eighth (issue 5) centuries were afforded their own pamphlets, while the remainder were paired in issues each listing 200 specimens. Along with the first century, centuries two and three (issue 2, 30 May 1698) and four and five (issue 3, 31 August 1699) were printed by Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford (proclaimed as ‘Reg[iae] Societatis Typograph[ica]’, or ‘Printers to the Royal Society’).28 Although no printer is named for centuries six and seven (issue 4, dated ‘1699’), centuries eight (issue 5, 31 December 1700) and nine and ten (issue 6, 16 January 1703) were again published by Smith, this time in partnership with Christopher Bateman.29 Sequential pagination runs throughout the issues (six gatherings totalling ninety-six pages) but only the first bears a formal title page. A consistent format catalogues all 1,000 objects: a Latin specimen denomination, 28 James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani centuria secunda & tertia (London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1698); Musei Petiveriani centuria quarta & quinta (London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1699). 29 James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani centuria sexta & septima (London: James Petiver, 1699); James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani centuria octava (London: Samuel Smith and Christopher Bateman, 1700); Musei Petiveriani centuria nona & decima (London: Samuel Smith and Christopher Bateman, 1703).

Fig. 2.1. Specimen of Selaginella exaltata (Kuntze) Spring collected by Archibald Steward from New Caledonia (Darién, Panama), 1690s, Natural History Museum (London), Sloane Herbarium, HS 157, fol. 8. Item 533 in Musei Petiveriani. Note the label excised from p. 52 of Petiver’s printed text and the manuscript annotation ‘Mus. nost. 533.’ Credit: © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum. Photo: Charles E. Jarvis.

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bibliographical cross-references where Petiver knows it to have been previously described and often a personal acknowledgement or very brief commentary. The use of black letter for vernacular names persists only intermittently after the first century (although it is deployed for many proper names in century eight). A range of paratexts surrounds the centuries, relating to the acquisition, explication or provenance of Petiver’s collections. They include a sententious prefatory address to the reader in Latin (issue 1); a long ‘Advertisement’ setting out ‘some short Instructions or an easie Method’ for Petiver’s ‘kind Friends in different parts of the World’ to follow when collecting natural specimens (issue 2); three sets of biographical squibs commending specific individuals whose contributions have particularly enhanced his museum (issues 3, 5 and 6); and catalogues of ‘desideratæ’ that Petiver wants to obtain, both ‘Drugs’ from the ‘East-’ and ‘West-Indies’ (issue 3) and plants from Caspar Bauhin’s Prodromos Theatri botanici (‘A Treatise of the Theatre of Botany’) (1620) (issue 4). This paratextual apparatus supports and sustains the central aim of Musei Petiveriani: to facilitate the acquisition of natural history objects – and knowledge about them – via a geographically dispersed network. The extent of the back matter both is defined by and constrains the letterpress afforded to the specimen indexes, enacting a running trade-off between ‘ready-made science’ (the catalogue itself ) and ‘science in the making’ (the paratexts). For all of its stark Latin itemisation, this is ultimately a personal publication, one that not only catalogues a private collection but also exercises the affectionate rhetoric and formal markers of epistolary interaction to address a particular body of readers. The ‘Directions’ that conclude the second issue, for example, terminate with the reassurance that: As amongst Plants […] so in all other things the most common as well as rare i.e. whatsoever you meet with, will be Welcome to Sir Your most Obliged and Humble Servant James Petiver. From my house in Aldersgate-street, London. May 30. 1698.

Petiver’s methods blur the distinctions between the social and scientific dimensions of manuscript letters, printed texts and museum collections. This is materially true of many of his extant herbarium sheets, on which

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dried plants are arranged in dialogue with handwritten annotations from the collector, notes inscribed by Petiver and printed labels excised directly from his catalogues.30 It also applies to the many textual roles Petiver afforded to Musei Petiveriani: as a representation of his collection highlights, as a constitution of his museum space, as an embodiment of his power to orchestrate natural history knowledge, as an object to gratify and incentivise collaborators. A memorandum compiled in Petiver’s notebook during December 1695 records upwards of thirty ‘Persons to whom I have given of my first Century’. Some were singled out for special treatment, their names annotated ‘chart. coul. & pap. alb.’ to indicate presentation copies on high-quality white paper (and perhaps with the engraved plate hand-coloured).31 Recipients included several of those name-checked in Centuria prima (including Sloane) as well as others whom Petiver now courted, like the ship’s surgeon Richard Planer (soon to make collections for Petiver during ‘Guinnea’ voyages transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic). It is true that these gifts were not consistently reciprocated – an unsolicited copy for Daniel Mackinen on Antigua proved apparently fruitless – but Petiver seemingly viewed such failures as a tolerable risk of his crowd-sourcing policy.32 As Swann has it, ‘the textualized collection constructs and embodies new social relations, new alignments of people as well as physical objects’.33 Musei Petiveriani sought to accomplish this both as a representation of ‘physical objects’ in its author’s collection and by operating itself as an object of value within the economies of social and material exchange that he manipulated. Petiver himself was ready to point this out, as he did when remitting to James Cuninghame (in China) a copy of his fifth issue: ‘I shall also goe on as my Friends shall enrich me with ye continuation of my Centuries as yu may see by my 8th in wch you have also a share.’34 The final main section of this essay presents a quantitative survey of the collaborators whom Petiver acknowledged in print across the six issues of Musei Petiveriani.

30 See Jarvis, ‘James Petiver’s Plants’. 31 London, British Library, Sloane MS 3332, fol. 128v. 32 James Petiver to Daniel Mackinen (‘Dr Mackenning’), London, 17 Dec. 1695 [draft], London, British Library, Sloane MS 3332, fol. 129v. 33 Swann, Curiosities and Texts, p. 12. 34 James Petiver to James Cuninghame, London, 16 July 1701 [draft], London, British Library, Sloane MS 3334, fols. 78v–79v.

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Acknowledging the Crowd35 Musei Petiveriani can be conceived as a work of composite as much as singular authorship, compiled by the substantial array of actors who together created and conferred meaning upon James Petiver’s museum. As such, it affirms recent historiographical revisionism that has so persuasively drawn attention to the frequently concealed structures of collaboration upon which Enlightenment knowledge production was predicated.36 By isolating as data the information about his collaborators that Petiver embeds in his catalogue via specific item acknowledgements, it is possible to quantify this process of heterogeneous ‘composition’ in ways that linear reading does not support. What emerges is a map of socially and globally diverse exchange that functions as a viable proxy for describing Petiver’s astonishing network between 1695 and 1703, surfacing thereby the constituents of the crowd that sourced his treasury of natural rarities. Before presenting such quantitative analysis it is crucial to define what is being counted. In the following, the unitary term ‘acknowledgement’ designates a repeated feature of Musei Petiveriani: Petiver’s practice of explicitly naming a contributor within the numbered record for an object. A total of 118 different individuals are thus identified across the ten centuries. However, Petiver did not deploy acknowledgements universally or uniformly. Given that the typeset content of the publication was an ongoing negotiation between competing requirements, he may have withheld during the editorial process some acknowledgements that otherwise would have been inserted. Moreover, while the vast majority of acknowledgements document the receipt of an item from an individual collector, some name an intermediary donor, while a few note the communication of important scientific information or the presence of a specimen in someone else’s collection. It is not straightforward to disambiguate these actions: as Petiver considered them similarly to merit acknowledgement, they have been treated equally within the analysis. Nonetheless, Petiver’s other major form of acknowledgement is excluded: the biographical squibs concluding issues 3, 5 and 6 which are not linked to specific items in the catalogue. The fifty-seven individuals whom Petiver mentions in these epilogues (almost half the number found across the object records) include fourteen not acknowledged elsewhere, taking to 132 the total population of his network in Musei Petiveriani. (A final individual, Petiver’s sometime friend Leonard 35 A summary of the quantitative information in this section first appeared in Coulton, ‘Remembering James Petiver’, pp. 201–03. 36 See, pre-eminently, Adrian Johns, The Nature of The Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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Plukenet, is singled out for condemnation relating to two ferns in issue 5: these references have also been discounted.)37 The 118 unique individuals acknowledged by Petiver within the object records can be grouped into three loose categories: 73 occasional contributors cited once or twice (62 per cent of the 118 individuals); 35 regular contributors (29 per cent), with between 3 and 7 notices each; and 10 major contributors (9 per cent) who account collectively for around two-fifths of the acknowledgements in Musei Petiveriani. Within this last group, three receive twenty credits or more: Hendrik Oldenland, a German physician employed by the Dutch East India Company as superintendent of their Physic Garden at the Cape of Good Hope (twenty acknowledgements); Samuel Browne, the resident surgeon at the English East India Company’s factory in Fort St George (Chennai) (thirty acknowledgements); and James Cuninghame, a ship’s surgeon and merchant in the service of the English Company in East and Southeast Asia, who also supplied items from Britain, the mid-Atlantic and the Cape of Good Hope (fifty-one acknowledgements). Browne and Cuninghame can additionally be connected confidently (via external means) with many other specimens listed in Musei Petiveriani. Crucially, therefore, Petiver developed both breadth and depth within his network, securing a large number of collaborators among whom he leveraged the best-situated and most able to maximum effect. Hundreds of specimens sent by Oldenland, Browne and Cuninghame survive in Petiver’s herbarium, often comprising the first instance of a species being received in Europe.38 Petiver supplies a printed acknowledgement for 357 (just over one third) of the 1,000 objects. This includes both explicit and directly implied acknowledgements, the latter being fifty-three instances where the text indicates an individual contribution that remains unnamed in a specific record. For example, listing a reddish butterfly as item 527, Petiver notes, ‘This and the following, Mr. Robert Rutherford, Surgeon, brought me from Carolina’. Item 528 (also a ‘Papilio Carolinianus rufescens’) therefore contains a ‘directly implied’ acknowledgement of Rutherford.39 While additional research can identify the contributors of many of the remaining 643 specimens, the current study attends deliberately to personal acknowledgements in print and the surrogate representation of Petiver’s network they afford. Clearly, Petiver judged some contributions more significant to 37 Musei Petiveriani, pp. 70 (item 741), 71 (item 743). 38 On these and others in Petiver’s network see Mark Carine (ed.), The Collectors: Creating Hans Sloane’s Extraordinary Herbarium (London: Natural History Museum, 2020). 39 Musei Petiveriani, p. 52 (items 527, 528).

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acknowledge in public than others: a reminder of the social interests that structure science in the making. If the precise textual forms of Petiver’s acknowledgements vary, some syntactic regularity is retained within the object records. Remaining on the same page of Centuria sexta as Rutherford’s butterflies, one finds (for example): 535. Muscus Lycopoides denticulatus scandens, in extremitatibus ramulorum polyspermus, ex Jehore. From whence Mr. Walter Keir sent me it.

The record supplies a unique number (‘535’) followed by the Latin polynomial assigned to this specimen: ‘A clubmoss (or lycopod), denticulate and climbing, with many seeds at the ends of its branches, from Johor.’ After the third century, Petiver had largely dispensed with typographical marks to designate the new species which increasingly populated his centuries: the absence of a cross-reference therefore indicates that he has not found this ‘Muscus’ described elsewhere. The type switches to italic for the ‘acknowledgement’: ‘From whence Mr. Walter Keir sent me it’, a perfunctory account of the individual collector and geographical source of the plant in southern Malaysia (although one needs to read back into the polynomial to decode ‘whence’). A similar structure had been observed in the previous record, for a ‘Muscus denticulatus major volubilis, è Capite Montis Serado’ (‘Moss, dentate and winding, from the Montserrado Cape’). This is one of several in this issue acknowledging a strategic recipient of the printed Centuria prima in December 1695: ‘Mr. Richard Planer Surgeon, presented me very lately with this amongst several other African Plants from that place.’ We learn slightly more about Planer than Keir: he is a ‘Surgeon’ who has donated ‘several […] Plants’ from west Africa. Other records disclose different details: one ‘Muscus denticulatus’ is an ‘elegant Plant [which] my worthy Friend Mr. Archibald Steward Surgeon, brought from the Scots Settlement at Darien’ (now eastern Panama) (Fig. 2.1); a ‘Papilio Mexicanus’ was supplied by ‘My hearty Friend Mr. John Kirckwood Surgeon’; while of a wetland fungus resembling Typha (‘Fungus Typhoides’) Petiver remarks, ‘The ingenious Dr. David Krieg Physician and Fellow of our Royal-Society sent me this very lately from Riga, having observed it this last Summer in a Bog near that City.’40 Quantification flattens some of this rhetorical detail: as such, it forms simply one method of interpretation alongside more qualitative approaches. 40 Musei Petiveriani, p. 52 (items 530, 532, 533, 534, 535).

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By fusing scientific and sociable registers, demarcated subtly but not securely by linguistic and typographical transitions, Petiver’s acknowledgements epitomise the infrastructure of his entire enterprise. Signals of amity and esteem – ‘my worthy Friend’, ‘My hearty Friend’, the ‘ingenious’ Dr. Krieg – are integral to Petiver’s acknowledgement technology, micro-encomiums designed to flatter, mollify, reassure. They represent and assert acquaintanceship and goodwill, couched in the terms of metropolitan affability – albeit that unequal bonds of patronage and commerce may lurk beneath the surface. Petiver had a wider audience in view, too, others whose respect and contributions he coveted to varying degrees. His acknowledgement texts therefore communicate the stunning geographical breadth of his museum (these few citations from a single page already compass south-east Asia, western Africa, northern and central America, northern Europe) while also bolstering his own credentials (note how the possessive pronoun applied to ‘our Royal-Society’ intermixes personal ostentation and national pride). The global distribution of Petiver’s network is remarkable, in relation to both specimens and collectors (Table 2.1). Ensuring even worldwide coverage almost emerges as a design principle when viewing the data. While the highest number of unique individuals contributed material from Britain and Ireland (38), these do not form the largest geographical group of object acknowledgements (101), which come from the Indian Ocean world (East Indies). Although Cuninghame and Browne accounted for the majority of these items (59 out of 101), seventeen other collaborators are named in forty-two records covering China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Significant numbers of objects and individuals are also linked with other regions known to Europeans, particularly those of commercial or colonial significance. The African contributions are split wholly between the western kingdoms that were focal for the transatlantic trade in enslaved humans (thirty-one coming from ten travellers to modern-day Ghana, Liberia, Benin and Angola) and the South African Cape, a key staging post en route to the East Indies (fifty objects from ten correspondents, including Oldenland).

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Table 2.1. Object Acknowledgements in Musei Petiveriani by global region.41 Region

No.

%

Individuals

East Indies

101

24

19

Britain and Ireland

87

21

38

Africa

81

20

20

Americas

73

18

34

Rest of Europe

64

15

22

Other

9

2

6

Not identifiable

4

1

2

The seventy-three acknowledgements relating to the Americas stretch from Newfoundland to Brazil. Among them are sixteen contributors of forty-one specimens from the English territories of Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts; twenty-five items from fifteen individuals in mainland and island colonies around the Caribbean Sea; and even an aquatic snail (‘Trochus’) donated by Captain William Bond ‘from the River Messisippi’.42 Tellingly, Richard Planer appears in two continental categories (plants from Guinea, butterflies from Cartagena), but he is far from the sole acknowledgee to have found a livelihood within international economies of enslavement (Bond also sent information about a ‘Pectunculus’ shell from the Gold Coast).43 In Europe, Petiver’s twenty-two suppliers were dispersed widely, from Lisbon to the Russian Caucasus and from Norway to the Aegean archipelagos. The remaining thirteen acknowledgements relate to correspondents in West Asia (three specimens from different individuals in the Levant), the islands of the south and mid-Atlantic (six specimens from three individuals), or simply prove not attributable to specific places (four acknowledgements, two individuals). While a very small number of highly mobile collectors fall into multiple geographical categories the data maps a network of almost 100 overseas collaborators, distributed from Manila to Mexico and from Canada to the Cape. 41 Defining the region for each acknowledgement was a variable process. In many cases Petiver provides a location in the object record, else it is readily verifiable from known biographical information. At other times a degree of informed speculation was required. In the trickiest instance of specimens or individuals who were highly mobile or historically obscure this was not always an entirely satisfactory judgement to make, but the benefits of assigning one region to each acknowledgement outweighed the defects. 42 Musei Petiveriani, p. 88 (item 845). 43 Musei Petiveriani, p. 24 (item 217), p. 49 (item 501), p. 51 (item 517), p. 52 (item 534), p. 55 (item 587), p. 68 (item 727), p. 77 (item 794), p. 88 (item 845).

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The social landscape of Musei Petiveriani is also fascinating (Table 2.2). Above all, data concerning the occupational background of Petiver’s acknowledgees reveals that he networked most effectively with his own sort. Almost half the personnel, 54 out of 118 people, were medical practitioners: thirty-five itinerant ‘surgeons’ employed by ships or overseas trading factories; thirteen physicians in a range of domestic and colonial situations; and six apothecaries, five of them in Britain, but also including George Franklyn of Charleston in Carolina.44 The three mega-collectors listed above all fall into these three categories. Taken together these fifty-four individuals prompted 245 acknowledgements, nearly three-fifths of the total. Surgeons in particular proved most productive, earning a ratio of 5.4 acknowledgements per person. They show how capably Petiver engaged those with whom he shared professional interests, as well as the significance of global natural history (particularly botany) for the intellectual and commercial dimensions of the expanding medical trades. Table 2.2. Social composition of acknowledgees by occupation.45 Occupation

Individuals (%)

Acknowledgements (%)

Ratio

Surgeon

35 (30%)

189 (45%)

5.4

Physician

13 (11%)

45 (11%)

3.4

Naturalist

12 (10%)

52 (13%)

4.3

Horticulturist

10 (8%)

18 (4%)

1.8

Clergyman

8 (7%)

25 (6%)

3.1

Merchant

6 (5%) 6 (5%)

23 (6%) 9 (2%)

3.8

Apothecary Other

11 (10%)

28 (6%)

2.5

Unknown

17 (14%)

30 (7%)

1.8

1.5

While Petiver tends to designate directly those ranked as ‘surgeon’, ‘physician’ and ‘apothecary’, an ‘occupation’ is not always so easy to assign for other contributors without additional research. It is possible to isolate clusters nonetheless. Among twelve ‘naturalists’ are several scholars whose intellectual approval Petiver so craved (and in at least some instances attained). Paul Hermann, Edward Lhwyd, John Ray, Frederik Ruysch, 44 Musei Petiveriani, p. 71 (item 744). 45 Where possible, Petiver’s own occupational categories were deployed. This is most commonly the case for surgeons and physicians. Elsewhere, as with geographical region, some degree of extrapolation, external research or historical speculation was required.

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William Sherard and Joseph de Pitton Tournefort are all granted multiple acknowledgements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, after the surgeons they constitute the most repeatedly commended group at 4.3 credits per person. One’s sense, however, is that whereas Petiver’s surgeons notionally longed to see their names in print, the naturalists were, rather, those whom Petiver wished to be gratified by this public acclaim. Ten ‘horticulturists’ supply eighteen further acknowledgements. They include the custodians of major botanical gardens (Jacob Bobart in Oxford, Caspar Commelijn in Leiden), commercial nurserymen in the capital (George London of Brompton, William Darby of Hoxton) and colonial servants (James Reed or Rheed of Barbados, possibly the former gardener of William Penn at Pennsbury Manor and one ‘Randal’ of the East India Company garden at Fort St George).46 The clergymen are more readily distinguished, being usually styled as ‘Reverend’. They include Georg Kamel, a Jesuit missionary in Manila; John Smith, a traveller to the Cape Coast of Guinea in West Africa; and Hugh Jones of Christ Church in Calvert County, Maryland (for whom Petiver had helped to secure both ordination and his ecclesiastical position).47 The remaining contributors were predominantly merchants and tradesmen both abroad and at home, among them the Nottinghamshire mercer William Pool, ‘Mr. Parr’ a London ‘Instrument-maker’, Charles Dubois the Cashier-General of the East India Company and the New England bookseller Hezekiah Usher. Petiver’s natural history network can overwhelmingly be profiled as men across a spectrum of the middling sort, those dependent to a greater or lesser extent on income earned from their own work, in many cases related to British overseas interests. There are exceptions of course. Sloane and Dubois, for example, accrued levels of wealth that elevated them into the ranks of the social elite, while Petiver repeatedly acknowledges two important patrons and phytophiles among the nobility: Henry Compton, the bishop of London and Mary Somerset, duchess of Beaufort.48 Nor is the duchess his sole female acknowledgee. Petiver expresses his gratitude to two widows who seemingly shared their husbands’ botanical interests: 46 On James Reed of Pensbury see Hubertis M. Cummings, ‘An Account of Goods at Pennsbury Manor, 1687’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 86 (1962): 397–416. Anna Winterbottom speculates that Randal may have been enslaved: Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 112–39, at p. 126. 47 On Petiver’s sponsorship of Jones see Ronald S. Wilkinson, ‘Hugh Jones, an Entomological Collector in Seventeenth-Century Maryland’, The Great Lakes Entomologist, 7 (1974): 129–31. 48 Musei Petiveriani, p. 58 (item 646), p. 73 (item 764), pp. 90–2 (items 890, 929, 934, 959).

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Anna Hermann of Leiden (relict of Paul at the University botanic garden); and Margaretha van Otteren, survivor of Oldenland at the Cape of Good Hope.49 Moreover, in the supplementary ‘Abstract of some Collections Received’ that closes the final issue, Petiver thanks two entomologists who have corresponded with him concerning the natural history of insects solely in their own right: Eleanor Glanville of Somerset (and also Lincolnshire) and Elizabeth Williams of Carolina.50 There are therefore inflections of social heterogeneity that must not be overlooked in Petiver’s cadre of proto citizen-scientists. Similarly there are meaningful differences of motivation underlying the relative textual uniformity of his acknowledgements: those whom he courts, those who depend upon him, those to whom he is genuinely indebted for an unending supply of rarities, those whom he hopes to provoke to more effective action. When Petiver chooses to embellish an acknowledgement using the language of regard, the term for which he overwhelmingly reaches is ‘friend’ (Table 2.3). Almost one-third contain this qualification for a named individual; indeed at one stage or another Petiver calls 56 of the 118 contributors (47 per cent) his ‘friend’. As Sebestian Kroupa (following Emma Spary) has explained, Petiver skilfully engineered circuits of ‘polite indebtedness’ by deploying the language of friendship as an emotional currency within relationships that were primarily of transactional utility to a collector of curiosities and knowledge.51 Musei Petiveriani repays collaborators for past services by coining ‘polite’ compliments, but it also confers upon them a renewed sense of obligation (‘indebtedness’) for the future. Polite indebtedness required Petiver’s ‘friends’ to prove themselves enduringly deserving of his epithets – as ‘hearty’, ‘worthy’, ‘ingenious’ and so forth – by returning additional specimens and information, thus earning the prestige of further acknowledgements in print. Friendship therefore offers a crucial rhetorical and conceptual token for harmonising his network as the locus of amicable intellectual interaction. It smooths over status discrepancies (Sloane and Dubois are both friends, although, tellingly, Compton and Somerset are 49 Musei Petiveriani, p. 19 (item 119), p. 36 (item 343). 50 Musei Petiveriani, pp. [94], [96]. Note that Glanville is called ‘Madam Elizabeth Glanvile’. On Glanville see Michael Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 106–8; for Williams see Susan Scott Parrish, ‘Women’s Nature: Curiosity, Pastoral and the New Science in British America’, Early American Literature, 37 (2002): 195–245. 51 Sebestian Kroupa, ‘Ex epistulis Philippinensibus: Georg Joseph Kamel SJ (1661–1706) and His Correspondence Network’, Centaurus, 57 (2015): 229–59 (p. 240) follows E.C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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not), collapses geographical distance into emotional proximity and dresses the mechanics of indebtedness in the habit of polite relationship. As Paul Trolander has argued of contemporary literary collaborations, ‘the notion of the proxy’ was a vital component of early modern friendship, conferring an active duty on each party to act in one another’s interests.52 This proxy dynamic was vital within Petiver’s system of knowledge exchange. Table 2.3. Repeated rhetorical tokens of acknowledgement.53 Term

Acknowledgements

% (of 366)

friend

114

31%

curious

37

10%

worthy

36

10%

ingenious

31

9%

kind

29

8%

obliging

15

4%

hearty

9

3%

honoured

7

2%

industrious

7

2%

pleased

7

2%

indefatigable

6

2%

celebrated

5

1%

Among other repeated rhetorical tokens of acknowledgement, four adjectives stand out for their very regular deployment (usually in conjunction with ‘friend’): ‘curious’, ‘worthy’, ‘ingenious’ and ‘kind’. They perform a calibrated mixture of scholarly commendation (curious, ingenious) and affective reassurance (worthy, kind). ‘Curious’, it should be noted, may be anomalously promoted in this list as eleven of the thirty-seven occurrences are applied to specimens rather than individuals: but this I have liberally interpreted as reflecting scientific esteem upon the collector as well as upon the object. Obligation supplies the next most frequently exploited 52 Paul Trolander, Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014), pp. 71–96. 53 Table 2.3 is simply a count of the number of explicit acknowledgements in which the given terms appear. They are derived from Petiver’s own vocabulary and included are each of those which he applied to a contributor on five or more occasions. In some cases, directly related words are incorporated under a single heading (‘industrious’ includes ‘industry’, ‘generous’ includes ‘generosity’). Omitted are two repeated terms that describe specimens only: elegant (24 uses) and beautiful (6 uses).

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semantic field – those whom Petiver finds ‘obliging’, or to whom he is ‘obliged’ – language that directly reinforces bonds of indebtedness and reciprocation between collaborators. Meanwhile, all seven uses of ‘pleased’ denote the supposed attitude of a donor who finds intrinsic enjoyment in the act of sharing nature’s wonders with a fellow enquirer, concealing any impolite motives of self-interest or necessity. Of a small blue butterfly (‘Papilio minor cærulescens’), for example, Petiver comments, ‘I never saw this but with Mr. Ray, [Tuesday] Jul. 11. 1699. who was then pleased to give it me.’54 Signifiers of especial diligence or tirelessness are reserved for a small coterie of associates: James Cuninghame features in five of the eleven acknowledgements referring to industriousness or indefatigability and, along with Samuel Daniel (a British surgeon in the Levant), earns the rare double eulogy of ‘indefatigable Industry’.55 Four different figures are acknowledged as ‘celebrated’ botanists (Jacob Breyne on two occasions), Petiver presumably intending the twin effect of their pleasure and his own elevation by his association with these prestigious men of science. Through explicitly acknowledging the global crowd that resourced his museum and its textual manifestation in Musei Petiveriani, James Petiver reveals the social technology of science in the making. Unlike the genteel natural philosopher of Simon Schaffer’s and Steven Shapin’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Petiver in no simple sense overwrites the labour of his networked operatives nor deems them ideologically improper to credit for their work.56 If this is a typically pragmatic decision – partly because Petiver’s own status as a tradesman unsettled the character of disinterestedness that the natural historian was supposed to embody, partly because his object aggregation strategy depended on rewarding ordinary people with the justified thrill of a printed acknowledgement – it does not obviate the fact that his oeuvre unusually illuminates the social production of science during the early modern period by naming direct contributors to the histories of botany and entomology who would otherwise be forgotten. Moreover (and more in line with Schaffer’s and Shapin’s model), his practice of identifying specific people and places in relation to novel species may also be considered as empirical evidence that corroborates Petiver’s unillustrated lists of unknown curiosities. If you need convincing that this plant or insect actually exists, the text directs, learn for yourself by talking to this person or visiting that location. It is, after all, crucial to recall 54 Musei Petiveriani, p. 35 (item 319). ‘Tuesday’ is typographically denoted with the astronomical symbol for Mars. 55 Musei Petiveriani, p. 24 (item 211), p. 57 (item 640). 56 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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that Musei Petiveriani is not just a network map or sequence of collecting tactics, but also a method of scientific documentation designed to disseminate emerging information about natural history objects new to Europeans that the imperial engines of commerce and colonialism were increasingly capturing. Today it remains a valuable key for unlocking and resituating the social and material histories of specimens (particularly as a guide to hundreds of extant plants in the Sloane Herbarium), while also supplying a crucial glimpse of pre-Linnaean biological nomenclature and taxonomy.57

Conclusion: the Silenced Crowd? We might conclude by asking how Musei Petiveriani gestures towards those global agents whom its author fails to acknowledge by name. As research increasingly demonstrates, collections such as Petiver’s were valuable projects of empire that extracted natural knowledge and property from a range of indigenous situations, to the unequal benefit of Europeans.58 In so doing they relied upon chains of interaction with a range of actors whom the historical record marginalises or omits. This is especially the case where such personages presented racial, ethnic, social or sexual difference from the white, male, European gentleman to whom the credit of scientific authority is invariably afforded.59 Given that systems of hegemony betray the traces of their own construction (or immanent critique) – systems that include the domains of Western science that have so effectively appropriated the ontological virtues of utter transparency and necessary disinterestedness – where might we locate such markers in Musei Petiveriani? In particular, how might this published record of ‘science in the making’ – itself a pragmatic articulation of Petiver’s middling status and limited capital (actual 57 Stephen A. Harris, ‘Seventeenth-Century Plant Lists and Herbarium Collections: A Case Study from the Oxford Physic Garden’, Journal of the History of Collections, 30 (2018): 1–14. 58 For a summary of relevant scholarship on the history of collecting see W.G. Burgess, ‘State of the Field: The History of Collecting’, History, 106 (2020): 108–19. 59 In relation to Petiver see: Kathleen S. Murphy, ‘James Petiver’s “‘Kind Friends” and “Curious Persons” in the Atlantic World: Commerce, Colonialism and Collecting’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 74 (2020): 259–74 and ‘Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History and the British Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 70 (2013): 637–70; Kroupa, ‘Kamel’; and Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge. More generally the literature is vast, but relevant starting points include Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Pratik Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

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and symbolic) – be susceptible to analytical efforts to retrieve not only the work and intelligence of those whom Petiver acknowledged, but also those about whom he remains silent? One trace of such heterogeneity that can be detected in the letterpress of Petiver’s catalogue bleeds through his assignment of names to some novel species. While Petiver was (as Sloane had understood) perhaps the world’s leading collector of global flora, he must have been perplexed time and again by the dried cuttings – often discoloured, sometimes damaged – that appeared in packets from distant continents. This in turn compromised the certainty with which he could compare his newly arrived specimens with published descriptions, or compose accurate polynomials of his own. Petiver relied therefore upon the information with which correspondents annotated their dispatches. While this typically took the form of the collector’s field observations in English or Latin, there are also multiple instances where indigenous names are reported, sometimes accompanied with intelligence concerning local uses for or traditions surrounding a particular plant. Such botanical objects – which include this supplementary documentation – embody ‘hybridised’ knowledge of the kind that Anna Winterbottom has shown to be structural to intellectual activity in the ‘East India Company World’ during this period. As well as European determinations, in other words, these objects constitute crucial evidence of indigenous botanical agency that has since normally been erased within both the history and discourse of Western science. A detailed study of the nomenclature deployed by Musei Petiveriani – read alongside the extant objects in the Sloane Herbarium – remains to be conducted, but even superficial attention glimpses the potential of this approach. It is telling that two of Petiver’s super-collectors, Cuninghame and Browne, are those whose plants are most frequently granted aboriginal designations. The first is item 498, ‘Um-ki Chinensibus’, an object record that combines the Chinese name (‘Um-ki’) with a Latin description, an acknowledgement of ‘my ingenious Friend Mr. James Cuninghame’ and the anthropological comment that ‘The Fruit of this is a famed Ingredient, used by the Chinese for dying Scarlet’.60 Other Chinese names supplied by Cuninghame are scattered throughout the succeeding centuries (particularly the tenth). In the case of Browne, several specimens across centuries six, seven (issue 4) and eight (issue 5) are afforded Malayam names that Petiver has retrieved from Hendrik van Rheede’s Hortus Malabaricus (1678–93), 60 Musei Petiveriani, p. 42 (item 498). See also Charles E. Jarvis, Ashley DuVal and Peter R. Crane, ‘Gardenia Jasminoides: A Traditional Chinese Dye Plant Becomes a Garden Ornamental in Europe’, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 31 (2014): 80–98.

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such as ‘Tsjama-pullu’ and ‘Tereta-pullu’.61 While these instances encode a more complex mediation of indigenous knowledge via an existing European source, they are remarkable for the way in which they evidence the value that could be sustained by transcultural nomenclature among early modern botanists. Moreover, research into the specimens sent by Browne to Petiver from Fort St George reveals that he often attached vernacular Tamil labels inscribed upon shards of bamboo.62 Beyond Cuninghame and Browne, other object records in Musei Petiveriani retain regional names from America and the Philippines.63 The relative uniformity of printed catalogue records means that Musei Petiveriani subjects the diversity of global nature to the specific disciplinary constraints of European botany. Nonetheless, echoes are sustained in these textual moments of what James Delbourgo has called ‘the knowing world’.64 Although indigenous botanical terms may have been imagined by men like Petiver as temporary imperfections to be supplanted by more adequate Western formulations, his publication provokes us to think in important ways about how natural history was increasingly operationalised as a multifaceted transnational enterprise for exchanging knowledge about the world. Through analysing the networked multiplicity of its crowd-sourced production, this chapter has demonstrated how Musei Petiveriani exposes such complex dynamics of early modern science in the making.

61 Musei Petiveriani, pp. 53 (item 559), 54 (item 570). 62 Charles E. Jarvis, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Collection of Indian Medicinal Plants in the Natural History Museum, London’, Journal of the Department of Museology (University of Calcutta), 11/12 (2016): 87–98. 63 Musei Petiveriani, pp. 56 (item 617), 57–8 (item 640); see also Geoff Bil, ‘Tangled Compositions: Botany, Agency and Authorship aboard HMS Endeavour’, History of Science, 60 (2022): 183–210, https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320971109. 64 James Delbourgo, ‘The Knowing World: A New Global History of Science’, History of Science, 57 (2019): 373–99.

3

‘Useful’ Translations in the Milanese Enlightenment Alexandra Ortolja-Baird

O

ne of the most obvious forms of textual transformation in all parts of the world is linguistic translation. Yet such translation is almost always accompanied by paratextual and material variation. Translations and other textual mediations have been interpreted as independent cultural forms with contexts and consequences stretching far beyond their original language editions.1 Moreover, as a result of growing interest in the dynamics of the circulation of ideas across the Enlightenment world and the ‘historical turn’ in translation studies, translators, much like printers, editors, booksellers, engravers and other intermediaries involved in the production and exchange of books, have been recovered as agents in their own right, whose actions bore direct, lasting and often significant effects on the forms, accessibility and reception of ideas.2 Accordingly, the study 1 See S. Stockhorst (ed.), Cultural Transfer through Translation. The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010); S. Burrows, E. Dziembowski and A. Thomson (eds), Cultural Transfers. France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth-Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010); Girolamo Imbruglia, Rolando Minuti and Luisa Simonutti, Traduzioni e Circolazione delle Idee nella Cultura Europea tra ‘500 e ‘700: Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2007); Jesús Astigarraga and Javier Usoz, ‘The Enlightenment in Translation: Antonio Genovesi’s Political Economy in Spain, 1778–1800.’ Mediterranean Historical Review 28: 1 (2013): 24–45. 2 See: L. Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation. Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); N. Ruggiero, La civiltà dei traduttori. Transcodificazioni del realismo europeo a Napoli nel secondo Ottocento (Naples: Guida, 2009); Stefano Ferrari, Il rifugiato e l’antiquario. Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice e il transfert italo-elvetico di Winckelmann nel secondo Settecento (Rovereto: Osiride, 2008); Birgit Tautz, ‘The Messy Side of the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Translators, Reviewers and the Traces They Left Behind.’ The Germanic Review: Literature,

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of eighteenth-century translations, translators and the satellite persons and processes orbiting translations has offered new avenues in thinking about the ideas, audiences and both material and human agents of Enlightenment. Building on this approach, this chapter explores the role of the Milanese printer and bookseller, Giuseppe Galeazzi (1694–1779), in the circulation of ideas in the Milanese Enlightenment. The translations pursued and printed by Galeazzi, which ranged from works of natural history like Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle to core cameralist textbooks such as Joseph von Sonnenfels’s Grundsätze der Polizey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaft, were vital in transporting diverse Enlightenment currents to Habsburg Milan in a period of complex censorship and political upheaval. However, these vernacular translations also served a social and arguably ideological purpose. Not only were works selected for translation based on their perceived ‘utility’ for Lombardy – be it economic, political, or social – but the translations were variously and explicitly adapted to the Lombard context and to align with the political and philosophical ambitions of the Milanese reforming class, through the inclusion of prefaces, letters to the reader and other paratextual additions, as well as degrees of interpretative translation. In this combination of selection and adaptation, Galeazzi encapsulates what Peter Burke argues are the two opposing, yet compatible, early modern rationales determining translation: firstly, to ‘fill the gaps in the host culture’, and secondly, ‘the principle of confirmation, according to which people in a given culture translate works that support ideas or assumptions or prejudices already present in the culture. If they do not support ideas of this kind, the translations are modified, directly or indirectly … in order to give the impression that they do.’3 Galeazzi played an important role in Enlightenment Milan, not just as an arbiter of ideas, but as translator or, perhaps more accurately, transposer of ideas. However, he was far from alone in this process. A diverse network of individuals collaborated in the translations – intellectuals, physicians, bureaucrats, university professors – many of whom were directly linked to Milan’s Habsburg-Lombard administration and its institutions and whose interests and ambitions interacted in the processes of translation. This Culture, Theory 95: 4 (2020): 241–56; Alessia Castagnino, ‘Traduzioni e circolazione delle Histories di William Robertson nella penisola italiana nel secondo Settecento.’ Diciottesimo secolo 2 (2017): 265–92; Lise Andries, Frédéric Ogée, John Dunkley and Darach Sanfey (eds), Intellectual Journeys: The Translation of Ideas in Enlightenment England, France and Ireland (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013). 3 Peter Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia (eds), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 7–38 (p. 20).

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entanglement of press, translators, institutions and administration consequently raises important questions regarding the relationship between this translation culture and the circulation of ideas in Enlightenment Milan which will be explored through examining three areas of Galeazzi’s translations: the journals Il Caffè, the Estratto della Letteratura Europea and the Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue; translated works on public health and agriculture; and the translation of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle.

The Milanese Book Trade The transfer of sovereignty from the Spanish to Austrian Habsburgs in 1707 resulted in a period of intensive centralisation and administrative reform in Lombardy, supported by the younger generation of Milanese intellectuals, among them the prominent Milanese philosophers Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri, who championed enlightened absolutism and took up professional positions within the new Habsburg-Lombard administration. The changing political and administrative constellations had a significant effect on the local bookscape. Censorship, in particular, became increasingly arbitrary as booksellers were subjected to overlapping interventions by both Church and state. As a consequence and in line with the growing suppression of the Church in political affairs throughout their Empire, the Habsburgs issued new censorship laws in 1768 which sought to minimise Church censorship and only regulate those disciplines and works which were explicitly blasphemous or dangerous to the state or social mores.4 It was not overly successful, as Pietro Verri complained in 1770: ‘the revision of books is presided over by subjects so imbecilic that they make you long for the Dominican friars’.5 By the 1780s there was renewed concern that ‘the arbitrary and often pedantic system of censorship’ was significantly suppressing the Milanese book trade.6 This was particularly noticeable in comparison to other Italian cities. The production of major publishing centres like Venice, Turin and Rome had increased substantially in the first half of the eighteenth century, while Milan languished in both the quantity

4 Il Piano per la censura dei libri del 1768. 5 Emanuele Greppi and Alessandro Giulini (eds), Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri, Vol. III (Milan: Cogliati, 1911), p. 302. 6 A. Tarchetti, ‘Censura e censori di Sua Maestà Imperiale nella Lombardia austriaca (1740–1780’, in A. De Maddalena, E. Rotelli and G. Barbarisi (eds), Economia, istituzioni, cultura in Lombardia nell’età di Maria Theresa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982): 741–92 (p. 781).

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and quality of its publications.7 Such torpor was also thought to be stagnating Milanese intellectual progress. Fear of censorship had resulted in the most important works of the Milanese Enlightenment being published outside Lombardy, among them, Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764) and Pietro Verri’s Meditations on Political Economy (1771) and Discourse on the Nature of Pains and Pleasures (1773–81), all published in Livorno. Censorship and prohibition predictably fuelled an illegal trade in books. Especially important in this regard was the Swiss publishing house and bookseller, the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN, 1769–94) which traded with Milanese booksellers, such as Jacques Barelle, Carlo Cetti, Mathieu Margaillan, Jean-Baptise Pasquali and most, importantly, Giuseppe Galeazzi. The STN dealt in all genres of books, including illegal and pirate editions that had been banned in Habsburg Lombardy and, although a primarily French-language press, the STN provided works translated from English, Italian and Spanish, among other languages. Other Swiss connections were equally significant.8 In particular, the Yverdon press of the Protestant polymath and Italian exile Fortunato de Felice – a major rival of the STN – had a prominent role in Milan’s bookscape, providing both journals and books in translation.9 The ongoing concerns over the Milanese book trade led to the administration disbanding Milan’s long-standing Corporation of Booksellers and Printers in 1787, which had regulated printing rights, the sale of books and book-selling locations. It was one of a wider series of liberalisation policies, which, combined with strengthening connections between Milanese and Swiss printers and booksellers, enabled Milanese domestic printing to revitalise in the later decades of the century, and new Italian-language works slowly began to complement the wealth of imported Swiss-French translations. Giuseppe Galeazzi, in particular, played an important role in this regeneration.

7 Carlo Capra, ‘Il Tipografo degli Illuministi Lombardi: Giuseppe Galeazzi’, in Alberto Postigliola (ed.), Materiali della Società italiana di studi sul secolo XVIII. Libro, editorial, cultura nel Settecento italiano (Rome: Società italiana di studi sul secolo XVIII, 1988): 49–53 (pp. 49–50). 8 See: Renato Pasta, ‘Prima della Rivoluzione : il mercato librario italiano nelle carte della Société typographique de Neuchâtel (1769–1789).’ Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 102: 2 (1990): 281–320. 9 See: Jean-Pierre Perret, Les imprimeries d’Yverdon au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981).

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Giuseppe Galeazzi Located in Milan’s booksellers’ district in Contrada S. Margherita, Giuseppe Galeazzi was an active bookseller from the 1730s, before turning his hand to printing in 1757. Despite the challenges presented by the Milanese book trade, Galeazzi’s business was one of remarkable success and stability; in 1766 he was appointed as regio stampatore (royal printer) and was even able to open a second bookshop in Cremona in the early 1770s. His sons joined and eventually succeeded him in the business, which was renamed as ‘Galeazzi and Sons’ in 1794 after Giuseppe’s death and which continued until 1811. Over a period of almost forty years (1757–96), the press produced just under 650 volumes, reaching its heyday in the 1770s, when it printed over 200 volumes across the decade. Works on the arts and sciences dominated their output, though their publications also included religious, juridical and historical subjects, especially in the earlier decades of trade. Their products likewise ranged in form and format, from books to journals, almanacs, sonnets, dissertations and pamphlets. While the firm stood apart in its success, it is the connections that Giuseppe Galeazzi cultivated with the leading citizens of Milan and his role in the dissemination of the ideas of the Milanese Enlightenment that are exceptional. It was Galeazzi who brought such important works to the public as Verri’s Meditations on Happiness,10 Beccaria’s Investigations into the Nature of Style,11 and the scientific writings of the mathematician and astronomer Paolo Frisi, as well as publications which addressed key domestic issues of the period, including criminal law reform, smallpox inoculation and the education of the peasantry. Not only did Galeazzi become the printer of the Milanese Illuministi but, in some notable instances, Galeazzi became integrated into their intellectual and professional circles. In the 1760s, he began to collaborate with Verri and Beccaria’s group, the Accademia dei Pugni, in publishing their reform-oriented journal Il Caffè,12 and they continued to work together on a series of subsequent journals and publications. Galeazzi’s entanglement with the proponents of enlightened absolutism manifested itself in the genres of works published and sold by the press. As his varied printer’s devices emblazoned with ‘PUBLICAE UTILITATI’ suggest, books of a ‘useful’ nature that aligned with the intellectual 10 Pietro Verri, Meditazioni sulla felicità (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1763). 11 Cesare Beccaria, Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1770). 12 Gianni Francioni, ‘Storia editoriale dell’Caffè’, in Gianni Francioni and Sergio Romagnoli (eds), Il Caffè, 1764–1766 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993): lxxxi–cxlvii.

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concerns of the Illuministi and the reformist drive of Milan’s political class – and which were often written by these same individuals – were abundant. Works on agronomy, agriculture, medicine, anatomy and monetary reform were commonly presented to readers as being of great utility, offering means of improvement for individuals and region alike. While we might question the motivations behind Galeazzi’s dedication to the useful arts and sciences – he was, after all, chasing sales in a precarious sector – his rhetoric of public utility mirrored much of the language and outlook of Milan’s reforming class, who framed their written and administrative contributions in similar terms. Even the Habsburg censorship laws of 1768 actively encouraged the publication of such ‘useful’ books on matters of economics and administration which ‘can serve as instruction to the nation and to stimulate the talents’.13 Among the useful works sold by Galeazzi, a significant number were translated from French, German, English and Latin, although, in some notable cases, intermediary French editions were also used to translate English and German materials. The translations published by Galeazzi itself were no less aligned with the political developments in Milan and the ambitions of Milanese and Habsburg reformers. For instance, in the 1760s, when the Habsburgs were striving to dismantle the privileges of the Church, Galeazzi published a translation of the Spanish statesman and economist Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes y Pérez’s Treatise on the Exemptions of Amortization (1767), which called for the end to ecclesiastical land and property tax privileges.14 Likewise, the ongoing discussions over criminal procedure in the 1770s, which had been stimulated by the publication of Beccaria’s attack on torture and capital punishment in On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, resulted in the translation of works like Joseph von Sonnenfels’s On the Abolition of Torture (1776).15 Although already timely, the texts often underwent further adaptations to tailor them to the local circumstances. This ranged from the addition of supplementary materials, annotations and commentaries to alterations made to the texts themselves and the printing of translated extracts within periodical reviews. The additions were intellectual products in their own right. They 13 Il Piano per la censura dei libri del 1768. 14 Trattato Della Regalia D’Ammortizzazione Nel Quale Si Dimostra Seguendo La Serie delle diverse Eta fin dal nascimento della Chiesa in tutti i Secoli, e Paesi Cattolici, l’Uso costante dell’Autorita civile nell’impedire le illimitare alienazioni di Beni Stabili a Chiese, Comunità, e alter Mani Morte … (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1767). 15 Su l’abolizione della tortura del sig. Di Sonnenfels consigliere nella Reggenza d’Austria di S.M.I e Professore di Politica. Tradotto dal tedesco. Con alcune osservazioni sul medesimo argomento (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1776).

Fig. 3.1. Frontispiece featuring Galeazzi’s motto ‘publicae utilitati’ from Lettera Critica del Chirurgo Brambilla (Milan, 1765). © The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, *69.F.119, Titelblatt.

Fig. 3.2. Frontispiece featuring Galeazzi’s motto from Delle progressioni e serie. Libri due del P. Francesco Luino (Milan, 1767). © The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna: 302.151-C, Titelblatt.

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not only had the potential to reposition the translated texts within different frames of cultural and intellectual reference, but could also communicate entirely new, conflicting or supplementary ideas, arguments and bibliographic information. This is especially pertinent considering that most were provided by prominent figures in the Milanese Enlightenment with connections to the Habsburg administration and Lombardy’s higher education institutions, as well as one another. In the case of Sonnenfels’s work, for instance, an anonymous supplementary discourse entitled Observations on the Use of Torture, now known to be by the Milanese magistrate Paolo Risi, author of the Animadversiones ad criminalem iurisprudentiam pertinentes (1766), was added to the edition in order to render the book ‘more useful to our criminal proceedings’.16 Many collaborators were also members of Milan’s Patriotic Society. The Society had been formed and funded in 1776 by Empress Maria Theresa in order to bring together scientific practitioners and reformers with the ambition of improving local agricultural and manufacturing practices and it became an important site of collaboration between the Lombard elite and Vienna.17 Members and correspondents included philosopher-administrators like Verri and Beccaria, public health titans like Johann Peter Frank, Samuel Auguste Tissot and Antoine-Augustin Parmentier and university professors like Paolo Frisi, as well as figures like the polymath Carlo Amoretti, the educator Francesco Soave and the Brera School physicist Giovanni Francesco Fromond, who also acted as Galeazzi’s translators.

Journals for Reform and Enlightenment The collaboration between the Milanese reformers and the Galeazzi press is most visible in the production of three journals: Il Caffè (1764–65), the Estratto della Letteratura Europea (1764–70) and the Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue (1775–77). The earliest of these, the Accademia dei Pugni’s Il Caffè [The Coffee-Shop], was printed by Galeazzi from its second volume in 1764. Modelled on The Spectator, the journal served to embody the phenomenon of coffee-house culture and provide a cosmopolitan space where its readers could engage in spirited discussion. 16 ‘Osservazioni sopra l’uso della tortura’, in Su l’abolizione della tortura del sig. Di Sonnenfels. 17 See: Lavinia Maddaluno, ‘De Facto Policies and Intellectual Agendas of an Eighteenth-Century Milanese Agricultural Academy: Physiocratic Resonances in the Società Patriotica’ in Sophus Reinert and Steven Kaplan (eds), The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2019): 395–438 (p. 419).

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Dedicated to cose non parole – things not words – Il Caffè directed itself towards public utility and domestic social reform through anonymous articles on matters of economics, politics, scientific and medical advances.18 In so doing, it captured the views of a young, educated class frustrated with patrician politics and cultural elitism, becoming, in spite of its brief lifespan, the mouthpiece of the Milanese Enlightenment. The relationship that developed between Galeazzi and the members of the Accademia dei Pugni during the production of Il Caffè led to their subsequent collaboration in the Estratto della Letteratura Europea. The Estratto was an Italian-language journal originally published in Bern and later Yverdon by the Typographic Society of Bern, best known for the Yverdon Encyclopédie (1770–80). It had been founded in 1758 by the Society’s creators, Vincenz Bernhard Tscharner and Fortunato de Felice, with the intention of counteracting the limited circulation of books and information across the Alps by providing articles which would profit humankind and scientific progress.19 Initially, Galeazzi acted as the journal’s main distributor in Italy; however, with the mounting pressure of producing the Encyclopédie, De Felice passed the journal over to Pietro Verri as editor and Galeazzi as publisher in 1766 (printed under the false place name of Yverdon), though he and other former Il Caffè writers continued to make contributions. The Estratto comprised anonymous overviews, reviews and translated extracts of new publications from across the continent, as well as shorter reports on new publications and lists of books available for sale through Galeazzi and the Typographic Society. As De Felice had intended, in an environment where books could be difficult to access, either physically or because of linguistic barriers, not to mention censorship, such regularly printed abridgements were an efficient means by which to communicate ideas and often filled an important gap in the cultural and intellectual landscape. It was in the Estratto that Milanese readers had their first taste of works like Vattel’s Law of Nations and Helvétius’s De l’esprit significantly before Italian editions were made available. Moreover, it provided rare translations of English-language works, which, if available at all, were often accessible only in heavily mediated French translations. The ability to fill this vacuum granted the Estratto an extraordinary power to shape that same landscape. The choices of which extracts made their way into the journal, which elements of books were in focus and the interpretation and assessment made of the works in question all affected the impression of 18 See: ‘Della patria degli Italiani’, in Il Caffè, pp. 421–7. 19 Estratto della letteratura europea (Bern, 9 Feb. 1758), pp. 1–2.

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these works upon Milanese readers. The collaborators were not ignorant to this power, which they saw as offering untapped potential for mass enlightenment, as argued by Beccaria in ‘On Periodicals’ for Il Caffè: The majority of people view a book as they do a man who wants to come into their affairs and reform their entire families; they are terrified of having the entire structure of their ideas overturned. But a periodical paper, which presents itself to you as a friend who wants just to whisper a word or two in your ear and that may suggest just a few useful truths … that may remove one or another error out of your mind almost without your noticing it, is much more welcome and much more heeded … most people do not believe themselves able to write a book; but everyone thinks he can write a periodical.20

Upon moving to Milan it was announced that the Estratto would be primarily dedicated to Italian-language publications. This ambition never materialised, owing to the difficulties in receiving notices of new books within the Italian peninsula. Instead, the journal kept its European scope and ‘useful’ focus, reviewing works considered ‘vital to human happiness’. Works of political economy, natural history, medicine, agriculture, astronomy and Church privilege were particularly well represented, as were those works more generally deemed ‘useful’, ‘clearly explained’ or presenting ‘simple methods’,21 among them such diverse publications as George Costard, The Use of Astronomy in History and Chronology, Robert Smith’s A Compleat System of Opticks and Simon Philibert de La Salle de l’Étang, Artificial Grasslands, or Ways of Perfecting Agriculture in all the French Provinces.22 The journal also displayed a keen interest in works of Scottish moral philosophy both before and after its move across the Alps. This is striking, given the significant role attributed to such writers as Adam Smith in the intellectual history of the Italian Enlightenment despite the limited availability of works of Scottish philosophy in Italian in this period.23 French translations were available, but many of these presented highly 20 ‘De’ Fogli Periodici’, in Il Caffè, pp. 411–12. 21 Estratto della Letteratura Europea (1769), 1: 106. 22 George Costard, The Use of Astronomy in History and Chronology, exemplified in an Inquiry into the Fall of the Stone into the Ægospotamos, said to have been foretold by Anaxagoras… (London, 1764); Robert Smith, A Compleat System of Opticks (Cambridge, 1738); Simon Philibert de La Salle de l’Étang, Prairies artificielles, ou moyens de perfectionner l’agriculture dans toutes les provinces de France (Brussels, 1762). 23 See: Franco Venturi, ‘Scottish Echoes in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 345–62.

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interpretative translations, such as the infamous French 1764 edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments by Marc-Antoine Eidous, which Smith himself considered a poor translation.24 Additionally, well-circulated collections of Hume’s writings, such as the five-volume collection commonly abbreviated to ‘Hume, Discours politiques, Tomo’, misattributed works by other authors to Hume.25 In this climate, the Estratto was an important vehicle in the early circulation of Scottish moral philosophy, in terms both of pure exposure and of the depth of textual engagement. Take, for instance, the two lengthy articles on Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1760, 1761) which followed the publication of the second English edition in 1760. Here, the anonymous reviewer focused on the Sixth Part of the Theory of Moral Sentiments ‘Of the Character of Virtue’ in the first segment, before then examining Smith’s system of morals in the second. Their command of the literature on moral philosophy is demonstrated by the extensive analysis and contextualisation of Smith’s arguments, which compare his views on virtue to those of Cicero, Plato, Samuel Clarke, William Wollaston and other philosophers and present the differences between Smith and Francis Hutcheson’s views on the moral sense. Other Scots featured in the Estratto included David Hume, whose Four Dissertations (Of the natural history of religion; Of passions; Of tragedy; Of the standard of taste) were reviewed in 1760, significantly before his economic essays were first translated in Venice by Matteo Dandalo in 1767,26 and shortly before French editions of his philosophical writings, such as Johann Bernhard Merian’s version of the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, were banned by the Church in 1761. The first essay on religion is the focus of the reviewer’s attention. In this essay, Hume traced the development of religious belief from polytheism to monotheism and its relationship to human nature and the limits of the human faculties, before concluding that while monotheism appears more rationally defensible, in practice it is often more intolerant and illogical than superstitious polytheism. Hume’s characteristic scepticism received little enthusiasm from the reviewer, who warned readers to approach the work with a ‘solid There was a limited command of English in Milan in this period, though some, like Alessandro Verri, did read Hume in English. 24 See: Hiroshi Mizuta, A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (London: Routledge 2016), pp. 69–71. 25 See: Paola Zanardi, ‘Italian responses to David Hume’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The Reception of David Hume in Europe (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005): 161–81 (p. 167). 26 David Hume, Saggi politici sopra il commercio: Traduzione dell’Inglese di Matteo Dandolo (Venice: G.M. Bassaglia, 1767).

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knowledge’ of religious truths, lest they be easily seduced by Hume’s ‘penetrating’ style and argument.27 Given the moderate Protestant outlook of the Typographic Society, which set them apart from the anti-religious Parisian Encyclopédistes, as well as the precarious censorship regulations across Italy, such statements are unsurprising. However, the defence of Christianity against Hume’s scepticism in the Estratto does not detract from the reviewer’s interest in Hume’s philosophical method and empirical style, nor does it prevent the account from giving an accurate rendering of Hume’s argument.28 The reconciliation of curiosity in and rejection of, Hume’s conclusions was commonplace across the continent as Hume came to be largely identified with sceptical debates. This identity explains ‘why some of the translations and commentaries, including those by Sulzer and Formey, had an overt polemical aim and rejected Hume’s views despite a favorable assessment of his philosophical style’.29 The review also spoke to other local interests. Although Hume was largely viewed as a ‘political’ writer in Italy in this period, owing to the resonance of his politico-economic arguments with enlightened reformism,30 the review signals a willing Milanese audience for ideas on the history of religion and its relationship to human nature and society, atheism aside. This willingness was indicative of the particular Milanese reading of the Scottish Enlightenment. In contrast to Venice and Naples, which focused on the Scottish philosophers’ political and economic statements,31 the Milanese looked to their views on the history of man in society for inspiration for their own discussions about human nature and society. While at the heart of the (anti)sceptical debate were questions regarding the limits of human understanding, these were inherently connected to wider discussions regarding the senses, anatomy, reason and human nature and their relation to the history of society, as well as epistemological and methodological questions regarding the investigation of these topics (especially empiricism and sensism), which were driving Milanese philosophical discussions. For the reformers, above all Verri and Beccaria, understanding 27 Estratto della Letteratura Europea (1758), p. 187. 28 See: Marialuisa Baldi, David Hume nel Settecento italiano: filosofia ed economia (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983), ch. 2. 29 Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, ‘On the Mitigated Phenomenalism of J.-B. Merian’, in Karin de Boer and Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet (eds), The Experiential Turn in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2021): 203–28 (p. 210). 30 Emilio Mazza, ‘Translations of Hume’s Works in Italy’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The Reception of David Hume in Europe (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005), pp. 182–94. 31 Venturi, ‘Scottish Echoes in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, pp. 349–51.

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these relationships was crucial not just in comprehending the evolution of civilisation, but also for justifying reforms in areas like law and economics and in creating political and social structures which worked in harmony with and took advantage of, human nature. The Estratto’s role in fostering this discussion in Milan is evidenced by other articles. In 1766, an extract of the work of metaphysics (also prohibited by the censors) by Hume’s Swiss translator Johann Bernard Merian was reviewed, which interacted with many of Hume’s ideas regarding the limitations of the senses and the need for metaphysics in the pursuit of scientific understanding.32 The same year, an extract of John Gregory’s influential work A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World was included, whose account of the connections between the soul, passions, religion and happiness contradicted many of the sceptical threads of Scottish philosophy, especially Hume’s.33 In 1758, David Fordyce’s widely circulated Elements of Moral Philosophy was reviewed, which, among other themes, explored the immortality of the soul, as did Helvétius’s De l’esprit, whose materialistic sensism was reviewed with enthusiasm in two lengthy reviews (1758, 1759). Similarly, in 1767, Adam Ferguson’s History of Civil Society was positively received for examining ‘man in all his relationships’.34 The growing pressures of censorship and the threat of losing his royal printer status led Galeazzi to abandon the Estratto in 1770.35 In its wake, he became involved in the Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue journal in 1777. Formed by Carlo Amoretti and Francesco Soave – who later became translators for the press – the journal had a similar style to the Estratto, comprising a combination of translated excerpts from recent works and notices about new publications, as well as information about prize competitions from various European scientific academies. While the Estratto had largely addressed works of arts and letters, the Scelta di opuscoli offered a broad scientific focus, including topics from across physics, mathematics, engineering, natural history, chemistry, anatomy, agronomy

32 Estratto della Letteratura Europea (1766), 3: 58–70. 33 See: R.J.W. Mills, ‘Religion, Scepticism and John Gregory’s Therapeutic Science of Human Nature.’ History of European Ideas, 46: 7 (2020): 916–33. 34 Estratto della Letteratura Europea (1767), 4. 35 Erica Morato, ‘Periodici milanesi dell’età teresiana: “Il Caffè”, l’“Estratto della letteratura europea”, la “Gazetta letteraria”’, in Massimo M. Augello, Marco Bianchini and Marco Enrico Luigi Guidi (eds), Le riviste di economia in Italia (1700- 1900): Dai giornali scientifico-letterari ai periodici specialisti (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1996): 89–115 (p. 96).

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and other fields, all directed towards a general readership.36 This shift reflected the development of a more ‘scientific’ mentality in Lombardy in the 1770s.37 Already, between 1772 and 1776, Galeazzi had collaborated with Amoretti on the Gazzetta letteraria journal. Although the journal focused primarily on religious and philosophical topics at its outset, including a number of works of Scottish philosophy by Adam Ferguson and Lord Monboddo,38 it increasingly featured more scientific and scientific-philosophic works, partially in reaction to changing censorship requirements, before eventually becoming the purely scientific Scelta di opuscoli. The focus on scientific advancement is clear from the journal’s dedication to the Plenipotentiary of Lombardy, Count Firmian, which stresses the necessity of translations in order to counter the ‘diversity of languages and the difficulty of accessing original works in Italy’ which hindered the development of the region’s arts and sciences.39 Consequently, the journal sought to provide faithful translations, although admittedly with all ‘needless digressions, unnecessary repetitions’ removed.40 Comments and additions were to be included only when necessary, usually in the form of additional clarification or references to supporting or contradictory arguments, as well as longer addenda and responses written by the translators. Despite its scientific aims, the editors proclaimed the journal’s dedication to matters of public utility in ways not dissimilar to the ‘things not words’ outlook of Il Caffè. The very format of the journal – like Beccaria’s whispering periodical – attended to the ‘prompt and easy propagation of knowledge’, while the careful selection of translations was predicated on their social benefit: The abstract calculations of the Geometers and Astronomers, the minute observations on the stamens or pistils of an exotic flower, the interpretation of an unearthed, semi-corroded inscription … only interests a small number of people. The new discoveries in Natural History, Physics, Medicine, Agriculture, Arts, discoveries that either lead to the explanation of unknown phenomena, or present new means to better provide for the needs and comforts of life, are those that have universal benefit and interest public curiosity.41 36 See: Arato, ‘Carlo Amoretti e il giornalismo scientifico nella Milano di fine Settecento’, p. 197. 37 Patrizia Delpiano, ‘I Periodici Scientifici Nel Nord Italia Alla Fine Del Settecento: Studi e Ipotesi Di Ricerca.’ Studi Storici, 30: 2 (1989): 457–82. 38 Gazzetta Letteraria 46 (17 Nov. 1773) and 18 (4 May 1774). 39 Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue 1 (1775), A3 verso. 40 Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue 1 (1775), preface, A7 recto. 41 Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue 1 (1775), preface, A6.

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The design of the journal resulted in a broad international range of contributions. In 1777 alone, the journal featured translations from prominent men of science, including Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Élie Bertrand, Cromwell Mortimer, John Hunter, Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, Charles Bonnet and Johann Beckmann, among many others,42 and such extracts as ‘The harmful qualities of putrid and marshy waters’; ‘Elements of agriculture based on facts and on reasoning for the use of peasants’; ‘Preventions against scurvy’; and ‘The influence of electricity on barometer variations’.43 However, the preference for works with ‘universal benefit’ resulted in the dominance of technical over speculative sciences. In this regard, the Scelta di opusculi mirrored changing attitudes towards the role and audience of the sciences within the Habsburg-Lombard administration, as the following section demonstrates.

Educating New Audiences The increasing interest in the scientific aligned with two important developments in Habsburg Lombardy. The first was the region’s extensive educational reforms, which reached their height after the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, resulting in the natural sciences playing a more dominant role in university curricula. A second, in many ways related, consideration, is the increasing importance that the Habsburg and Milanese reformers placed on the communication of the sciences to a wider audience. This pedagogical ambition of enlightening the population was visible in the creation of new print genres, such as the Scelta di opusculi and institutions like the Patriotic Society, but it was also expressed through a growing corpus of scientific publications and translations. We see this in the 1770s and 1780s, when Galeazzi almost doubled his output of works of sciences and arts.44 Among them was a proliferation of publications addressing matters of public health and agriculture that echoed concerns at the political level. As an agricultural economy, Lombardy was reliant on the improvement and management of agriculture to support its population and foreign trade, which was increasingly addressed from within the administration and the Patriotic Society through a series of innovations in sharecropping, fiscal systems and farming technologies. Public health was likewise subject to increasing regulation through the Habsburg ideology of medical police, 42 Others include: John Pringle, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, Louis-Bernard Guyton, Baron de Morveau, Etienne Grossin Duhaume, William Brownrigg and Johann Reinhold Forster, Nathaniel Hulme, Ramón M. Termeyer, Johann Georg Sulzer. 43 Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue (1777): 29–32. 44 Capra, ‘Il Tipografo degli Illuministi Lombardi: Giuseppe Galeazzi’, p. 53.

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which sought to administer centrally all areas of individual and public health and welfare. While innovation remained crucial to the improvement of agriculture and public health, it also depended on convincing the wider public of the benefits of such advances over traditional practices, as was made clear in Il Caffè: Agriculture especially suffers the damage of such prejudices and often the harvest of both silk and grains is ruined because instead of considering the season and the mild or humid air, instead of observing atmospheric phenomena, which have a physical and no small influence on the good cultivation of agricultural produce, very often rural tasks are produced at the wrong time so as to obey the wishful influences of the moon.45

To aid in this task, Galeazzi produced a range of translations of works on agriculture and health that were intended for new groups of readers, especially for those among the rural population. Among them, was the translation of the Scottish physician William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, or, A Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines (1769) printed by Galeazzi in five volumes between 1785 and 1786, which introduced non-expert readers to the causes and prevention of diseases.46 Despite the book’s global success – it ran to nineteen editions in Buchan’s lifetime and was translated into almost every European language, including Italian (Naples, 1781–82)47 – the translator was obliged to address a variety of criticisms angled at the Milanese translation. One such objection was directed at the use of the vernacular rather than Latin for medical writings, to which the translator responded that the vernacular was paramount to increasing the utility of the text for a wider audience. A more striking concern was the claim that Buchan’s work could have little relevance in a profoundly different climate where ‘illnesses are of a different character and susceptible to different treatments’.48 This view, the translator argued, demonstrated a grave misunderstanding of medicine which, being ‘universal in its precepts’, did not require adaptation to different 45 ‘Le osservazioni degli influssi …’, in Il Caffè, 297. 46 Medicina domestica o sia trattato completo di mezzi semplici per conservarsi in salute, impedire e risanare le malattie, 5 vols. (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1785–6). 47 Galeazzi’s edition was translated from the ‘sixth English edition into French with many additions and annotations by Signor Duplanil [Jean Denis Duplanil] and from the second French edition into Italian by a professor of medicine’. 48 ‘Prefazione del Traduttore Italiano’ in Medicina domestica, 1: a3.

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localities. As such, he claimed that there was no need to adjust the text to the Lombard climate, and consequently the only alteration made was the inclusion of Venetian and Milanese measurement conversion tables in the general index. Yet, while the content did not need to be tailored to be relevant, Buchan’s text required further augmentation in order to be especially useful to the wider Lombard public. This did not occur in the edition itself, but in a later 1787 translation of the French physician Anne Charles Lorry’s Essay on Food, to Serve as a Commentary on Hippocrates’ Dietetic Books which was framed and advertised by Galeazzi as a supplement to the Domestic Medicine.49 Although Lorry’s original work was published in 1757, significantly before Buchan’s, the editor’s preface emphasised that its translation was intended as an extension to the Domestic Medicine which offered additional, complementary reflections on areas of diet and health.50 By alerting readers to the connections between the translations, both works were reframed for the benefit of new readers as constituent parts of a single discourse on health and hygiene. The drawing of intellectual connections between works in this way is a common form of intervention both within and between Galeazzi’s translations. We see this in the edition of the Swiss physician Johann Friedrich Herrenschwand’s Treatise on the Most Common External and Internal Diseases, translated by the Milanese physician Michele Gherardini in 1789 and dedicated to the sanitary inspector general of Lombardy Johann Peter Frank. The translation included an extensive translator’s introduction, which gave an overview of the history of medical discoveries and outlined the comments and additions made to the text: I tried to unite all that which has been written by modern writers to perfect the lights of diagnosis and the cure of ills; also I have added the description of some diseases which I believed necessary for the greater completion of the work … Herrenschwand furnished this practical treatise with extensive medical-surgical recipes, with the exact description of the remedies and preparations, to which I have added the composition and the virtues of other preparations omitted

49 See: ‘Libri che trovansi vendibili presso Giuseppe Galeazzi’ in Trattato delle principali e delle piu frequenti malattie esterne ed interne ad uso degl’iniziati in medicina, dei chirurgo-medici e dei praticanti che suppliscono in mancanza dei medici graduati … (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1789). 50 Saggio sopra gli alimenti, per servire di commentario ai libri diatetici d’Ippocrate (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1787).

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by the author so that the reader can find in this single book what is described in many works.51

As Gherardini indicates, his additions transform the work into a compendium of sorts, where readers could source a diversity of medical information beyond Herrenschwand’s alone. Not only was this useful for readers, but, as Gherardini remarks, it was also economical, sparing individuals from purchasing multiple costly Latin editions. The perception of medicine as universal contrasts substantially to the outlook in agricultural and agronomical translations. These were commonly presented as needing to accommodate not just differences in climate and topography but the socio-economic and cultural structures of the region, even though, in practice, many of these modifications were not dissimilar to the additions encountered above. We find this in the translation of apicultural works produced by Galeazzi, such as the 1775 edition of Daniel Wildman’s Complete Guide for the Management of Bees Throughout the Year.52 Wildman’s guide was presented by the editor as a vital contribution to the ‘rural economy’ and was intended, through its ‘clear, simple and concise style’, for the education of the rural population, whose existing literature was ‘full of tales of the Ancients, who adopted the prejudices of their times to fill their writings with that false marvel … and which does not agree at all with facts and experience’.53 However, to be truly useful to this population, the text needed to be tailored to Lombardy through comments which provided additional bibliographic references and syntheses of relevant experiments made by individuals like Adam Gottlob Schirach, Jan Swammerdam and René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, as well as descriptions of the regional flora most suited to Lombard bee-keeping and critiques of antiquated local practices. In addition, a supplementary treatise by the Habsburg-Lombard functionary and corresponding member of the Patriotic Society, Galeazzo Fumagalli, on his double apiary which was ‘better adapted to our Lombard climate’ was also included, accompanied by diagrams to encourage the use of his method.54 51 Trattato delle principali e delle piu frequenti malattie esterne ed interne ad uso degl’iniziati in medicina, dei chirurgo-medici e dei praticanti che suppliscono in mancanza dei medici graduati … (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1789), 1: viii. 52 Guida sicura pel governo delle api in tutto il corso dell’anno di Daniele Wildman inglese, colle annotazioni di Angelo Contardi veronese (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1775). 53 Guida sicura pel governo delle api in tutto il corso dell’anno, A3, footnote 1. 54 The Society later tasked Fumagalli, alongside Carlo Amoretti, to investigate asphalt in Como as part of wider discussions on the exploitation of fossil fuels.

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The process of regionalisation was rarely simple, especially when it came to language. We see this in Carlo Amoretti’s translation of the Hungarian professor of agriculture, Ludwig Mitterpacher’s, Elements of Agriculture, which was ‘abbreviated, augmented and … accompanied by notes which apply the principles to cultivation in Lombardy as well as tables and a bibliography of Italian authors to make the text more useful for those studying this science in Lombardy’.55 The Latin-to-Italian translation had been commissioned by the Habsburg-Lombard government as part of a provincial literacy campaign, with the hope that it would instruct peasants in good agricultural practices. However, in the absence of any national Italian language of flora and fauna, Amoretti struggled to translate Latin terms into the vernacular, which obliged him to use both Tuscan and Lombard dialect vocabularies and the Italianisation of Latin words. Translators also faced additional conceptual problems. In the 1765 translation of the French naturalist François Boissier de la Croix de Sauvage’s Directions on the Breeding and Management of Silkworms, with Two Treatises: On the Cultivation of Mulberries and the Origins of Honey, the translator communicated some of the challenges of tailoring the work to benefit public utility and the improvement of agriculture in Lombardy.56 That literary Tuscan and Lombard dialect had different vocabularies for agricultural words like ‘silkworm’ was a common reality. A greater issue, however, was posed by the absence of some concepts from Italian all together. One example, sericulture, or the cultivation of silkworms, and known as magnaguerie in Croix de Sauvages’s France, had no equivalent term in Italy. The unavailability of a translation partly resulted from the different professional structures and forms of manufacturing within these two regions, but it also reflected the state of Italian language reform.57 This was a significant point of concern for the Milanese reformers. Literary Italian was highly regulated by the conservative Accademia della Crusca, whose linguistic corpus (Vocabolario della Crusca) sought to preserve the purity of the Italian (Tuscan) language. 55 Elementi d’agricoltura di Lodovico Mitterpacher …: Tradotti in italiano, e corredati di note relative all’ agricoltura milanese …, in three volumes (Milan: Nell’ Imperial monistero di S. Ambrogio Maggiore, 1784); revised edition, Elementi d’agricoltura di Lodovico Mitterpacher …: Tradotti in italiano, e corredati di note relative all’ agricoltura milanese …, 3 vols. (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1791). 56 Della Maniera di far nascere, e di nutrire i bachi da seta, trattato del Sig. Abb. Boissier de Sauvages … con due trattati, uno della coltivazione de’ gelsi, l’altro sull’origine del mele. Tradotto dal Franzese, 3 vols. (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1765). 57 See: Till Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness: Political Economy in the Italian Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), ch. 7 ‘Lombardy: Enlightenment from Above and from Within’.

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However, without a sufficiently extensible language with which to engage in contemporary economic, political or scientific debates and express new ideas and the promise of censorship for those who tried to develop one, the Milanese reformers saw little hope for the domestic development of these fields,58 as Pietro Verri despaired: out of fear of the new verb regrettare you wanted to substitute compiangere; you thus denied an idea because there is no corresponding word in our language, instead of giving citizenship to a French word that renders the idea perfectly.59

The Crusca was also a pernicious form of social gatekeeping. For those ‘poor unfortunate and uncultured souls who were only able to speak the plebeian Lombard language’,60 the Crusca, like Latin, prevented individuals from personal improvement as well as fully partaking in their political and economic rights. This attitude, and that regarding the democratisation of publication in agricultural and health more generally, are indicative of the paternalism common to advocates of enlightened absolutism. The desire to educate the populace in ‘useful’, scientifically evidenced and economically productive methods was symptomatic of shifting views about the responsibility of the state. The growing desire to rationalise the governance and management of society into a science accompanied a determination to put the sciences to work for society. Yet it was also telling of the Milanese reformers’ drive to propel Lombardy onto the international stage. The need to develop a domestic scientific language and culture was central to transforming Lombardy into an enlightened nation.

Translating Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Between 1770 and 1773 the Galeazzi press produced a thirty-two-volume translation of one of the most important eighteenth-century works of natural history: Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi, originally printed in Paris by the Imprimerie Royale in thirty-six volumes between 58 ‘Rinunzia avanti notaio degli autori del presente foglio periodico al Vocabolario della Crusca’, in Il Caffè, pp. 47–50. 59 As quoted in Gianmarco Gaspari, Letteratura delle riforme: da Beccaria a Manzoni (Palermo: Sellerio, 1990), p. 15. 60 Pietro Verri, ‘Osservazioni sulla tortura’ (1777), in Memorie storiche sulla economia pubblica dello stato di Milano (Milan: Destefanis, 1804), pp. 191–312.

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1749 and 1789.61 The Histoire naturelle was an ambitious project which far outstretched its compiler’s original intention of simply cataloguing the French Royal Cabinet. Instead, it sought to provide a comprehensive description of nature, and consequently comprised theories of the earth and reproduction, as well as descriptions of quadrupeds, birds and minerals, written by a range of natural historians, among them, the anatomist Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Although a controversial work, owing to its break with both the biblical concept of time and Linnaean taxonomy, the Histoire naturelle became a work of immense popularity.62 Written in an accessible prose and accompanied by nearly 2,000 sumptuous illustrations, the work purposefully appealed to a diverse audience ranging from natural historians to polite readers. Its success enabled Buffon to sell a small-format edition to the printer Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in 1767, which was followed by a flurry of responses, abridgements and reviews directed at a general public unable to afford Buffon’s costly original. Like Panckoucke, Galeazzi published the translation in a cheap duodecimo format, as well as a reduced version in thirteen volumes available by subscription. Although produced some two decades after the publication of the first volume of the Histoire naturelle, Galeazzi’s edition is only the second-oldest translation of the text, after Albrecht von Haller’s German translation of 1750. The delay can be partially explained by the prevalence of French-language editions available throughout the continent after Panckoucke, though this same prevalence raises questions as to why an Italian translation was deemed necessary. While the promise of commercial success was undoubtedly attractive to Galeazzi, as was the social benefit of the vernacular, there is reason to believe that the translation of the Histoire naturelle spoke to additional intellectual interests. The Milanese reformers were already engaging extensively with Buffon’s theories in the 1760s after the publication of volumes XII and XIII on quadrupeds, in which Buffon had ‘discreetly presented his more daring ideas’.63 His views on natural history were especially well received by the Il Caffè group, who were drawn to Buffon’s sensationist epistemology, which bridged philosophical and biological thinking to present a physiological–anthropological, vitalist account of sensations. It was part of a wider corpus of largely French sensational theories, which included Buffon’s rival Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s 61 Storia naturale, generale, e particolare del Sign. de Buffon… Colla descrizione del gabinetto del re del sig. Daubenton, 32 vols. (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1770–73). 62 See: Daniel Mornet, ‘Les enseignements des bibliothèques privées (1750–1780).’ Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 17 (1910): 449–96 (p. 460). 63 Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 153.

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Treatise on Sensations – partially translated by Galeazzi in 176864 – that were influential in the development of Verri and Beccaria’s accounts of the motivating sentiments of pains and pleasures and their role in political philosophy and economy, which would become seminal strands of Milanese Enlightenment thought.65 The Milanese exposure to Buffon’s ideas was often mediated through the physician and professor of anatomy Pietro Moscati, who was closely linked to the Milanese reformers through his contributions to Il Caffè and the Scelta di opuscoli, his participation in the Patriotic Society and his collaboration with the Lombard administration. An influential anatomist across the continent, Moscati was largely responsible for circulating vitalist ideas in Italy,66 and had voiced support for Buffon’s views on nature as well as criticism of the conflicting Linnaean system of classification.67 Like Buffon, he believed that discussions concerning the nature of the soul and the function of the nervous system needed to be connected to the anatomy of the human body, and he shared Buffon’s view that the human faculties of reason and reflection were what separated man and beast. However, Moscati deviated from Buffon in a number of areas, above all regarding Buffon’s views that the soul was the essence of the thinking mind, which Moscati believed to be the product of the structure of the nerves and the brain. This argument attracted significant attention from the Milanese intellectual community, who identified not only the significance of Moscati’s statements for anatomy but also the cultural and philosophical repercussions of his materialist leanings.68 The Il Caffè group enthusiastically embraced Moscati’s views, defending his stance against 64 Compendio ragionato del trattato delle sensazioni del Sig. Abate di Condillac (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1768), as referenced in Laurent Reverso, Les Lumières chez les juristes et publicistes lombards au XVIIIe siècle: influence française et spécificité (Presses universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2004), p. 248. 65 Silvia Contarini, ‘Nota introduttiva’, in Pietro Verri and Silvia Contarini (eds), Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (Rome: Carocci, 2001): 25–61. See: Beccaria to André Morellet (Milan, 26 Jan. 1766), letter 68 in Carlo Capra, Renato Pasta and Francesca Pino Pongolini (eds), Edizione nazionale delle opere di Cesare Beccaria (Milan: Mediobanca, 1994), 4: 222–3. 66 See: Edoardo Proverbio, ‘Sulle ricerche pneumatiche, sulla respirazione, circolazione e composizione del sangue … il contributo di Pietro Moscati.’ Atti Della Fondazione Giorgio Ronchi, 62 (2007). 67 Silvia Caianello, ‘Intorno alle prime edizioni italiane di Buffon,’ in Giulia Cantarutti and Stefano Ferrari, Traduzione e transfert nel XVIII secolo tra Francia, Italia e Germania (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2013): 95–119 (pp. 101–5). 68 Pietro Verri to Alessandro Verri (Milan, 14 Feb. 1770), in F. Novati, E. Greppi et al. (eds), 12 vols, Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri, (Milan: Cogliati, 1910–42), 3: 215.

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purely mechanistic interpretations of organisms,69 and expressing their admiration for his ambition to reclassify nature by anatomy alone.70 It is probable that Moscati indirectly, if not even directly, encouraged the translation of the Natural History, though he was unlikely to have carried out the translation himself.71 He had existing connections to Galeazzi, who had already printed his Lessons on Anatomy in 1768, which had been pivotal in introducing Buffon’s ideas to a wider public, as well as his Of the Essential Bodily Differences between the Structure of Brutes and Humans in 1770, which provoked a querelle across the Republic of Letters owing to its conclusions regarding the evolutionary differences in bipeds and quadrupeds.72 Other indicators in the edition – namely the reordering of the contents of the volumes,73 and the inclusion of supplementary materials – highlight how it was adapted to an audience already engaged in the vitalist debate stimulated by Moscati. This is evidenced by a number of substantial additions to the original text, the most visible being in volume XII on quadrupeds (1771).74 Here, Galeazzi inserted the anonymous discourse ‘Of man and of the reproduction of different individuals. Work that serves as an introduction and defence to the natural history of the animals of Mr. de Buffon’.75 The text is a translated excerpt from the longer essay of the same title by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke and published anonymously in 1761,76 which defended Buffon’s views, above all his interpretation of reproduction. Although framed by Galeazzi as a generous ‘gift’ to readers in order to further their understanding of the subject, the appeal of Panckoucke’s work was most likely its defence of the compatibility of Buffon’s arguments with Christian dogma. It was not an unwarranted concern; Buffon himself had responded to accusations of irreligion by the Paris Faculty of Theology in volume IV (1753). However, while allegations of the text’s materialism had dissipated in France by the 1770s, Galeazzi’s emphasis on how Buffon 69 ‘La Medicina’, in Il Caffè, 201–2. 70 See: Pietro Verri to Alessandro Verri (Milan, 9 Jan. 1768) in Novati, Greppi. et al (eds), Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri, 1: 129–30. 71 See: Silvia Caianello, ‘Intorno alle prime edizioni italiane di Buffon’, p. 106. 72 Indice de’ discorsi anatomici che si tengono pubblicamente nel Theatro della regia Università di Pavia (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1768); Delle corporee differenze essenziali che passano fra la struttura de’ bruti, e la umana (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1770). 73 For instance, Buffon’s two views of nature are transplanted from vol. 12 to vol. 8; the Discours sur la nature des Animaux is in vol. VII, not IV. 74 Also volume XIII, depending on the copy. 75 Dell’uomo e della riproduzione dei differenti individui. Opera che può servire d’introduzione e di difesa alla storia naturale degli animali del Sig.r de Buffon. 76 Caianello, ‘Intorno alle prime edizioni italiane di Buffon’, pp. 102–3.

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and Panckoucke’s writings confirmed the existence of God suggests that he feared possible repercussions in Habsburg Lombardy, undoubtedly inflamed by the ongoing discussions over materialism and metaphysics already seen in the Estratto. Galeazzi’s voice resounds elsewhere, most visibly in the letter to the reader included in volume XI (1771).77 Here, he announced the forthcoming translation of Buffon’s Natural History of Birds (French original, 1770–83). Although certainly a form of advertising, the lengthy letter presented a thirty-eight-page synopsis of the first two volumes, complete with direct quotations translated from the French. It reveals Galeazzi’s own in-depth engagement with Buffon’s theories and firm grasp of the significance of his conclusions. We see this in the focus that Galeazzi placed on the function of images. In order to capture the extraordinary diversity of the avian world, Buffon had employed over eighty artists to provide scale, hand-painted illustrations of birds to compensate for what, Galeazzi explained, were the insufficiencies of language in communicating the subtleties of their appearances. This differed from the approach taken in the earlier volumes, which depicted animals in their natural habitats or culturally coded environs (including pagodas and Corinthian columns) as it was thought that these fixed environments were central to the development and differentiation of the species. As birds were untethered to geographical areas, depicting their climate and habitat could not serve the same function, thus requiring a different visual language. Galeazzi’s identification of the epistemic role of images reflects ongoing discussions over the limitations of nomenclature and classification among natural historians. Buffon had criticised Linnaeus – himself opposed to illustrations – for this exact reason, as he believed that no abstract scientific language system had the capacity thoroughly to explain nature and thus argued that it was better to describe, compare and characterise nature in relation to its own diversity as well as proximity to man, rather than classify it.78 The focus on Buffon’s linguistic arguments is visible in other additions, such as the inclusion of the ‘Discourse on style’ in volume VII (1771), adjacent to the ‘Discourse on the nature of animals’. The discourse had been delivered by Buffon in 1753 upon his election to the Académie Française and, although printed in Paris the same year, it was only revised by Buffon in 1777, when it was published in volume IV of the Supplements to the Histoire naturelle. Its inclusion echoes the 77 Also volumes XII/XIII, depending on the copy. 78 Richard Sörman, ‘Science and Natural Language in the Eighteenth Century: Buffon and Linnaeus’, in Britt-Louise Gunnarsson (ed.), Languages of Science in the Eighteenth Century (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011): 141–55 (p. 154).

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interest in Buffon’s views on the shortcomings of arbitrary classification for representation and understanding. Although it presents reflections on the art, style and taste of writing, these faculties are fundamentally related to Buffon’s views on understanding the connections within nature and the ways in which true language and ideas are products of observation and experience: Why are the works of Nature so perfect? It is because each work is a whole, because Nature works on an eternal plan which she never forgets. She prepares in silence the germs of her production, she sketches by a single stroke the primitive form of every living thing; she develops it, she perfects it by a continuous movement and in a prescribed time. … The mind of man can create nothing, produce nothing, except after having been enriched by experience and meditation … But if he imitates Nature in his procedure and his labour, if he raises himself by contemplation to the most sublime truths, if he reunites them, links them on a chain, forms of them a whole, a thought-out system, then he will establish, upon unshakable foundations, immortal monuments.79

The relationship between language, signs and society was central to many of the Milanese reformers’ own writings of the 1770s.80 On the one hand, this manifested itself in criticisms of the social and conceptual restraints of the Crusca and the ‘relentless wordsmiths’.81 On the other hand, writers like Verri and Beccaria built on the debates on sensations and the origins of language to propose more radical visions of communication for the purposes of enriching society. They envisaged that more natural language systems would facilitate the enlightenment of the populace and foster the improvement of domestic arts and sciences. However, this required rethinking the fundamental elements of language, from the creation of sound to the formation of ideas, not to mention the signs by which they were communicated, in ways that reflected the relationship between sound, sensibility and ideas. The debt to Buffon is highly visible in this regard. Both Verri and Beccaria presented near-identical statements to the ‘Discourse on style regarding the nature and form of speech’, with the latter’s Inquiry into the Nature of Style (Galeazzi, 1770) stating that ‘all speech is a series of words which corresponds to a series of ideas; all speech is a series of articulated 79 Discours sur le style et autres discours académiques par Georges-Louis de Buffon (Paris: L. Hachette, 1843), p. 7. 80 See: Ellen Lockhart, ‘Alignment, Absorption, Animation: Pantomime Ballet in the Lombard Illuminismo.’ Eighteenth Century Music 8:2 (2011): 239–59. 81 Pietro Verri’s ‘parolai’ (wordsmiths) appear in ‘Pensieri sullo spirito della letteratura d’Italia’, in Il Caffè, 211–22.

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sounds: therefore every difference in style consists either in the diversity of ideas or in the different succession of the representative sounds’.82 Moreover, the discussion over the social potential of language diffused across Milanese society, reaching its height in the Angiolini–Noverre aesthetic quarrel of the 1770s, coterminous with the translation of the Natural History. At the heart of the dispute was the choreographer and former director of the Imperial Theatres of Vienna and St Petersburg, Gasparo Angiolini’s arguments that gesture could function as a didactic language and that verbal language served no role on the stage.83 This conclusion was partially based on his reading of Condillac’s Treatise on Sensations, whose thought-experiment of the statue he had transformed into a ‘philosophical ballet’ in Milan. Seeing the potential of Angiolini’s arguments in lending credence to his own views on language as a tool of enlightenment, Pietro Verri offered his support, claiming that Angiolini’s non-verbal ‘language of action’ appealed to the human senses and transformed individuals through vivid impressions.84 That the translation of Buffon’s views on language served to confirm and stimulate the existing Milanese debate is further supported by the limited contextual adjustments made in Galeazzi’s edition. Not only does this contrast with the examples explored in the previous section, but also with other early translations of the Natural History. The first German translation, for instance, tailored Buffon’s work to the German intellectual climate through a Linnaeisation of his argument.85 The later Neapolitan edition (1772–77) included frequent interventions contradicting Buffon’s arguments (above all, his statements on Mount Vesuvius), and, as its editor pointedly remarked in the preface, contained myriad corrections to the ‘imprecise’ Milanese translation in order to make it ‘conform more to our language’.86

82 Cesare Beccaria, ‘Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile’, in Luigi Firpo, Gianni Francioni and Gianmarco Gaspari (eds), Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Cesare Beccaria (Milan: Mediobanca, 1984), 2: 81. 83 See: Lockhart, ‘Alignment, Absorption, Animation: Pantomime Ballet in the Lombard Illuminismo’. 84 Pietro Verri, ‘Lettre à Monsieur Noverre’, in Panizza (ed.), Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Verri (Rome: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 3: 623–55. 85 Stéphane Schmitt, ‘From Paris to Moscow via Leipzig (1749–1787): Translational Metamorphoses of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle.’ Erudition and the Republic of Letters 4: 2 (2019): 255. 86 ‘Prefazione dell’Editore’, in Storia naturale, generale, e particolare del Sign. de Buffon, Intendente del Giardino del Re …. (Naples: Fratelli Raimondi, 1773), 7: xi–xii.

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Conclusion Although diverse in content and ambition, the different writings and publications examined in this chapter give an insight into the complex interaction of Galeazzi’s translations with the political and cultural climate of Enlightenment Milan. The varying involvement of protagonists of the Milanese reform movement in the translations, the selections and adjustments made to texts to align them with domestic concerns, and the identification of the potential of vernacular translations as vehicles for local education and improvement, all indicate that translation culture was inextricable from the wider political context. As both an expression of and contributor to this dynamic, the translations and their producers consequently played an important role in confirming the cultural currents of the Milanese Enlightenment. This was exploited by the reformers themselves, who identified the value of translations and print more generally, in supporting their ambitions for mass enlightenment and the refinement of domestic culture, as well as their arguments for reform. Thus, while the Habsburg reform project was driven by Viennese and Milanese administrators and intellectuals alike, it was simultaneously bolstered by the faithful adherence to this programme communicated through the publishing strategies of printers like Galeazzi. Although the translations might have been presented for their ‘utility’ for Lombard readers, they were no less useful in their support for the tone of Habsburg-Lombard reformism.

4

Monsters, Myths and Methods: The Making and Global Reception of a Norwegian History James Raven

H

ow far does the production of attractive books with careful design, fine typography, quality paper and well-crafted images assist in making the incredible believable? This chapter offers a test case. Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, published his Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie in Copenhagen in two parts in 1752 and 1753. It was translated into German as Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens and the first part published, also in Copenhagen, a year later in 1753, with the second part following in 1754. A year after that, both parts were translated into English and published together in London as The Natural History of Norway. The three editions, in Danish, in German and in English, issued between 1752 and 1755, forged the reputation of the Naturlige Historie; no further editions of the full work were published,1 although the publications of the 1750s spawned numerous later extracts, commentaries and references. Plentiful illustrative engravings and, in the London version, a pull-out map, accompanied the different printed editions. Numerous European periodicals reviewed Pontoppidan’s work. Major institutions across mainland Europe ordered the Danish- and German-language editions, and, most conspicuously, the English edition was bought by dozens of institutions and significant writers and collectors around the world.2 1 A modest but elegantly printed German edition of 1769 republished only the first part of the Naturlige Historie. 2 This research on Pontoppidan began in 2009, following an invitation to contribute to the Literary Citizens of the World Project in Oslo, then Trondheim, Bergen and Venice (2016–19); and is now published as Ruth Hemsted, Janickes Kaasa, Ellen Krefting

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The London edition was the finest and in many ways the most authoritative version of Pontoppidan’s great endeavour, even though it was not in the original language. Its success, this chapter argues, was the result of the intersection of ideas and material forms and of the appreciation and subliminal effect of that union both then and since. Comparative study of the Naturlige Historie reveals how different translations, not only in language but in format, typographical choices and designs, inserted and re-cut illustrations, and publication and promotional processes contributed to different valences of authenticity and authority, and, as this chapter details, to a legacy of debate and influence. By focusing study on a single title, we might chart the history of an individual work from its genesis, publication, circulation and reception in different forms and in different places across generations of use and conservation. Such approaches are undertaken in different ways by the contributors to this volume. Many, in pursuing the intersection of ideas with materialities, also effectively build on projects whose concept has been subject to debate about the compass of ‘book biography’.3 The Naturlige and Aina Nøding (eds), Literary Citizenship in Scandinavia in the Long Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2023). My continuing research in more than sixty archives and libraries, examining more than eighty copies of the Naturlige Historie in its different editions, and related catalogues, letters and papers, has been generously supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Research Grant (SRG19\190747), and benefited from the one detailed monograph on the work, the image-and-text focused doctoral study of Simone Ochsner Goldschmidt, published as Wissensspuren Generierung, Ordnung und Inszenierung von Wissen in Erik Pontoppidans Norges naturlige Historie 1752/53 (Tübingen and Basel: A Francke Verlag, 2012); together with her ‘Om illustrasjonenes betydning i Pontoppidans Norges naturlige Historie (1752/53).’ Lychnos (2010): 179–85. In addition, although not concerned with bibliographical or physical aspects of the volumes, Brita Brenna, ‘Natures, Contexts, and Natural History’. Science, Technology, & Human Values 37: 4 (July 2012): 355–78 investigates how ‘systematic enquiries like Pontoppidan’s work contributed to bringing different kinds of nature into being’. Gina Dahl first showed me the copybook of Pontoppidan’s diocesan letters held at the Regional State Archives in Bergen [Statsarkivet i Bergen], Bjørgvin biskop, kopibok 2 (1747–9), 3 (1749–51), 4 (1751–3), and 5 (1753–4), first mined by Michael Neiiendam (see note 6 below), with correspondence since published and annotated in Gina Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok 1751–1753 (Bergen: Kapabel Press, 2019). I am most grateful to her and for the generous assistance of Anders Toftgaard, Joanna Maciulewicz, Maximiliaan van Woudenberg, Graham Jefcoate, many Danish and Norwegian colleagues and the librarians and archivists at the more than eighty institutions worldwide holding copies of the Historie/Geschicte/History and Pontoppidan materials. 3 Further discussed in the Conclusion below, pp. 379–80; the most influential studies include Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Paul Eggert,

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Historie/Natural History was sought by institutions and readers around the globe, and remains today a popular collector’s item in international book sales. By examining archival notes, reviews and annotated surviving copies bought by scholars, writers, clerics and institutions in Europe and the North American and Indian colonies and trading ports, we can determine how Pontoppidan’s scientific and historical ‘verification’ methods were received and the part played by different material book forms. There is one other key reason for the influence – indeed, the notoriety – of the Naturlige Historie, where text, image and presentational form came together to ensure future reference to the bishop’s writing and imaginaries. In a celebrated and much debated section of Part Two of the Naturlige Historie, Pontoppidan argued for the existence of sea serpents, kraken and mermaids. Pontoppidan, for all his insistence on verifiability, on providing evidence for everything he described, included long sections on the sightings of varieties of marine monsters. He gave notes on contemporary observations and images of the creatures, many drawn from earlier works on Scandinavian myth, and repeated by great early modern naturalists. His observations astonished. Pontoppidan wrote that the kraken was the size of a floating island. Some mermaids and mermen were said to be Danish-speaking. The extended discussion and depiction of the sea monsters has proved influential to the present day and in locations far from Norway. Pontoppidan’s affirmation of giant sea creatures as part of God’s creation depended on the explicit presentation within his text of testimonials and verified sightings, all as contributions to an increasingly popular exploration of ‘natural science’. The descriptions of the giant sea ‘worms’ or serpents provided models and encouragement to recorded sightings the world over.

The Genesis Born in Aarhus, Denmark in 1698, Erik Pontoppidan studied divinity at the University of Copenhagen. In 1719, when employed as a tutor, he made his first visit to Norway, part of the Danish realm, and later travelled to the Netherlands and to London and Oxford. From 1726 to 1734 he served as pastor at Hagenbjerg, north of Flensburg, where he became known as a protector of Pietists, advocates of a movement originating in Lutheran Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (University Park, PA and Sydney: Penn State University Press and Sydney University Press, 2013); see also James Raven, ‘Writing a Life-Cycle of an Early Modern Book: Observations and Questions about Book Biographies’, Knygotyra 80 (2023): 18–42.

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north Germany and emphasising personal transformation through individual devotion and spiritual renewal. Pontoppidan soon achieved a further reputation for his religious tracts and as a historian and antiquarian, at this time writing and publishing in Latin and in the expected German (the language of the court). Surveys of his many writings before the Naturlige Historie can be found elsewhere,4 but one early publication merits particular note. In 1735, when Pontoppidan was appointed preacher to the Danish court in Copenhagen and chaplain to the notably pious and authoritarian Christian VI, he was commissioned to write an elucidation of the Small Catechism of Martin Luther used by the Church of Denmark. Pontoppidan’s resulting Sandhed til Gudfrygtighed [Truth to Godliness] appeared in association with the 1736 landmark royal decree compelling instruction for Confirmation and the allied 1739 decree establishing elementary education for all the king’s subjects. Written in Danish to ensure widespread understanding (and compliance), Sandhed til Gudfrygtighed remained a staple guide to Danish and Norwegian religious thought and practice for the next two hundred years (even if many of its school-age users – some in living memory – concluded that its length and sheer number of questions often frustrated its intentions to teach in the vernacular). As pertinent as its language, is that the commentary was printed (in 1737) at the Vajsenhuset in Copenhagen, a royal foundation which served as an orphanage and a hub for like-minded clergy, scholars and theologians.5 The former Missionskollegiets Trykkeri (or printing house) moved to the Vajsenhuset after the city fire of 1728, and was given its own printing privilege. Foremost was its exclusive right from 1740 to print and distribute Bibles and hymnals.6 The Missionskollegiet had also been established to fund and direct Protestant missions under royal patronage, including to the Danish colony of Fort Dansborg (Tranquebar), which was to be a distant recipient of copies of Pontoppidan’s writings.7 4 The standard but elderly biography is Michael Neiiendam, Erik Pontoppidan I (1698–1735). Studier og bidrag til pietismens historie (Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad, 1930), and Erik Pontoppidan II (1735–1764). Studier og bidrag til pietismens historie (Copenhagen, G.E.C. Gad, 1933); see also, Halkild Nilsen, ‘Biskop Erik Pontoppidan og skolestellet i Bergens stift’, Årbok for Bjørgvin bispedøme (Bergen: Bjørgvin bispedømeråd, 1955): 67–82. 5 Svend Skov Jensen, Nogle Kapitler af Vajsenhusets Historie (Copenhagen: Berlingsdke Bogtrykkeri, 1952); Chr. Ottesen, Det Kgl Vaisenhus Gennem To Hundrede Aas (Copenhagen: Haase and Son, 1927). 6 Harald Ilsøe, Biblioteker til salg. Om danske bChr. Ottensenogauktioner og kataloger 1661–1811 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Bibliothek Museem Tusculanums Forlag, 2007), pp. 98, 116. 7 The Missionskollegiet was abolished in 1859.

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The endeavours at the Vajsenhuset demonstrated the value of collaborative information networks, something that was to be vital to the construction of the Naturlige Historie. The first Director of the Vajsenhuset was Count Johan Ludvig Holstein (1694–1763), Danish Minister of State, Patron of the University of Copenhagen, co-founder and life President of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and revered dedicatee of Pontoppidan’s Naturlige Historie. In the Vajsenhuset worked other prominent Pietists, one of whom, Erich Johan Jessen, later Minister of Justice and State Councillor, prepared at Holstein’s prompting a description of territories belonging to the king of Denmark based on the answers received from a questionnaire sent out in 1743. Eventually, this material was left to Pontoppidan, and then to Hans de Hofman (1713–93), lawyer, genealogist, historian and member of the Justice Council, State Council and Conference Council,8 and the brother of Pontoppidan’s third wife, Johanne Marie de Hofman. Hofman was to be instrumental in the printing arrangements for the Naturlige Historie, and, after Pontoppidan’s death, oversaw the publication of the final parts of Pontoppidan’s masterly and finely illustrated Den danske Atlas (The Danish Atlas).9 Pontoppidan’s writings and scholarly interests increasingly combined the theological with the historical. Publications included his opbyggelse (‘edifying’) novel, Menoza (1742–43), the eccentric story of an Indian prince who maintained that rationalist arguments for the existence of God are insufficient for salvation.10 More generally, by the early 1740s, Pontoppidan was flourishing intellectually and, in the broadest sense, politically. All changed in 1746. The accession of Frederick V that year brought the new king’s rejection of his father’s famously pious court, a reversionary censure of Pietism and a disruption to the intellectual and religious circles in which Pontoppidan moved. Frederick’s criticism of Pontoppidan’s sympathies led, conveniently it seems, to his appointment as bishop of the Norwegian diocese of Bergen. His exceptional energy was evident from the outset. Within months of his arrival in June 1748, he introduced educational reforms, established reading classses for poor children, penned pedagogical pamplets in Danish and wrote and published (in Bergen in 1749) his Glossarium Norvagicum, eller Forsøg paa en Samling af saadanne rare

8 Konferensråd or Council of the King’s Advisors, Dansk biografisk leksikon [DBL] VII: 498–500. 9 DBL VIII: 489–90 (p. 489); https://biografiskleksikon.lex.dk/Hans_de_Hofman/. 10 See Laurel Lied, ‘Danish Catechism in Action? Examining Religious Formation in and through Erik Pontoppidan’s Menoza’, Studies in Church History 55 (June 2019): 225–40.

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norske Ord [or an Attempt at a Collection of Strange Norwegian Words].11 And he soon conceived the writing of Norges naturlige Historie. The new undertaking was, he wrote, partly to demonstrate the glory of God in the rationally and physically revealed marvels of the northern lands still little known to scholars and educated readers in the rest of Europe, and partly in anticipation of the explorations of his new diocese and discoveries in natural history, a subject which in Europe and the Americas was spawning huge intellectual and publishing interest. Pontoppidan was able to collect information and physical items from across his new diocese but he may also have gathered relevant knowledge before his arrival as bishop. The material from the 1743 Holstein–Jessen questionnaire had been available to him at the Vajsenhuset in Copenhagen for five years and had already helped in the compilation of his recent Glossarium. Jessen’s territorial topographical labours based on the answers to the questionnaire may also have been keenly consulted by Pontoppidan.12 Pontoppidan drew on an enthusiasm for a new type of knowledge of the world, one already identified in the preceding chapters of this volume and amplified by those that follow. For Pontoppidan, early eighteenth-century pietism fuelled complex religious skirmishes, but to this tumult also came an ‘Oplysning’, which might be interpreted as ‘Enlightenment’ but also, notably, translates as ‘information’, ‘disclosure’ and ‘awareness’. In pursuing this Oplysning, the bishop determined to use his position to enlighten those unfamiliar with Norway and its God-given wonders.13 Such systematic enquiry, also equating to the Danish ‘viden-skaber’ (and in German, Wissenschaften), underpinned the empirical construction of the Naturlige Historie.14 As recent scholarship on natural history of the period has insisted, however, credulity was also integral to its methods.15

11 Neiiendam, Erik Pontoppidan, 2: 145–74; Nilsen, ‘Biskop Erik Pontoppidan’, pp. 67– 8; Pontoppidan had already been granted exemption from censorship in March 1748, allowing him to publish locally, Neiiendam, Erik Pontoppidan, 2: 284. 12 Håkon Hamre, Erik Pontoppidan og Hans Glossarium Norvagicum (Bergen: Norwegian Universities Press, 1972), pp. 6–9. 13 ‘Foreigners seldom visit us, unless they are seamen and merchants; and these have little else in view, than the lucre of their professions’, Pontoppidan, Natural History, 1: ix. 14 The methodology underpins Brenna’s argument that ‘Pontoppidan’s work contributed to bringing different kinds of nature into being’, ‘Natures, Contexts, and Natural History’, p. 356. 15 Notably, N. Jardine, J.E. Secord, and E.C. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Emma Spary, Utopia’s Garden. French Natural History from Old Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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Essential to Pontoppidan’s planned work was the further collection of materials enabled by his visitation tours and the development of a clerical network of informants who engaged, observed and recorded. Pontoppidan’s visitations began on 9 July 1748, less than five weeks after his arrival in Bergen. For the next few years, in the limited travelling season of the three summer months, he journeyed determinedly through his extensive diocese. Pontoppidan’s letter-book of 1751–53 contains numerous references to information requested and received from clergy in the diocese about natural phenomena on both land and water. Pontoppidan was to acknowledge his helpers in the Naturlige Historie itself, writing somewhat patronisingly that for priests stranded in country parishes, natural knowledge will not only furnish them with many clear arguments, and edifying reflexions to themselves and their hearers … but it will besides prove a liberal amusement in their solitude; it will enable them, by much greater opportunities than the learned enjoy in towns, to make useful discoveries or improvements, from the products of nature, to the lasting benefit of their country, which it is their duty to promote.16

Pontoppidan was demanding, expecting high standards and responsiveness. According to numerous reports, he was well liked by ordinary people, even though he addressed them in a High Danish based on the educated Copenhagen dialect – one now developed and increasingly standardised by contemporary print.17 Among notable correspondents for Pontoppidan were the dean of Nordre, Augustin Meldal (1697–1777), and the clergyman, natural historian and topographer Hans Strøm (1726–97),18 who first gave

2000); and P.H. Smith and P. Findlen (eds), Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002). 16 Pontoppidan Natural History 1: vii–viii; see also Brita Brenna, ‘Clergymen Abiding in the Fields: The Making of the Naturalist Observer in Eighteenth-Century Norwegian Natural History’, Science in Context 24: 2 (2011): 143–66. 17 Neiiendam, Erik Pontoppidan, 2: 159–60, 166–7; travels also noted by Pontoppidan, Natural History, 1: xviii. 18 In July 1751 Pontoppidan wrote to Strøm to thank him for observations and intelligence [observationer og Efterretninger], proffering thanks on behalf of himself and the public, and noting that he would be able to use anything received before Michaelmas (29 Sept.); he thus revised his assertion in late 1749 that his writing would be completed before Pentecost (May) 1750, now anticipating a self-set deadline of autumn 1751, Pontoppidan to Strøm, 9 July 1751 Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, p. 92.

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species descriptions for Norwegian animals.19 The striking copperplate engravings in Strøm’s book further established his reputation as a scientific authority, and in 1760 he co-founded the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.20 Pontoppidan also used both Strøm’s and Meldal’s sons for information gathering. Both, he noted, lived among fishermen. At the same time, Pontoppidan corresponded with natural history writers and collectors overseas, including the Welsh naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726–98), to whom he also sent mineral and fossil samples.21 The widening web of contacts and cognoscenti was also to assist significantly in the reception and translation of the Naturlige Historie. Scholarly use of visitations and clerical networks was nothing new, of course, but the focus on natural history was, at least to this degree, unprecedented. It also set an example followed later in the century by, among others, Johan Ernst Gunnerus (1718–73), bishop of Trondheim, who obtained natural history information in similar ways. In a letter to Holstein of 29 December 1750, Pontoppidan wrote that during three years of summer travels into each and every recess of this diocese I have by the constant Exploration of Priests, Farmers, Fishermen, Hunters etc: gained so many observations that since last September I have amused myself for many hours with putting my Collectanea in order and compare them with other decouverters of very mountainous Landes. I find that Norway in its true nature is known neither to its own inhabitants nor to the Danes.

For that reason, he concludes, an attempt at a ‘physical’ history of Norway is a ‘thing of Great Significance’.22 19 Hans Strøm, Physisk og Oeconomisk Beskrivelse over Fogderiet Søndmør beliggende i Bergens Stift i Norge; Oplyst med Landkort og Kobberstykker, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1762/66). 20 Ragnar Standal, ‘Hans Strøm sitt innsamlingsarbeid på Sunnmøre – med bakgrunn i annotasjonsboka hans’, in Arne Apelseth and Atle Døssland (eds), Seminarrapport. Hans Strøm (Volda: Høgskulen, 1999): 46–68 (p. 35); and Arne Apelseth, ‘Hans Strøm, (1726–97). Ein kommentert bibliografi’, Forskningsrapport nr. 2, Mørefor­ sking i Volda (Volda: Høgskulen i Volda, 1995), p. 20, who writes that Strøm ‘counts the meeting with Pontoppidan’s work [the Naturlige Historie] as an important turning point in his life’. 21 Warwickshire County Record Office [WCRO], CR 2017: TP338/1–8, Letters from Pontoppidan to Pennant, 1755–66, letter 7 Sept. 1755 TP338/1; I am grateful to Edwin Rose for alerting me to the survival of these letters. 22 Pontoppidan to Holstein, 29 Dec. 1750, Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, p. 240 (my trans.).

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The Writing In June 1749, after his many months of collecting materials, Pontoppidan began writing his Det förste Forsög Norges naturlige Historie at his Bergen residence. The determinedly titled ‘first attempt’ (Det förste Forsög)23 built up a survey of the climate, topography, minerals, flora, fauna and insects of Norway, with sections also on habits, costume and folklore. As explained in his eventual preface to the second volume, completion of his writing was interrupted by a great fire in Bergen in August 1751 from which his house, all his research notes, specimens and working manuscripts only just (‘by the Mercy of God’) escaped. The interruption contributed to the salutary decision to write the later sections (including those on giant sea creatures) more hurriedly than he might have wished, and to publish the work in two parts, with the second part appearing the next year.24 Pontoppidan footnoted an almost excessive number of learned references and retained textual quotations from Latin, French and other languages, but, like his Sandhed til Gudfrygtighed and Menoza, he wrote his Naturlige Historie in the vernacular. Pontoppidan explained that earlier he had published in Latin for learned doctors of the souls, and not in Danish, the language of those who might be enticed by the heresies described.25 As a result, Pontoppidan contributed to a growing number of writers, notably including the Bergen-born dramatist, essayist and historian Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), publishing in Danish and, indeed standardising and developing it. It was therefore in Danish that Pontoppidan described his observations and information, including the section on sea monsters. He sought exacting confirmations and verifications, precisely to be secure in the glorification of the Almighty. In the eighth chapter of Part Two of the Naturlige Historie, Pontoppidan provides, in addition to graphic engraved images, a series of in-court witness statements and other testimonies verifying

23 As he wrote in his Preface, he would rejoice to see it improved by ‘more interesting articles, and more refined observations’, Pontoppidan, Natural History, 1: xix. 24 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: iii–iv. 25 Hæreses nominare interdum est seminare, consultius duximus opusculum hocce, Danica prius lingva compilatum, nunc in latinum sermonem transusum edere & animarum medicis, mali istius clam repentis parum consciis, potius qvam ipsis ægrotis sc. rudioribus legendum committere.

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sightings of sea snakes,26 kraken,27 other sea monsters and mermen and mermaids (Danish speaking or not).28 Reproduced accounts and depositions include those from Strøm; a minister, Peter Angel; Hans Egede; Lucas [Luke in the English edition] Jacobsøn Debes, author of a 1673 history of the Faroes, Peter Gunnersen and several ferrymen; eye-witness verses by Peter Daas and, most prominently (and to be much cited in later debate about the kraken), a 1746 Bergen sworn testimony of one Captain Lorentz [Lawrence] de Ferry, followed by the names of court witnesses. De Ferry’s account of sighting the great sea snake is given in impressive detail. As Pontoppidan affirmed, ‘it deserves to be printed at large’.29 And of these ‘witnesses of credit and reputation’, writes the bishop, ‘hundreds might be produced for each instance’.30 In fact, this is not the only section of the Naturlige Historie where Pontoppidan’s credulity is exposed. Describing the good living of the Norwegian people, for example, the bishop affirmed that ‘in their daily course they have no superfluity’ and that many live ‘to a hundred and twenty years’.31 Nonetheless, undaunted, he advised his readers in his preface to Part Two that The eighth chapter [of Part Two], which deals with the northern sea monsters or the miraculous animals in the sea, should contribute just as much to this [understanding of the Divine and the marvellous work of God] as any of the preceding ones. Because in these new days one is far more afraid of childish gullibility than in the past … I foresee that those who only pay attention to the content of what has been reported of that Chapter – of pages on mermen, the large sea snakes of several hundred elen, and the much larger sea octopus, Kraken, or Horven … will be accused of the previously announced gullibility in these matters, and I will have to endure it for so long before [the reader] has read through the chapter. But then I will not need an apology.32 26 ‘The great sea-snakes I once held only for chimera, but am now fully convinced that they are found in the North sea, as sure as any other fish’, Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: 38. 27 ‘Incontestibly [sic] the largest sea-monster in the world’, Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: 210. 28 ‘As to the existence of the creature, we may safely give our assent to it, provided that it is not improbable, or impossible in the nature of things’, Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: 187. 29 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: 197. 30 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: 186. 31 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: 256. 32 Pontoppidan, Naturlige Historie, 2: [9], my translation; when this passage was translated into English in the 1755 London edition, the emphasis was slightly changed,

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The Printing, Publication and Translation Unlike the Glossarium, the new work required typographical and engraving skills beyond those available in Bergen. The first volume of Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie was printed in quarto in late spring 1752 by Ludolph Henrik Lillie (1719–65), ‘factor, corrector and newswriter’ and successor to the well-established Copenhagen printing house of Ernst Heinrich Berling (d. 1750).33 According to a letter to Holstein of 27 July 1751, the manuscript of the first section of what was to be the first volume of the Naturlige Historie had been sent to Copenhagen before Pentecost, with the bishop promising the remainder by Michaelmas.34 At the same time, Pontoppidan presumably sent some or all of the drawings for the first volume to Copenhagen, where they were engraved and separately printed as pull-outs to be tipped into Lillie’s printed pages at the collation stage and made ready for binding. The manuscript of the final section of Part One accompanied a letter sent by Pontoppidan to Count Holstein on 16 November 1751.35 That the manuscript of this first volume was despatched by its author in parts is notable. It might be argued that delivery in parts lessened the chance of complete loss during transport, but the number of parcels also increased risk of loss. More obviously, successive deliveries must have complicated the printing process. In the July letter to Holstein, Pontoppidan had written that he hoped printing could begin in Copenhagen as soon as his brother-in-law, Hans de Hofman, allowed and ordered it. The serial arrival of separate bundles of manuscripts complicated Hofman’s direction of the work at Lillie’s printing house, and might have contributed to the length of time taken for the printing of each volume and to the different arrangements made for volume two.

giving more specificity to the creatures and to readers’ initial scepticism (Natural History, 2: iv). 33 Erich Pontoppidan, Dr, Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie, forestillede dette kongeriges luft, grund, fielde, vande, væxter, metaller, mineraler, steen-arter, dyr, fugle, fiske og omsider indbyggernes naturel, samt sædvaner og levemaade. Vol. 1, 4to. (56) + 338, folded engravings (Kiøbenhavn: Trykt i de Berlingste Arvingers bogtrykkerie ved Ludolf Henrich Lillie, 1752). Etched title vignettes; woodcut headand tail-pieces, initials. A fine four-page post-1758 catalogue by Lillie survives at the Royal library, Copenhagen but contains no mention of the Naturlige Historie; for Lillie see Harald Ilsøe, Bogtrykkerne i København og deres virksomhed, ca. 1600–1810: En biobibliografisk håndbog med bidrag til bogproduktionens historie (Copenhagen, 1992), pp. 124, 128, 148–50. 34 Pontoppidan to Holstein, 27 July 1751, Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, p. 98. 35 Pontoppidan to Holstein, 16 Nov. 1751, Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, p.116.

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The preface to the second volume is dated 24 April 1753. In it, the bishop writes of his pleasure at how well the first part of the work has been received.36 In the English translation, a footnote highlighted the hiatus between the two parts for ‘the reasons mentioned in the preface’ (also noting that each volume was published in quarto).37 Following delivery of the next manuscript portions, Hofman moved operations to the press room of the Vajsenhuset, where the second Danish-language volume of the Naturlige Historie was printed by Gottmann Friderich Kisel.38 As a result of the staggered manuscript deliveries and of the engraving, separate printing and then collation of the images, the printing process of each volume took between about nine months and a year. In his preface to the first volume of the Naturlige Historie, Pontoppidan reaffirmed his commitment to writing in the vernacular and that he would ‘rejoice’ to see his work ‘improved by more interesting articles, and more refined observations’.39 In the further preface to Part Two, he added the hope that translation of his work ‘in time, will usefully reveal unusual things for different Nations as well as for ourselves’.40 Significantly, he links translation specifically to the section on sea monsters, having already in this preface alerted readers to the attention he will give to marine animals. If my account of these extraordinary Sea animals should not displease … I willingly submit my thoughts … to their judgement; whose corrections and observations tending to the amendment of this work by a new edition, or by translations into other languages, [which] will be always agreeable to me, and the favour will be received with gratitude.41

Pontoppidan was not to be disappointed. The translation into German began a few months after the appearance of the first volume of the Naturlige 36 Naturlige Historie, 2: [9]; in the English trans., Natural History 2: iv: ‘The First Part of this present work has had the happiness to receive the approbation of the public’. 37 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: iii, footnote. 38 Erich Pontoppidan, Dr, Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie, forestillede dette kongeriges luft, grund, fielde, vande, væxter, metaller, mineraler, steen-arter, dyr, fugle, fiske og omsider indbyggernes naturel, samt sædvaner og levemaade. vol. 2, (24) + 464 + (24). folded engravings (Kiøbenhavn: Udi det Kongelige Wäysenhuses bogtrykkerie, trykt af Gottmann Friderich Kisel, 1753). Etched title vignettes; woodcut head- and tail-pieces, initials. 39 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 1: xix. 40 Pontoppidan to Holstein, 29 Dec. 1750, Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, p. 240. 41 Cited here from the English edition, Natural History, 2: v; ‘recognized with gratitude’ is perhaps the more precise translation from the original Danish.

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Historie in late spring of 1752. As Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens, the German-language edition was printed, again in Copenhagen and again in two parts, in separate volumes in 1753 and 1754.42 The German edition, however, was published in octavo. The translation was commissioned by its Copenhagen printer and publisher, Franz Christian Mumme. The translator, Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–76), was a German-Danish composer and well-known music critic, who kept himself afloat by translating. Like Pontoppidan, Scheibe had fallen foul of the new court of Frederick V and now taught in faraway Sønderborg in southern Denmark. It was for good reason that Scheibe was acknowledged on the title page of the translation. His foreword to the first volume, dated 15 April 1753, ran to sixteen pages. In it, he offered an extended commentary on the work and confessed to problems with the translation of obscure terms.43 He also complained to his readers that he had been forced to rush: To make this worker’s effort more useful for reference a director should have been assigned to it, but because of the remoteness of the place where it was printed, such a thing could not have happened, especially because the publisher wanted it to be ready for the Ostermesse [the Easter Fair, probably the trade fair at Leipzig].44

It seems unlikely in fact that Mumme’s printing of the first volume of Scheibe’s German translation was completed before the Easter Fair (Scheibe perhaps confused this with the Leipzig Michaelismesse of late September); the volume seems first to have appeared in newspaper notices in the early autumn, when it was advertised for sale on 10 September 1753.45 Almost exactly a year later, Scheibe completed his translation of the second volume, with his preface dated 1 September 1754. Over seventeen strident pages, he defended his labours on the first volume, which, he acknowledged, had been savaged by critics (including in the lengthy review in Staatsund Gelehrte Zeitung in August 1753).46 But Scheibe repeated his dismay that proofs from the press in Copenhagen could not 42 Erich Pontoppidans, D. Versuch einer naturlichen Historie von Norwegen: worinnen die Luft, Grund und Boden, Gewasser, Gewachse, Metalle, Mineralien, Steinarten, Thiere, Vogel, Fische und endlich das Naturel, wie auch die Gewohnheiten und Lebensarten der Einwohner dieses Konigreichs beschrieben warden. Aus dem danischen Ubersetzt von Johann Adolph Scheiben, 2 vols. (Kopenhagen bey Franz Christian Mumme, 1753, 1754); 8vo. 43 Pontoppidan, Versuch einer naturlichen Historie, 1: 24–5. 44 Pontoppidan, Versuch einer naturlichen Historie, 1: 25. 45 Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender, 10 Sept. 1753 (1753 no. 73). 46 Staatsund Gelehrte Zeitung (Aug. 1753).

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be corrected because by then he lived at too great a distance.47 He also believed that frequent misprints occurred because of his ‘embarrassingly’ poor handwriting. For that reason, he announced that a list of corrections to the first part would follow the contents list in this second volume.48 Fascinatingly, the translator’s second preface, with all its extraneous material and tedious length, is now a rare item: it has been removed from many surviving copies.49 Reviews and notices of the Naturlige Historie and the Natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens circulated widely,50 boosting encouragement for an English translation, such as that revealed in correspondence with Pennant in Wales (and for whom Pontoppidan was to count as one of his ‘Fossil friends’). Pontoppidan’s first letter to Pennant of 7 September 1755 thanks him for sending a copy of the London edition.51 The bishop wrote in French (‘Quoique j’ay passé un demi an dans Votre bonne patrie, je n’ose pourtant pas entreprendre de faire en Anglois la reponse’ [Although I spent half a year in your fine country, I dare not yet undertake a reply in English]). He apologised for his delay in replying to Pennant’s communication of 18 July, which had been sent to Bergen. Pontoppidan was now in Copenhagen, his return from de facto exile in 1754 consolidated by appointment a year later as prochancellor of the University.52 47 Pontoppidan, Versuch einer naturlichen Historie, 2: 21. 48 Pontoppidan, Versuch einer naturlichen Historie, 2: 36 49 From the majority of those twenty or so copies I have examined; the errata list faithfully printed by Mumme is similarly rare, and in one copy survives only as a twopage fragment (pages 53 and 54) bound in at the end of the volume crossed through with long pen strokes. 50 These included the Lærde Efterretninger 1752, p. 98 and 1754, p. 179; Kiobenhavnste Nye Tidender om Lærde og Curieuse Sager 13 (30 Mar. 1752), pp. 98–100 [remarkably early; see above, p. 82], 23 (6 June 1754), pp. 179–82, and of the German edition 37 (13 Sept. 1753), pp. 289–90; Göttingische Anzeigen 9 July 1753, pp. 753–65 (and notices of the German and English trans. 28 Mar. 1754, p. 312, 13 Dec. 1755, p. 1372; Staatsund Gelehrte Zeitung (Aug. 1753); [Buschings] Nachrichten von dem Zustande der Wissenschaften und Kunste (Copenhagen and Leipzig) 1: 112–28 (1754); Gentleman’s Magazine 25 (1755): 219–23, 269–70, 318–21, 355–61; Monthly Review 12 (June 1755): 447–62; 13 (July 1755): 35–49. 51 This is in fact only implied – ‘je suis bienaise de voir mon faible essay sur l’histoire naturelle du cet pay traduit en votre langue’– and it is possible that Pennant’s letter of 18 July merely informed the bishop of the appearance of the London edition; WCRO, Corresp. Thomas Pennant, CR2017/TP338/1, Pontoppidan to Pennant, 7 Sept. 1755. 52 The celebrity of the Naturlige Historie no doubt contributed to his appointment and rehabilitation (at least to some) in Copenhagen, although it is also asserted that he had roused antagonism in Bergen; certainly, he returned to Copenhagen in 1754,

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The bishop continued with a reference to the translations: ‘Pour ce qui est de l’affaire en question, je suis bienaise de voir mon faible essay sur l’histoire naturelle du cet pay traduit en votre langue tout comme en Allemand et maintenant en Français. C’est trop d’honneur quant a moy’ [Regarding the matter in question, I am blessed to see my feeble essay on the natural history of that country translated into your language just as it is in German and now in French. It’s too great an honour for me]. Although no French translation appeared as a separate volume, lengthy extracts from both parts (with brief commentaries) were serialised in French in the Copenhagen periodical Mercure Danois, also printed and edited by Lillie, in twelve instalments between October 1753 and May 1755.53 Subscriptions for the English translation were solicited by advertisement in London in the autumn of 1754, with the two parts of the Naturlige Historie published together in February 1755 in a grand folio volume titled The Natural History of Norway.54 The translation was commissioned by the German bookseller Andreas Linde (d. 1759), originally from Saxony in north-eastern Germany and part of the German and Scandinavian community in London. Although no subscribers’ list was published, leading advocates for the London publication are likely to have belonged to the sociable and learned circle of Anglo-Germans and Scandinavians in the Strand, the expanding West End and around the respective Lutheran retaining his Bergen bishopric until 1757; his later years in Copenhagen were also marked by confrontation in religious and political circles and he concentrated on his writing. 53 Mercure Danois, 1753: Oct., pp. 168–88, Nov., pp. 288–302, Dec., pp. 23–43; 1754: Jan., pp. 167–80, Feb., pp. 317–30, Nov., pp. 259–75, Dec., pp. 37–50; 1755: Jan., pp. 156–69; Feb., pp. 293–306, Mar., pp. 75–90, Apr., pp. 175–85, May, pp. 303–15, with advance notice of the Kraken description in the first instalment and a culminating translation of that section in the final; the wider relationship between the Naturlige Historie and French influence before and after its publication is examined in Simone Ochsner, ‘Entrelacs du savoir: la France et l’Histoire naturelle de la Norvège de Pontoppidan’, La Revue de la BNU 8 (2013): 52–61. 54 Right Revd Erich Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway: Containing A particular and accurate Account of the Temperature of the Air, the different Soils, Waters, Vegetables, Metals, Minerals, Stones, Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; together with the Dispositions, Customs, and Manner of Living of the Inhabitants: Interspersed with Physiological Notes from eminent Writers, and Transactions of Academies (London: Printed for A Linde, Bookseller to Her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, in St Catherine-Street in the Strand, 1755); 2o; v. 1. xxiii, [1], 206 p.; v. 2: vii, [1], 291, [13] p; title page vignettes (type ornaments) + 28 engraved plates + folding map; proposals for subscription appeared in the Public Advertiser, 11 Oct. 1754 (and repeated in that newspaper 4 Dec. and almost certainly at other times, as well as in Linde’s Catalogue).

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churches. The Strand by then comprised a densely inhabited area, populated especially by European immigrant traders, high-end craftsmen and notable booksellers.55 Linde had arrived in London by January 1743 and set up shop as a bookseller, bookbinder and stationer ‘at the Bible in Katherine-Street in the Strand’ in 1749.56 An engraved trade card describes him as ‘Andrew Linde, book-binder, to His Royal Highness Prince George’,57 and several of his bindings for George III when Prince of Wales survive in the King’s Library at the British Library. Most early imprints featuring Linde were associated with translations from the German and German-language books printed in London by Johann Christoph Haberkorn and Johann Nicodemus Gussen, but Linde also developed an affinity with Nordic concerns. His interest in Scandinavia was confirmed by the publication of the English–Danish dictionary of Andreas Berthelson, a London-based clergyman, which Haberkorn printed for Linde in 1754, the year in which the Pontoppidan translation proposals circulated.58 A dedication in the dictionary to the crown prince of Denmark preceded a list of subscribers, the vast majority of whom were associated with Norway. Linde furthered these interests during a visit to Germany in early 1755, some months after the Natural History subscription announcement, and possibly reaching Hamburg in the Danish-ruled Altona as well as the Leipzig trade fair.59 As compiler of the English–Danish dictionary, Berthelson made an obvious choice to translate Pontoppidan, which he naturally did from the Danish rather than the German (as was made clear on the London title page).60 Unlike Scheibe in the German Copenhagen edition, however, Berthelson was not to be acknowledged on the title page or indeed anywhere within. 55 See James Raven, ‘Transforming the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade: John Nourse and his Bookshops on the Strand’, in Neil Keeble and Tessa Whitehouse (eds), Textual Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Books from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press, 2019), ch. 1. 56 Advertisement, Daily Advertiser, 26 Dec. 1750. 57 John Johnson collection, trade cards, Bodleian libraries, Oxford. 58 Linde died in 1759; will, 4 Nov. 1759, London Metropolitan Archives, AM/ PBR/007/268–71, proved 17 Nov. 1759. 59 See Graham Jefcoate, ‘German Printing and Bookselling in Eighteenth-Century London: Evidence and Interpretation’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 57 (2003): 147–248; and Deutsche Drucker Und Buchhändler in London 1680–1811: Strukturen Und Bedeutung Des Deutschen Anteils Am Englischen Buchhandel 12 (Archiv Für Geschichte Des Buchwesens, 2015). 60 A published review in July 1755 noting that the translator was not a native English speaker was nonetheless positive: ‘the whole is very intelligible’, Monthly Review 13 (July 1755): 49.

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On Linde’s orders, the English text was printed in folio by John Reeves (d. 1767) of Drury Lane. Reeves, who had been used by Linde before, is not acknowledged in the book but is identifiable from the typeface, ornaments and design (of which more below). There was one other significant feature of this London edition. No longer was this the modestly titled ‘first attempt’ [Det første Forsøg]. Although the lengthy descriptive subtitle remained and Pontoppidan’s preface was faithfully translated with its modest admission of insufficiencies and the hope that others would improve his findings, the English title page stood with greater, plainer authority as ‘The Natural History of Norway’.

Material Differences: Financing, Format and Quality The most obvious difference between the three different language editions of the Naturlige Historie is their size and format: the two-volume Copenhagen quarto in Danish, the bulkier two-volume Copenhagen octavo in German and the much grander London folio, which, unlike the other two, required a bookrest or desk on which to open it for secure reading. The publishers of all three editions offered copies printed on two different qualities of paper and in slightly different sizes. All these material variations derived from the volumes’ financing, expectations of appeal and the production constraints and possibilities in turning Pontoppidan’s ideas and words into physical texts. At an early stage, Pontoppidan engineered certain financial support for the original two volumes of his Naturlige Historie. In one of his pre-publication letters to Holstein, Pontoppidan wrote that he wanted to pay for the printing himself and that ‘the drawings for this I would probably strive to procure at my own expense’. For the engraving and printing of the copperplates, however, he requested funding which he estimated at 400 to 500 riksdaler (‘to wait for as the king’s gift’), and the printing expenses, together with ‘a reliable general Land-Map, which he thought only existed in the Royal archives’.61 An official letter of February 1751 records that the bishop

61 Letter to Holstein, 29 Dec. 1750, Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, p. 240; ‘Men Kaabber-Pladernes gravure og Aftryk som jeg mener kunde bestrides med bemeldte liden Summa ville jeg allerunderdanigst vente af vores Allernaadigste Konges kierlige Omhue for alt det der befordrer hands Landes Gave ved Indbyggernes Opmuntring til videre Efter-tanke. I hvoromalting er overlades denne velmente proposition’ [But the engraving and imprint of the Copper-Plates of which the expenses in my opinion could be defrayed by the aforementioned small sum, I would most humbly expect from the loving care of our Most Gracious King, a consideration that fully

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Fig. 4.1. Title page openings of Det første Forsøg paa Norges Naturlige Historie (Copenhagen, 1752–53), Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens (Copenhagen, 1753–54) and The Natural History of Norway (London, 1755). © The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

received the full 500 riksdaler for the engraving work.62 Pontoppidan dutifully acknowledged the subvention managed by Holstein and the original edition, under the supervision of Hofman, incorporated elaborate dedications to Holstein and Adam Gottlob Moltke, courtier, tutor and favourite of Frederick V. The land-map, however, was only to be included – and magnificently so – in the London edition (a feature that raises the interesting question as to whether any of those involved in the London publication knew of the bishop’s original hopes, or whether a large map was regarded as a naturally helpful addition). The first printer of Naturlige Historie, Lillie, advertised the work in his own Copenhagen newspaper, the Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender,63 promotes his countries’ [natural] gifts by the Encouragement of his subjects. However that may be, I hand over this well-meaning proposition]. 62 Chief Secretary’s Letter-book, 6 Feb. 1751, no. 22, cited in Neiiendam, Pontoppidan, 2: 298, n. 102. 63 The newspaper published twice a week by the Berling family, from 1749 to 1762, called Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender (Copenhagen Danish Gazette; and Nye Tidender from 1748) and from 1762 to 1808 De til Forsendelse med Posten allene privilegerede Kiøbenhavnske Tidender (The Copenhagen Gazette reserved exclusively for Distribution by Post). From 1749 to 1767, the Berlings also published a newspaper in German, called Kopenhagener Deutsche Post-Zeitungen (Copenhagen German

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on 27 March 1752 as ‘now printing’ and to be ready by Sankthansdag [St John the Baptist’s day or midsummer’s day] 24 June. Anticipating three months’ printing-house work, he also made a special point of adding in the advertisement that ‘because the copperplates do not permit a large print run it is advertised far from Copenhagen especially for Norwegian-born devotees [Norge bornde liebhabere]’. Lillie announced that potential customers could subscribe at his shop for a copy, printed either on writing or on other good-quality paper. No price was announced. It is unclear where ‘far from Copenhagen’ Lillie might have advertised, but perhaps it assumes a far-flung circulation of the newspaper in distinction to simple notices in the city itself. Notably, the first appraisal of the work appeared in the Kiøbenhavnske Nye Post-Tidender on 30 March 1752, months before the actual publication of the Naturlige Historie.64 We might assume that on publication in 1752, subscribers received their copies, that Pontoppidan also distributed some copies as gifts and that despite the warnings to would-be purchasers of a small print run, commercial sales beyond the initial subscription arrangement were also anticipated. Certainly, an advertisement in Lillie’s twice-weekly newspaper on 8 January 1753, six months after the mid-1752 publication of the Part One quarto volume, offers it for sale on higher-quality Dutch paper [hollandskpapier] for twelve marks (two rigsdaler) and on printing paper [trykpapier] for nine marks.65 We do not know how many copies had been sold by subscription, but early orders had obviously not exhausted supply. Less clear is whether Lillie remained in charge of all aspects of publication. The January newspaper notice (repeated in the issues of 2, 12 and 19 February 1753) advertised the volume as for sale not at Lillie’s printing house but at Madame Wickman’s house at the corner of Kloststraebet and Skindergaden and in the bookshop of the bookseller Akerman on Amagertorv [Amager Square]. 66 Just over fourteen months later, on 24 May 1754, the second part of the work was advertised by Kisel as available in a quarto volume, and again on two qualities of paper, and available ‘at the bookshops’ and at the house of Peder Kofod Ancher, a law professor and a judge of the Danish Supreme Court since 1753, and of conservative disposition – he later defended the Danish absolutist monarchy against Enlightenment criticism. The second Gazette), with the same layout as Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender, but with a different content. 64 Kiobenhavnste Nye Tidender om Lærde og Curieuse Sager 13 (30 Mar. 1752), pp. 98– 100. 65 Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender, 8 Jan. 1753. 66 Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender, 8 Jan. and 2, 12 and 19 Feb. 1753.

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volume was given the same two prices as the first, ‘despite the fact that it was almost one alphabet [that is, a signature or gathering] larger’,67 but the move of its production to the royal foundation of the Vajsenhuset, where it was printed by Kisel, apparently relates to a further official subsidy. The arrival of the manuscript of Pontoppidan’s Part Two is recorded in a protocol of the Vajsenhuset of 7 June 1753. Ludvig Harboe, recently bishop of Trondheim, now back in Copenhagen, is said to have examined the work and then delivered it to Johan Finkenhagen, the Director of the Vajsenhuset, to be ‘forwarded to printing’. It has been concluded from this entry that the second volume was printed ‘at no cost to the author’, in addition to ‘evidence that Pontoppidan had been supported in this undertaking by a subsidy for the drawings and their engravings’.68 Certainly, no subscription appears to have been attempted for this volume, although the original March 1752 advertisement for subscribers might not have anticipated the two-part publication. Even less clear is whether all post-publication proceeds went to the bishop, the printers having been paid outright for the printing work, or whether some shared arrangement was in place. One clue is that after Pontoppidan’s death in 1764, the bookseller Andreas Hartvig Godiche issued an auction catalogue of the late bishop’s books and effects which included the thirty-two engraved copperplates used to print the images, a bundle of left-over engravings and the remaining stock (probably as unbound without the engravings slipped in) of eighty-five ordinary copies of the second volume and seventeen copies printed on skrivpapier [the quality or ‘writing’ paper].69 This volume in its two paper variants was the one printed at the Vajsenhuset with apparently major further subsidy; the return of the plates and remaindered stock to the bishop might have resulted from the gift of the foundation with which he was long associated, but might also suggest an arrangement for a post-publication profit share (of whatever extent). Tellingly, the ‘publisher’s rights to the same book’ [forlags rettigbed til samme bog] were also offered at auction, together with the rights to

67 Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender, 24 May 1754. 68 Christian Molbech, Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Historie i dets første Aarhundrede 1742–1842 (Copenhagen: Jens Hostrup Schultz, 1843), pp. 66–7; Finkenhagen (or Finckenhagen) was a regular correspondent of Pontoppidan, especially on matters concerning the Catechism, see Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, pp. 52, 53, 61, 90. 69 Royal Library, Copenhagen, Catalogus over Endeel Exemplaria af adskillige Sal Hr. Procantzler Pontoppidans … 24 Martii [March] 1766 (Copenhagen: Andreas Hartvig Godiche), p. 2, items 6 and 7.

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further books by Pontoppidan including Origines Hasniensis.70 By now, Godiche himself might have had an interest as ‘publisher’, having bought up the stock of the deceased bishop,71 but the original proprietor of both rights and unsold volumes would seem to have been Pontoppidan himself. As with the Copenhagen Danish edition, no printing records survive either for the Copenhagen German or for the London editions. As undertaken by the active printer and bookseller Mumme, the German edition seems to have been conceived for straightforward post-publication sale without subscription (even though Mumme did propose subscriptions for some of his publications, some with rigid deadlines and some in which Pontoppidan himself had taken an interest in Bergen72). Certainly, as Scheibe lamented, he was forced to rush his translation in order for printed sheets to be ready for sale at one or more trade fairs in Germany. The first volume’s added and extravagant dedication to the queen might have sought not just new attention but royal subsidy (for which there is no direct evidence).73 In London, Linde published an elaborate description of how the folio volume was to be offered on a subscription basis and with the choice of paper. The ‘conditions’ advertised in the newspaper ‘proposals’ and repeated in Linde’s December 1754 Catalogue stated that ‘this work will be printed in a new Letter, and good paper,74 in one volume in folio’ on ‘as near as can be computed, about 100 sheets’. With ‘twenty-six curious copper-plates’ (corrected to twenty-eight in the December Catalogue proposals), the twopart book was promised to subscribers at ‘one guinea in sheets, one half to be paid at the time of subscribing, and the other half on the delivery of the book.’ The conditions then added ‘☞ [‘N.B.’ in the Catalogue] A few Copies will be printed on a fine Writing Demy, Price One Guinea and a Half ’. The

70 Catalogus over Endeel Exemplaria af adskillige Sal. Hr. Procantzler Pontoppidans. 71 A fine painting of Godiche at the Frederiksborg Hillerod museum (inventory no. A 4620) represents beside him a number of titles and books in sheets including Pontoppidan’s Danske Atlas and Danmarks og Norges oeconomiske Magazin (of which Pontoppidan formed part), all having then been transferred to his ownership. 72 For an example, see Dahl, Biskop Pontoppidans brevbok, p. 64. 73 ‘Righteous mother of the country, given to us by heaven, [who] is alone able to do my business and to provide this book with a wonderful sweetness,’ Pontoppidan, Versuch einer naturlichen Historie, 1: [7]. 74 The ‘good’ that is not the higher-quality paper of the more expensive copies, seems to have been Dutch, given that the chain lines are horizontal on the folio page rather than vertical, indicating an end-to-end double paper mould. This was not introduced into England until 1768 by James Whatmore, who had seen these at work in the Netherlands.

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advertisement offered a specimen for inspection which was also to indicate the size of the sheets.75 The financial organisation of the London edition and its relatively high price ensured a high-quality folio production, with subscriptions taken in by Linde and nine other prominent London booksellers and the main bookseller in Oxford and in Cambridge.76 Once the subscription copies were disposed of, the book was sold outright.77 By 1757, the Natural History was advertised for sale among a list of ‘Books lately published by A. Linde’ as ‘In one vol. Folio, 1£ 10s. bound’ in the end pages of another small publication by Linde. One further variation in size resulted from royal patronage: surviving copies sent to the king and now in the Royal Library at Windsor and the King’s Library at the British Library were printed on a larger size of folio measuring just over 16 inches by nearly 10 inches (just within Medium Folio measurements) as compared to the standard copy of just over 12 inches by nearly 9 inches (within Crown Folio measurements). Differences in the binding of surviving copies of the different editions unsurprisingly reflect the tastes and purses of their purchasers, some selecting tooling and decorative marks of ownership in addition to the quality of the leather. Given the interval between the publication of each part, almost all surviving copies of the Danish and German editions are bound separately as two volumes. The two-part, separately paginated division remained in the London edition, but the parts were bound together and sold as one grand folio volume. A few examples of the basic wrapper or binding from the Copenhagen bookseller-publishers do survive. In the case of the volume printed by Lillie, the basic covering seems to have been a standard blue paper, and a slightly stiffer blue-grey board by Mumme.78 75 Public Advertiser, 11 Oct. and 2 Dec. 1754. 76 ‘Printed for A. Linde, In Catherine-street in the Strand, by whom Subscriptions are taken in. Subscriptions are likewise taken in by W. Innys and J. Richardson in Pater-noster Row; A. Millar and J. Nourse, in the Strand; R. Dodsley, in Pall mall; J. Brindley, in New Bond-street; J. Robinson, in Ludgate-street; J. Whiston and B. White, in Fleet-street; T. Merrill, in Cambridge; and J. Fletcher, at Oxford.’ 77 Catalogue of ‘Books lately published by A. Linde’ bound in at end of A Second Solemn call on Mr. Zinzendorf, otherwise call’d Count Zinzendorf, By the late Henry Rimius, Esq; Printed for A Linde, Bookseller to her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, in Catherine-Street, in the Strand; and sold by J. Robinson, in Ludgate-Street, and by J. Cook, under the Royal Exchange (London), [1757]. 78 A rare variant, now at the National Library in Oslo, are the German-language volumes bound together in blue-grey paper covers; within, among later bookplates including the stamp of Drammens Folkebibliothek (opened in 1916) is the signature of Pehr Erik Thyselius (1769–1838), bishop of Strangnas and father of a future Danish prime minister; National Library, Oslo, NA/A 1992–17597.

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In London, judging by the less personalised of the surviving copies, Linde (who was of course also a binder) produced a stock with standard leather binding and a basic thin gold, single-border tooling.79

Material Differences; Typography and Design In addition to their different size and format, the editions varied in textual organisation, and even more so in typographical design and execution. During his residence in Bergen, Pontoppidan had other of his writings than the Glossarium printed there, while others besides the Naturlige Historie had to be printed in Copenhagen because, as noted, Bergen printers lacked the necessary type. One such, as he explained in his correspondence, was the 1752 fourth volume of his Annales ecclesiæ Danicæ. The Naturlige Historie required an even greater range of type, as well as the printing of the many engravings. The resulting Copenhagen Danish-language edition boasts neat, well-executed printing, very largely in black letter but with a complex range of additional types. Given the poor and variable paper, however, some print often showed through the pages. The effect of different typefaces also distracts, at least to the modern eye, with some footnote Latin references in roman, with titles in roman italics, but other references in small black letter, using * and ** asterisks, double asterisks and asterisms to link text to notes. The close lines and intense printing of the German-language edition make many surviving copies more difficult to read than the Danish volumes (and in stark contrast to the elegant and generously spaced print of the London folio). Where the edition in German did improve on the original was in the addition of fuller contents lists and further key words in the margins as finding and explanatory aids for readers. The responsibility for this was proudly claimed by the translator, Scheibe, who wrote in his preface that the ‘contents of all the chapters together with particular items of interest that appear in them, and the reference words in the margins have been made more complete and authoritative than they were in the Danish. I have attached explanations to the engravings and to which chapters they belong.’80 These accompaniments were also adopted in the London edition, and with more elegant spacing, adding even more authority and 79 I am grateful to Nicholas Pickwoad, who observed of one such copy that here was a ‘German-style 3-piece adhesive case binding … in the way it constructed thickenough gatherings out of the single bifolia in which it was printed by tipping three of them together and sewing through the central one … maybe that was a habit Linde brought to England with him.’ 80 Pontoppidan, Versuch einer naturlichen Historie, 1: 25.

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effectiveness as a work of reference. Linde and Reeves redesigned the footnotes for greater clarity and utility, Pontoppidan’s explanatory prefaces remained but the London edition discarded the German translator’s commentaries, together with the elaborate dedications and prefatory verses of the original Danish volumes. Headings to each chapter listing its sub-sections had been introduced by Scheibe in the German translation; but the English was at times more expansive and immediate. Berthelson followed and improved Scheibe’s listing of the engravings and marginal subject tags, aided by greater typographical clarity. It was left to Linde and Berthelson as designers of the London edition, however, to introduce a ‘General Index’, which was effected in eleven double-columned and well-presented pages. As was now standard for English printing, Reeves used roman as the foundational type rather than black letter. On the pages of the folio, the roman type contributed to an elegant setting and use of space. In a page text of twenty lines, the type measurement is about 130mm, and although thinly leaded,81 offers a spatially attractive composition. The Natural History’s dominant Great Primer roman [122mm when unleaded] was quite possibly a Dutch import and a sort of lucidity with elegant ligatures and ascenders and descenders.82 Italics are used sparingly for citations, headings, titles and words of emphasis. Smaller roman is used for footnotes (with some Greek and other types used appropriately in the references) and for headings and marginal reference tags. All is in marked contrast with the often bewildering and more antique typographical complexity of the original Danish and the German-language editions, where different fraktur, roman and several uncommon types and the capitalisation of complete words changed rapidly – often within single sentences. In the Copenhagen editions, the type changed for different languages, names, proper nouns and citations, with a range of different sizes employed in critical apparatus including the headings, subheadings, footnotes, marginal labels, tabulations and indices. Roman italic was used occasionally for titles and references in footnotes. Rare would have been the opportunity for a reader to compare the different language editions, but the greater simplicity, use of space and readability of the design and typography of the English edition (even accounting for readers used to a normative fraktur text) was in itself consequential. Reeves’s compositional work gave added authority to the translated words of Pontoppidan, such as those in his preface to Part One: 81 That is the distance between one imaginary baseline and the other being slightly more than the typeface’s x-height but less than its point size. 82 I am grateful to Caroline Archer for assistance here and for confirming that it is not Caslon type.

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‘The reader will meet with many strange, singular, and unexpected things here, but all of them strictly true; some of them not discovered before, others confirmed, and, to the best of my ability, in some measure accounted for, and illustrated.’83 Here and elsewhere, accuracy and elegance of printing seemingly equated to accuracy and elegance of phrasing and thought. Such relationship between the meaning and the appearance of words particularly assisted where the bishop’s verification of the natural world was open to question. In such confirming and accounting for the strange appearance of the kraken, the arrangement of the type, of the mise en page of the English edition, is particularly effective. Reeves expansively and clearly set out the sworn testimonies supporting de Ferry and the other observers of marine monsters. Far more than in the other editions, the material arrangement of the text of the signatories eases the finding and reading of this most celebrated section of the work. Accompanied by a dramatic engraved dual image of the sea serpent, this notorious section offers persuasive authority and conviction. Material presentation enhanced credibility.

Material Differences: the Images All the editions of Pontoppidan’s volumes on the natural history of Norway were famously illustrated with copperplate engravings. The engravings were printed separately and inserted between the other printed pages. How readers physically viewed the images varied according to the format of the volumes. The pages of engravings were tipped in and folded as pull-out pages for the Danish and German editions. The same images were further copied and recut in London for the English folio edition, but here, given the size of the pages, there was no need for pull-out pages (save for the insertion of a new and grand folded introductory map of Norway). Rather, engravings were printed each to occupy a single page of the folio, centrally positioned on the page and with generous surrounding space. In the 1764 Godiche catalogue the original copperplates (pladern) used for printing the engravings for the Naturlige Historie were listed under the book’s Danish title as in thirty-two pieces or items (and presumably, given the total, including the title-page vignettes). It is possible that some of these plates were used in the 1769 German-language Flensburg and Leipzig edition of volume one. Listed also in the auction catalogue was a bundle [et bundt] of loose pages of the printed engravings themselves. 84 Although this 83 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 1: xi. 84 Catalogus over Endeel Exemplaria af adskillige Sal Hr Procantzler Pontoppidans, pp. 58, 60.

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does not clarify the extent of the original patronage and financing, Pontoppidan had evidently retained both plates and superfluous engraved pages as his property, From the outset, Pontoppidan envisaged his Naturlige Historie to be illustrated for reference, even though this increased the complexity of the publication process (a practical challenge to book production addressed in several other studies in this volume85). The title page announced the work as illuminated by copperplates – ‘Oplyst med Kobberstikker’, a further instance of ‘oplysning’. The final twenty-eight plates ranged over illustrations of birds, plants, trees and mountainous landscapes and varied in quality from fine engravings of fossil and shell specimens and delicate leaves and flowers to cruder images of a couple in local dress and of parades of indigenous animals. Significantly, although the Danish and German-language editions were both printed in Copenhagen and within a year or so of each other, not all the same plates were used and were instead recut in the city, with labels and titles recut in the new language. In London all the engravings were recut, usually with astonishing exactitude. A single pull-out was added to the London Natural History. Opposite to the title page was inserted an engraved folding map of Norway that was (as acknowledged in its title cartouche) a derivation from Johann Baptist Homann’s Grosser Atlas ueber die ganze Welt (Grand Atlas of all the World), published in Nuremberg in 1716 and ‘corrected by Martin Hubner, Professor of History at the University of Copenhagen’. The map was probably engraved by Thomas Kitchin. The volumes printed on finer paper were also to include a copy of the folded map, printed on a stiffer card, whose outlines were additionally hand coloured, although Linde’s instructions seem not always to be followed. Some surviving copies with the higher-quality paper contain an uncoloured map, and some coloured maps were inserted in the standard paper copies. In the Copenhagen copperplates, numbers added to many of the corners or borders indicated placement within the volume. The London Natural History was more publicly directional, with a printed list of instructions for collator and binder included in the text immediately before the final index.86 Consideration of where each image was to appear was fundamental to the construction of the volume.87 None of the plates in any of the editions 85 See especially chapters 2, 7 and 8. 86 Pontoppidan, Natural History, 2: [292]. 87 In fact, execution of the collation instructions and (despite the success of the design and type-setting) even the results of Reeve’s printing were not consistent. The many surviving variations are beyond the limits of this chapter and will be addressed in a separate monograph, in progress, on the Naturlige Historie as a book biography.

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Fig. 4.2a. Pull-out engraved dual image of the Soe Orme in Det første Forsøg paa Norges Naturlige Historie, vol. 2 (Copenhagen, 1753) and of the Seeschlangen in Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens, vol. 2 (Copenhagen, 1754). © The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

is signed, so we know almost nothing of the artists or of the engravers in either Copenhagen or London. Only the title-page vignette to the first Danish-language volume is autographed by its engraver, Odvardt Helmoldt de (von) Lode (c.1726–57), and its artist, Peter Cramer (1726–82).88. The image is of Bergen harbour and boats with the mountains behind, foregrounded by a deity who has been identified as Apollo but is perhaps Amphitrite, Among the fifty or so surviving copies of the English Natural History so far examined, the most obvious discrepancies result from inattention when the engravings were bound in. Variation in printing and assemblage also seems to have affected the destination of copies, including the imperfect examples in the University Library of St Andrews and in the Advocates Library of Edinburgh. Under the Copyright Act of 1709, both libraries were entitled to claim a copy of any book registered at Stationer’s Hall; both appear to have been sent substandard copies by Linde. 88 ‘O H de Lode Ch R S D Sculpt; P. Cramer inv.’

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Fig. 4.2b. Engraved dual image of the sea worm placed opposite to page 196 of the second part of The Natural History of Norway (London, 1755). © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; Wren Library, Grylls 23.177.

goddess of the sea (and whose offspring, incidentally, included sea monsters), atop a giant shell with horses, a lion, a bear and other fishermen with nets beneath. Cramer was a self-taught Copenhagen painter who specialised in theatrical scenery, but rarely engraved from his own drawings. De Lode, who also signed the title-page vignette to the second volume, was a young Danish painter and engraver in Viborg and later in Copenhagen. He worked from at least 1743 for several magazines, engraving a series of portraits of notable people, significantly including Holberg in 1752, the year of the first volume of the Naturlige Historie. We have more information about the origin of the most famous image in the Naturlige Historie – the giant sea worm or serpent – and can infer still more about its pedigree as the key visual supplement to the sworn testimonies in the text. It was Hans Strøm who provided Pontoppidan with a drawing of the sea serpent, but this itself was notably derivative. The depiction of the ‘Soe Orme’ (Seeschlangen / sea worm) was imaginatively close to long-standing representations circulated widely in Europe

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over several centuries. One image dominated. A lengthy book of 1555 about Scandinavian people, customs and animals by Olaus Magnus, archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, much translated (and known in English as A Description of the Northern Peoples), became the standard reference on Scandinavia. Like Albertus Magnus (c.1200–80) before him, Olaus Magnus described, among a menagerie of exotic sea creatures, a swamfish, the most ravenous animal in the sea, an equus marinus or giant sea horse with bifurcated fish tail and a colossal sea serpent that prowled beyond the rocky coastline of Bergen.89 Among notable readers of Olaus Magnus, Conrad Gessner (1516–65), Swiss physician, naturalist and bibliographer, repeated the descriptions in his Historiae animalium (Zurich, 1551–58), which redrew the alarming illustrations of two species of sea serpent: a smaller type of up to forty feet long and the dragon-like mega-serpent. Clearly influenced by Gessner and Magnus, German scholar Adam Olearius recorded a third-hand sighting around 1676 and historian Jonas Ramus recorded another in 1698, four years after. Hans Lilienskiold further embellished the image in his four-volume and gorgeously painted manuscript ‘Speculum boreale eller den finmarchiske beschrifwelsis’.90 Although Pontoppidan is critical of Olaus Magnus, observing that he ‘mixes truth and fable together’, elsewhere in his infamous section of the Naturlige Historie, the bishop draws heavily on assumptions made by Olaus, and the larger of the combined views of the ‘sea worm’ follows the two-centuries-old drawing of the writhing, spouting monster lifted well out of the sea – so much so that Sir Walter Scott conflates ‘the wondrous tales told by Pontoppidan’ with Olaus Magnus in a novel of 1821.91 Seventy years after that, the Dutch scholar Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans wrote a major study of the sea serpent in which he charted both the antecedents and the enduring heritage of Pontoppidan’s cryptozoology.92

Reception and Legacy References to Pontoppidan’s work appeared almost immediately in popular essays, travel books, natural histories and even novels. Thomas Amory’s Life of John Buncle, published a year after the Natural History, cites 89 See Erling Sandmo, Monstrous: Sea Monsters in Maps and Literature 1491–1895 (Oslo: National Library of Norway, 2019). 90 Accessible via http://www.ub.uit.no/northernlights/eng/lillienskiold.htm. 91 Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate [Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1822], Waverly Novels edn XXIV (Edinburgh, 1902): 356 (note B). 92 Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, The Great Sea-Serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise (Leiden: E.J. Brill and London: Luzac and Co., 1892).

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it to certify that the bogs of Ireland were like those of Norway.93 More instrumental were a succession of anthologies and extracts, led, two years after the publication of the Natural History, by a reprinting of several of its sections in the third volume of A Compendium of the Most Approved Modern Travels, issued by the publishing bookseller John Scott of Paternoster Row.94 In 1763 a rival Paternoster Row anthology published by John Payne reproduced large sections of the Natural History, also giving great emphasis to the accounts of sea monsters.95 Similar extracts continued in publications in both Britain and mainland Europe.96 Even clearer testimony to the influence of Pontoppidan’s Natural History was its extensive distribution. This was despite the Monthly Review advising that its long account of the Linde volume was necessary because ‘the size and price of the book … may limit the circulation of it’.97 In fact, the English edition of the Natural History was bought by dozens of institutions around the globe, from Franklin’s Library Company (acquisition number 102) and other libraries in Philadelphia,98 to All Souls College Oxford, 93 Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq; Containing various observations and reflections, made in several parts of the world; and many extraordinary relations (London,1756), p. 497; later, Laurence Sterne’s The Koran also mentions Pontoppidan but not in relation to the Natural History. 94 A Compendium of the Most Approved Modern Travels … Illustrated and adorned with many useful and elegant copper-plates (London: J. Scott, 1757), vol. 3, pp. [139]– 270. 95 The Beauties of Nature and Art Displayed, In a Tour Through the World (London: J. Payne [1763]–64) vol. 8 (sea monsters described pp. 149–53). 96 Including the major part of vol. 3 of the 7 vol. Compendium of Authentick and Entertaining Voyages by William Bathoe as A new catalogue of the curious and valuable collection of books [1767?], item 1458; and in Germany vol. 20. of Sammlung der besten und neuesten Reisebesechreibungen carried extensive extracts from the Natürlichen Geschichte Norwegens (Berlin: August Mnlius (?Molius), 1764), pp. 115– 239. 97 Monthly Review 12 (June 1755): 447–62 (p. 448). 98 I am most grateful to James N. Green for researching a complicated acquisition history: Edwin Wolf ’s catalogue of Franklin’s library notes a list of books he acquired in London from the booksellers Wilson and Nicol, 13 May 1769 (lot 17, 18s.); the catalogue for that sale (ESTC T55034) includes Pontoppidan’s Natural History but Wolf was unable to locate that copy. At about that time, two copies are known to be held in Philadelphia, one acquired by the Union Library Company (ULC) before 1765, and the other apparently by the Library Company (LC) (when in 1769 the ULC merged with the LC, duplicates were sold and the Pontoppidan appears in the list of duplicates in the Pennsylvania Gazette of 1 Mar. 1770 – although the ULC might itself have had a duplicate, as it was formed by a merger with the Association Library Company in 1765). Whatever the case, it attests to the attractiveness of the Natural History. Green adds ‘if, however, we assume LC did have a copy in 1769/70, it is

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whose Fellows included the volume in their order of March 1764.99 Another purchaser was the rajah of the Danish Indian colony of Tanjore. Also too late to be an original subscriber, the rajah was an enthusiastic collector who bought the English edition even though the colony hosted numerous Danish and German Pietist missionaries. The proportion of subscribers to early post-subscription purchasers is unclear, but surviving copies bear the bookplates of contemporary naturalists, scholars and interested gentlemen. Copies and bookplates inspected for this study and now scattered across the globe100 include those of Joseph Banks, Edward Gibbon,101 timber merchant and MP John Cator, collectors Richard Gough, Francis Douce, Charles Nicoll Bancker of Philadelphia and Thomas Grenville MP (son of the prime minister and bibliophile who left his collection to the British Museum), the literary historian Olaus Heinrich Møller, the diplomat and colonial governor Peter Anker, author and merchant Henry Arthur Bright, Polish professor of law, Daniel Gralath and of dozens more writers and clerics in Europe and North America Despite the cavils over the translation in German, initial reviews of Pontoppidan’s great work were positive. London periodicals applauded the Natural History in extensive tributes, giving the bishop a generous benefit of doubt over the sea monster section. The assessment given over two issues of the Monthly Review within weeks of the book’s London publication concluded that ‘in the present instances, and particularly in that of the Kraken (not the most digestible of them) after paying but a just respect to the moral character, the reverend function, and diligent investigations of our author, we must admit the possibility of its existence’.102 Derision remotely possible it was Franklin’s, if he had immediately sent it off to Philadelphia after buying it. Most of the books Franklin acquired in London he kept for himself, however, and when he hastily decamped to Philadelphia in spring of 1775, he either brought them with him or had them sent on, but had no time to do anything with them before he headed off to Paris in the fall of 1776. They were boxed up and stored in the country until his return in the 1780s. If his Pontoppidan was still in his possession when he died, then it was undoubtedly sold with the rest of his books in 1801–4.’ Other copies are in fact currently held in Philadelphia at the American Philosophical Society, Pennsylvania Hospital and the University of Pennsylvania. 99 Codrington Library, All Souls, Library Minute Book MS 419.1764.03 100 At the Library of Congress, Harvard, Columbia, Trinity College Dublin, the British Library, National Library of Poland, Szczcin Public Library, Poznan University Library, National Library of Norway, the Bodleian Library, the Royal Society, Westminster Abbey, the Natural History Museum, numerous college libraries at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, among many other repositories (with copies also regularly advertised by rare booksellers). 101 His copy rediscovered in Oslo in National Library Special Collections, f. Lib.rar.727. 102 Monthly Review 13 (July 1755): 35–49 (p. 43).

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spread, however. In 1751, for the introductory pages to the Naturlige Historie, a laudatory poem was contributed by the great Danish book collector Bolle Willum Luxdorph (1716–88), most of whose 15,000 volumes are now in the Royal Danish Library. Twenty years later, Luxdorph penned a note to the front page of his own copy (now held in Oslo103). Luxdorph quoted from no less authority than the comte de Buffon’s 1777 Histoire naturelle, extensively considered in the preceding chapter of this volume:104 ‘I doubt very much that hares eat mice, and that’s not the only marvellous or false fact which can be blamed on Pontoppidan’ [see the same testimony in other places also]. But, as the bishop had himself predicted, it was the section on sea monsters that attracted most scorn. As The Scots Magazine wrote only five years after publication of the London edition when reviewing an old Cadiz tale of a merman pulled from the sea: The connoisseurs of this age, who pique themselves upon their incredulity, have for some years employed the shafts of their ridicule upon the Norwegian bishop Pontoppidan, for seeming to adopt, in his natural history of Norway, certain extraordinary incidents relating to the wonders of the deep; some of which, according to his account, or indeed altogether astonishing.105

Other critical voices focused on Pontoppidan’s kraken as a singular and pseudo-scientific recasting of the Jörmungandr and other primitive and discredited Nordic mythologies. In 1770, alluding to the legend of Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent, Pierre Henri Mallet, Genevan writer and student of Danish history and literature, declared that ‘we see plainly in the … fable the origin of those vulgar opinions entertained in the north, and which Pontoppidan has recorded concerning the craken and that monstrous serpent described in his History of Norway’.106 By the early nineteenth century, criticism stabilised. An anonymous critic in the Retrospective Review, an English periodical published between 1820 103 Oslo, National Library of Norway, NA/A h 1773. 104 See above, pp. 62–8; Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi, originally printed in Paris by the Imprimerie Royale in 36 volumes between 1749 and 1789 Storia naturale, generale, e particolare del Sign. de Buffon … Colla descrizione del gabinetto del re del sig. Daubenton 32 vols. (Milan: Giuseppe Galeazzi, 1770–73). 105 The Scots Magazine, XXII (1 Apr. 1760): 191. 106 Paul Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities: or, An historical account of the manners, customs, religion and laws, maritime expeditions and discoveries, language and literature of the Ancient Scandinavians [1770], trans. Thomas Percy, rev. I.A. Blackwell (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), p. 514.

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and 1828, wrote that ‘Pontoppidan, though idolized in Norway has been universally hailed and quoted by the rest of the world as the Munchausen of his day, and a very wholesale dealer in gratuitous and absolute falsehood’.107 Nonetheless, the reviewer declared sympathy for Pontoppidan and hoped ‘to clear up the mists which concealed the truth from their [the readers’] gaze, and wrapt up tales and traditions, which they would willingly have recorded in a plain unvarnished state, in a fantastic robe of improbability or exaggeration’. The same reviewer added that ‘although it is our intention, whenever and wherever we can, to lend the good Bishop a helping hand, we by no means pledge ourselves to act as his champions throughout’.108 By far the greatest helping hand was not so much the idea behind the words but the authority given to them by the physical grandeur and beauty of the English edition of the Natural History, a quality of design that withstood even the occasional deficiencies of the printing house and bindery. Readers enjoyed assurance from quality; credibility lingered and even increased. The elegant English edition ensured a lasting and global influence of Pontoppidan’s Natural History and, most emphatically, the enduring image of apparently genuine sea monsters. The presentational skills of the Linde edition buttressed the recorded verifications, an accuracy testified by scrupulous translation and typographical performance. The printed errata list which followed the index at the end of the volume was not only far shorter (five items only) than that of Scheibe (twenty-five errata are listed in the German-language edition, with many more identified by critics), it also seems to have been one noticed and taken seriously by readers. Some of the mistakes listed are transcription errors (‘for animal read annual’), but at least one is the result of the translator Berthelson or a press reader detecting problems with meaning: ‘Kraken’ is to be corrected to ‘sea snake’ on the page opposite to the engraving of the sea worm or serpent. Many owners have dutifully corrected this error by pen in surviving copies of the Natural History (see, for example, the correction in the margin top left in Fig. 4.2b). It is a correction which reflected a confusion which Berthelson shares with many later readers between types of sea monster identified. The kraken, largest of the monsters, is described in pages after the sea snake and is not the creature imagined in the engraving and not the creature attested to by de Ferry’s deposition.109 Those testimonies, however, 107 Retrospective Review 13 part II (1826): 181–212 (p. 181). 108 Retrospective Review 13 part II (1826): 181–212 (pp. 182, 183). 109 The English translation is often critical; the testimony of Peter Gunnersen and two other ferrymen is given (Natural History, 2; 194) where the merman is referred to in the English as a ‘sea monster’.

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both written and pictorial, were for successive generations to be associated with the giant, island-sized kraken. Although a fuller study of the book’s reception is beyond this chapter and will follow elsewhere, many marginal comments, other annotations and pasted-in notes by readers in surviving copies attest to animated engagement with the section on sea snakes. It is almost without exception the only section that receives such attention in surviving copies. Readers’ notes on their own sightings of sea monsters can be found in copies of all three editions. A copy of the Danish edition now held at the National Library in Oslo, for example,110 bears in the margins alongside ‘serpens marinus’ scribbles dated 1868 and made by Ludvig Daae (1829–93), Norwegian jurist, landowner and politician, referencing three sightings recorded in the Oslo newspaper Morgenbladat (founded 1819).111 The greatest number of such additions and insertions remain in copies of the English edition, which also often served as a repository for accounts of other monster sightings. To give an early example, inserted close to the kraken description in the copy owned by Joseph Banks and now held at the British Library, is a four-page letter ‘To the Printer of the St James Chronicle’ together with a further two letters, one of two pages of a sighting off Rothesay in August 1775, and one of five pages further detailing the appearance of a giant sea creature and sent to the Sheriff of Lanark.112 A similar signed deposition, dated 1786, of the sighting of a giant ‘sea worm’ off the Isle of May is found in the copy of the Natural History now held by the Advocates Library, Edinburgh.113 Other references citing the authority of Pontoppidan appeared for the next 150 years or more in newspaper references to kraken appearing off the 110 N/A 1992:16770/si. 111 Three are noted: Morgenbladat, issue 258 [15 Sept. 1837], 272 [29 Sept. 1837] and 361 [27 Dec. 1839]. One account exactly mirrors the Naturlige Historie engraved image of the two testator boatmen rowing desperately away from the sea serpent: ‘this terrible guest has followed the course of the boat for long distances, and when they tried to flee, two of the fishermen so exhausted themselves that they had were bedridden. All entirely trustworthy men, one affirmed that the length of the worm was 600 to 800 alen [c.360–480 metres], or perhaps much larger, because when they came close to the worm’s head, they were unable to see its other end. It is thickest immediately behind the head where the thickness is believed to be the size of a large horse; its black or dark eyes are the size of a normal dinner plate … and on the neck is seen something moveable, which looks like the mane of a horse,’ Morgenbladat, 15 Sept. 1837. I am grateful here for the assistance of Siv Gøril Brandtzæg. 112 Banks also owned the original Danish edition, each volume very beautifully bound. 113 Later examples include a copy now back at Bergen, bought by a leading resident of Margate in 1910, a Mr Arthur Rocoe, who faithfully notes on the flyleaf ‘Chapter on the Serpent Kraken read February 1914’.

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coasts of Ireland, Newfoundland, South Africa and India and in the spectral depths of Loch Ness (and one modern study attributes Pontoppidan’s publication to a – dubiously calculated – increase in printed and dated sightings of sea serpents from 23 between 1751 and 1800, to 215 between 1801 and 1900, and 194 between 1901 and 1950114). But the most celebrated referencing came in canonical novels. In 1851, Herman Melville described the arrival of a giant squid in a dramatic passage in Moby Dick: There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan [sic] may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.115

Professor Pierre Aronnax, fictional natural scientist and narrator of Jules Verne’s 1869–70 Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas) asserts that ‘un autre évêque, Pontoppidan de Berghem, parle également d’un poulpe sur lequel pouvait manœuvrer un régiment de cavalerie’ (another bishop,116 Pontoppidan of Bergen, also tells of a devilfish so large a whole cavalry regiment could manoeuvre on it). Reference books of the late nineteenth century such as Henry Lee’s Sea Monsters Unmasked (London, 1883) used Pontoppidan assiduously. As Lee wrote of one sighting: ‘There was no appearance of a mane. Its mode of progressing was by vertical undulations; and five of the witnesses described it as having the hunched protuberances mentioned by Captain de Ferry.’117 Many other modern newspaper accounts name Pontoppidan as their source, however hazy they often are about the nature and origins

114 Bernard Heuvelmans, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents (1968) claiming only nine dated and documented sightings of sea serpents before Pontoppidan’s History, compared to twenty-three sightings; 1751–1800, 166 1801–50, 149 1851–1900, and 194 1901–50; Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero, Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) similarly credits Pontoppidan’s Natural and its translation into English with providing a cultural template for people to interpret unusual things they saw in the sea. 115 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1st American edn (New York, 1851), ch. LIX, pp. 275–7. 116 That is, other than Olaus Magnus, titular Swedish bishop, referenced by Verne in relation to Nidros [sic], now Trondheim, which he visited though was not its bishop. 117 Henry Lee, Sea Monsters Unmasked (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1883), p. 63.

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of his work.118 Even cinematic creatures featured in such films as It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959) and Gorgo (1961). Spin-offs continue in computer games of the twenty-first century, with digital versions of sea monsters bearing an uncanny resemblance to the drawings of the Naturlige Historie and its successive editions. The influence of the notorious section of the Naturlige Historie has endured over two and a half centuries because of the apparent authentication of natural discoveries, abetted by residual myths of Nordic monsters and maritime behemoths, as advanced by the appeal and persuasiveness of materially different forms of integrated word and image – incorporations reviewed in this chapter from evidence much of which is itself recovered by new material means and which will allow further investigation in the future.119

118 An article in The Irish Times, 10 Aug. 2015 usefully surveys past sightings off the Irish coast, notably that of Sept. 1871 in the Limerick Chronicle and reprinted in The Times of London, commenting on the appearance of the ‘fabled sea serpent in Ireland’; another vivid account by the illustrated newspaper, The Days’ Doings, described ‘the appearance of an extraordinary monster, [with] an enormous head, shaped somewhat like a horse, while behind the head and on the neck was a huge mane of seaweed-looking water; the eyes were large and glaring, and, by the appearance of the water behind, a vast body seemed to be beneath the waves’; others referencing Pontoppidan include The Kerry Examiner, 23 Feb. 1841; The Cork Examiner, 29 Nov. 1848; The Freeman’s Journal, 26 Nov. 1875; Belfast Newsletter, 13 Aug. 1883 and later The [Dublin] Saturday Herald, 9 Apr. 1932, Kerryman, 22 Sept. 1934; more recently John Shelley in The Mayo News, 2 Feb. 2000, who added (apparently unable to trawl the internet), ‘I’m not sure when the “Natural history of Norway” was written, except that it was certanly over a hundred years ago …’ 119 Physical examination of surviving copies remains essential, despite their scattered locations, but digitisation of reviews, periodicals, newspapers and other materials allows comparison of material from many different towns and countries, formerly impossible without extensive travel and lengthy trawling, and promising further disclosures.

5

The Lettres chinoises and its Shaping of Contrasting Perceptions of China Trude Dijkstra

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arly modern Europe was enthralled by China and its main protagonist from the late sixteenth century onwards, Confucius.1 This ancient sage was the subject of books and pamphlets, his likeness was depicted in print and on porcelain and his teachings were discussed in the pages of newspapers and journals throughout Europe. In 1740, the French writer Jean Baptise Boyer, marquis d’Argens, even dedicated his Lettres chinoises to the soul of this long departed Chinese savant: ‘Manes du plus grand homme qu’ait produit l’Univers, souffrez que je vous donne un témoignage du profond respect que j’ai pour votre mémoire’.2 Separated in time by a millennium and in space by thousands of miles, D’Argens’s dedication seems counter-intuitive. Dedications were usually aimed at remunerated (or prospectively remunerated or otherwise beneficial) patronage, and D’Argens could hardly have expected the soul of Confucius to grant him any earthly rewards in exchange for a flattering inscription. Yet there was more to be gained here than direct financial

1 This chapter has been made possible by the generous support of the Society of the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) 25th Anniversary Fellowship and the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust Fellowship. 2 ‘Manes [the venerated or appeased spirit of a dead person] of the greatest man the Universe has produced, allow me to give you a testimony of the deep respect I have for your memory’, Jean Baptiste de Boyer, Lettres chinoises, ou correspondance philosophique, historique & critique, entre un chinois voyageur & ses correspondans à la Chine, en Moscovie, en Perse & au Japon, I (The Hague: Pierre Paupie, 1755), épître. This same dedication first appeared in the third instalment of the first edition of Lettres chinoises (The Hague: Pierre Paupie, 1739–40).

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compensation.3 By ‘teaching the public what my feelings are for the greatest man the universe has produced’, D’Argens’s dedication appealed in both sentiment and subject to the ever-growing number of early modern readers clamouring for knowledge about China. One result of this inquisitiveness has already been noted in Petiver’s particular interest in and naming of specimens sent from China;4 D’Argens responded to the eagerness for knowledge of China with an epistolary novel: a genre that had only recently come into being. As the Western humanities have increasingly focused on global perspectives in the last couple of decades, scholars have emphasised the interconnectedness between cultures in Asia and Europe. A wide range of topics have been covered, often with a focus on the interactions facilitating the transmission of goods such as porcelain, lacquerware, silks and spices as well as shared knowledge about medicine, philosophy, writing systems and how this dissemination of goods and knowledge impacted upon the respective societies into which they were introduced.5 The role of the Jesuits in the early European study of China and Confucius has been emphasised by, among others, David Mungello, who considers these premodern interactions as a form of ‘proto-sinology’.6 Nicolas Standaert and Thierry Meynard have made many primary sources available, undertaking fundamental research on the intellectual and religious consequences of Sino-European interactions.7 Recently, it has been 3 Pat Rogers, ‘Book Dedications in Britain 1700–1799: A Preliminary Survey’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16.2 (1993): 213–33; Zoran Velagić, ‘The Patron Function in Eighteenth-Century Book Dedications: The Case of Croatian Religious Writing’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 21.3 (2014): 363–77. 4 See above, pp. 40–1. 5 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Christian Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). 6 David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology, Studia Leibnitiana, XXV (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1989); David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: the Search for Accord (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1977); David E. Mungello, ‘Confucianism and the Enlightenment: Antagonism and Collaboration between the Jesuits and the Philosophes’, in Thomas H.C. Lee (ed.), China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991), pp. 99–128; Knud Lundbaek, ‘The Image of Neo-Confucianism in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus’, Journal of the History of Ideas 44.1 (1983): 19–30. 7 Nicolas Standaert (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in China, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2001–10); Ad Dudink and Nicolas Standaert, Chinese Christian Texts Database, www.arts.kuleuven.be/sinology/cct, last accessed 16 Oct. 2020; Thierry

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noted how Chinese philosophy became an important instrument within early modern intellectual discourse in Europe; Thijs Weststeijn, Jonathan Israel and Joan-Pau Rubiés underlined the influence of China on the broad spectrum of European intellectual thought.8 Meanwhile, historians of the early or ‘radical’ Enlightenment have considered the way in which the intellectual world of early modern Europe assessed and classified the Chinese ‘other’ through its encounter with Confucius.9 However, while researchers are becoming aware of the intricacies involved in the various processes of information exchange between Europe and Asia, there remains a gap in knowledge of how the materiality of textual transmission influenced and facilitated discussion and perception. And while the field of book history has shown itself mindful of concepts related to textual transmission through print, there are few studies that combine interest in materiality with intellectual influence. As such, the subject of this chapter is how the budding literary genre of the epistolary novel influenced the representation of Chinese religion and philosophy, and Confucius in particular, in the first half of the eighteenth century. The chapter focuses on Jean Baptiste Boyer’s epistolary novel Lettres chinoises of 1739–40. As Meynard (ed.), Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687): The First Translation of the Confucian Classics (Rome: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 2011); Thierry Meynard, The Jesuit Reading of Confucius: The First Translation of the Lunyu Published in the West (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015). 8 Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France (1640–1740) (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1932); Jonathan Israel, ‘The Battle over Confucius and Classical Chinese Philosophy in European Early Enlightenment Thought (1670−1730)’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 8.2 (2013): 183–98; Thijs Weststeijn, ‘Spinoza Sinicus: an Asian Paragraph in the History of the Radical Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68.4 (2007): 537–61; Thijs Weststeijn, ‘From Hieroglyphs to Universal Characters: Pictography in the Early Modern Netherlands’, in Eric Jorkink and Bart Ramakers (eds), Art and Science in the Early Modern Netherlands: Yearbook for History of Art (2011), pp. 238–81; Thijs Weststeijn, ‘Vossius’s Chinese Utopia’, in Eric Jorink and Dirk van Miert (eds), Isaac Vossius (1618–1689): Between Science and Scholarship (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 207–42; David E. Mungello, ‘European Philosophical Responses to Non-European Culture’, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 87–100. 9 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Terry L. Mazurk, ‘Buddhism and Idolatry’, in Rachana Sachdev and Qinjun Li (eds), Encountering China: Early Modern European Responses (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), pp. 161–96; Nicolas Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Timothy H. Barrett, ‘Chinese Religion in English Guise: the History of an Illusion’, Modern Asian Studies 39.3 (2005): 509–33.

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will become clear, this was a transitional work that combined the relatively new epistolary structure with the established format of learned journals and travelogues. The purpose of the present study is to examine D’Argens’s conflation of existing genres in the Lettres chinoises and to consider what this tells us about the possible influence of an emerging literary device upon perceptions of the Asian ‘other’ in early modern Europe.

China in Early Modern Europe From the late sixteenth century, the European demand for knowledge about the so-called Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo 中國) greatly increased. During this ‘First Global Age’ a growing number of Europeans travelled to China by sea in search of commerce and conversions, and the eyewitness accounts they brought back home slowly opened up the country to Western scrutiny.10 Printers and publishers quickly recognised the potential of this newly revealed ‘exotic’ world. What started out as a trickle of publications on China ‘gradually swelled into a deluge of printed materials from presses all over Europe’.11 By the eighteenth century, European readers had access to a substantial amount of information on China through a variety of publications. Letters and travelogues recounted the first-hand experiences of merchants and Jesuit missionaries on the ground in Asia. Based on these eyewitness accounts, business-savvy bookmen began turning out compilations by professional writers which further disseminated knowledge on China in print.12 The enduring European interest in the Middle Kingdom is further attested by more ephemeral publications such as newspapers, digests and learned journals. These different types of printed works regularly discussed Chinese events.13 Combined with the ever-increasing availability of Chi10 John E. Wills, ‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, in John E. Wills (ed.), China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800. Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy and Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 25. 11 Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe: Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 9. 12 Western Books on China Published up to 1850 in the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A Descriptive Catalogue, ed. John Lust (London: Bamboo, 1987; Marcia Reed and Paola Demattè, China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007). See also Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0 via Univie. ac.at/Geschichte/China-Bibliographie/blog, last accessed 3 Nov. 2020. 13 Trude Dijkstra, ‘“It Is Said That …”: The Chinese Rites Controversy in Dutch Newspapers and Periodicals in the Seventeenth Century’, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 23 (2016): 172–91; Edwin J. van Kley, ‘News from China.

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nese products and the visible presence of the country through material culture, printwork fixed China into the European imagination during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This European fascination with the Middle Kingdom was further fired by the occasional Chinese visitor.14 Not the first but perhaps the most famous of these was Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗. Baptised Michael Alphonse, Shen travelled to Europe with the Jesuit Philippe Couplet in 1683. Together, they visited the Dutch Republic, Flanders, Italy and England. In Versailles, Shen was presented to Louis XIV, whom he showed how to use chopsticks correctly and how to write Chinese characters. In Oxford, he met with Thomas Hyde and catalogued the collection of Chinese books of the Bodleian Library. James II was so delighted by Shen’s visit that he ordered Geoffrey Kneller to paint a portrait of this ‘Chinese convert’, which the king supposedly kept in his bedroom.15 The enthusiasm for these exotic visitors was so great, that a blue-eyed, blond-haired Frenchman could successfully pose as a native of Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) around the turn of the eighteenth century. Thus, George Psalmanazar wrote a popular account of his supposed home country and was invited to speak at the University of Oxford and the Royal Society. Later in life he owned up to his ruse, yet for a time Europe was enthralled by this ‘pretended Asian’.16 A plethora of written materials and the occasional tantalising glimpse of a real-life (and sometimes pretended) Chinese visitor moved a number of writers to use Asia as the backdrop for their novels, plays and poems.17 Although they sometimes presented a burlesque image of Asia, these works generally placed the societies of China and Europe on the same level. Writers depicted China as fascinatingly different, yet not necessarily

14

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Seventeenth-Century European Notices of the Manchu Conquest’, The Journal of Modern History 45.4 (1973): 561–82. Thijs Weststeijn, ‘Just like Zhou: Chinese Visitors to the Netherlands (1597–1705) and their Cultural Representation’, in Thijs Weststeijn (ed.), Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural Encounters between the Chinese, the Dutch and Other Europeans, 1590–1800 (Leiden, 2020), pp. 104–31. Theodore N. Foss, ‘The European Sojourn of Philippe Couplet and Michael Shen Fuzong, 1683–1692’, in Jerome Heyndrickx (ed.), Philippe Couplet, S.J. (1623–1693): The Man who Brought China to Europe, (Nettetal: Steyler-Verlag, 1990), pp. 121–42. Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Graham Earnshaw, The Formosa Fraud: The Story of George Psalmanazar, One of the Greatest Charlatans in Literary History (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books Ltd, 2018). Theodore N. Foss and Donald F. Lach, ‘Images of Asia and Asians in European Fiction’, in Thomas H.C. Lee (ed.), China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991), pp. 165–88.

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as incomprehensible or bizarre. Indeed, they often emphasised that there were things to be learned from Chinese Confucian culture. In 1667, Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel’s play Zungchin suggested that Confucius had ‘planted golden morals’.18 The Jesuit missionaries’ descriptions of the Chinese state even inspired writers to imagine the benefits of incorporating Confucian ideals into European politics. Both Hendrik Smeeks’s utopian kingdom Krinke Kesmes19 – where all religions lived together in peace – and Christoph Wieland’s political novel Der goldne Spiegel oder die Könige von Scheschian (1772), which presented a model government in the faraway country of ‘Indostan’ – were modelled after the Middle Kingdom.20 Considering the presence of Chinese ideology in Europe, it comes as no surprise that some European authors went on to imagine how their society would look through Chinese eyes. The device of fictitious letters from a foreign observer dates to at least Giovanni Paolo Marana’s L’esploratore turco (1684), yet Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) truly gave shape to the genre. In the preface to his Lettres persanes, Montesquieu explained the appeal of this newly emerged genre: Mais, dans la forme des lettres, où les acteurs ne sont pas choisis, et où les sujets qu’on traite ne sont dépendants d’aucun dessein ou d’aucun plan déjà formé, l’auteur s’est donné l’avantage de pouvoir joindre de la philosophie, de la politique et de la morale, à un roman et de lier le tout par une chaîne secrète, et en quelque façon inconnue.21

Indeed, Thomas O. Beebee has emphasised that the epistolary novel allowed the novelist to act as ‘both a philosopher and a social critic’.22

18 ‘Konfutius, gansch Sina door bekent […] plante goude zeden, voor twintigh eeuwen op het lant, en in de steden’, Joost van den Vondel, Zungchin of ondergang der Sineesche Heerschappye: treurspel (Amsterdam: Weduwe Abraham de Weest, 1667). 19 Hendrik Smeeks, Beschryvinge van het matige koningryk Krinke Kesmes (Amsterdam: Nicolaas ten Hoorn, 1708). 20 Christoph Wieland, Der goldne Spiegel oder die Könige von Scheschian (Leipzig: s.l., 1772). 21 ‘But, in the form of letters, where the participants are not chosen and where the subjects one treats with do not depend on any design or predetermined plan, the author is given the advantage of being able to join philosophy, politics and ethics to the novel and of linking them all together by a secret and, in a sense, imperceptible chain’, Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 227. 22 Thomas O. Beebee, ‘The Epistolary Novel’, The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 288–94 (p. 290).

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Jean Baptiste de Boyer’s Lettres chinoises was no different in that regard. The novel was first published by Pierre Paupie in The Hague between 11 June 1739 and 15 November 1740.23 It was reprinted five times before 1800 and soon translated into English and German.24 Lettres chinoises is the third part of a trilogy of epistolary novels entitled ‘La Correspondance Philosophique’. The success of the first two books – Lettres juives and Lettres cabalistiques – encouraged D’Argens ‘a courir une troisième fois dans la même carrière, oú j’ai été assez heureux les deux premières’.25 In all three instalments, D’Argens made the foreign visitors observers of their time period, in which they pose as philosophes. In Lettres chinoises, five Chinese visitors abroad exchange their views on the different countries through which they travel. Sioeu-Tcheou in France, the German lands and Poland, Choang in Persia, Tiao in Russia and Scandinavia, Kieou-Che in Japan and Siam and Yn-Che-Chan in Beijing purportedly learned the local languages from Jesuit missionaries. This clever device allowed D’Argens to consider both China and Europe from different perspectives: Enfin me voilà portée cher Yn-Che-Chan, de me servir de la langue Françoise, dont la connoissance nous a couté plusieurs années d’étude. Je vais faire usage des instructions de nos amis les Européens: bientôt je pourrai vérifier si ce qu’ils nous racontoient des moeurs des François, est conforme à la vérité, & si les Livres que nous avons lus par le canal des Missionnaires, sont dignes de foi.26

23 François-Xavier de Peretti, ‘Introduction aux Lettres chinoises de Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Argens: un regard philosophique sur la nature humaine au croisement des cultures’, Transnationalité et transculturalité (Aix-en-Provence, 2017). 24 Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Chinese Letters. Being a Philosophical, Historical and Critical Corresponence between a ChineseTtraveller at Paris and his Countrymen in China, Muscovy, Persia and Japan (London: D. Browne and R. Hett, 1741); Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Chinesische Briefe, oder philosophischer, historischer und kritischer Briefwechsel, zwischen einem reisenden Chineser in Paris und seinen guten Freunden in China, Moscau, Persien und Japan (Berlin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1768–71). Here, we will consider the French edition of 1755 by Pierre Gosse of The Hague, which contains 162 letters in six instalments. 25 ‘to pursue it for a third time in my career, as I was quite happy the first two times’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises (1755), épître. 26 ‘Finally, I am brought to this point, my dear Yn-Che-Chan, [of being able] to use the French language, the knowledge of which has cost me several years of study [to acquire]. I will make use of the instructions of our friends, the Europeans. Soon, I will be able to verify whether what they told us of French customs is confirmed to be true; and whether the Books that we have read by way of the missionaries are worthy of the faith’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I (1755), pp. 1–2.

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Based on Jesuit information, in Lettres chinoises, Sioeu-Tcheou and his correspondents combined Chinese Confucianism with European Enlightenment thinking. Through the voices of the Chinese mandarins, D’Argens presented a trenchant satire of European politics, culture and religion, whereby the characters are, at the same time, exotically different yet transcendentally universal. In letter VIII from Sioeu-Tcheou at Paris to Yn-Che-Chan in Beijing, the Chinese religious system is compared to that of France: ‘Les François, cher Yn-Che-Chan, sont aussi divisés par le nombre de Sectes qu’il y a entre eux […] dont les trois principales sont, 1. celle des Lettrés, qui suivent la doctrine des anciens Livres canoniques, & les explications qu’en ont données Confucius & les autres Docteurs; 2. elle des sectateurs de Lao-Kium; & 3. celle qui adore la Divinité Foe.’27 Through Sioeu-Tcheou, D’Argens goes on to explain that there are three ‘principal sects’ in Paris as well, ‘which may be compared to those three Chinese; and I think the parallel very just’. In his description of China, D’Argens used a large number of sources, embedding his work in a rich tradition of European writings on China. Many of these are easily identifiable, as they are cited verbatim. Historical accounts and works of travel by such writers as Maturin Veyssière La Croze, Isaac de Beausobre and François Eudes de Mézeray served as inspiration, yet missionary literature also proved particularly influential. As noted by David Mungello, eighteenth-century philosophes depended either directly or indirectly upon missionaries from the Society of Jesus for their knowledge of China.28 Eyewitness accounts by Jesuit missionaries such as Nicolas Trigault and Martino Martini (1615) circulated throughout Europe in print and manuscript and played a significant role in the transmission of knowledge between China and the West. It should be emphasised that the missionary sources of the Lettres chinoises had made Confucius the main protagonist of Europe’s interactions with Chinese philosophy. Consider the fact that ‘Confucius’ is the Jesuit Latinisation of the original Chinese title of Kong Fuzi 孔夫子 – literally ‘Master Kong’. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century much controversy surrounded the Jesuit interpretation of Chinese religion. In his commentary on European society as expressed by fictional Chinese visitors, D’Argens engages with this debate primarily through choices 27 ‘The French […] are divided into as many sects as the Chinese are; of whose sects the three principals are. 1. That of the Learned who adhere to the Doctrine of the ancient Canonical Books and to the Explanations given of it by Confucius and the other Doctors. 2. That of the Followers of Lao-Kium. And, 3. That which worships the Deity Foe’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I (1755), p. 56. 28 Mungello, ‘Confucianism in the Enlightenment’, pp. 99–127.

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related to his sources. What results is an image that is primarily built upon the Jesuit interpretation of Confucius. It is an image, however, that is adjusted according to whether the work is read as a novel, a news periodical or a travelogue.

Confucius in Europe: Accommodation and Controversy Confucius had become the focal point of the Jesuits’ missionary policy as part of their accommodationist approach to conversion. After arriving in China in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuits soon realised that access to the imperial court – and thus any real aim at top-down conversion – would have little chance without a sound grounding in both the language and culture of China. The Jesuits learned to speak, read and write classical Chinese and they were determined to adapt to the religious characteristics of the Chinese.29 The Jesuits had identified three ‘sects’ in China: those of the Confucians, the Buddhists and the Taoists.30 Despite earlier attempts at adapting Christianity to the common people by focusing on elements of Buddhism and Taoism, the Jesuits quickly preferred the teachings of Confucius or, as they called it, ‘the sect of the Literati’.31 According to one of the 29 Michele Ruggieri summed up the aim succinctly: ‘In short, we have become Chinese in order to win China for Christ’: letter of 7 Feb. 1587, in P. Tacchi Venturi, Opere Storiche de P. Matteo Ricci S.J., II (Rome: F. Giorgetti, 1913), p. 416. 30 Timothy Brook, ‘Rethinking Syncretism: The Unity of the Three Teachings and their Joint Worship in late Imperial China’, Journal of Chinese Religion 21.1 (1993): 13–44; Hong Chen, ‘On Matteo Ricci’s Interpretations of Chinese Culture’, Coolabah 16 (2015): 87–100; John D. Young, Confucianism and Christianity: the First Encounter (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1983), pp. 41–58. 31 Today, scholars have not come to a consensus on the meaning and the extent of the terms ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Confucian’. Strictly speaking, no Chinese equivalent of these terms exists, which are sixteenth-century neologisms by the Jesuits to refer to the ‘venerable, all-encompassing tradition of socio-ethical precepts and philosophical norms governing human conduct and social relations in Chinese antiquity’, which are presumed to be first expressed by the historical ‘Confucius’ or Kong Fuzi 孔子. In canonising Confucius and his teachings, Ricci and his companions relied more on missionary requirements than on providing an accurate description of the Confucian Ru tradition in its own socio-historical setting. The Chinese never coined a single term to describe the broad spectrum of diversity within the Chinese tenets. They referred to ruji (literati family), rujiao (literati teachings), ruxue (literati learning) or simply to ru (literati). The tradition of ru existed before Confucius, but the ethical vision of Confucius and his followers has defined and enriched this earlier tradition. Therefore, Confucius is honoured within the Chinese tradition as ‘master’ (zi), ‘ancestral teacher’ (zongshi), ‘first teacher’ (zongshi) and ‘great sage’ (zhisgheng). In the absence of more appropriate terms, this chapter will refer to ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Confucian’ as convenient appellations for the literati tradition of ru, which

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founding members of the Jesuit China mission, Matteo Ricci, the Chinese had always believed in the one true God and a (re)acquaintance with Christianity simply completed their faith. Confucius was presented as a philosopher who used rational means to achieve a righteous life and as a saint who had prepared the way for Jesus Christ. His teachings were regarded as a moral system of example whereby various Confucian rites such as ancestor veneration were considered as civil and cultural functions, rather than religious rites, and thereby not in conflict with Christian doctrine. To defend this accommodating approach to their superiors and the general public, the Jesuits provided Europe with reports and correspondence about China.32 However, more information does not necessarily lead to an increase in tolerance or understanding, and debates concerning the religiosity of the teaching of Confucius soon became one of the primary points of contention in the so-called ‘Chinese Rites Controversy’. The Chinese rites had been an internal concern of religious authorities in Paris and Rome since the beginning of the seventeenth century. While the Jesuits claimed that the Chinese rites were secular rituals compatible with Christianity, Dominicans and Franciscans disagreed and reported the issue to Rome. The Chinese Rites Controversy would not formally be resolved until 1939, when the Holy See allowed Christians to participate in ceremonies involving Confucius and to observe ancestral rites. In the intervening years, leading universities in Europe had been involved in the conflict, together with eight popes and two Chinese emperors. Printers and publishers prospered, given that proponents of both positions issued voluminous writings for and against the Jesuit position. Indeed, the Rites Controversy only increased European interest in China; D’Argens built his Lettres chinoises on an increasing number of works both supporting and detracting from the Jesuit accommodation. The work most extensively consulted by D’Argens in his descriptions of China was published in the wake of the Controversy by the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste du Halde, editor of the Lettres édifianès.33 His Description géographique, historique chronologique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine (1735) was, at least according to Voltaire, ‘la plus ample et la meilleure description de l’empire de la Chine qu’on ait

encompasses a broad spectrum of socio-ethical doctrine which is conventionally traced to the teachings of Kongzi. 32 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangès per quelques missionaires de compagne de Jesus, 34 vol. (Paris: Nicolas de Clerc et al., 1702–76). 33 Jean Baptiste du Halde, Description géographique, historique chronologique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine, 4 vols. (Paris: P.-G. Le Mercier, 1735).

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dans le monde’.34 Du Halde collected the accounts of twenty-seven Jesuits, together with François Noël’s 1711 Latin translation of six Confucian books and a summary and commentary of the Five Classics (Wujing 五經) that constitute the foundation of Confucianism. The Description … de l’empire de Chine further demonstrates the importance of Confucius for the European understanding and critique of China, a notion which is reflected in D’Argens’s discussion of the subject.

Genre Epistolary works such as Lettres chinoises are now considered to belong to a genre that came into being only during the late seventeenth century, its contours still unclear and malleable. Yet, even today, scholars seem unsure about how to characterise this type of work: Thomas Beebee focuses on the novelistic aspects of Lettres chinoises, while Robert Granderoute of the Dictionaire des Journaux calls it a periodical. Ronald Crane and Hamilton Jewett Smith consider the work a philosophical pamphlet; Zoë Kingsley in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing compares the genre to travelogues and Andrew Pettegree links it to early modern news networks.35 The different interpretations of genre are no mere technicality. The perceived genre fundamentally shapes how readers interact with a text. It reveals underlying communicative actions and social backgrounds, both of which help to explain the materiality and form of texts and motives to practices of reading.36 The designation of a work to a particular genre affects the expectations and understanding of the individual perceiving the text, both before, during and after reading. Genre ‘sets a certain horizon of expectations and offers a key to understanding the text’.37 In recent years, an 34 ‘The broadest and best description of China’s empire in the world’, Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire XIV, Catalogue de la plupart des écrivains Français (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878), pp. 32–114 (p. 68). 35 Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Zoë Kingsley, ‘Travelogues, diaries, letters’, in Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 408–22; Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About itself (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014). 36 For an exhaustive overview of the recent developments in genre studies see: Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research and Pedagogy. Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010). 37 Jacob Ølgaard Nyboe, ‘The Game of the Name: Genre Labels as Genre and Signature’, Scandinavian Studies 88.4 (2016): 364–93 (p. 370).

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increasing body of interdisciplinary scholarship has engaged with the study of genre, including literary theory, sociology, philosophy, applied linguistics and rhetorical theory. While different approaches constitute different methodologies, leading to a broad range of possibilities and implications for conducting genre research, they have all committed to the idea that genres reflect and coordinate social ways of knowing and acting, thereby providing important means of researching how texts function in various contexts. In Chapter 6 of this book, indeed, the sentimental is allied (or perhaps degraded) to the pornographic in an exploration of how evolving fiction genres, with transatlantic reach and reinterpretation, advance social criticism and expose perceived hypocrisy. Taking a cultural studies approach to genre, Tzvetan Todorov argues that ‘genres bring to light the constitutive features of the society to which they belong’, meaning that genres may be used to explore texts and historic social practices.38 The choices expressed by printers’ and publishers’ output lay bare a society’s ideology: ‘that is why the existence of certain genres in one society and their absence in another, are revelatory of that ideology’.39 Furthermore, Peter Hitchcock argues that the urge to classify genres is itself ‘indissoluble from a particular history of self and society’.40 He urges analysis of the emergence of genres – such as the epistolary novel in the middle of the eighteenth century – in order to understand the conditions ‘under which particular genres may appear and expire’.41 According to Hitchcock, the formation and transformation of genres reflects the legitimation of social and cultural practices and ideologies while coeval generic distinctions maintain dominant hierarchies of culture and power. As evidenced by D’Argens’s Lettres chinoises, a cultural studies approach to genre exposes the complications of considering such a work within the traditional boundaries of literary and non-literary genres. Mikhail Bakhtin famously described the complex relationship between genres, pointing to horizontal and vertical axes of genre relations. Horizontal relations describe how genres may respond to one another within a sphere of communication: the publication of Lettres chinoises led an anonymous writer to comment publicly upon the work in the Journal helvétique of October 1740, which was followed the next month by D’Argens’s reaction in the same 38 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Origin of Genres’, in David Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory, (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 193–209. 39 Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), p. 19. 40 Peter Hitchcock, ‘The Genre of Postcoloniality’, New Literary History 34.2 (2003): 299–330. 41 Ibid., p. 311.

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journal. Vertical relations are concerned with what Bakhtin calls ‘primary and secondary genres’.42 Primary genres constitute everyday communication, while secondary genres – such as the novel – recontextualise these primary genres by setting them in relationship to other primary genres. As such, literary genres are made up of, and in turn recontextualize, multiple primary genres. Thomas Beebee builds upon this notion by arguing that literary genres ‘give us not understanding in the abstract and passive sense but use in the pragmatic and active sense’, as they reveal cultural ideologies through the relationship between everyday genres and their so-called use values, which is obtained through a social and rhetorical economy.43 Genres are therefore the ideological reproducers, bearers and articulators of culture; in turn, genres are what give texts social-use value. A proper understanding of genre in different historical times and cultures not only illuminates the multiple uses and motives of reading and writing, it also may be of benefit to the history of the book. Indeed, according to Dallas Liddle, genre history should be ‘a precondition for any true history of the book’.44 As a literary historian, he defines the history of the book as dynamic and integrative: ‘it tries to see beyond the literary-historical focus on individual authors to the webs and circuits of relationship and filiation that condition the creation, relation and reception of texts and to see text as a complex site of cooperation and interaction rather than as a single artist’s expression’.45 While this definition is especially geared towards a literary-historical understanding of book history, it nevertheless points clearly towards the important material and commercial contexts in which early modern texts came into being. Such an examination can be built around D’Argens’s Lettres chinoises, following Liddle’s aim by placing the analysis within a broader context of genre considerations and the work’s paratext. The creation of genres was not D’Argens’s doing, yet the manner in which he related to established material and textual devices (the fictitious novel, the periodical news press and the epistolary travelogue) gives insight into the creation, dissemination and possible reception of images of China through a variety of genre categories. Perhaps most importantly, D’Argens’s engagement with genre 42 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 60–102. 43 Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 14. 44 Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain. Victorian Literature and Culture Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), p. 175. 45 Ibid., p. 180.

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presents a way to consider the text as part of a larger body of similar works. Classifying the work as novel, travelogue or news shapes (the readers’) practices of understanding and evaluating particular works, thus providing a set of standards by which to judge the text – and consequently its description of China and Confucius.

Lettres chinoises as a Novel Today, D’Argens’s Lettres chinoises is usually considered as an early example of an epistolary novel. In the early eighteenth century, Montesquieu claimed that his ‘Lettres persanes taught people to write letter-novels’.46 Indeed, although he did not invent the genre, Montesquieu’s letters did inspire D’Argens in the writing of his trilogy of epistolary novels based around an ‘Oriental’ theme. In turn, Lettres chinoises went on to encourage Oliver Goldsmith in writing his famous Citizen of the World (1762).47 By considering Lettres chinoises as epistolary fiction, we run into issues of narrative and authorial veracity. Because epistolary novels featured the supposedly original voices of equally supposed authorities, the genre had ‘the potential to lure readers into the liminal space between fact and fiction’.48 D’Argens published his work when the novel proper was only just emerging as a literary category. At this early stage, the novel was still undergoing a period of narrative indecision in which truth and fiction were often aimed at simultaneously.49 As such, D’Argens’s image of Confucius as an enlightened philosopher and saint who prepared the way for Christ may just as well be considered fictitious, as these notions are provided by a (not necessarily reliable) Chinese narrator. Yet D’Argens does not situate his protagonists as imposters. First, he attempted to make Siou-Tcheou and his correspondents seem more genuine by giving them a ‘backstory’ (that is, by assigning them a native province). Second, the information provided by the Chinese visitors is based on missionary literature. The narrators therefore 46 Montesquieu, Mes Pensées, (no. 1621) at Édition en ligne des pensées de Montesquieu https://www.unicaen.fr/services/puc/sources/Montesquieu/, last accessed 6 Nov. 2020. 47 Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, 2 vols. (London: E. Spragg, for J. Good, 1794). Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World was first published in 1762 in Newberry’s Public Ledger. 48 Gerd Bayer, ‘Deceptive Narratives: On Truth and the Epistolary Voice’, Zeitschrift Für Literaturwissenschaft Und Linguistik 39: 2 (2009): 173–87. 49 Peter Garside James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1: 15–25; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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paint a picture of China that does not deviate much from that of the Jesuits. In the introduction, D’Argens explains this by stating: ‘J’ai supposé des Chinois assez bien instruits dans les sciences Européennes; mais cela ne choque point la vraisemblance, puisque j’en fais d’anciens amis des Missionnaires Jésuites’.50 Often, the direct source is mentioned explicitly (‘Le Pere du Halde a donné une traduction entiére de cette piéce’).51 As such, this information could be considered reliable by knowledgeable readers but also verifiable for those less informed. While the travels of Siou-Tcheou and his correspondents were an invention of the author, the information the Chinese visitors gave about Chinese philosophy was demonstrably authoritative. The letter format of Lettres chinoises facilitated the perceived authenticity of the narrative. By presenting China and Confucius through letters, D’Argens added greater realism to the story. Moreover, he was able to put ideas about contemporary European and Chinese culture in a direct, shared dialogue. Through the letters exchanged between different Chinese correspondents, D’Argens could suggest various viewpoints side by side, rather than a single – and possibly objectionable – truth. That this polyphonic device was meant to ‘soften’ the narrative is further evidenced by statements such as ‘La secte des Lao-tse […] me parait assez ressemblante à celle des Convulsionnairs de Paris’ and ‘Je crois qu’on peut [la secte de Molinistes] comparer, à celle de Foe’.52 In this respect, the qualifiers ‘seems to me’ and ‘I believe’ emphasise that what is stated here about the sect of Lao-tse [Laozi 老子] and the sect of the Molinists should be considered subjective opinion by the individual rather than objective fact. However, as these opinions on Confucius are repeated again and again throughout 50 ‘That I have supposed the Chinese writers of these letters to be very well instructed in the learning of the Europeans, is not shocking to probability; for I admit them to have had a long intimacy with the missionary Jesuits and I know that they have cultivated an acquaintance with several English merchants at Beijing, by whose means they have read the best European books for above ten years past’, D’Argens, Lettres Chinoises I, épître. 51 ‘Father [Jean-Baptiste du] Halde has translated the Treatise of this Chinese philosopher. I [D’Argens] always make use of his translation and often of his very expressions’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I, p. 208. See for a discussion of the translation of the Chinese treatise: Huiyi Wu, ‘Alien Voices under the Bean Arbor: How an Eighteenth-Century French Jesuit Translated Doupeng Xianhua 豆棚閒話 as the “Dialogue of a Modern Atheist Chinese Philosopher”’, T’oung Pao 103.1–3 (2017): 155–205. 52 ‘The sect of Lao-tse […] seems to me quite similar to that of the Convulsionnairs of Paris’, ‘I think we can compare [the Molinist sect] to that of Foe’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I, p. 91, my emphasis.

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the work’s six instalments, they acquire an increasing ring of factualness and truth.53 So, it was not just Siou-Tcheou who thought of Confucius as the greatest sage China had ever known: ‘What respect have we not for the memory of Confucius’. And his correspondents in various faraway places believe, repeat and thus validate the same. Lettres chinoises further questions notions of fact and fiction by playing with the reliability of its purported authors.54 When published in 1684, Letters Written by a Turkish Spy was presented as a genuine translation from an Arabic text of 1683, purportedly written by Mahmoud, an agent of the Porte stationed in Paris. A comparable device is used on the title page of Lettres chinoises, which claims that the letters are ‘translated from the originals into French by the Marquis d’Argens’. However, the subsequent preface by the author immediately makes clear that the letters are in fact his own invention. D’Argens wonders aloud: ‘peut-on condamner qu’on suppose dans des Lettres feintes des Chinois, peut-être un peu plus instruits qu’ils ne le sont’.55 In later instalments, the ruse of presenting the letters as Chinese originals is abandoned completely; and rightfully so, according to one commentator. In the October 1740 issue of Journal helvétique, the anonymous writer argues that ‘il n’était pas nécessaire, ni peut-être utile, que l’Auteur s’annonçât dans le Titre, pour être le même que celui des Lettres Juives & Cabalistiques. On sent des les premières lignes que c’est du Vin du même Tonneau’.56 In summary, Lettres chinoises plays with notions of reliability, facilitated by the transtextual link between the work’s letter-form and the newly emerging novel. Yet, while the Chinese traveller’s itinerary would be recognised by most readers as an invention of the author, the information these travellers gave about China would be considered more reliable, as it resembled familiar textual forms.

53 Lisa K. Fazio et al., ‘Knowledge Does not Protect Against Illusory Truth’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 144.5 (2015): 993–1002. 54 Tamar Yacobi, ‘Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem’, Poetics Today 2:2 (1981): 113. 55 ‘[C]an there be any harm in supposing certain Chinese people, in fictitious letters, to be perhaps a little more learned than they are in reality?’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I, p. preface, my emphasis. 56 ‘It was not necessary, nor perhaps useful, for the author to announce himself on the title, as being the same [author] as that of the Jewish & Cabalistic letters. One gets a sense from the first lines onwards that it is wine from the same barrel’, Journal helvétique, Oct. 1740, p. 372.

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Lettres chinoises as News While the epistolary novel was only just emerging as a literary genre, the letter-form as a vehicle of information exchange was familiar to most eighteenth-century readers. During the early modern period, news came to the public through letters published in newspapers, journals, digests and pamphlets. Indeed, most periodicals relied completely on letters from foreign or domestic correspondents for their news.57 The origin of the early modern periodical can be traced to the Venetian Republic of the sixteenth century. There, an early form of handwritten newspaper circulated as a single, folded sheet that appeared on a regular schedule. The news sheet found its way from Italy to the German lands and Holland, its spread and distribution facilitated by the printing press. The eighteenth-century development of the newspaper and its changing material form and content will be explored further in Part Two of this volume, but it is the expansion in the production of printed and manuscript news and journals in the seventeenth century that underpins the writing, publication and reception of the Lettres chinoises. In 1645, for example, the Dutch city of Amsterdam alone boasted seven different newspapers issued by six publishers in ten weekly editions on four days of the week. And of early learned journals, the most notable began in 1665 with the publication of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, to which Petiver, as noted in Chapter 2, regularly contributed. Many titles followed, presenting news, political, commercial and scientific, as deemed relevant to a pan-European Republic of Letters. And, as explored in the previous chapter, the early periodic news press, with an increasing number of titles, ushered in a new system of communication that made relatively up-to-date information available to a socially and economically diverse public, promoting a hitherto unknown diffusion of knowledge. So, to what extent could the Lettres chinoises be considered part of the genre of ‘news’? Arthur der Weduwen has proposed four requirements for a publication to be considered news: the material must be periodic (frequent and regular), it has to be contemporary (new), the material must be publicly available and the publication has to have a miscellaneous content (reports need to come from different locations).58 According to these crite57 Nicholas Brownlees, ‘“Newes Also Came by Letters”: Functions and Features of Epistolary News in English News Publications of the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 394–419. 58 Arthur der Weduwen, Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century, 1618–1700, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), pp. 5–14.

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ria, Lettres chinoises bears all the characteristics of a news publication. The work was publicly available in French, German and English and contained letters from such diverse places as Paris, Moscow, Isfahan and Nagasaki. Its instalments appeared at regular intervals between 11 June 1739 and 15 November 1740, each volume containing thirty letters of eight pages which were issued bi-weekly on Monday and Thursday. Finally, ‘pour continuer à marquer au Public ma reconnoissance au sujet de l’empressement qu’il a témoigné pour mes demi feuilles’, readers might collect from the publisher the title page, the dedicatory epistle and the preface free of charge.59 More significantly still, the Lettres chinoises resembled in its design and typographical format a news publication. Indeed, the publication of epistolary correspondence was central to the periodical press in the early modern period – as it essentially still is today. So, newspapers and journals (as will be seen in more detail in Chapters 9 and 10) often reported news in the form of ‘letters from abroad’. Journals and digests even encouraged their readers to send in their own letters, thereby facilitating the dialogue between writers and readers. As in D’Argens’s Lettres chinoises, this even led to the creation of fictional correspondents. The most famous fictitious journalist of the early modern period was perhaps Isaac Bickerstaff Esq., the nom de plume used by Richard Steele for his contributions to the English Tatler. Apparently, Steele borrowed the name from his friend Jonathan Swift, ‘who, just before the establishment of the “Tatler,” had borrowed it from a shoemaker’s shop-board and used it as the name of an imagined astrologer.’60 The fluid boundaries between novel and news and between fiction and fact are also attested by publications such as Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), in which Defoe acts as both journalist and novelist. It should come as no surprise that it was only a short step from Mr Bickerstaff ’s or Defoe’s imaginative world to that of Siou-Tcheou in Lettres chinoises.61 Newspapers, digests and journals – but also the Lettres chinoises – functioned as ‘print versions’ of the Republic of Letters. They performed a role in the spread of intellectual and scholarly discourse. From the late sixteenth century onwards, this discourse often concerned China, in large part because of the increasing availability of information. For example, the 59 ‘to continue to highlight to the public my knowledge of printing, which is evidenced by my “half-sheet”’, D’Argens, Lettre chinoises, épître. 60 Henry Morley, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Steele, Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer (London: Cassell, 1887). 61 Brian Cowan, ‘Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives’, in J.A. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 55–72.

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Jesuit translation of the main work of Confucius (1687) was reviewed in every major learned journal, while newspapers and digests alike reported on the trials and tribulations of papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon at the imperial court in Beijing. Newspapers advertised Chinese products and reported on ships to and from China. Lettres chinoises ties in with this form of news provision, adding an extra dimension as somebody on the ground in Beijing was – allegedly – covering these events, presenting current information from a non-European point of view. The association between the epistolary structure of Lettres chinoises and news periodicals influenced its reading of China and Confucius as the country acquired a topical dynamic. From the 1650s onwards, China was ‘rather dramatically thrust [into] European consciousness and Westerners began their first debate over the significance of Chinese event[s]’.62 In general, notices about Asia prior to the introduction of the periodical press had been static descriptions. As Edwin van Kley noted, ‘events that occurred in China were not reported to Europeans; Chinese government, institutions and customs were described to Europeans’.63 The distinction between reporting information and describing it is a crucial one. The representation of China in print had long been that of a remote and often idealised empire. Thanks to the influx of more detailed and current information, this static image was at least partially replaced with that of a more dynamic picture. China became the subject of a wider variety of interpretations, dramatising events and allowing for more substantial debates over the significance of Chinese incidents. Especially after the Chinese Rites Controversy became a publicly discussed issue during the 1680s and 1690s, information about China acquired greater immediacy and dynamism. D’Argens builds upon this ‘topical’ device not only by relating events in China to European society but by comparing European news to Chinese society as well. Consider the fiftieth letter, written by Yn-Che-Chan in Beijing to Sioeu-Tcheou in Paris, which comments upon the Chinese Rites Controversy: ‘depuis son [Sioeu-Tcheou] départ, il est arrivé une révolution bien terrible pour tous les Européens: ce que tu m’avois prédit, il y a quelques années dans une de tes Lettres’.64 While some of the events subsequently described took place long before the publication of Lettres chinoises, they are presented with a sense of topical urgency. The 62 Edwin J. van Kley, ‘News from China: Seventeenth-Century European Notices of the Manchu Conquest’, The Journal of Modern History 45: 4 (1973): 561–82. 63 Ibid., p. 562. 64 ‘Since his [Sioeu-Tcheou] departure, a very terrible revolution has happened for all Europeans; what you predicted to me a few years ago in one of your letters’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I, p. 63.

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author – through his fictitious narrators – does this by linking Chinese events to current developments in Europe. In Letter 50, narrator Yn-CheChan writes: ‘Le tribunal des Rites jugea l’exil de tous les Missionnaires nécessaire à la tranquilité de la China, où leur division, leur haine, leur ambition auraient pu cause tôt ou tard des troubles aussi dangereux que ceux que les Prêtres ont excités & excitent journellment dans les Etats de l’Europe.’65 Thus he draws a direct line between current affairs in Europe and something that happened in China some years previously – thereby giving the latter a sense of actuality and urgency. Indeed, the pressing relevance of the events described is emphasised: ‘Les Jésuites qui ont eu la permission de rester à la Cour en qualité de Mathématiciens, me paraissent consternés de toutes ces révolutions. Je ne leur en parle que rarement, dans la crainte d’augmenter leur douleur’ (note that the writer is purportedly residing in Beijing).66 As with the fluid relationship between fact and fiction more generally, D’Argens wrote his epistolary novel in such a way that the boundaries between old and new information became vague. The already-mentioned issue of the Rites Controversy surrounding the Jesuit mission in China is a good example. Again, in Letter 50 of the Lettres chinoises narrator Yn-Che-Chan wrote that ‘depuis son départ, il est arrivé une révolution’ – a reference to the Rites Controversy. But many European readers were already familiar with this controversy, given that the events surrounding it had been extensively discussed in various periodical publications during the 1690s. D’Argens, however, presented this event in such a manner that the Lettres chinoises fostered a discussion of this ‘news’ on three levels: first, between Yn-Che-Chan and Siou-Tcheou within the fictitious world of the book itself; second, between the fictitious Chinese writer Yn-CheChan and the European reader; and third, between the work’s actual author D’Argens and his readership.

Lettres chinoises as Travelogue Lettres chinoises cannot be considered separately from the travelogues that came before it. As argued by Jean Viviès, ‘the fictional travel narrative and 65 ‘The tribunal of Rites judged the exile of all missionaries necessary for the peace and quiet of China, where their division, their hatred, their ambition could sooner or later have caused disturbances as dangerous as those which the priests have stirred up and stir up daily in the states of Europe’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I, p. 503. 66 ‘The Jesuits who have been allowed to remain at court as mathematicians seem to me appalled by all these revolutions. I rarely speak to them about it, for fear of increasing their pain’, ibid., p. 504.

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the travel narrative are not clearly demarcated categories but poles which reveal a continuum’.67 In fact, epistolary novels often took the form of a travelogue. Equally, early modern travel writing was regularly presented in epistolary form.68 Indeed, Jan Borm argued that travel writing should not be considered as a demarcated genre but, rather, as ‘a useful heading under which to consider and to compare the multiple crossings from one form of writing into another and, given the case from one genre into another’.69 This interchange harks back to the earliest beginnings of both genres. In a fourth-century example of a personal account of travel, the Christian bishop Synesius recorded his voyage from Alexandria to Cyrene through letters.70 In turn, one of the first epistolary novels – Giovanni Paolo Marana’s L’Espion Turc – recounts the fictitious travels of ‘Mahmut the Arabian’ in France between 1637 and 1682. The close interrelationship between the two genres advanced the prominence of the letter-form within the literary marketplace. As a consequence, innovations and adaptations in the (fictitious) epistolary genre of travel increased. The fluid boundaries between the travelogue and the epistolary novel exemplify the reading habits of Europe’s early modern reading culture in which the genre-hybridity reveals authors’ attempts to use formal conventions to familiarise the unfamiliar.71 The epistolary form of the travelogue is ‘a means for establishing verisimilitude and stimulating self-examination’.72 Both the epistolary novel and the travel narrative depend on a loose and ongoing conception of story and plot; the amorphous letter-form seldom works towards an overarching ending. The objective of both therefore is more to examine one’s own society than to delineate the foreign culture that the work purportedly describes: ‘here we have a new scene; we see a comparison drawn between the manners of several European nations and those of the Chinese; a people so singular in everything, that it has given occasion for abundance of new Reflections, which cannot fail to edify as well as entertain’. Again, we may note that Lettres chinoises plays with notions of veracity in order to provide 67 Jean Viviès, English Travel Narratives in the Eighteenth Century: Exploring Genres (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 27. 68 Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983). 69 Jan Borm, ‘Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology’, in Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (eds), Perspectives on Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 13–26. 70 Das and Youngs (eds), Cambridge History of Travel Writing, pp. 1–16. 71 Das and Youngs (eds), Cambridge History of Travel Writing, pp. 1–10. 72 Jennifer Speake (ed.), Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia (London and New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), p. 402.

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grounds for self-examination by emphasising verisimilitude. In writing an epistolary novel, D’Argens borrowed heavily from contemporary travel writing. He combined fictitious and factual narrative to provide readers with entertainment and grounds for reflection on their own society. Borrowing from Janicke Stensvaag Kaasa, by the middle of the eighteenth century, China may be understood both as a geographical referent and as an imagined space: it is a real place ‘but also a written space, a place we read about, a literary space’.73 Existing notions about ‘Oriental’ China embed ideas and values about the country, investing the culture with symbolic meaning which by then was rooted in 150 years of travel writing. From the outset, travellers to China had been greatly interested in the country’s religion and philosophy. Travelogues like Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario (1596) fitted the newly encountered religion and philosophy of China into a traditional European frame of reference: ‘in many places they pray to the devil, to avoid him hurting them’.74 In the following decades, when most of the basic facts of Chinese geography, culture and religious customs became common knowledge, travel writers increasingly put emphasis on the delectare rather than the prodesse. Furthermore, book producers – in varying capacity of author, printer or publisher – began to tailor to the presumed wishes of the potential readership. When comparing the ‘Amsterdam’ (1665) and ‘Antwerp’ (1666) editions of Johan Nieuhof ’s Het Gezandtschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den grooten Tartarischen Cham, den tegenwoordigen Keizer van China, it immediately becomes clear that the former was intended for a Protestant readership in the Dutch Republic, while the latter was intended for a Catholic audience in the Southern Netherlands.75 The Antwerp edition emphasises the Jesuit presence in China, while in the Amsterdam edition Dutch trading relations are accentuated. Such interventions by author, printer or publisher influence representations of China and Confucius, in this case by focusing on the contentious terminology surrounding ‘philosophies’ and ‘religion’ and ‘sects’. 73 Janicke Stensvaag Kaasa, ‘Travel and Fiction’, in Das and Youngs (eds), Cambridge History of Travel Writing, pp. 474–87; John Tallmadge, ‘Voyaging and the Literary Imagination’, Exploration: Journal of the MLA Special Session on the Literature of Exploration & Travel 7 (1979): 1–16. 74 Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Journael van de derthien-jarighe reyse, te water en te lande, gedaen door Jan Huygen van Linschooten, na Oost-Indien (Amsterdam: Gillis Joosten Saeghman, 1664), p. 32. 75 Guido van Meersbergen, ‘De uitgeversstrategie van Jacob van Meurs belicht: de Amsterdamse en “Antwerpse” editie van Johan Nieuhofs Gezantschap (1665–1666)’, De Zeventiende Eeuw 26. 1 (2010): 73–89.

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By the early eighteenth century, many interventions by the book producers aimed their description of China and Confucius at an adherence to or detraction from the Jesuit policy of accommodation. The very first letter explains that Sioeu-Tcheou’s aim is to check whether the European books brought by the ‘missionaries’ present the truth. His travels through France thereby function as a moveable search for veracity. Of course, this itinerary is not only planned out by D’Argens, the outcome is clear from the outset. By combining fact and fiction, D’Argens’s assessment of both Confucianism and the Jesuits is slowly revealed to the readers, who – like Sioeu-Tcheou – are embarking on a journey of exploration guided by the invisible narrator. On this journey, the Chinese travellers encounter such characters as the hostess of an inn in Le Havre-de-Grâce [Le Havre], who rather abruptly exclaims: ‘Notre curé dit qu’il aimerait mieux que les bleds gelassent & que les pommes fussent toutes pourries, que de donner un coup de chapeau au Père Recteur des Jésuites.’76 In turn, Sioeu-Tcheou explains that in China people do not distinguish Europeans, but by their country of origin. In a subsequent letter, Yn-Che-Chan relates to the same issue when stating that ‘tu fais que quoiqu’ami des missionnaires, j’ai toujours persisté dans les opinions de l’illustre Confucius, & que les conversations que j’ai eues au sujet de la religion, n’ont jamais pu m’ébranlait. Ce n’est pas que celle des Européens ne me paroisse très belle & très estimable.’77 These fictitious anecdotes are similar in form and content to contemporary travelogues: indeed, while the characters are the invention of the author, the information they relate is echoed in various accounts of travel. Sioeu-Tcheou tells of China in a manner close to that of how Jan Huygen van Linschoten or Nieuhof tells of China. Each of these writers incorporates in varying degrees the fictional in the factual and the factual in the fictional. Furthermore, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the lines between novel and travelogue had blurred, whereby entertainment value became as important as dry facts. In Lettres chinoises D’Argens combined these aims in order to emphasise the verisimilitude of Europe and China, paving the way for self-examination by the contemporary reader: ‘The French, Dear Yn-Che-Chan are, in many things, like the Chinese.’ 76 ‘Our parish priest says, that the corn should be spoiled and all the apples rot off the trees, before he would put off his hat to the Father rector of the Jesuits’, D’Argens, Lettres chinoises I, p. 4. 77 ‘you know, that although I am a friend of the missionaries, I always adhered to the illustrious Confucius and that the discourses they have had with me upon the article of religion could never shake me. Not that I do not think the religion of the Europeans very good and much to be valued’, ibid., p. 48.

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Conclusion Through the fictional correspondence of Sioeu-Tcheou, Yn-Che-Chan and their fellow Chinese travellers, Jean-Baptiste D’Argens holds up a Chinese mirror for his European readers to reflect upon their own culture and society. The flexible genre of the epistolary novel allows him to borrow from the novel, news periodicals and travel writing, amalgamating elements of each into an image of China that not only adheres to his own point of view but also appeals to his potential readership. By conflating these existing genres, D’Argens – like Montesquieu before him – builds towards the expansion of the epistolary genre, demonstrating to future authors – like Goldsmith – how ‘to write letter-novels’. The narrative form that D’Argens thereby helped to consolidate relied upon bringing across effects of intimacy (novel), immediacy (news) and authenticity (travel writing) – what Samuel Richardson terms ‘writing to the moment’ – to present a trenchant satire of European society, whereby the Chinese characters are, at the same time, exotically different yet transcendentally universal. Central to D’Argens’s adaptation of these genres is his play with veracity: the interplay between fact and fiction in both narrative and form. What results is an image of China and Confucius that on the one hand builds upon the Jesuit policy of accommodation in presenting the Chinese sage as a philosopher from which Europe may have much to learn, but on the other hand exhibits characters that are critical of this very same Jesuit policy. The novel form allows for the introduction of fictitious characters who, by the very fact that they adopt lines from earlier authoritative works, need not lose any of their truthfulness. Moreover, because the materiality of periodical news publications corresponds to the letter-form of Lettres chinoises, D’Argens links Chinese events to current developments in Europe. He thereby presents issues related to Confucius and the Chinese rites with a sense of topical urgency. Finally, the consideration of Lettres chinoises as a form of travel writing illuminates its aims of establishing verisimilitude and stimulating self-examination. Both of these aims are aided by an ambiguous interplay between fact and fiction. In the end, it is up to the reader to judge not only the work itself but also its presentation of Confucius. In the front matter of the English translation of Lettres chinoises (1741), publishers Browne and Hett speak directly to these readers, explaining their reasons for publication. First, they note the commercial incentive: ‘the good success of that work [Lettres juives] has encouraged us to publish another, written by the same author and in the same taste, which we hardly doubt of being as well relish’d as the former, since the author’s reputation seems already to bespeak its acceptance’.

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Second, this commercial success is equated with quality, as ‘the reception which the publick has given to the Lettres juives […] is a strong argument in their favour, it being very uncommon, if not impossible, for a work to have so universal an approbation without some merit’. Indeed, the readers themselves attest to the work’s quality: ‘to pretend the contrary, would be to arraign the taste of all those readers who have honoured it with their applause’.

6

An American Reception of Clarissa: Erotica and Youthful Reading at the Salem Social Library Sean Moore

O

n the eve of the American War of Independence, an incident in the history of the oceanic exchange of knowledge and ideas in the eighteenth century, in this case between an American customer and a British bookseller, reveals how sentimental literature, erotica and even humour intersected in a single bulk book purchase. A fictive identification of a parallel or even hypocritical notion of enslavement linked the materiality of the purchase and a putative book-borrowing collection to a complex social and political critique. The documentation of this transaction is a book list dated 7 February 1772 found in the papers of Timothy Pickering,1 later the third US Secretary of State between 1795 and 1800, but at the time a lawyer and an officer in the Massachusetts militia. Entitled ‘Catalogue Books Ship’d on Board the Vesuvious. Ichabud Lovelace Commander’, this list immediately raises the eyebrows of a scholar of the eighteenth century. The Commander is given the names Ichabud and Lovelace. Lovelace is the love interest of the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and generally regarded as a libertine villain because he rapes her. Indeed, it is clear that Pickering is being identified accusatorily as Lovelace because of the novel’s rape theme and Pickering’s reading of it. In Kathleen Lubey’s words, ‘Clarissa endlessly talks about rape’ and ‘the novel begins in medias res

1 Pickering Family Papers, MSS 400 Box 9, Folder 1, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Figs 6.1a (above) and 6.1b (opposite). Recto side of Pickering’s Vesuvious booklist, together with verso side of booklist with title. Catalogue Books Shipt on Board the Vesuvious, 7 Feb. 1772, Pickering Family Papers, MSS 400, box 9, folder 1. © Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA.

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with unstoppable rape already under way’.2 Taken together with ‘Ichabud’ being a term that Boston mothers as recently as this author’s own Massachusetts childhood used to describe masturbation (‘Itchy-bod’), the names are clearly both a joke and a libel that linked rapist intent to the consumption of sentimental fictions like Richardson’s. Given some of the erotic titles in the list, this catalogue must be taken as a satirical one with the possible design of blackmail, as the list is not written in Pickering’s own hand. Why Pickering, or one of his family members, preserved this document in his papers is another question entirely, but it is of significance to our understanding of his role in the Revolution, given that it is dated at a moment of increasing tension in Massachusetts between patriots and loyalists. Pickering at this time was not as thoroughly convinced of the necessity of armed insurgence as one might expect a Massachusetts Minuteman to be. He is indeed remembered as a villain who hesitated in April 1775 at the battles of Lexington and Concord, delaying his unit’s march to the scene and allowing the retreating British to escape back to Boston. If we take the list to be, in part, an attempt at blackmailing an important military officer, it may at the very least be taken as a cautionary tale about importing enemy goods at a time when that enemy could inspect the contents of a book shipment at a colonial customs house or aboard ship. Given that the document is dated at the height of the Non-Importation Movement in the colonies – the covenants to boycott British imports – this threat was real, and loyalist booksellers like John Mein of Boston were quick to use customs records to point to the hypocrisy of patriots like John Hancock for importing goods even though they had signed an agreement to not do so. The 1772 book catalogue, together with Pickering’s shareholding membership in the Salem Social Library, accordingly, may help explain what has been identified as the problem of ‘the broader cultural significance of the book import boom’ of the years immediately preceding the Revolution.3 Even during ‘a time of increasing colonial tension’, American consumers like Pickering were satisfying their yen for British luxury goods like books. At the same time, slavery was funding this American participation in the consumer revolution and moves to ban it like Lord Mansfield’s 1772 Somerset decision that no one could be a slave on British soil may have been the

2 Kathleen Lubey, ‘Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29.2 (Winter 2016–17): 151–78. 3 James Raven, ‘The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century’, in Hugh Amory and David Hall (eds), A History of the Book in America, Volume I: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 196.

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Fig. 6.2. Contract for the sale of captured African-British troops. Col. Pickering account current with Marshall of the Admiralty, 10 Dec. 1779, Pickering Family Papers, MSS 400, Box 9, Folder 1. © Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA.

central threat to that participation that motivated the colonists to rebel.4 Pickering, although identified as an opponent of slavery later in his career, was fully engaged in the Atlantic slavery economy earlier in his life; indeed, another document in his files shows him profiting from the sale of captured Black British soldiers during the War of Independence.5 The Salem Social Library, a proprietary subscription library founded in 1760 in which Pickering was a shareholding member, was itself a slavery-funded reading network of businessmen trading in that economy and many of those men became patriots. The catalogue and circulation records of this institution alone establish that colonials were fully immersed in the 4 Sean Moore, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1730–1814 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 5 Pickering Box 9, Folder 1.

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latest sentimental literary titles and other fashionable imported works, and Pickering’s account with the library shows that he had already been reading some of the works on the 1772 book list in the 1760s. The author of the booklist uses the name ‘Lovelace’ as a libertine figure linking the sentimental with the pornographic. Clarissa itself was usually received as pornography; as Lubey writes, ‘Clarissa in this sense can only be read pornographically’,6 but this was so because it was an early example of a ‘rape culture’ art object – one whose current interpretation could indeed conform to the view that rape is now a ubiquitous object of entertainment for some people. The slavery form of human trafficking underwriting book sales can further be understood as linked to another form of human trafficking in adult entertainment, with the first paying for the second. The message that the booklist’s author seems to be sending, given this information, is that patriots’ complaints of being ‘enslaved’ by Britain were hypocritical, given the evidence of slavery-funded pornographic reading.

The Colonial Book Trade as Slavery-financed Importation of Taste The main features of the eighteenth-century book trade in America are that it was dominated by imports from Britain and therefore constituted another branch of what we have come to regard as the ‘provincial book trade’ of England.7 This dependency was particularly obvious of works in literary genres. For colonists, the category of ‘literature’ meant London imprints of both English books and ones translated from Continental languages; there were very few domestic American literary titles of any note until the final quarter of the century. Quantification of the ratio of imports to domestic publications and of just how much of the British market the thirteen original colonies constituted is difficult to establish two and a half centuries later, although James Raven has given us figures that indicate that British printers and booksellers were dependent on the American reader to stay in business. In fact, British exports to America accelerated year on year in the quarter century immediately preceding the Declaration of Independence, despite the pressing need for patriotic propaganda to be issued from colonial presses.8 6 Lubey, ‘Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa’, p. 176. 7 John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8 James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia: University of

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To contend that the patriots and other North American readers were Anglophiles would therefore be an understatement. You are what you read, and, given that almost all of the imported books were in the English language, the colonists absorbed English values. They regarded themselves as a ‘British’ people who were simply asserting their traditional rights against an imperial government that was corrupt, in decline and therefore no longer conventionally ‘English’ in the ways that they had been taught for generations by their largely bigoted clergy and other authority figures. Nonetheless, they were reading these imported titles differently from those in the British Isles for their own purposes (just as the Milanese readers of Chapter 2 reinterpreted imported texts, and in another example later in the century (Chapter 10) distant Caribbean readers reacted in ways unanticipated and unintended by European print exporters). The North American colonial readers constituted themselves as a distinct ‘imagined community’ that placed separate and new meanings on the texts most crucial to their existential needs and cravings. The central needs of the patriots were economic, which in any analysis of eighteenth-century growth and expansion meant the preservation of slavery as the great engine of wealth creation, second only to the debt-fuelled military expenditure binge we associate with the rise of the ‘fiscal-military state’, to which slavery was related as the expression of the human spoils of war.9 As Robin Blackburn and Gerald Horne have contended, British public opinion and movements towards abolition with such events as the Somerset case of 1772, which declared slaves free when they reached English soil, threatened the slavery-based American economy.10 Colonial lawyers and other men and women rightly feared that this legal decision was a precedent that would soon mean abolition in any English-law territory, and began to engage in a ‘conservative counter-revolution’ against this progressive trend. Indeed, during the American Civil War (1861–65) leaders of the Confederate states like Jefferson Davis believed that they were fighting a second American revolution against the Union to defend

South Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 3–18; Raven, ‘Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century.’ pp. 184–5. 9 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. xvii. 10 Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 145, 134; Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), pp. 9, 11.

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their economic livelihood and the right to own and use slaves.11 Slavery provided eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American Whites with the purchasing power to give themselves the trappings of ‘English’ gentlemen and ladies, for which slaveholding consumers of luxury imports like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson provided national role models.12 The significance of this development is the relationship between prevalent ideologies and the material book (and adjuncts such as other printed items and book orders and lists, as well as developing libraries). Not only was slavery supporting the American participation in the British consumer revolution of the period, but the transatlantic book market was dependent on it as well. The problem was one of what Simon Gikandi has so aptly termed ‘the culture of taste’ that created a hierarchy of what were the ‘good’ cultural products of Britain.13 This ranking system for taste, however, produced insecurity about not possessing the consumer goods that made one appear distinctly gentlemanly or ladylike. Such cravings were largely paid for by the largesse of the slave trade and the related enterprises of sugar, rum distilling, tobacco, shipbuilding and the professional paperwork and news businesses necessary to make them profitable. Publishing was one of those paper businesses. If there were anything that British literary genres became for Americans at this time, it was the expression of the market in the sophistication, manners, cultural capital and other facets of the ‘possessive individualism’ of the contemporary ‘economic man’ depicted within the pages of books themselves. In a new age of English philosophy inaugurated by John Locke, ‘to be an individual is to be an owner’, as one exponent of C.B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism has suggested, and slave ownership was paying for tasteful objects.14 Possessive individualism is posited as the mode of subjectivity necessary to induce people to cast off their previous sense of social obligations and become full participants in the new consumer revolution. In order for this to work, selfish appetites needed to be stimulated. The three ‘Ss’ of 11 Emory M. Thomas, ‘Jefferson Davis and the American Revolutionary Tradition’, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908–84) 70.1 (Feb, 1977): 2–9, 7. 12 Kariann Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 88, 86, 83. 13 Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 6. 14 C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, ed. Frank Cunningham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Joseph Carens, ‘Possessive Individualism and Democratic Theory: MacPherson’s Legacy’, in Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C.B. MacPherson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 2.

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the period’s literature – sympathy, sensibility and sentimentality – initially imagined as the modes of a socially responsible society, ironically became the vehicles for such psychological work in that works of their nature mostly were read alone and in social isolation. In relation to this (and in fascinating distinction to the reception of Adam Smith in Lombardy as described in Chapter 3), Michael Genovese has claimed that the work of Smith in both The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) was to constitute the sentimental, obligated self first and then divorce it from his second invention: the self-interested profiteer whose appetites fuel the public wealth: Regardless of how important sympathy and sentiment were to his view of total social living, Smith removed them from his analysis of how strangers profit from each other in markets never imagined as just more extensive versions of that society of friends, family and neighbors for whom one theoretically has habitual sympathy. By splitting affect from economics and naturalizing this divorce as the state of economic man, Smith breaks with commercial writers of the past and with much eighteenth-century literature.15

The possessive individualist self achieved a central importance in the Atlantic economic world just as Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations. It is therefore unsurprising that this book celebrated individualism and was ‘loved’ by the sentimental American reader. To be sure, Locke and others had begun to construct this self in the late seventeenth century, and in the early eighteenth century Bernard Mandeville largely modelled the man of selfish vices as the necessary ingredient for a healthy economy in The Fable of the Bees (1714), but Smith succinctly summarized and revised a century of these developments in his two main works. This connection between sentimentality and consumption in literary works has been explored by Deidre Lynch, Lynn Festa and Lynn Hunt. Lynch argues that the characters in sentimental novels constituted readers on their possessive individualistic behaviour, transforming them into people who thought of themselves in terms of the capital that they could accumulate.16 It has not gone unnoticed that this development was linked with slavery and colonialism; Festa writes that ‘the massive expansion of colonial enterprise fostered a blossoming of sentimentality during the 1760s 15 Michael Genovese, The Problem of Profit: Finance and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), p. 32. 16 Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 81, 112.

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and 1770s’.17 This cult of sentimentality also generated interest in equality and human rights, as Hunt has written, which also laid the groundwork for anti-slavery feeling and public opinion.18 In short, the emotional work that these kinds of works were doing was not only encouraging readers to shop and accumulate like the characters in the books that they were reading, but also forming a nascent awareness of the inequality of the enslaved persons who were making this Atlantic marketplace possible. The ‘Charge Book’ of the Salem Social Library, one of the places where Pickering was reading, provides abundant evidence that works that could be classified as ‘sentimental’ were circulating well. Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Smith’s Moral Sentiments, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, William Smith’s translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime, Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste and other works on aesthetics and the affections were popular with borrowers. The library’s sentimental fiction, including Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, Samuel Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison and Pamela and Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph, reached an even broader Salem readership.19 Tellingly for an author who wrote A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne’s equally sentimental Yorick’s Sermons was borrowed very frequently: twenty-nine times by a diverse array of the library’s membership.20 By a material traffic in ideas, the transatlantic book trade was therefore producing a sentimental yet possessive individualist American self that was nonetheless ‘making war against the land of literature and of books’ of the kind that they were reading to conceive of this self. 21 Slavery, while offensive to many of the new sentimentalists, was nonetheless financing the American acquisition of cultural capital. Its preservation may also have been what led the patriots to rebel. What is significant about the imported books, however, is how they were interpreted in ways ‘that changed according to the mutations of colonialism, migration, exile, commerce, political 17 Lynn Festa. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 68. 18 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), pp. 39– 40; Blackburn, American Crucible, p. 154. 19 All of this borrowing data comes from ‘Charge Book, 1760–1768’, Social Library Records, MSS 56, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. Hereafter this ledger will be cited as ‘Charge Book’ without page number but, rather, with reference to borrower or collective data from many different sheets. 20 ‘Charge Book.’ 21 Kevin Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 173.

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independence and nationalism’.22 Put another way, a book of political theory, literature or another genre had a very different meaning when interpreted by an imagined community seeking economic independence and the political sovereignty necessary to attain it. The transatlantic book trade, in short, was paradoxically providing freedom from its source in much the same way that Plato wrote that the medium of writing ‘is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard and when an attack is made upon this bastard, neither parent nor anyone else is there to defend it’.23 In other words, writing was interpreted differently in the child colonies than in the mother country. As explored below, putting new meanings on texts became part of the patriot rebellion against the ‘tyrannical parent’ of Britain.

Clarissa, Rape Culture and Material Conditions The American reception of Clarissa and of Richardson’s novels in general has received sustained attention over the past several decades – and an attention that requires careful consideration of the material issues of reprinting and of importation and of the different preferences for the size and format of the work. The awkward tendency of some book historians to measure a British book’s popularity in the colonial and early Republic period by its American reprints has tended to miss the point that imports dominated the trade, a fact not lost on scholars like Jay Fliegelman and Leonard Tennenhouse. Most Europeans, according to Tennenhouse, preferred the abridged Clarissa from the moment of its publication, owing to the full novel’s length and consequent high price, and American printers soon began to reprint those abridgements and others of their own design.24 Fliegelman mentions that there were 1772 and 1786 American abridgements that have been lost to history, though reprints beginning with a 1791 Philadelphia one published well after the war helped to revive interest in the novel.25 Indeed, there was a ‘post-Revolutionary boom’ in Richardson’s works and ‘American printers found it profitable to produce 22 Leslie Howsam and James Raven, ‘Introduction’, in Howsam and Raven (eds), Books Between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, 1620–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 3. 23 Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1 (Charmides, Lysis, Laches, Protagoras, Euthydemus, Cratylus, Phaedrus, Ion, Symposium), trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), p. 276. 24 Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘The Americanization of Clarissa’, Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 11.1 (Spring 1998): 177–96 (p. 184). 25 Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: the American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 86–7.

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American editions of Richardson’s novels in unprecedented numbers for an American readership’ in the 1790s.26 All the same, ‘readers under British rule preferred the [unabridged] English Richardson over an abridgement’, a fact reflective of the dominance of English imports over colonial reprints both prior to and after the War of Independence, and of Pickering’s acquisition and reading of the novel itself.27 Moreover, the way that Americans received these editions and were reading Clarissa’s decisions as a character is crucial to understanding the novel’s importance as a text advocating revolution. Both Fliegelman and Gordon Wood have spoken of the ‘parental tyranny’ about whom she could marry as the reason for her rebellion against her father and how this rebellion was figured by patriots as ‘America’s flight from it parental tyrant, England’.28 A 1779 Philadelphia propaganda piece entitled ‘A Vision of the Paradise of Female Patriotism’ features a woman named Clarissa who has a vision of herself as serving America. Fliegelman explains that, ‘For Clarissa was to the eighteenth century what The Maid of Orleans had been to the fifteenth: a martyred heroine who had led a revolutionary cause. “The people,” declared John Adams, a generation after the war, ‘are Clarissa.”’29 The fictional character Clarissa, in short, becomes the metaphorical figure for the ‘virginal’ fledgling United States. To understand this American obsessiveness over this book, it is important to note how it participated in the culture of sentimentality absorbed through the material imports on North American shores and how it helped to motivate young patriots. Indeed, as we approach understanding the colonial reading of Clarissa, it is important to note the popularization of sentimental fiction both in Britain and in the colonies in the 1760s and 1770s – a popularization some considered ripe for satire. Henry Mackenzie, for example, in The Man of Feeling (1771), places the material nature of textuality at the centre of a story about emotions by having a ‘discovered’ fragmentary manuscript as its basis. He essentially critiques manuscript and book collecting as a form of fetishisation of the text that is dominating the book market in sentimental wares. MacKenzie lampoons the hero of the sentimental novel as a naive narcissist who is paying for emotional moments and events – sometimes in book or other written form – that he takes as morally instructive. By making Harley, this novel’s hero, appear ridiculous, the author is therefore sending up the best philosophical and 26 Tennenhouse, ‘The Americanization of Clarissa’, p. 184. 27 Tennenhouse, ‘The Americanization of Clarissa’, p. 186. 28 Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 148; Fliegelman Prodigals and Pilgrims, p. 83. 29 Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, p. 89.

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literary traditions that had been linking morality to affection, beauty and taste and which had arisen as forms regulating the burgeoning book market of the period. In doing so, as Barbara Benedict has observed, Mackenzie ensures that Harley, as a collector of texts and scenes through which he experiences emotions from ‘teary nostalgia to lust and compassion’, attracts contemporary readers shopping for more books of virtualized emotion.30 Harley experiences emotional scenes of real and sometimes performed suffering in his travels. He usually pays the person experiencing those emotions in part from charity, but also in part for sharing emotions with a sentimentalist like himself. Harley’s tendency to do this is taken to extremes in chapters 26 through 28 in his encounter with the prostitute Miss Atkins, to whom he gives money after she shares her account of how she became a fallen woman. In such stories, Mackenzie ironizes the book market and the ways in which texts move about and are read by having her explain that, ‘My mother’s books were left behind at the different quarters we removed to and my reading was principally confined to plays, novels and those poetical descriptions of the beauty of virtue and honour, which the circulating libraries easily afforded.’31 Harley is shown to be a man aroused by politeness and virtue in many of his episodes, as they are tropes of sentimental taste and fiction, so Miss Atkins, in these lines, has just set the table and whet his appetite for the story of her ruin. He does not pay her for actual sex, but for what must have been taken as the titillating, virtualized narrative of her seduction and destruction by her suitor. It is not for nothing, then, that Mackenzie begins the story with a discussion of such young men and writes the line, ‘“Let them rub it off by travel.”’32 Within this market network, this patriotic appropriation of Clarissa becomes all the more disturbing, accordingly, when we begin to see her rape by Lovelace as what many American men found entertaining about Richardson’s novel. Indeed, authors who satirized Richardson’s works focused on how they also had sexual appeal. Henry Fielding’s Shamela, and other parodies of Pamela, hinted that its readers’ ‘overwhelming obsession, however, is with pornography’.33 Richardson’s first novel had dual 30 Barbara Benedict, ‘The Sentimental Virtuoso: Collecting Feeling in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 23.3 (Spring 2016): 473–99 (p. 486). 31 Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London: Cassell and Co., 1886), pp. 82–3. 32 Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, pp. 15–16. 33 Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 33.

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appeal as ‘both didacticism and erotica’, and in some send-ups like Pamela Censured, the novel ‘becomes not moral denunciation but pornography disguised as denunciation – or, more dizzingly, pornography disguised as the moralizing exposure of pornography in moral disguise’.34 Sentimental fictions by the likes of Richardson, therefore, were easily exposed as sexually arousing texts. The satirical view of sentimental literature and the people buying it as possessive individualists who have tastes verging on the pornographic may not always have been accurate, but erotic works of the period certainly made use of similar formal strategies for awakening readers’ emotions. As Darren Wagner has observed in writing about John Cleland’s popular erotic novel Fanny Hill (1748), ‘the culture of sensibility revolved around social expressions and sexual interactions that hinged upon individuals’ mental and physical sensitivity, awareness, impressions and responses.’35 Sentimental books, in other words, were intrinsically tied to sexuality – a tie that Mackenzie clearly exploits to make his joke about readers like Harley. As Wagner writes, ‘erotic texts such as Cleland’s, intentionally exposed the sexual and the bodily as a common motivation for characters of sensibility’.36 Mackenzie was clearly not alone in making such observations, and indeed, more than two decades before his novel was published, it was clear that Fanny Hill was already a response to Pamela in its own decade. Keymer and Sabor have shown that the sales of Fanny Hill ‘have over the centuries almost certainly exceeded those of Pamela itself ’,37 and they write that ‘there are striking parallels between the two novels and Cleland is far from hostile to Richardson. Cleland clearly had an eye on Shamela in writing his work, but his heroine, Fanny Hill, is in many ways the antithesis of Fielding’s and her views on love and fidelity are closer to those of the heroine of Pamela.’38 Put another way, money and marriage are plot devices and symbols in both works and sexuality, albeit in different ways, is the vehicle for them. Richardson, in short, set the tone for the burgeoning market in erotica and pornography that accompanied sentimentality’s rise in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Cleland and Mackenzie’s self-conscious satire of the literary book market of the quarter-century before the Revolution has further transatlantic 34 Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, p. 34. 35 Darren N. Wagner, ‘Body, Mind and Spirits: the Physiology of Sexuality in the Culture of Sensibility’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.3 (Sept. 2016): 335–58 (p. 335). 36 Wagner, ‘Body, Mind and Spirits’, p. 348. 37 Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, p. 104. 38 Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, p. 104.

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significance once we understand that Pickering, too, was being made as much of a parodic figure as Harley through the Vesuvious book list at the centre of this chapter. ‘Commander Lovelace’ of the Vesuvious is directly implicated in this parody, as Richardson’s Clarissa was also known to be a book dealing in at least semi-pornographic wares. Indeed, the author of the fake Vesuvious booklist had clearly read Pamela Censured as a blatant, though rather engaging, work of pornography, ‘by Capt. Samuel Cock; Sometime Commander to the Good Ship the Charming Sally’. A bogus subscription-list plays mercilessly on Slocock’s name, which is listed alongside ‘Aldernman Slycock’, ‘Mr. Nocock’, ‘The Hon. Mrs. Laycock’ and ‘Madam Handcock’.39 One could see how the name of the patriot ‘John Hancock’ of Boston would instantly conjure this genre in the minds of his critics, with Pamela having lit the fire for both legitimate sentimental fiction and its erotic parody.40 In Clarissa, however, as Edward Copeland argued almost fifty years ago, ‘the pornographic landscape of Fanny Hill is not quite present, but the assumption is the same, that “passion,” once it is unleashed, is uncontrollable and irresistible. Both Lovelace and Clarissa subscribe to this belief.’41 In both novels, in Copeland’s view, these erotic emotions are mediated and not real and therefore appealing to the Harleys (or Pickerings) of the world. Lubey, however, has critiqued the critical consensus beginning with Copeland and running through the commentaries of William Warner, Terry Eagleton, Terry Castle and Judith Wilt about the pornographic status of the novel by identifying it with rape. She insists that although Richardson’s descriptions of sexual scenes ‘narratively obscure penetration’ and accordingly might not technically be ones of rape, these influential accounts ‘overlook the novel’s recursive summoning of sexual detail’ through Clarissa’s memories.42 It is an interpretation surely shared by whoever composed the fake Vesuvious book list in Pickering’s possession.43

39 Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, p. 24. 40 Incidentally, the Charming Sally was also the name of a Massachusetts slave ship, of another ship that was an American privateer during the War of Independence, and perhaps of other vessels that punned on the pornographic book title. https://www. archives.gov/education/lessons/slave-trade.html; https://www.southcoasttoday. com/special/20190105/southcoast-history-hop-aboard-charming-sally-revolutionary-war-sloop. 41 Edward W. Copeland, ‘Clarissa and Fanny Hill: Sisters in Distress’, Studies in the Novel 4.3 (Fall 1972): 343–52 (p. 347). 42 Lubey, ‘Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa’, p. 159. 43 Copeland, ‘Clarissa and Fanny Hill’, p. 350.

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Pickering’s Biography and Reading Pickering’s Vesuvious catalogue shows just how much sentimental, and even erotic, literature had penetrated into an old Puritan town like Salem. The list contains not only sentimental and picaresque titles like Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality, Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom and Roderick Random, Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler and Clarissa itself. It also contained more obscure romance novels known only by the titles Adventures or Memories of a Man of Pleasure, Charles Careless Esq. His Amours, Cassandra a Romance, Memoirs of a Coquette, History of the Amours of Miss Kitty, Jilt or Female Fortune Hunters, Adventures of a Rake of Taste and Venus Unmasked. This move from sentimentality to erotic work is in the spirit of spectacle as Ramesh Mallipeddi describes it, transforming sentimentality from resistance to commodification in the post-Seven Years’ War Atlantic marketplace into a full commodification of the body.44 It is apparent that on the eve of the Revolution some readers – in this case a Salem man who was to become a colonel in the Continental Army and future US diplomat – were not resisting the British consumer society that their non-importation agreements, detailed below, putatively scorned.45 Explaining Pickering’s possible interest in the works mentioned above requires some assessment of his character. Pickering was born the second of two sons in Salem in 1745. His father was a large farmer and righteous deacon of Salem’s Third Congregational Church. Pickering was sent to study at Harvard at the age of fourteen, graduating in 1763. He then worked for Salem’s town clerk John Higginson, a shareholder in the new Salem Social Library, and studied law with William Pyncheon, also a member of the library, both of whom probably helped the young Pickering to become a library shareholder in 1765. He was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1768 and was active as an officer in the Essex County Militia as early as 1766. His political sympathies in the years leading up to the Revolution were initially loyalist, joining a faction opposed to boycotting resolutions, but as a young man he then became an opportunist who saw in patriotism a chance to advance his career. He was ‘the archetypal young man on the

44 Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p. 36. 45 Moore, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries. p. 69; Pickering, Box 9, Folder 1.

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make of the revolutionary generation’.46 The Boston Port Bill and Boston Tea Party pushed him into opposing the leaders of the British Parliament and he was actually arrested on the orders of General Gage for being a member of Salem’s Committee of Correspondence. He was promoted to colonel of the Essex Militia at a crucial time in 1775, when the British Colonel Leslie had been ordered to land and march to Salem to seize suspected patriot artillery. ‘The Affair at the North Bridge’, as it has been called, might have been the start of the War of Independence, had Pickering immediately summoned men to attack Leslie and his soldiers, but he held back and eventually negotiated a deal with Leslie that he would desist in his search for weapons and march back to Boston. One of the reasons that Pickering has sometimes been regarded as a ‘villain’ in American history is that he was reluctant to march to the battles of Lexington and Concord, arguing with other militia officers who were certain that the British would withdraw. This procrastination resulted in Pickering and his men arriving late to a battle which might have fully defeated the British unit rather than allowing it to escape back to Boston.47 Pickering went on to fight in the War of Independence and serve in a variety of prominent roles, including Adjutant General, member of the Board of War and Quartermaster General of the Continental army. His career as a diplomat began in 1790, when George Washington appointed him to lead a delegation in negotiation with the Seneca Native American tribe, and then Washington appointed him Postmaster General in 1791, a role in which he continued these negotiations. In 1795, Washington appointed him Secretary of War and then Secretary of State, a role he held under both Washington’s and John Adams’s presidencies until 1800. Establishing Pickering’s reading habits up until this 1772 list was created can be done by reference to the circulation records of the Salem Social Library, which show him beginning to read there on 22 July 1765 and continuing until the extant records end in spring 1768. His record is somewhat representative of what the other shareholders were reading, a reading focused on literature, law and political thought and travels. Because he was a lawyer and future diplomat, it is not surprising that the first book that Pickering borrowed was an expensive quarto edition of Vattel’s Law of Nations. Indeed in these years he also borrowed Burlemaqui’s Principles of Natural Law, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and a French history of England by Paul de Rapin (the subject of the next chapter), texts all contributing to 46 Gerard Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), p. vii. 47 Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic, pp. 3–33.

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the ideological origins of the American Revolution. In travels, he borrowed Ultoa’s Voyages, a book called A Collection of Voyages, and The Adventurer, and he displayed an interest in other cultures by borrowing English editions of the Qur’an and the Life of Mahomet. By far the most frequent category of book he borrowed was literature, however. He took out Hudibras, multiple volumes of the works of Pope, Swift, Shakespeare and Addison, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, Farquhar’s Plays and Dryden’s poems. Notably, he was also reading Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. By mapping what might be called ‘sequential reading’, where each volume of a longer work like a novel is recorded as taken out sequentially over several borrowing periods, we can be more certain that a book was actually read.48 Pickering so read Grandison over three months from 31 August 1767 to 7 December 1767.49 There are many booklists in the Phillips Library’s Pickering papers, but most of them seem to detail estate inventories, sales and acquisitions of other Salem men interested in the most fashionable British titles like Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. The main conclusion of this study of works circulating in Salem, and lent to Pickering in particular, is that they are reflective of the trend towards sentimental and pornographic reading in North America in the quarter century leading up to the Revolution. Our understanding of how these titles worked on the consciences of British readers is therefore relevant to our understanding of how they were interpreted in both similar and divergent ways in the colonies. Pickering himself would not have been proud of it being known that he read erotic works, so would not have made a list of them. The fake Vesuvious cargo manifest was clearly designed by a man or woman with the intention of shaming the future US Secretary of State.

Erotic Works on Pickering’s Vesuvious Booklist The book titles on the Vesuvious list were new and notably current ones in the 1760s and 1770s, as well as ones highly in demand. As seen with Fanny Hill, works like these probably outsold more legitimate sentimental fictions by Richardson and others on both British and American shores. None of the scandalous titles appears in the catalogues or circulation records of the Salem Social Library or any other colonial social library in this period, so they clearly were only available discreetly. This possible evidence of their private possession by Pickering might also suggest that British officials and 48 Moore, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries. pp. 28–9. 49 ‘Charge Book’.

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their loyalist allies were keeping a close eye on the consumer habits and behaviour of the patriot leadership as it emerged just before the war. In putting down a rebellion, psychological warfare in the form of shaming and the threat of actual prosecution for pornography may have been used to sway Pickering, even if the evidence suggests that his possession of erotic novels did not slow down his career. Two titles seem representative of the scandalous tales. The Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure is Henri-François de La Solle’s 1751 book with the subtitle of ‘The Adventures of Versorand’.50 Notably, the edition found in the database is a small duodecimo, the preferred format of such disposable books. The narrator announces himself on the first page as Versorand, who tells us ‘I was at first a Rake and at last turned Philosopher’.51 In documenting the first of many loves, the narrator introduces characters – a man named Danery and woman named Mademoiselle Deville – and speaks in tropes of amatory fiction: There are moments favourable for being well received of Ladies. A pretty woman does not shut herself up with a lover, either to play, or to quarrel and this is so true, that when the door opens, there still is visible in her countenance an air of voluptuous liberty, capable of rendering the most timorous lover bold and daring. Happy is the man who can lay hold of those precious minutes and happier he who is permitted to take the advantage of them.52

There is competition for the Mademoiselle’s affections and she forgets Danery and agrees to become Mistress of a Count who has been pursuing her because she is broke in Paris; as the narrator tells us, ‘Handsome women know the value of their beauty, but not at all of money.’53 The book continues as a prostitute’s tale, one of the styles of the genre of erotica that was popularized in Fanny Hill and contains romantic episodes involving other characters. The Rake of Taste is a 1760 anonymous book with the subtitle of ‘The Elegant Debauchee, a True Story’.54 This story begins with a cast of characters 50 James Raven, British Fiction 1750–1770: A Chronological Check-list of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), p. 166. 51 Henri-Francois de la Solle, The Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, Or the Adventurers of Versorand, 5th edn (London: Osborne, 1751), p. 1. 52 De la Solle, Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, p. 21. 53 De la Solle, Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, p. 24. 54 See Raven, British Fiction 1750–1770, p. 166 (no. 549), where full publication and review details are given.

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who are in a coach on their way from London to Bath. The first is a recent widow named Honoria, whose sexual morality is described as follows: Fairly then rid of a husband, whom she had long looked upon as the great obstacle to the indulgence of her passions, in that unbounded way which had always appeared to her as the great and true enjoyment of life. Unincumber’d, I say, with that worst of all incumbrances, a husband, she had nobly resolved, late in life as it was (for she was about six and forty) to throw off all manner of restraint and to run souse into all of those pleasures of which she had not yet lost the relish.55

Any kind of religious morality is here discarded in favour of the morality of sentiment – one of politeness and virtue in the form of the unbounded pursuit of one’s emotions. Honoria, like Clarissa, has cast off her husband as she would an oppressive parent. If to become a mature individual in eighteenth-century terms was ‘to adjust one’s expectations and desires to the possible … to be freed from the ultimate slavery of excessive desire and unrealistic dreams’, as Fliegelman has written, then Honoria’s arousal is a symptom of her childhood.56 If this erotic tale has a moral, it is that pornography can be enslaving, though perhaps a necessary genre to experience in order to become a wiser person of knowledge. Miss Polly Witts, another passenger in the Rake of Taste’s coach, is said to have been raised in a seaport city ‘famous for initiating young ladies in the true art of love’.57 With them is ‘fat Obadiah Broadbrim, a jolly quaker of forty-five years, who, having professed a religion (if it can be called one), for the meer purposes of worldly gain (a character by no means uncommon), had fully answer’d his original purposes and was now retiring, with about forty thousand pounds in his pocket, to an estate he had purchased in Wiltshire.’58 Given this genre’s tendency towards the prostitute’s tale, it is not hard to see why this rich, immoral Quaker is in the carriage. The last character in the coach is the ‘Rake of Taste’ himself, the narrator, who is enraptured by the possibility of possessing the women. These characters proceed to speak in a bawdy manner about Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and how the author should have used the proper word to describe male anatomy rather than the ‘nose’. The main point of the titles in the Vesuvious list seems to be suggestive and associative rather than substantive. For example, whoever wrote the 55 56 57 58

The Rake of Taste, Or, the Elegant Debauchee, a True Story (London: Wicks, 1760), 3. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, p. 30. Rake of Taste, pp. 3–4. Rake of Taste, p. 5.

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list changed the name of ‘Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure’ to ‘Adventures, or Memories, of a Man of Pleasure’ so that it would be listed second on the Vesuvious’s alphabetical list of books. It seems that because Richardson’s novel is associated with Clarissa being kept in a brothel and raped by Lovelace, the writer of this fake catalogue of shipped books is attempting to link the prostitution theme of much erotica with Pickering, essentially calling him a rapist by being interested in this content. The Vesuvious list writer seems to fall into what might be described as the ‘rape culture’ so prevalent in the eighteenth century,59 and helps to explain why the rakish rapist Lovelace, the fictional character Pickering is said to have become by reading Clarissa, was being linked to pornography.

Conclusion Pickering, as a patriot leader, might, of course, have been targeted by an enemy of his and of the Revolution; his booklist is clearly satirical, not written in his own hand, meant to be embarrassing and is dated in 1772 just as tensions were rising. As written by someone else with an agenda, the titles on the list were both illegal and shaming: another book towards the end of the fake Vesuvious booklist is entitled ‘Scotch Portmantle Open’d at York’. The intention is towards shaming and even prosecution. The title might indicate that the fake Vesuvious booklist itself may be taken as the discovery of the contents of something shipped to Pickering in a ‘portmantle’, trunk or other piece of luggage and those contents – the books on the list – were potentially embarrassing for a man of his station. In relation to the Revolution, it can be argued that this shaming suggested that the parent (Britain) was cracking down on the child (the American patriots) for being in an earlier stage of human, and possibly national, development than the masters and fathers in the home country. If Clarissa represents the British North American colonies, as the anti-democratic John Adams had indicated, then the various Lovelaces – colonial patriots – were advocates of democracy who had stolen her: ‘Having placed her in a drugged stupor [Lovelace] rapes her and deprives her of that virginity her father had sought to exchange for a fortune.’60 Indeed, Lubey argues that this is how the novel was read: ‘understood by eighteenth-century readers to refer to forced penetration as well as to abduction, the term [‘rape’] would have been readily associated with Lovelace’s unlawful theft of Clarissa.’61 59 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 60 Fleigelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, p. 85. 61 Lubey, ‘Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa’, p. 167.

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The patriots, in being associated with Lovelace, were taken by some to be stealing the father’s future money by taking control over his American plantation, symbolized by his daughter. Shaming through insinuations about a military officer’s reading of pornography, in short, may have been the parents’ effort to circumvent that outcome. As the most notable British novel that made its way to America’s northern shores in its period, Clarissa, in full and in abridgement, holds a special place in our understanding of how the transatlantic book market in the literature of sensibility was translated by American readers for their own experiences and purposes. Richardson’s position in Pickering’s reading both at the Salem Social Library and on the fake Vesuvious booklist indicates that his works were mostly read by an elite and well-educated audience like the lawyer he was and the slaveholders his fellow library shareholders were. There were other works of sentimentality available to these men, but Clarissa is central to this reading of the American reception of these works for the simple fact that it was listed on the fake Vesuvious list and because the title of that list features the name of the leading male character. The context of the list demands what its contents do: an understanding of how it was seen, even in its own time, as work that was tantamount to pornography. Richardson’s first novel, Pamela, had already been regarded as such by authors who parodied it and its attempted rape scenes and Clarissa would also draw scrutiny for similar reasons. Scholarship that integrates the historical, physical circumstances of literary arrivals and collection with close textual scrutiny establishes how these novels were interpreted in their own time and helps us understand why the author of the fake list of books imported into Salem would find an American purchasing Clarissa alongside other explicitly pornographic titles both scandalous and amusing. Shipped books in a transatlantic traffic servicing libraries and collectors as well as individual readers represented a material context – of importation but also of the opportunistic critiquing and satirizing of it – that illuminates variations in reading and the reception of ideas between one side of the Atlantic and the other.

PA RT T WO

Images and News

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Travelling Images: Exchanging, Adapting and Appropriating Illustrations for a History of England Isabelle Baudino

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s recorded in the previous chapter, one of the books most borrowed by Timothy Pickering and his fellow members of the Salem Social Library on the eve of the American Revolution (and a text read for its support to the Patriot cause) was a French history of England by Paul de Rapin. That a French writer should become the most influential historian in England and its colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century is not the least remarkable achievement of Paul de Rapin de Thoyras (1661–1725). Born into a Huguenot family, Rapin began his life far from the English Channel, in the viscounty of Albi in southern France, but was forced to leave his native country after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes and the attendant death of his father, in 1685. After a brief stay in England, he travelled to the Netherlands, where he became a volunteer soldier in the army of William of Orange, thus returning to England in November 1688 with the impressive flotilla that landed at Torbay. Following a short but active military career, Rapin was offered the position of tutor to the son of Hans Willem Bentinck, Baron Bentinck of Diepenheim and Schoonheten. Rapin then continued to work for Bentinck, who was one of William III’s closest advisors and, from 1689, Earl of Portland. It was, however, when his employment with the Portland family ended in 1704 that Rapin turned to the writing of history, dedicating the following twenty years of his life first to his Dissertation sur les whigs et les tories and then to a ten-volume

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Histoire d’Angleterre, both published in The Hague (La Haye), in 1717 and 1724–25, respectively.1 Rapin’s Histoire aroused immediate interest in England. First translated by the Reverend Nicholas Tindal (1687–1774), the History of England was published in monthly parts by the leading London bookseller, James Knapton, assisted by his eldest son, John. Filling a gap in a historiographical landscape that had been shaped by religious and political debates, Rapin’s narrative offered both the novelty and the variety sought by readers. Tindal’s History of England was such a success that competing translations soon emerged on the London book market, prompting the enterprising Knaptons to issue new editions.2 Between 1731 and 1751 alone, some 400 advertisements (many being the same advert published in different newspapers or repeated over a period of several days) appeared in the London press to tout the merits – and sometimes disparage the worth – of the many serialised numbers in which the three English translations of Rapin’s Histoire were sold. Those numerous adverts invariably promoted the illustrations that were made to ornament those publications. For, in addition to becoming the most influential historical textual source of the first half of the eighteenth century, Rapin’s narrative also triggered an illustrative frenzy. Indeed, Rapin’s History of England stimulated a formidable array of images found in all editions that contained, in varying proportions, maps, genealogical tables, historical scenes, heads and historiated headpieces and tailpieces (that is ornaments at the beginning and end of a book’s chapter or 1 I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, and the kind expertise of its staff during a Visiting Fellowship in the summer of 2017, enabling me to access and study the archival material analysed in this chapter. 2 See The History of England. Written in French by Mr de Rapin Thoyas. Done into English by Tindal M.A. Vicar of Great Waltham in Essex, 15 vols. (London: James and John Knapton, 1725–31), followed by a 2nd edn sold in weekly numbers between 1732 and 1733 by James, John and Paul Knapton, a 3rd edn, an abridgement and a summary published by brothers John and Paul Knapton in 1743–51, 1747 and 1751. Tindal’s first English translation was followed by an abridged version written by John Lockman: [John Lockman], A New History of England, in English and French, by Question and Answer. Extracted from the most celebrated English historians; particularly M. de Rapin Thoyras (London: Prevost and Motte, 1729); it was a textbook, primarily intended for children, that was illustrated by Samuel Wale (1714–86) in 1747 and was continually reissued until the mid-1790s. Two contending translations followed, a three-volume publication issued by James Mechell: The History of England. Written originally in French by M. Rapin de Thoyras, 3 vols. (London: Mechell 1732–37), with vol. 1 translated by John Kelly, vol. 2 by Joseph Morgan and vol. 3 by Thomas Lediard, and a two-volume one put together by Ebenezer Rider: The History of England. Written in French by Mr. Rapin de Thoyras. Translated into English with additional notes, by J. Templeman, Esq. 2 vols. (London: Rider, 1734).

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division, decorated with scenes from history). Although it has not received much scholarly attention, the impact of Rapin’s History on the historical imagination was noticed in the eighteenth century and is substantiated in a manuscript catalogue written by Stephen Wren, the grandson of Sir Christopher Wren. In his 960-page compilation, dated from 1759, Stephen Wren listed hundreds of images that were, according to him, inspired by Rapin de Thoyras.3 Compiled from books in his possession, Wren’s catalogue actually includes all plates made for the different editions of Rapin, as well as many other engravings which he relates to specific pages in Rapin’s text, thus pointing to his own practice of extra-illustration.4 Wren’s enumeration also throws light upon the ekphrastic potential of Rapin’s History, an anecdote-filled narrative punctuated by sentimental and dramatic stories that captivated the British reading public for decades and prompted readers to visualise vivid descriptions. As evidenced by Wren’s sizeable catalogue, an analysis of all the subjects that were drawn by British artists from Rapin’s History and of the circulation of all the illustrations that could be related to it, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, the focus of this study is the illustrations that were made specifically to complement the English translations of Rapin published by the Knaptons and James Mechell. The main interest here is with portraits: Rapin’s ornaments primarily consisted of ‘heads’ – as portraits of famous people were called – of English kings and queens. Portraits of past rulers had become an antiquarian vogue in England since the sixteenth century and were collected in catalogues of coins and medals, compiled in engraved anthologies and displayed on the walls of long galleries.5 Since the seventeenth century, collections of engraved portraits had poured from the London presses, so much so that the taste for heads turned into a craze in Georgian Britain.6 3 This manuscript can be consulted at the Yale Center for British Art (Reference Library and Archives) in New Haven (CT), see Stephen Wren, Catalogue of the Prints in Mr Rapin’s History of England and Mr Tindal’s Continuation with the Ornaments &c. Explained (1759). 4 On this topic, see Lucy Peltz, Facing the Text. Extra-illustration, Print Culture and Society in Britain, 1769–1840 (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2017). 5 On the wider context for the growing interest in portraits of illustrious men in Europe, see Francis Haskell, History and its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 26–79. 6 In his short essay ‘Of Collectors of English Portrait Prints’, Horace Walpole derided the ‘rage for English heads’ and the ‘most prodigious’ collections amassed at great expense by his contemporaries. See Horace Walpole’s Book of Materials at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, CT, LWL 49 2615 II, p. 2. This fashionable pursuit has been the subject of an exhibition curated by Cynthia Roman at the

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This chapter’s exploration of how the heads illustrating Rapin’s History of England resulted from the designs and inventions of both British and foreign artists and from the circulation and transmission of styles and prototypes crossing seas, frontiers and centuries arises therefore from the vast escalation in the production and circulation of engraved illustration in books, periodicals and stand-alone prints from the mid-seventeenth century. Lavish and intricate engravings for books and periodicals were famously created in many of the great printing houses and centres of mainland Europe, including by Jacques de Sève (fl. 1742–88) in Paris, the principal artist for illustrations commissioned by the comte de Buffon for his thirty-six volume Histoire naturelle (1749–88, as described in Chapter 3) and engraved by Louis Le Grand. Similarly influential and greatly copied engraved plates proved integral to Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts) published between 1762 and 1772. In the same way that the illustrations to Pontoppidan’s Norges naturlige Historie were re-engraved and thereby altered between editions and countries, the many later editions and abridgements of the Histoire naturelle and the Encyclopédie gained different qualities and emphases (and misinterpretations) in the hands of generations of later engravers and publishers. The reputation of English craftsmanship soared with the production of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia in 1665, the first major publication of the Royal Society, with commanding, finely detailed illustrations of some of the specimens Hooke viewed under the microscopes he designed,7 and also with extraordinary illustrations offered in such works as the medical treatises of Thomas Willis (1621–75).8 In different ways, all were celebrated graphics for works of science and medicine (from agriculture and astronomy to volcanology and zoology), but as maps, charts, diagrams and intricate representations they also continued to adorn, and actively instruct in, a plethora of learned journals, review periodicals and encyclopaedias as well as volumes of practical ‘how-to’ books, and the natural histories of a Petiver or a Pontoppidan. By the time of Rapin’s death no publication, if sufficient private or market-sourced financing were available, could escape Lewis Walpole Library, entitled ‘Illustrious Heads: Portrait Prints as History’ (22 Nov. 2010–7 Sept. 2011). 7 Reproduced with full-size plates, an index, and the full machine-readable text in the Royal Society project ‘Micrographia Online’, https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/07/ micrographia-online/. 8 See Alastair Compston, ‘All Manner of Inegnuity and Industry’: A Bio-Bibliography of Dr Thomas Willia 1621–1675 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

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the possibility of engraved illustration, while the cross-over of interest and expertise between different subjects for engraving was palpable.9 By the mid-eighteenth century, heads and other images became a commercial necessity in the book trade (a later, significant edition of the Bibliothèque orientale, discussed below, for example, was given new and commercial validation by an engraved supposed portrait of its long-dead author10). Engraved images in title pages and advertisements flaunted the quality and appeal of illustrations ‘curiously engraved on copper-plates’ and underline the crucial part played by these ornaments, especially in the marketing of history books.11 Hence, while the original French edition of Rapin’s Histoire d’Angleterre was ornamented by François Morellon de La Cave (1696–?1766) with an allegorical frontispiece, twenty-two small historiated headpieces and the two heads of William the Conqueror and Edward III, the English editions were lavishly illustrated with three different complete sets of heads. For their first translation of Rapin, published in monthly numbers between 1725 and 1731, the Knaptons employed none other than George Vertue (1684–1756), the official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries, to design and engrave heads for them. When, in turn, James Mechell issued his translation of Rapin in 1732, he soon realised that heads were a requirement if he wanted to stand up to the Knaptons.12 So, in addition to opting for a weekly publication, he employed five engravers to make illustrations: Giles King (active c.1732–40), Nathaniel or Richard Parr, Henry Roberts (c.1710–90), Robert Sheppard (active c.1712–40) and James Smith. In order to retain their position, the Knaptons immediately 9 One discussion of the preparations by Hooke for Micrographia suggests that among the studies he may have undertaken were the ‘heads’ of various available frontispieces, including that of Charles II, Meghan C. Doherty, ‘Discovering the “True Form”: Hooke’s Micrographia and the Visual Vocabulary of Engraved Portraits’, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science (2012) version accessed Oct. 2021 at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0031. 10 Chapter 11, pp. 250–1. 11 On the use of pictures for commercial purposes, see James Raven, The Business of Books (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 250–3. On the marketing of history, see D[aniel]. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 277–83. On English prints over the period, and on ‘curiosity’ being one of the buzzwords of the printing trade (pp. 129–30), see Timothy Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). 12 Whereas Mechell had started publishing the first numbers of his History of England translated by John Kelly in June 1732, he informed the public of his intention to publish illustrative plates for it three months later, in Sept. 1732, see his advert in Country Journal or The Craftsman, issue 323, 9 Sept. 1732.

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launched a new weekly publication of their translation.13 A year later, in 1733, they also entered into a new agreement with George Vertue for the production of a new set of heads.14 As a result of the publishers’ rivalry, two contending sets of heads, illustrating two competing translations of Rapin, were sold simultaneously between 1733 and 1736, reminding us of the energy that was directed into the publication of heads. The six visual artists employed to design those illustrations were well acquainted with each other, for Giles King had been apprenticed to Vertue, while both Vertue and Sheppard had been members of the academy in Great Queen Street. They were employed by rival booksellers to compete in the creation of heads that would entice readers to buy the many numbers in which Rapin’s History was sold. With copyright being a topical but nonetheless tentative notion in the mid-1730s, the artists could emulate one another, borrow elements from their plates and adapt them. They also could avail themselves of earlier visual material, reuse it and recycle it. As will be seen in this study, much travelling was also involved in the search for material sources and monuments that were used to document historical portraiture, while time-travelling was both a defining feature of those historical illustrations and the key to their persistence. This chapter thus aims to retrace the transit of images involved in the processes of exchange, adaption and translation underlying the making of heads for Rapin’s History. It deals with the itinerary followed by images across the city of London, through the streets that separated neighbouring publishers and artists, while also tackling the longer and more complex, voyages, in both space and time, during which images were appropriated and repurposed. In order to analyse the dialogic creative environment that surrounded the making of those plates, I shall examine the first sixteen portraits in these sets, namely, the heads of Egbert, Alfred the Great, Canute, William I, William II, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, Richard I, John, Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV. As recorded by Vertue in his notebooks, the likenesses of ancient rulers had not been fixed by established portraits and, as a consequence, they required more research and invention on the part of designers than the heads of more

13 See their notice in the Daily Advertiser, issue 443, 3 July 1732. On the rivalry between Mechell and the Knaptons, see Roy McKeen Wiles, Serial Publication in England Before 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 106–9. 14 For detailed studies of this partnership, see Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 151–3 and David Alexander, ‘George Vertue as an Engraver’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 70 (2008): 217–18.

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recent rulers, those from Henry V to William III and Mary, whose iconography was well known from identifiable portraits.15

Borrowing Ornaments Adverts and notices inserted in the London press highlight the vital financial interests at stake in the publication of heads and provide, therefore, the general backdrop against which the circulation of heads must be studied. While announcing the release of Number 15 of his translation of Rapin’s Histoire, Mechell added: ‘The ornamental Cuts being desired by the Encouragers of this Work, they are now Engraving by one of the best hands and will be delivered two at a Time, at the Price of Sixpence; which is but half the Price the Octavo Plates were sold for. This shall not retard this Work in the least.’16 True to his word, he managed to keep issuing numbers while publishing the first heads within three months. His team of engravers was able to share the considerable workload involved in such an undertaking and to churn out plates at a quick pace. For their part, the Knaptons, who had started to reissue their translation in weekly numbers to assert their rights over Rapin’s History, soon felt that they could not reissue the engravings that Vertue had made for their first edition. Their decision to commission new plates from Vertue was prompted by their urge to please the novelty-seeking public as well as by their fear of being outmoded. For, in addition to being produced rapidly, Mechell’s plates looked good, so good that they could potentially overshadow their competitors made by Vertue. Indeed, the plates Vertue had designed for the Knaptons between 1725 and 1731 were not as decorative. They were unified by their identical single-sheet layout; each ruler’s head-and-shoulders portrait was presented in an oval medallion surrounded by a frame adorned with a garland of oak leaves seemingly carved in relief. The ruler’s name was inscribed in what looked like a hollowed sculpted rectangular cartouche placed below each roundel. Both medallions and cartouches were set against a darker background devoid of embellishments (with the notable exception of King Alfred, whose medallion was surrounded by emblematic objects such as a bow and arrows, a shield, a heraldic cross, his raven banner and lyre). As such, these plates expanded illustrations Vertue had made earlier, heads that had been published by William Mears in 1723 to accompany the text of 15 ‘Vertue’s Notebooks: Volume I [British Museum Add MS 23,069]’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 18 (1929): 94. Vertue wrote that after Edward II ‘all the other following kings pictures are known & painted’. 16 See Country Journal or The Craftsman, issue 323, 9 Sept. 1732.

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Thomas Salmon’s Chronological Historian.17 For this cheaper publication, Vertue had crammed thirty-one heads of kings and queens of England, from William the Conqueror to George I, onto four pages. Displayed in roundels, surrounded by simple frames inscribed with the rulers’ names, they were presented in the manner of miniatures, also recalling royal genealogical trees printed in the seventeenth century such as Benjamin Wright’s 1619 Roiail Progenei of our Most Sacred King James.18 Departing from his earlier plates, which may have been considered inappropriate for Rapin because they reflected Salmon’s royalist sympathies, Vertue expanded their format but reformulated them in a sober style. Mechell and his team, on the other hand, opted for a more decorative layout. Still working towards the production of a unified set of heads, King, Parr, Roberts, Sheppard and Smith presented their portraits on identically structured single sheets. In their move towards enhanced ornamentation, the team elongated the medallions so as to give three-quarter-length portraits of rulers in which more elements of their dress were shown. The artists framed the portraits with similar surrounds of oak leaves, adding ribbons, flowers or shells, even scrolls and acanthus leaves, adorning their roundels further with coats of arms at the bottom. Most remarkably, Vertue’s cartouches were expanded into parapets on which medallions rested and where rulers’ names were inscribed. At both ends of these parapets, which were declined in various architectural styles, scrollworks often complemented their fashionable Rococo outlook. But, despite their state-ofthe-art appearance, the Mechell plates actually recycled a thirty-year-old layout created by Edward Lutterell (d. 1737) – also a member of the Great Queen Street Academy19 – and Peter Vanderbank (1649–97) for plates published in 1706 to illustrate a Complete History of England.20 Comparison with this earlier set shows that the team employed by Mechell took up the layout designed by Lutterell and Vanderbank, who had displayed their portraits of kings and queens in oval medallions, with decorative frames and 17 Thomas Salmon, The Chronological Historian (London: Mears, 1723). 18 See a copy of this engraving in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London (NPG D1370). 19 See Ilaria Bignamini, ‘Art Institutions in London 1689–1768: A Study of Clubs and Academies’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 54 (1988): 61–95. 20 See A Complete History of England: with the Lives of all the Kings and Queens thereof; From the Earliest Account of Time, to the Death of his Late Majesty King William III, 3 vols. (London: Aylmer, Bonwick et al. 1706). Vols. 1 and 2 of this historical compound were edited by John Hughes, while vol. 3 was written by White Kennet. The title page included a special mention to the plates: ‘The Whole Illustrated with Large and Useful Notes, taken from divers Manuscripts and other good Authors: And the Effigies of the Kings and Queens from the Originals, Engraven by the Best Masters.’

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a coat of arms, seemingly resting on parapets. One element of unity in the Lutterell and Vanderbank set was actually found in the identical parapet, reproduced from plate to plate, with a different portrait and its matching coat of arms placed on top of it. This parapet was adorned, at both ends, with baroque dolphins which easily morphed into Rococo scrolls, thirty years later, in the Mechell plates. As an experienced engraver, Vertue was undoubtedly a quick learner and, when he set out to make a new series of heads for the Knaptons in 1733, he paid special attention to embellishments. Vertue rose to the challenge posed by his younger rivals and judiciously used the artistic licence he was given to compose his new set as a skilful display of variety. The Knaptons were prompt to advertise the results as ‘proper ornaments and decorations’.21 Elaborating on the essential features of the genre, Vertue showed some heads in oval medallions with decorative frames (Canute), but also others in different square frames and even an unframed one (Edward the Black Prince). Most notably, each plate was decorated with sets of wellknown symbols (such as the trumpets of fame placed above Edward I) and regalia (crowns, orbs, sceptres, standards), as well as more specific ornaments (such as fox tails for Henry IV). Vertue added other objects, including maps, books, weapons and trophies, as visual equivalents to words, each signifying the particular distinctions of individual monarchs. Thus heroic feats were indicated by weapons and armour (Canute, William I) and, in the case of Richard I, the Lion-heart, by a fantastic lion pelt: hinting at the English king’s Herculean valour. The animal skin eerily holds the king’s portrait as well as the royal banner in its paws. Less martial achievements were denoted by books and scrolls: these are found above Henry I’s portrait, together with a cornucopia and a caduceus because William I’s younger son was believed by Vertue to have been the first to encourage the arts and sciences. In addition to objects, Vertue added allegorical figures: below King Egbert is a map of the seven kingdoms, brought to the attention of the viewer by a Saxon ammonitore whose dress and hairstyle animate what could have otherwise been quite a static portrait. Similarly, below Edward III, a woman wears a fleur-de-lys dress with fleur-de-lys standards lying by her side, personifying France. The victorious English king towers above her in full armour.

21 See The London Evening Post, issue 1043, 27 July 1734.

Fig. 7.1. George Vertue, Portrait of Richard I, the Lionheart, 1734. Etching and engraving on paper, 28.8 x 19.1 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Searching for Tangible History As a founder member of the Society of Antiquaries and as its official engraver, Vertue shared his fellow antiquarians’ distinctive engagement with material sources and how these might yield precious historical detail about ancient objects and buildings. Among the objects displayed on his set of heads, Vertue drew the coins and medals he had used as sources, as well as miscellaneous fragments and other relics that advertised the research he had undertaken. For, as he made clear in the written account that introduced his bound volume of heads, his ornaments were not intended solely as aesthetic devices. Rather, the ornaments represented visual records of the ‘antiquities followed’ to recover the kings’ likenesses.22 Vertue became convinced that coins were a major source of historical evidence and that a knowledge of coins was an indispensable part of the study of royal history. On the plates dedicated to Egbert, Canute, William I, William II, Henry I, Stephen and Richard I, Vertue included representations of the coins he had studied in order to recover the kings’ features. His drawings allowed a wider public to see in clear detail the ancient coins and medals which were jealously treasured by numismatists and collectors and his plates encouraged viewers to compare his derivative portraits with the primary sources on which they were based, highlighting the metallic origins of his images of kings. Through their association with coins, engraved heads were presented as mobile and portable artefacts, as representations that directly connected Vertue’s contemporaries to their ancestors.23 This was underlined by his modelling the presentation of heads, either frontally or in profile, on the accompanying coins. Likewise, this display showing coins and portraits side by side evidenced that Vertue had copied accessories, such as headgear, or physical features, such as beards or particular hairstyles, on these artefacts, thus stressing further their documentary value. Vertue’s plates also show that in his search for tangible history he relied on the study of sculpture and architecture. His portrait of Henry III is adorned by two views of buildings presented in separate frames: one just below the portrait, as a sort of predella, showing Westminster Abbey and the other, placed in a slanted position against it, the shrine of Edward the Confessor. Both views point to architectural projects planned by the king, whose distinctive architectural legacy is celebrated in the ornament of his 22 See George Vertue, The Heads of the Kings of England, Proper for Mr. Rapin’s History, Translated by N. Tindal, M.A. (London: Knapton, 1736), p. 5. 23 On the heightened portability of profiles, see Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions. The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), pp. 26–9.

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portrait. The image of Henry III is shown through a lancet arch flanked by clustered columns, in what Georgians would have recognised as a Gothic setting appropriated to the style of the king’s edifices. Similarly, Edward I’s plate takes viewers on a journey in both time and space: two vignettes in the shape of small windows, with oak-leaved garlands hanging over them, are placed below the king’s portrait, on either side of the historiated predella. They open onto the gate of Caernarvon castle, with the statue of Edward I above it, illuminated by sunlight, on the left, and, on the right, onto the Hardingstone Cross, one of twelve crosses the king had erected between London and Lincoln in memory of his wife, Eleanor of Castile.24 Added views of identifiable medieval monuments, inserted as separate images within compositions, dignified his relatively modest engravings. While celebrating the achievements of the kings depicted, those illustrations magnified them as great builders (and nation builders) and induced viewers to reflect on the traces they had left. Moreover, those views were invitations to travel: they tended to localise the memory of past rulers, encouraging viewers to go and acquaint themselves with the picturesque traces of their own history.

Reconstructing Likenesses As a result of the circulation of historical portraits and of the reproduction of images from material sources, eighteenth-century heads ended up being complex visual assemblages in which regal figures appeared through layers of images that were reproduced, flipped, altered by parts or reconstructed anew. When he started working for Mechell in 1732, Giles King dwelled on the plates Vertue had finished the year before and found inspiration in his former master’s works, as exemplified in his head of Egbert. Signed by King and dedicated by Mechell to John Moyne Lewis, it shows the Saxon king in profile, with features, crown and braided hair identical to those drawn by Vertue, who was one of the first engravers to have portrayed the monarch. Piracy is further evidenced in the reversal of Egbert’s head on the Mechell plate, which differs from Vertue’s earlier version only by an added piece of costume. Still more similar are the heads of Richard I, Edward I and Edward II engraved by James Smith for Mechell; all three are reversed and copied from Vertue’s earlier designs to the particular details of their dress: the crown and armour of Richard I with his strange flaring spaulder, Edward 24 Vertue had sketched this Eleanor Cross, situated outside Northampton, while on his way to Althorp in July 1732; see ‘Vertue’s Notebooks: Vol. V [British Museum Add MS 22,042]’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 26 (1937): 104–5.

Fig. 7.2. James Smith, Portrait of King Richard I, 1733. Engraving on paper, 37.4 x 23 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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I’s crown, his heavy collar with its diamond-shaped pendant worn over his ermine mantle and Edward II’s cloak and jewels all featured on Vertue’s first set of heads for the Knaptons, and even on the medallions he had designed for Mears in the early 1720s. Such examples of straightforward piracy were not the rule, however, for not all Mechell plates were directly copied from Vertue’s. Most were composite artworks including elements borrowed from Vertue as well as from other heads. In many instances, the likenesses and dresses of Vertue’s first sets of heads were adapted from previous heads. Details such as Edward I’s collar and Edward II’s cloak and jewels were derived from the portraits of the king which Renold Elstrack (c.1570–c.1625) had designed for Henry Holland’s Baziliologia, a Booke of Kings.25 Since the seventeenth century, Elstrack’s heads had been much copied and imitated to cater for the growing taste for such sets. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, they were still considered as a trusted source for royal portraiture: Vertue, his elders – Lutterell and Vanderbank – as well as his younger fellow artists all plundered Elstrack’s plates for costume. Through Elstrack’s carefully detailed engravings, eighteenth-century engravers accessed more ancient materials and could reach what they viewed as more original sources that extended their historical knowledge.26 Transmitting memories of more ancient heads, Elstrack’s plates were used as a catalogue of dress and accessories from which artists could either reproduce complete outfits or select elements and accessories. On the head of William II, both Vertue and James Smith reproduced the collar with which Elstrack had adorned the king, while Lutterell and Vanderbank left out this piece of jewellery and adopted the brocade cloak designed by Elstrack instead. Very often, artists adopted the most distinctive elements of costumes, such as the fantastic cabasset helmet Elstrack had placed on King Stephen’s head, which recurs in plates by Lutterell and Vanderbank, Smith and Vertue. Beyond dress, eighteenth-century artists consulted earlier plates in search of realistic likenesses of kings, whose individual features they endeavoured to recover. Since the Renaissance, physiognomies of past 25 See Anthony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603–1689 (London: British Museum Press, 1998), p. 51. Griffiths explains that no original copy of Henry Holland’s Baziliologia, a Booke of Kings, published in 1618 in London by Compton Holland, survives. In 1628 however, Elstrack’s plates were used as illustrations to William Martyn’s Historie and Lives of the Kings of England and his series became standardised as a much sought-after set of portraits of kings from William I to Henry VIII. 26 The most important sources for Elstrack were Hendrick Goltzius, The kings and queens of England (1584–85) and T.T., A booke, containing the true portraiture of the countenance and attires of the kings of England (London: Beauchesne, 1597).

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kings, popes and emperors had been much coveted and collected as indications of the characters of past rulers. Still considered by many as mirrors of the personalities of kings and queens of the past, sets of heads became increasingly appreciated as mnemonic tools in eighteenth-century England. Tellingly, Vertue’s first series of heads was published in a book that underlined chronological accuracy as a defining feature of modern history.27 Whether as images of exemplary figures, or as memory aids, heads of past rulers had to be as individual as possible to fulfil their didactic aims. The print market’s demand for variety further encouraged artists to formulate different faces and expressions, to take painstaking steps in order to shape the appearance of kings. As alluded to above, however, when sources were deemed authoritative, artists copied them with limited variations. For instance Elstrack’s ‘true pourtraiture of Richard the 2’ based on a full-length portrait of the king at Westminster Abbey, believed to have been painted during the king’s lifetime and resembling his tomb effigy, has travelled through the centuries almost unchanged. While amending the expression of the king, Lutterell and Vanderbank reproduced the main features of the portrait. Opting for a fuller face and flatter eyebrows, Vertue nonetheless stuck to the prototype in his three versions of the Plantagenet king. Precisely because it was difficult to renew such a consensual head, Smith turned the king’s direction, showing Richard II in profile, while still adhering to the agreed features.

Approaching Past Rulers Rather than resulting from widespread consensus, however, standard likenesses were most often achieved through a gradual process of speculation and adaptation. Lutterell and Vanderbank retained only the moustache and long, forked beard Elstrack had drawn on Henry I’s head. They shortened his hair, significantly reduced his shoulder width and changed his eyes, nose, crown and dress, establishing an image of the founder of the Plantagenet dynasty that was readily adopted by Smith. Vertue, however, shaved Henry I’s beard and produced an altogether rejuvenated likeness of the king. He stuck to this image of the king when he drew his third version of the head, between 1733 and 1736, reproducing the coin from which he had taken the likeness on his final plate and explaining, in his account, that he had also studied the king’s effigy.28 Contrary to other engravers who designed one set of heads and then reproduced it throughout their career with marginal 27 Salmon, The Chronological Historian, unpaginated preface. 28 Vertue, The Heads of the Kings of England, p. 5.

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amendments, Vertue made three different sets of heads of the same English kings and queens over a period of thirteen years, each demonstrating his growing antiquarian expertise. Not only did he change the presentation of his heads, from thirty-one medallions crammed on four pages, to forty heads on single pages, first with identical layout and then with bespoke ornaments, but he also amended the likenesses. His notebooks shed light upon the reasons behind the changes he introduced in the depiction of past rulers, for they document the wealth of sources he consulted, presuming they could offer glimpses of the real persons. His meticulous research led him to tour country houses, to undertake trips in order to sketch monuments and to consult ancient coins, medals, as well as illuminated manuscripts kept in private collections, universities or royal palaces. Vertue and his contemporaries increasingly viewed ancient funerary monuments as documents on the kings, queens and princes they commemorated, but also as beautiful relics of the Gothic style that was being revived around him. Hence, when the Knaptons published Vertue’s last set, the artist’s heads were bound with twenty-two additional engravings showing views of royal tombs and monuments, six of which were actually designed by Vertue himself. These showed views of the chapel at Windsor, Westminster Abbey and the cathedrals of Canterbury, Gloucester, Winchester and Worcester, taking viewers on a tour of royal tombs in England, encouraging them to extend the pleasures of the imagination to travels in space … and time. Vertue’s antiquarian pursuit and search for material sources likewise led him to rely on centuries-old documents from which he was able to retrace the journeys of prototypes. In Guillaume Rouillé’s Promptuarii iconum insigniorum, published in Lyons in 1553, he found that the peculiar headdress Elstrack had placed on Henry IV’s head, copied ever since, was very similar to that worn by Charles VI of France.29 He thus surmised that because the two kings were contemporaries, the same headdress had been used for both heads, but despite his reservations retained the quaint chaperon. In Dominicus Custos’s Regum Neapolitanorum vitae et effigies, published in Antwerp, in 1605, he found that Elstrack’s heads of William I, Stephen and Richard I had been modelled on those of Manfred of Sicily, Roger II of Sicily and René of Anjou.30 Both Vertue, in his first set, and Morellon La Cave borrowed Elstrack’s head of William I to produce a sleeker image of the Norman conqueror. After drawing inspiration from 29 See ‘Vertue’s Notebooks: Vol. II [British Museum Add. MS. 23,070]’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 20 (1931): 45–6. 30 See ‘Vertue’s Notebooks: Vol. V [British Museum Add MS 22,042]’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 26 (1937): 103.

Fig. 7.3. Rois et Reines d’Angleterre from Bernard de Montfaucon, Les monumens de la monarchie françoise, vol. 2 (1730), p. 114. 48 x 29.7 cm. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Diderot, Lyon [shelf mark: 228.2].

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Elstrack for his head of King Stephen as well, Vertue opted for completely different likenesses of William I and Stephen in his last set. Laying stronger claims to authenticity, he insisted on the ‘care and circumspection’ he had used to select his sources and cited three silver coins and one illumination, as well as two coins and a parchment, to suggest new features and dress for both kings.31 Stripping William I of his armour and Stephen of his cabasset helmet, Vertue put ancient-looking crowns on the monarchs’ heads while extrapolating their dress from his sources. Emboldened by his antiquarian finds, Vertue changed the heads of longdead rulers because he believed that his research brought him closer to their physical features. Compiling material sources that had been made either during the kings’ lifetime or very soon after their death, he designed plates that could take viewers back in time to catch a glimpse of the living kings. In a forensic search, he embarked on a quest for funeral effigies and sepulchral monuments, emphasising in his account that they were authoritative sources that captured the true likenesses of his royal models. Keen to resort to material remains that could outline the link between the past and the present, he considered monuments as documents bearing the records of time. Partaking in the eighteenth-century ‘cult of the tomb’,32 Vertue carefully recorded for each ancient king, from William I to Edward II, the location and state of their monuments, whether an effigy of the king existed and the facial characteristics he could draw from material sources.33 Always on the lookout for new archives, he kept abreast of antiquarian publications at home and abroad. As mentioned in his account, while making his last set of heads, he consulted Montfaucon’s Monumens de la monarchie Françoise, released between 1729 and 1733. The French scholar’s compendium allowed Vertue to travel, albeit virtually, to the Loire Valley, to Fontevraud, where Henry II, his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their son Richard I had been buried at the turn of the thirteenth century. Drawing on the copperplate showing the Plantagenet monument in the Benedictine abbey, he formulated new portraits of Henry II and Richard I.34 Forsaking the image of Henry II he had borrowed from his elders and that of Richard I he had derived from it, Vertue reproduced both kings’ facial characteristics and dress from Montfaucon’s plate. The resulting heads, however, were 31 Vertue, The Heads of the Kings of England, p. 5. 32 See Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries. The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 273. 33 See ‘Vertue’s Notebooks: Vol. I [British Museum Add MS 23,069]’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 18 (1929): 94. 34 See plate XV in Bernard de Montfaucon, Monumens de la Monarchie Françoise, vol. 2 (Paris, 1730).

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not mere copies, for Montfaucon’s engravings were repurposed by Vertue. Instead of showing the Plantagenet monument, Vertue remediated Montfaucon’s plate: using the face masks of the dead kings, he brought back life into the recumbent effigies, raising their bodies with open eyes, the father holding a sceptre and the son a battle axe. Similarly, several heads, in this last set, were actually represented as if they had been painted as Kit-Kat portraits, that is, as three-quarter lengths with enough space to include one or both hands. Vertue had studied formats very carefully – and made diagrams of them in his notebooks35 – choosing to present ancient rulers not only as real-life characters but as if they had posed for him in his studio. Their heads were further enlivened as shown in the portraits of both Henry II and Richard I, whose hands and arms extend beyond the frame. Anticipating Ricardo in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, several kings and queens of England portrayed by Vertue in his last series seemed intent on stepping out of their frames. Contrary to previous heads that were safely framed, unequivocally flattened and two dimensional, the portraits of Henry II, Richard I or Edward II which Vertue made for his last set reached out to the viewer. In these engravings, the remediation of ancient images and pictures resulted in a form of resuscitation when Vertue’s search for tangible history led him to corporealise heads. His plates, more than on any other, bridged the distance between the eighteenth century and bygone medieval times, encouraging viewers to see kings of the past as real persons who, despite being several centuries distant, could look his contemporaries in the eyes. The kings’ presence is made even more tangible by the addition of small historiated scenes below the portraits. Vertue is here negotiating the push and pull of historical distance,36 pushing the Georgian imagination back into the past to see Plantagenet kings as they were at the time of their deaths, many centuries earlier, and at the same time pulling them towards viewers, triggering a process of identification that elicited an emotional response.

Time-travelling Heads On Vertue’s plates, the tangible presence of exemplary past kings, embodying national values, simultaneously oriented the nation towards the past and future. Helping Britons to relate to their national past, the lifelikeness 35 ‘Vertue’s Notebooks: Vol. V [British Museum Add MS 22,042]’, The Volume of the Walpole Society 26 (1937): 113. 36 On this topic, see Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).

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of Vertue’s heads also accounts for their subsequent travels as long-lasting templates for historical portraiture. Continued by Vertue’s rivals, when the Knaptons employed Jacob Houbraken and Hubert-François Gravelot to design and engrave the ‘Heads of the most Illustrious Persons of Great Britain’ in 1737, they were an inspiration to many generations of artists and gradually appeared on a variety of objects. They were, for instance, reproduced on one of the earliest pedagogical jigsaws designed to help children learn British history. Designed by schoolmaster John Hewlett (1762–1844) and engraved by specialist bookseller William Darton (1755–1819), this sophisticated teaching aid entitled Engravings for teaching the elements of English history and chronology after the manner of Dissected maps for teaching geography, was published in 1787. Out of the thirty-two irregularly shaped rectangular wooden pieces printed with the portrait of a king, ruler or queen of England, or Great Britain, from William I to George II that it comprised, twenty-four were directly copied from Vertue’s last set of heads. Being much smaller, they were also simplified versions of the original luxurious engravings. They nonetheless show that individual likenesses of English rulers drawn by Vertue had become part of a potent national imagery that was circulated among ever larger sections of the British population. Made from images that had been circulated, copied, adapted and repurposed, the heads that were sold to illustrate the English translations of Rapin de Thoyras’s Histoire de l’Angleterre were not mere engraved plates. The flimsy printed sheets were popular and commercial versions of grand portrait galleries and could thus be seen as new monuments that localised historical memory and memorialised past English rulers. But, far from immobilising history, they made royal portraiture more mobile, more prone to circulation and appropriation. Designed to ascertain the cultural foundations of the newly created nation, they prompted the Georgian public to engage visually with their national past. With their enhanced reality effects, these illustrations travelled through time, lending themselves to endless reconstructions in a variety of material media.

8

From Charts to Cartes: Translating Graphs across the Channel in the late Eighteenth Century Jean-François Dunyach

T

he ‘heads’ of Rapin exemplified increasing, innovative and far-flung exchanges in print – and resistance to them – and particularly across the English Channel, where exchanges of knowledge were notably strong.1 A hotbed of varied invention and circulation, Enlightenment Europe boasted an array of exchanges, from the lofty circles of luminaries and officials to the lower ranks of less celebrated agents of transfer. Among the lesser-known but intriguing agents of exchange was the Scottish inventor, statistician and writer William Playfair (1759–1823). Born the son of a Kirk minister, Playfair was trained by his brother, the famed professor of the University of Edinburgh John Playfair (1748–1819) and sponsored by Scottish Enlightenment literati as well as more conventional political patrons such as Lord Shelburne. Playfair’s travels in Enlightenment Europe, particularly in France between 1787 and 1792, are particularly illustrative of the different purposes of cross-Channel exchanges before the French Revolution.2

1 See Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows and Edmond Dziembowski (eds), Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: SVEC, Voltaire Foundation, 2010); François Crouzet, De la supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la France (Paris: Perrin, 1985), trans. as Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2 See Jean-François Dunyach, ‘William Playfair (1759–1823), Scottish Enlightenment from below?’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (eds), Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), pp. 159– 72.

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In many respects, Playfair’s endeavours and cross-Channel schemes demonstrate the various problems of often interlinked technological, industrial and intellectual transfers. The history of Playfair’s activities also challenges both ‘diffusionist’ assumptions of top-down transfers (from elites to the lower ranks) and centralised perspectives (from ‘capitals’ of innovation to peripheries) in the exchange of ideas and knowledge, even though there has been much recent research on the role of ‘go-betweens’.3 Playfair further exemplifies striking features of the relationship between the materiality of ideas and their exchange: technical innovation, material culture and intellectual dissemination. His Parisian career as a foreign projector questions ‘from below’ issues such as the terms and modalities of exchange, the geography of transmission, the market for translations and the social and institutional reception of inventions.4 His career also reveals the individual initiatives and the social and personal mechanisms of patronage, sometimes straightforward and sometimes oblique, that enabled inventiveness and its acceptance.5

3 On the diffusion of innovation, see Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962, 5th edn, 2003) and Barbara Wejnert, ‘Integrating Models of Diffusion of Innovations', Annual Review of Sociology, 28 (Aug. 2002): 297–326; on go-betweens, see Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World, Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770– 1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications – Watson Publishing International LLC, 2009). 4 On the literary and philosophical aspects of reception theory, see Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1984). 5 On individual and collective repertoires of actions, see Charles Tilly’s classic, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978); on the sociology of innovation, see Eric C. Dahlin, ‘The Sociology of Innovation: Organizational, Environmental and Relative Perspectives’, Sociology Compass 8:6 (2014): 671–87; Tom R. Burns, Nora Machado and Ugo Corte, ‘The Sociology of Creativity: Part I: Theory: The Social Mechanisms of Innovation and Creative Developments in Selectivity Environments’, Human Systems Management 34:3 (2015): 179–99; ids., ‘The Sociology of Creativity: Part II: Applications: The Socio-cultural Contexts and Conditions of the Production of Novelty’, Human Systems Management 34:4 (2015): 263–86; ids., ‘The Sociology of Creativity: Part III: Applications: The Socio-cultural Contexts of the Acceptance/Rejection of Innovations’, Human Systems Management 35:1 (2016): 11–34; and Sara Yousefikhak, ‘Sociology of Innovation: Social Construction of Technology Perspective’, AD-minister, 30 (Jan. –June, 2017): 31–43, http://www.scielo. org.co/pdf/adter/n30/1692–0279-adter-30–00031.pdf.

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The Fortunes of Patronage William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) received only a succès d’estime from the British public and the press (notably a rather lengthy and supportive review in the Scots Magazine on 1 January 1787). This was despite its genuine graphical innovativeness by the creation of redesigned line-graphs and the invention of bar charts.6 Shortly afterwards, as both a pamphleteer and an industrial engineer and entrepreneur, the Scots projector Playfair dedicated his Essay on the National Debt (1787) to his patron Lord Shelburne. If Playfair expected financial assistance from that quarter, then it was unforthcoming. After his London metalwork establishment foundered, Playfair eventually cut ties with Britain and left to try his luck, like hundreds of other British tradesmen and manufacturers of the time, in the French market. It was a market apparently opened up by the Eden-Rayneval Treaty of 1786, which came into effect in May 1787.7 Playfair’s later account of his Atlas’s success in France, however, leaves no doubt about the mixed motivations and ambitions prompting his arrival in France: When I went to France, 1787, I found several copies there, and, amongst others, one which had been sent by an English nobleman to Monsieur de Vergennes, which copy he presented to the king, who, being well acquainted with the study of geography, understood it readily and expressed great satisfaction. This circumstance was of service to me, when I afterwards solicited an exclusive privilege for a certain manufactory, which I obtained. The work was translated into French and the Academy des Sciences […] testified its approbation of this application of geometry to accounts and gave me a general invitation to attend its sittings in the Louvre; and at the same time did me the honour of seating me by the president during that sitting […] my book had done wonders […]8

The initial reception was nonetheless far from Playfair’s self-flattering narrative. He arrived in Paris in June 1787 with a few letters of recommendation addressed by Shelburne to his own friends among French officials, and notably including Charles Gravier de Vergennes (1719–87), Louis 6 See Ian Spence and Howard Wainer, ‘Introduction’, in William Playfair, The Commercial and Political Atlas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–35. 7 On Playfair’s initial background, training and path towards the Earl of Shelburne’s patronage, see Dunyach, ‘William Playfair’. 8 William Playfair, ‘Memoirs’, unpublished manuscript in private hands, fols. 4–5.

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XVI’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and the academician André Morellet (1727–1819). But the Scotsman soon experienced the misadventures of an untimely arrival. Crucially deprived of potential support from the authorities by Vergennes’s recent death in February 1787, Playfair was met with a cold reception from Morellet.9 The philosophe’s account of the meeting to his friend Shelburne merely disparaged Playfair’s invention: I have seen Mr Playfair yesterday whose work you obligingly sent to me. His method is clever, but I think totally worthless. With this method, one can only show things, but when it comes to communicating or disserting upon them, one needs figures and numbers and then the whole chart of Mr Playfair gets useless. A more useful purpose is that he suggests to sell us buckles and buttons at a cheap price. As he doesn’t speak a word of French, I have suggested him to bring his written project [;] I will translate it and so will he make his way. I will help him with my acquaintances and those of my friends.10

Alluding to Morellet’s lack of interest in the Atlas, Playfair later penned a sardonic account of the botched introduction and the uncooperativeness of his would-be French patron: I only understood […] that he was a very irascible philosopher and a harsh master and one whom there could be little pleasure in knowing. […] I was invited to come and see him again but I know not whether instinctively or not, I hated the man so that I never went near him again and I have been pleased since that I never did.11

The apparent communication failure and Morellet’s apparent lack of mastery of English might question his reputation as an accomplished translator. A very influential character in the république des lettres, Morellet was indeed able (if usually on Shelburne’s advice) to secure several translations of English texts by some of his many acquaintances. He was 9 Robert Darnton, ‘An Exemplary Literary Career’, in Jeffrey Merrick and Dorothy Medlin (eds), André Morellet (1727–1819) in the Republic of Letters and the French Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), pp. 5–26. 10 Morellet to Shelburne, 21 June 1787, in Dorothy Medlin, Jean-Claude David and Paul Leclerc (eds), Lettres d’André Morellet (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation) 2: 65, trans. J.-F. Dunyach. On Morellet and Playfair, see J.-F. Dunyach, ‘Le marquis, l’abbé et l’Anglais ou William serviteur de plusieurs maîtres. Expertise, patronage et échanges transmanche à la fin de l’ancien regime’, in Marion Brétéché and Héloïse Hermant (eds), Parole d’experts. Une histoire sociale du politique (Europe, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021), pp. 179–97. 11 Playfair, ‘Memoirs’, fols. 1–2.

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himself credited (if at times anonymously) with the translation of Alexander Pope’s Universal Prayer (in 1760), John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774) and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1786). In rejecting such an important figure and the head of an important translation network, Playfair had made a particularly bold and potentially harmful move for any aspirant to literary fame. Nonetheless, Morellet’s account displays an apparent will to comply with the ‘moral economy’ of sociability and patronage, and he offered to provide information and support for another of Playfair’s multifarious projects, the creation of a commercial metal workshop facility in Paris. By switching from literature to industry and trade, Playfair circumvented Shelburne’s patronage. That support had been strictly limited to the Atlas’s literary success as illustrated by the delivery of several copies of the book to the earl’s French networks, particularly including officials and men of influence like Vergennes and Morellet.12 Even so, Playfair’s work prospects seemed limited. Despite Shelburne’s fairly wide distribution of a curiosity book likely to entertain his correspondents, reviews of it were scarce in France by 1787. The notable exception was a benevolent notice in the anglophile weekly Censeur universel anglais. The leading source of British intelligence in France, however, Samuel Swinton’s Courrier de l’Europe, remained silent.13 Playfair’s path towards greater public recognition further illustrated the intricacies of the process of patronage. He attracted the interest of casual Parisian acquaintances and their semi-official connections as a British engineer trained in Birmingham under no less a figure than James Watt. In so doing, Playfair bypassed the barriers put in his way and reached a greeting-line of patrons extending to the highest French authorities. Particularly instrumental in this process was the spendthrift Jean-Claude Richard, abbé de Saint-Non (1727–91). Saint-Non was a former member of the Paris parlement and a writer and regular guest of several salons. By 1788 he was still enduring the commercial fiasco of his publication of a monumental Voyage 12 Dunyach, ‘Le marquis, l’abbé et l’Anglais’. 13 Censeur Universel anglais ou revue générale critique et impartiale de toutes les productions anglaises sur les sciences, la littérature, les beaux-arts, les manufactures, le commerce, 6 Jan. 1787. On the Censeur universel anglais (published between July 1785 and July 1787), see Madeleine Fabre, Jean Sgard and François Weil, ‘Le Censeur Universel Anglais (1785–1789)’, Dictionnaire des Journaux (1600–1789), online: http:// dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0204-le-censeur-universel-anglais. On Le Courier de l’Europe, see Gunnar von Proschwitz and François Weil, ‘Le Courrier de l’Europe, 1776–1792’, Dictionnaire des Journaux …, http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0268-courrier-de-leurope.

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pittoresque ou Description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (1781–86). Saint-Non helped to design (and translate) the scheme of the industrial project aimed at reaching the higher ranks of patronage, this being a plan for a steam-powered metal rolling-mill in Paris.14 The abbé then advanced Playfair further in the patronage process by introducing him to the shady but influential Baron Jean-Pierre de Batz (1754–1822). De Batz was himself tied to the Swiss finance tycoon Étienne Clavière (1735–93) and his own patron, Louis le Tonnelier de Breteuil (1730–1807), Secrétaire d’État de la Maison du Roi.15 Although circuitous, Playfair’s entry to the minister’s circles proved well timed, given that Breteuil, then at the height of his influence, was actively sponsoring a series of modernisation schemes which included the rehabilitation of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris and several public construction projects. This ambitious minister was particularly fond of science and technology. Himself a Membre honoraire de l’Académie des Sciences he championed the Académie as an instrument for the modernisation of France. Breteuil had notably sponsored the first aerostatic experiments and offered, through the Maison du Roi and the Académie des Sciences, opportunities for state recognition and support for inventors and technicians.16 A firm link between the Académie des Sciences and the Maison du Roi, together with his interest in steam-power and innovation was behind Breteuil’s invitation to James Watt and Matthew Boulton to come to France in 1786, as well as the founding of a public contest to renovate the then rickety Machine de Marly, originally designed to power the waterworks in the gardens of the palace of Versailles.17 In April 1788, Breteuil managed to secure the necessary official lettres patentes for Playfair’s rolling-mill company in Paris, while the Scotsman’s design of a renovation project for Marly

14 Jean-Claude Richard (ed.), L’abbé de Saint-Non, Un humaniste au siècle des Lumières (1727–1791) (Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, 1992), pp. 27, 37, 42. 15 Roselyne Tournebise, Le baron de Batz, Ses amis, ses adversaires et la Révolution: les différentes facettes d’un conspirateur (Nîmes: Ollé-Lacour, 2020); Guy Antonetti, ‘Clavière (Étienne)’, Les ministres des Finances de la Révolution française au Second Empire (I): Dictionnaire biographique 1790–1814 (Vincennes: Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique, 2007), pp. 61–97, http:// books.openedition.org/igpde/850. 16 Pascale Mafarette-Dayries, ‘L’Académie royale des sciences et les grandes commissions d’enquête et d’expertise à la fin de l’Ancien Régime’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 320 (2000): 121–35, www.persee.fr/doc/ahrf_0003– 4436_2000_num_320_1_2318. 17 René-Marie de Rampelberg, Le ministre de la Maison du Roi 1783–1788, le baron de Breteuil (Paris: Economica, 1975), pp. 13–23.

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was exhaustively assessed by a member of the Académie des Sciences, Charles-Augustin Coulomb (1736–1806).18 Thus, despite an initial misstep, the subsequent translation of his Atlas and its introduction of statistical graphs in France crowned a diverse ‘patronage package’ actively earned by Playfair. In some respects, with technical invention and practical endeavours in the workshop given precedence to statistical novelties, the more familiar priorities of patronage were restored. Indeed, the prospect of a massive success for the Scotsman’s graphs remained limited, something clearly illustrated by Morellet’s sulky initial reception of the Atlas and the extent to which this contrasted with his continuing appreciation of Playfair’s technical skills.

Publication Strategies Under Breteuil’s auspices, the translation and editorial processes of Playfair’s work started sometime in 1788 with a joint translation of the Commercial and Political Atlas and the Essay on the National Debt published in a single volume in March 1789.19 The translator was the Dutch homme de lettres and publisher Hendrik Jansen (1741–1812), who, with the académicien and royal censor Jean-Baptiste Suard (1732–1817) and the abbé Morellet himself, had undertaken several important French translations such as William Robertson’s History of America (1778). Jansen was also the translator of German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), including, notably, his Remarks on the Architecture of the Ancients (1783). In 1787, Jansen also translated Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses and De arte graphica.20 A relatively minor but well-connected character in the république des lettres, Jansen was also a member of the influential Loge des Neuf sœurs, founded in 1776, whose most famous members included Voltaire, Condorcet and Benjamin

18 Bruno Jacomy, ‘ Une nouvelle machine pour Marly’, in Georgia Santangelo (ed.), Les Maîtres de l’eau d’Archimède à Marly (Marly-le-roi and Louveciennes: Artlys, 2006), pp. 148–64. 19 Playfair, Commercial and Political Atlas, p. viii. 20 Jan Blanc, ‘Grand style. Joshua Reynolds dans les théories de l’art françaises du XVIIIe siècle’, in C. Magnusson and C. Michel (eds), Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Somogy, 2013), pp. 301–28; Pascal Grenier, ‘La nécessité de Winckelmann: Hendrik Jansen, 1741–1812, et la littérature artistique à la fin du XVIIIème siècle’, in Jackie Pigeaud and Jean-Paul Barbe (eds), Entretiens de la Garenne-Lemot I (Nantes: Centre des Lettres classiques), pp. 111–26; ‘Henri Jansen’, Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains, 5 vols. (Paris, 1836), 5: 347; http://data.bnf.fr/en/atelier/12229646/hendrik_jansen/.

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Franklin.21 The Dutchman, though clearly identified in the final (printed) official approbation of the publication by his literary partner, Jean-Baptiste Suard, was cryptically mentioned as ‘un homme de lettres’ by Playfair in the opening address of the Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire.22 It is also likely that political and lobbying considerations played a part, with Breteuil temporarily away from office and apparently choosing an ally, the staunch anti-Necker Garde des Sceaux Charles de Paule de Barentin (1738–1819), to press the case for Playfair with the censor, Suard.23 At least it seemed then most unlikely that the censeur royal would have banned or barred in any way publication coming from and protected by such friendly connections among the literary world and state officials. The publisher of the Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire was Louis François Barrois (1748–c.1835). ‘Barrois l’aîné’, a noted bookseller and publisher from a famous Parisian bookselling dynasty, had established the Quai des Augustins for whom Jansen had already translated Winckelmann.24 As a publisher, Barrois maintained a specific interest in science and arts books, notably treaties on architecture, engineering and mechanics, such as the Recueil de Mémoires sur la mécanique et la physique (1783) from the astronomer and sous-directeur of the Académie des Sciences Alexis-Marie de Rochon (1741–1817). The fairly numerous translations 21 Jean Claude Besuchet de Saunois, Précis historique de l’ordre de la franc-maçonnerie, depuis son introduction en France jusqu’en 1829 (Paris, 1829); Louis Amiable, Une loge maçonnique d’avant 1789: la R.L. Les neuf sœurs (Paris, 1897); Nicholas Hans, ‘UNESCO of the Eighteenth Century, La Loge des Neuf Sœurs and its Venerable Master, Benjamin Franklin’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97:5 (1953): 513–34; Jean-Luc Chappey, ‘La Société Nationale des Neuf Sœurs (1790– 1793). Héritages et innovations d’une sociabilité littéraire et politique’, in Philippe Bourdin and Jean-Luc Chappey (eds), Réseaux et sociabilité littéraire en Révolution (Tours: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2007), pp. 52–85. 22 ‘Jean-Baptiste Antoine Suard (1732–1817)’, in Dictionnaire des Journalistes, http:// dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/759-jean-baptiste-suard. 23 ‘Barentin’ in Arnaud de Maurepas and Antoine Boulant, Les Ministres et les Ministères du siècle des Lumières, 1715–1789, Étude et dictionnaire (Paris: Christian/JAS, 1996), pp. 124–30. On censorship under the Ancien régime, see François Moureau, La plume et le plomb, espaces de l’imprimé et du manuscrit au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2006), pp. 229–49; Madeleine Cerf, ‘La Censure Royale à la fin du dix-huitième siècle’, Communications, 9 (1967): 2–27; Robert Darnton, Censors at Work, How States Shaped Literature (New York: Norton & Co., 2014); Raymond Birn, Royal Censorship of Books in Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 24 Blanc, ‘Grand style’, p. 302; ‘Barrois, Louis François, dit Barrois l’aîné’, in Frédéric Barbier, Sabine Juratic and Annick Mellerio (eds), Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et gens du livre à Paris: A–C (Paris: Droz, 2007), pp. 147–9.

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of Barrois’s catalogue illustrate a general and steady eighteenth-century accumulation of translations in which travel and history but also science and theology were well represented. Nonetheless, the overall share of translations in the published output of the period in France remained fairly modest, comprising only 3 per cent of all titles published in 1736 and 7 per cent of those published in 1771.25 Whether Playfair’s publication was somehow subsidized remains unknown, and although translations were mostly at the publisher’s or the author’s initiative, the overall cost of the publication, with its hand-painted engraved charts, was far above Playfair’s limited financial capacities. The expensive quarto format (271 x 212 mm) was nonetheless slightly smaller than the foolscap folio (216 x 330 mm) and the oblong quarto (254 x 330 mm) chosen for the English editions (published by Debrett in 1786 and Stockdale in 1787). The most striking feature of the French edition was the choice of the more common portrait (vertical) format instead of the original landscape in the English predecessors. Further, for obvious editorial, financial and technical (printing and folding) reasons, only thirteen charts of the forty-seven originals (forty-four from the Atlas and three from the Essay on the National Debt) were selected for the French edition. The delicate, hand-coloured folding engraved plates containing the charts obviously proved as challenging for the French publisher as it had for his English counterparts. Whatever its exact funding and print-run (still unknown), the Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire was nonetheless obviously sponsored and enjoyed the full gamut of ancien régime recommendations, including those of high-echelon officials, leading Enlightenment figures and institutions.26

25 Ann Thomson, ‘L’essor de la traduction au XVIIIe siècle’, Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique de l’Europe [online], https://ehne.fr/fr/node/14109; Yves Chevrel, Annie Cointre and Yen-Maï Tran-Gervat (eds), Histoire des traductions en langue française XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 1610–1815 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2014), notably ch. VIII: ‘Sciences et arts’ by Patrice Bret and Ellen Moerman, pp. 595–722; Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘The Enlightenment in Translation: Regional and European Aspects’, European Review of History – Revue européenne d’histoire 13:3 (2006): 385–409; Patrice Bret and Jean-Luc Chappey, ‘Pratiques et enjeux scientifiques, intellectuels et politiques de la traduction (vers 1660-vers 1840) – 1 – Les enjeux politiques des traductions entre Lumières et Empire’, La Révolution française 12 (2017), http://journals.openedition. org/lrf/1768. 26 The full title was Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, du commerce, des finances et de la dette nationale de l’Angleterre, par M.W. Playfair. Suivis d’un Essai sur la meilleure manière de faire les emprunts publics; d’après la comparaison des Emprunts perpétuels & des Annuités de quinze année, en Angleterre; par le même Auteur (Paris: Barrois l’Aîné, 1789).

Fig. 8.1. William Playfair, The Commercial, Political and Parliamentary Atlas, London, Debrett, 2nd edn, 1787.

Fig. 8.2. William Playfair, Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, Paris, Barrois, 1789.

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The book itself was a combination of the Atlas and the Essay on the National Debt, two publications that had received a weak reception in the French press. The positive survey of the Atlas in the Censeur universel anglais was largely based on the book’s advertisement by Playfair himself and broadly described the work’s scope. Nonetheless, the article highlighted the author’s concision, clarity and accuracy. Although, contended the reviewer, the plan of the book and its charts might have seemed awkward to some readers, Playfair’s argument offered clear if complex conclusions about the recovery of British foreign trade since 1782, conclusions overshadowed by the alarming prospect of the burden of the British national debt. Nonetheless and despite the praise showered on the accuracy of the information and data exhibited in Playfair’s tables, the excessive reduction in scale in the charts made several of them, according to the same reviewer, quite ‘indiscernible’. Such comments echoed the ‘accuracy conundrum’ already stressed by British critics reviewing the graphs and attested to the hesitancy of French public reception for the invention.27 Playfair’s other publication, the Essay on the National Debt, had been surveyed in the English Review in February 1788 and was translated in L’Esprit des journaux the following June.28 Although the reviewer conceded Playfair’s skill and clarity in his Essay, his gloomy assessment of the potentially revolutionary consequences of the debt were deemed hyperbolic and inflated. Furthermore, inaccuracies and misprints in the charts were highlighted with a dismissive final statement that was translated verbatim in French: ‘Plain arithmetical tables would have answered the purpose much better. These lineal representations appear to us like the use of hieroglyphics after the invention of letters.’29 The French title is a matter of importance: Playfair’s work was the first literal translation of ‘lineal arithmetic’ as ‘arithmétique linéaire’, a coinage that had first appeared in English in the dedication to Lansdowne in the Essay on the National Debt in 1787. It prompted an explanation from the author in a new preface to the French public, as he later also penned for his Lineal Arithmetic published in 1798. The chosen expression, ‘tableaux 27 Le Censeur universel anglais, 6 Jan. 1787, pp. 38–42. 28 Journal Encyclopédique ou Universel, Jan. 1786, pp. 33–5 ; The English Review, Or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, Feb. 1788, pp. 109–14; L’Esprit des Journaux, June 1788, pp. 138–40. On the latter publication, see Philippe Vanden Broeck, ‘L’Esprit des Journaux (1772–1818)’, in Jean Sgard (ed.), Édition électronique revue, corrigée et augmentée du Dictionnaire des journaux (1600–1789), http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0397-lesprit-des-journaux. 29 English Review, Feb. 1788, p. 114; see trans. in the Esprit des Journaux, June 1788, p. 140.

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d’arithmétique linéaire’, was a deliberate choice in translation. The geographical ‘carte’ (map) formerly used by Morellet, was resolutely discarded in favour of ‘tableau’ (table) a term unequivocally associated with mathematical expression and a nod to the scientific and its clear application to the economy, commerce and finance. The choices made by the translator represented an advertising ploy in addressing the charts to the French public. Thus, a few amendments from the English original work were required, providing a true illustration of an innovative cross-Channel transfer of knowledge in the translation and adaptation of data in the charts. Among other examples, the ‘Tableau de la dette nationale de l’Angleterre depuis 1688 jusqu’en 1786’ was transposed from the English Debrett editions’ ‘Chart of the National Debt of Britain from the Revolution to the End of the War with America’, but retained the original format with grids, scales, data and ornamentation. The transposition necessitated only a few changes in the title and legend. Such events as the Glorious Revolution were not deemed obvious enough to the French public and were replaced with dates. Likewise, amounts in British pounds were converted into French livres (at the 1789 rate) and the timeline was expanded to 1787 as a token of currentness and accuracy for a French public absorbed by financial considerations. With similar motives, the original 1787 English dedication in the Atlas to the Scottish advocate and agriculturist George Dempster of Dunnichen (1732–1818) and the dedication to Lansdowne in the Essay on the National Debt were expunged and replaced by a single address to Playfair’s French patron, the baron de Breteuil. The address boasted the merits (if not the ‘wonders’) of a work which allegedly followed from the Scotsman’s ‘personal invitation to France’, but it remained silent about the initial failure of the recommendation process and about Playfair’s wayward and arduous journey back into official favour. In a fit of biased logic and self-advertisement, Playfair presented his commercial observations as the motive behind Breteuil’s protection of ‘an establishment that was missing to French industry’, that is, his rolling-mill company. By contrast, official industrial patronage had de facto paved the way to the recognition of a formerly neglected book.30 By what was effectively a rescue operation, Playfair thus legitimized the original process of recommendation as intended by Shelburne in association with Morellet, but by means of his own industry and talents in association with Breteuil. By the same token, the French version of the Atlas discarded all the specific data and plates relating to British trade contained in the English original. It did so in order to keep to the generalities believed to be essential to maintain the interest of the book’s new French public. The 30 Playfair, Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, pp. v–vi.

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original statistics regarding English trade with Spain, Portugal, the German States, the Baltic and Nordic States, Turkey, Holland and Flanders, the United States, the Spanish West Indies, Africa, even Ireland and Scotland, were thus disposed of. The primary purpose of the French preface was to ensure publicity for the newly invented discipline of lineal arithmetic. The edition was clearly aimed at the French public and its edification through the neighbouring nation’s example, with the reduction of the previous works’ scope and data to strictly British matters. Strongly promoting the virtues of comparatism, Playfair offered up the British example taken from his former publications as a case study for France. Despite the differences between the two national constitutions and their respective financial situations, the principles exemplified by Britain in the Tableaux might provide, Playfair contended, matters of information and reflection for the French senior pars, the government and ‘the great national assembly which is about to take place in this kingdom’.31 The Scotsman was thus making a strategic case for the importance of his own discipline in the light of the coming of the états généraux called in August 1788 and when publications on financial matters were proliferating in France. Playfair obsequiously praised the French system of government as more vigorous than the British, with ministers more likely to apply better policies (at least when established) and more able to set up a better system of finance. In resuming his criticisms against the British system of finance, the author nonetheless displayed a striking optimism about the two countries: if British finance had recovered, France’s was next on the path to re-establishment. Returning to his main contention in the Essay on the National Debt, Playfair paradoxically asserted that Britain had conducted a faulty finance policy in regard to public loans, even though the outcome of this had proved successful. In return, the French government could benefit from its neighbour’s example to sketch an active and decisive plan.32 Linear arithmetic might thus provide men of state with appropriate information and highlighted the salient numerical figures and trends necessary to the establishment of an ‘enlightened’ policy. A supportive reference to a false assumption in the Letters of Junius (1769–72) about the decline of British foreign trade was also the occasion for a vindication of the public utility of statistical graphs for France, though the typically British reference compelled Playfair to an extensive account and commentary to the French

31 Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, p. viii. 32 Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, p. ix.

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public.33 The expertise and pedagogy provided to the French public on debt and the sinking fund proved instrumental to the advertising of lineal arithmetic. Given that the French debt had by then reached some five billion French livres, the debate on public finance was raging indeed and the British example was looming large in public opinion. The British debt had urged the establishment of a new sinking fund in 1786, allowing the debt-service coverage ratio to drop to 3.8 per cent in 1788 as it was peaking at 7.5 per cent in France. Although, by 1788, the British national debt had reached some £245 million, the equivalent of six billion French pounds, 85 per cent was already consolidated and regularly amortized.34 An amortization plan was urgently needed in France as the lenders’ confidence waned and the political crisis worsened. The impact of Playfair’s essay, for all the timeliness of its publication, was somehow difficult to assess, given that the prospects for French national finance were being drawn from a foreign example rather than from direct illustration. Moreover, the French ‘enlightened’ public was already well acquainted with the literature on the sinking fund, notably through the observations in the existing translations of Richard Price’s Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt (1772 and 1774) and Observations on Schemes for Raising Money by Public Loans (1777). As early as 1776, the Observations sur la nature de la liberté civile, an anonymous French translation of Price’s essays on the national debt and public loans, was published in Rotterdam; in 1782, the Genevan economist Pierre Prevost (1751–1839) published in Berlin his État des finances d’Angleterre au commencement de la guerre d’Amérique, extrait des Observations de M. Price, a translation of Price’s account of British finances, and in 1783 the calculator Hocquart de Coubron’s Vues d’un citoyen sur la dette de l’État et concordance de ces vues avec celles du Dr Price was published in the Hague. Cross-Channel comparatism was also à la mode with the anonymous Situation actuelle des Finances de la France & de l’Angleterre already stressing comparisons between France and Britain published in 1788.35 In 1786, the establishment of a national sinking fund across the Channel had already provoked 33 Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, p. xv. 34 Jean-Marie Thivaud, ‘Dette publique, politique monétaire, emprunt, impôt en perspective historique, XVIe–XIXe siècles’, Revue d’économie financière 46 (1998): 17–42; Daniel Carey and Christopher J. Finlay (eds), The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in Britain, Ireland and America, 1688–1815 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011). 35 Jean-Marie Thiveaud, ‘Aux origines de la notion d’épargne en France: ou du Peuple-prévoyance à l’État-providence (1750–1850)’, Revue d’économie financière 42 (1997): 179–213.

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comments and Price’s contentions about the schemes for a sinking fund based on the British example were already championed in France by the Genevan mathematician and actuarian Emmanuel Etienne Duvillard de Durand (1755–1832) who minutely reproduced these in Recherches sur les rentes (1787), a work readily illustrated by tables and graphs.36 There was nothing new about such Franco-British comparisons: in 1781, the Swiss financier Isaac Panchaud (1737–89) had issued his Réflexions sur l’état actuel du credit public de l’Angleterre et de la France, and, shortly before Playfair’s Tableaux, the engineer and finance expert Guillaume-Charles Faipoult de Maisoncelles (1752–1817) had published his Situation actuelle des finances de la France et de l’Angleterre. De Maisoncelles’s work was fairly widely reported in the press, notably in the Journal de Paris and the Journal encyclopédique.37 Playfair’s arguments struck a nationalistic chord with an indirect call to invigorate France not just by credit, but by better credit. His conclusions that a proper amortization plan for the debt with a sinking fund would improve a country’s finance seemed at least to raise spirits, and, certainly, the reviews did not miss the opportunity to stress the apparently appalling situation of British state finance. Playfair thus served further ongoing antiNecker interests as an alternative option to the new minister’s fiscal reform plan. The Scotsman’s entry to public debate was carefully planned: in the spring of 1789, Breteuil was actively preparing his return to office after a few months’ fall from grace during Jacques Necker’s ministry (August 1788– July 1789) with a financial scheme of his own (a 100 million livres loan) to be presented to Louis XVI to circumvent the future assembly’s potential hold on public finance. The project was to be set up by de Batz himself and ‘the leading bankers in Paris’.38 In this respect, Playfair’s table that portended a good or bad outcome showed the amortization of a twenty million livre loan by the way of a ‘fonds d’amortissement’ (sinking fund). That, 36 On Duvillard de Durand, see Guy Thuillier, ‘La carrière d’Emmanuel-Étienne Duvillard’, Le premier actuaire de France: Duvillard (1755–1832) (Paris, Comité d’Histoire de la Sécurité Sociale, 1997), pp. 1–24; id., ‘À propos des papiers d’Emmanuel-Étienne Duvillard de Durand (1755–1832)’, Histoire Économique et Financière de la France, Études et documents, II (Paris : Imprimerie Nationale, 1990), pp. 425–36. 37 See ‘Faipoult (Guillaume-Charles)’, Antonetti, Les ministres des Finances, pp. 179– 200 and ‘Faypoult (Guillaume Charles)’, in Louis-Gabriel Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (Paris: 1843), 13: 470–71. The reviews of the Situation des finances are given in the Journal de Paris, 27 April 1789 and in the Journal Encyclopédique ou Universel of May 1789, pp. 57–92. 38 Marquis de Bombelles, Journal, 8 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1977–2013), 2: 342–3; see Munro Price, The Fall of the French Monarchy, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil (London: Macmillan, 2002), pp. 72–4.

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and his assurance of a reduction by 50 per cent of the debt’s burden, may be regarded as supplementary arguments in Breteuil’s lobbying campaign for his return to official business. The possibility of the establishment of a French national sinking fund was raised and thoroughly discussed in the King’s council in July 1789, but eventually discarded.39

Literary Promotion His translation secured, Playfair moved a step further towards literary recognition with a reception at the Académie des Sciences, the subject of an anecdote boastfully – and repeatedly – recorded in his later works, the Lineal Arithmetic (1798), the 1801 third edition of the Commercial and Political Atlas and his British Family Antiquity (1809). In the latter he gave a more detailed account: When my book on Linear Arithmetic was translated into French and a copy presented to the Academy des sciences, M. Condorcet made me a fine speech. I was placed on the right hand of the president, during the sitting and invited to come when I pleased, with a promise, that by calling out a member, I should always be admitted, as indeed I afterwards was.40

Although Breteuil was a Membre honoraire de l’Académie des Sciences and a great provider of technical assistance to the society when in office, the official sponsor to the Académie was Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde (1735–96), one of the most active academicians of the time.41 An enthusiastic engineer, Vandermonde was also the curator of the unique collection of machines bequeathed by the inventor Jacques Vaucanson (1709–82) to the king. Playfair himself later recalled Vandermonde as a ‘conservator of models of machines’.42 The shared interest of the two men in machines, 39 Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, pp. 85–6; Price, The Fall of the French Monarchy, pp. 70–4. 40 W. Playfair, ‘Conclusion of the English Peerage’, British Family Antiquity (London, 1809), 2: xxxiv, note. 41 Gérard Jorland, ‘Vandermonde, Alexandre-Théophile (1735–1796)’, in Claudine Fontanon and André Grelon (eds), Les professeurs du Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, 2 vols. (Paris: CNRP-CNAM, 1994), 2: 634–9; Denis Woronoff, Alain Alcouffe, Giorgio Israel, Gérard Jorland and Jean-Claude Perrot, ‘Vandermonde’, in Daniel Nordman, Jean Dhombres et al. (eds), L’École normale de l’an III, 5 vols. (Paris: Dunod, 1992–2016), 2: 339–58. 42 See André Doyon et Lucien Liaigre, ‘L’Hôtel de Mortagne après la mort de Vaucanson, 1782–1837’, Histoire des entreprises 11 (May 1963): 5–23; Liliane Hilaire-Pérez,

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applied mathematics, engineering and political economy cemented their friendship, while Playfair’s training and technical knowledge acquired with Boulton and Watt and his various technical schemes could not fail to stir the academician’s curiosity. Vandermonde’s steadfast involvement in the French Revolution would nonetheless motivate Playfair’s withdrawal from his society in 1791. Playfair’s active advertising campaign, notably through a series of complimentary copies to officials, is illustrated by the archives of the Académie des Sciences: on the 28 March 1789, very shortly after the book’s publication, the Académie’s president Condorcet recorded that ‘M. Plainfair [sic] sent [in] a copy of his work on finance and lineal arithmetics’.43 Apart from prestigious individuals and corresponding members, very few introduced visitors were allowed to attend the private meetings of the Académie, on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the Louvre.44 Hence Vandermonde’s enforced intercession for Playfair when, in 1786, for instance, the English botanist Sir James Edward Smith had himself to rely on academic sponsorship to be admitted to the sittings, of which he would later give a rather ironic account.45 Breteuil’s and Vandermonde’s protection may well explain the ‘general invitation’, a distinguished honour in some respect, granted to Playfair to attend the sittings, even though these were more social events between members than actual scientific meetings. Indeed, the two-hourlong sessions were mostly dedicated to the reading of correspondence addressed to the Académie, the presentation of works by members, the listening to the experiences of a few introduced authors and scientists (among whom Playfair might have been one) and the presentation of memoirs by some academicians. The alleged honouring of Playfair by his being led to his seat by the president apparently conveyed dignity to the event, but some depictions of the sittings were as much ironic as they were comical. In 1780, the Swedish astronomer and Académie correspondent Anders-Johan Lexell was struck by the academicians’ lack of attention and ‘Les depôts d’inventions en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle’, in Patrice Bret, Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère and Liliane Hilaire-Pérez (eds), Des matériaux pour l’histoire, Archives et collections scientifiques et techniques du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: ENS Éditions, 2000), pp. 25–37; Stéphane Van Damme, Paris, capitale philosophique: de la Fronde à la Révolution (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005), pp. 186–7. 43 Archives de l’Académie des Sciences, Procès-verbaux des séances, 28 Mar. 1789, fol. 86: ‘M. Plainfair [sic] a envoié un exemplaire de son ouvrage sur les finances et sur l’arithmétique linéaire.’ 44 Bruno Belhoste, Paris savant. Parcours et rencontres au temps des Lumières (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), ch. 1: ‘Messieurs de l’Académie’. 45 James Edward Smith, A Sketch of a Tour on the Continent, in the Years 1786 and 1787, 3 vols. (London, 1793), 1: 130–2.

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constant chatting during the lectures, while James Edward Smith sneered at the incessant talking of members which at times compelled the president to ring his bell ‘only when the general noise prevents his hearing himself or his next neighbour’.46 For linear arithmetic, Playfair’s invitation to the Académie represented more than a mere rescue from obscurity. Indeed, the author’s socializing with such figures as Condorcet, whose interest in political economy was particularly active at the time, might be seen as a clever attempt to infiltrate the circles of the scientific and intellectual élite. In 1787, a dedicated commission, notably composed of Condorcet, Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94), Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), Jacques Antoine Cousin (1739–1800) and Vandermonde, was formed to assess the viability of financial and insurance projects at the behest of Breteuil, whose desk was strewn with various national bank and credit schemes. By then, Condorcet was perfectly aware of the mathematics of rents and the amortization of public debts. His conversations with his collaborator and disciple Duvillard de Durand, notably on the latter’s Recherches sur les rentes and his project of a ‘Caisse d’accumulation des épargnes et d’assurance sur la vie’, are well known. The two men were actively working on Condorcet’s project of mathématique sociale and the secrétaire was already corresponding with Breteuil on some aspects of the subject.47 The Scotsman’s ‘invention’ could hardly fail to draw the secrétaire’s attention: the move towards the Académie was perfectly consistent with the nature of the publication, the history of its patronage and Playfair’s own academic acquaintances.48 Even so, Playfair’s social contacts fuelled his retrospective contempt for what he regarded as depraved French ‘luminaries’ and ‘system mongers’ turned revolutionaries:

46 Belhoste, Paris savant, pp. 15–17; Smith, A Sketch, 1: 131. Lexell’s report is to be found in a letter to Johann Albrecht Euler, 7 Jan. 1781, in Arthur Birembaut, ‘L’Académie royale des Sciences en 1780 vue par l’astronome suédois Lexell (1740–1784)’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 10:2 (1957): 148–66. 47 Giorgio Israel, ‘The Two Paths of the Mathematization of the Social and Economic Sciences’, Physis, XXX (1993): 27–78; Bernard Bru and Pierre Crépel, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, Arithmétique politique: textes rares ou inédits (1767–1789) (Paris: INED, 1994), pp. 524–9 and 536–42; Jean-Marie Thiveaud, ‘Condorcet: prévoyance, finance et probabilités, entre raison et utopie’, Revue d’économie financière 49 (1998): 51–77. 48 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Anne Rasmussen (eds), La science populaire dans la presse et l’édition (Paris: CNRS, 1997); on Britain, Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1600– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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I had the chance to know Condorcet, la Harpe, Morellet and a number more of the great modern luminaries when I was at Paris and I saw them near enough to hate and despise them and I continue to do so, notwithstanding their learning and abilities. The greater those were, the more blameable were their possessors for misapplying them.49

Later, in the ‘Conclusion of the English Peerage’ of the British Family Antiquity (1809), Playfair was nonetheless to soften his stance against the French Luminaries: As to the system mongers and philosophers, I had no personal reason to dislike them; I knew many of them and they behaved very well to me […] As individual men, their conduct was polite, attentive and flattering.50

The advertising and patronage process was also to include the press. Ensuing reviews in two official publications dedicated to science and literature, the Mercure de France and the Journal des savants, in June 1789 were part of this strategy, as for any officially supported publication. It was a blatant illustration of its patronage.51 It is true that the Journal des Savants offered only limited advertising, with a plain announcement of the publication, but this already represented a clear token of endorsement and a teasing intelligence on the amazing total amount of the English national debt.52 By contrast, the Mercure de France devoted a whole article to Playfair’s work that June.53 The Mercure’s publisher, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (1736–98), was none other than Jean-Baptiste Suard’s brother-in-law. The 49 William Playfair to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, 2 Dec. 1809, Letters from and to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq., 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1888), 1: 393. 50 Playfair, British Family Antiquity, 2: xxxiv. 51 On the Journal des Savants, Jean-Pierre Vittu, ‘Journal des savants (1665–1792, 1797)’, Dictionnaire des Journaux, http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0710-journal-des-savants; Jean-Pierre Vittu and Jeanne Pfeiffer, ‘Les journaux savants, formes de la communication et agents de la construction des savoirs (17e–18e siècles)’, Dix-Huitième Siècle 40 (2008): 281–300. On the Mercure de France, see Suzanne Tucoo-Chala, ‘Mercure de France ‘2’ (1778–1791)’, Dictionnaire des Journaux, http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0925-mercure-de-france-2. 52 Journal des Savants, June 1789, p. 442. 53 Mercure de France, 6 June 1789, pp. 27–30. See Rémy Landy, ‘Jean Baptiste Suard (1732–1817)’, Édition électronique du Dictionnaire des journalistes (1600–1789), http://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/759-jean-baptiste-suard; id., ‘Jean François La Harpe (1739–1803)’, ibid., http://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/444-jean-francois-la-harpe.

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Suards were also particular friends with Condorcet, with whom they sometime shared accommodation and who secured Jean-Baptiste’s problematic election to the Académie française in 1774.54 Suard himself was, since 1778, the rédacteur général of the Mercure and, although not very active, may have pulled strings to secure a review of Playfair’s publication. Another contributor to the Mercure was Jean-François de La Harpe (1739–1803), man of letters and an academician, with whom Playfair was acquainted. The anonymous reviewer, continuing Playfair’s argument in the French preface, gave more emphasis to financial matters than to the charts themselves, even though these were praised for their clarity. Endorsing the rosy prospect of a better financial situation in France compared to the situation in Britain, the reviewer celebrated the Tableaux as a work of information and national recovery in an alarming time of debate and despair over public affairs.55 According to this well-informed article, the overall quality of the publication, described as ‘one of the most commendable on finance and commerce that has been published for a long time’, was a result of the close collaboration between the author and his translator, the latter enjoying the privilege of ‘working under Mr Playfair’s eyes’.56 By such a multilevel endorsement process, Playfair was characterized in public debate as apparently conservative, an alternative voice trying to bypass Necker’s reforms. Another later – and positive – review arrived in revolutionary times in January 1790 in the science section of the Journal de Paris.57 The science reviewer and founder of the publication, Antoine Cadet de Vaux (1743– 1828), was himself a chemist and apothecary and was very well connected to Parisian literary and scientific intelligentsia as a younger brother to the chemist and academician Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt (1731–89).58 Whether de Vaux was in any way acquainted with the original works is unknown, but the review particularly stressed the clever political transposition to the current situation and parallels between Britain and France, celebrating the skills of the author and his scheme: ‘M.W. Plaifair [sic] now 54 See Suzanne Tucoo-Chala and William Murray, ‘Charles Panckoucke (1736–1798)’, Édition électronique du Dictionnaire des journalistes, http://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/616-charles-panckoucke. 55 Mercure de France, 6 June 1789, p. 30, trans. J.-F. Dunyach; on the management of financial matters in France, see Michel Morineau, ‘Budgets de l’état et gestion des finances royales en France au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue Historique 264 (1980): 289–336. 56 Mercure de France, 6 June 1789, p. 30, trans. J.-F. Dunyach. 57 Journal de Paris, vendredi 22 janvier 1790, p. 87. On the publication, see http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0682-journal-de-paris. 58 http://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/136-antoine-cadet-de-vaux.

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residing in Paris where he has formed a most useful enterprise [for the rolling of all sorts of metal] that was missing in France, repays his debt as a citizen to the new fatherland he has chosen by spurring the spirits of those who are lamenting on the state of our finance …’.59 Praising the wisdom, clarity, accuracy and public utility of the book, the reviewer signalled the book as worthy of the attention of all legislators in charge of finance, ‘the most difficult branch’ of state affairs. By the summer of 1789, Playfair seemed to be on the brink of achieving the aim of any writer and professional in ancien régime societies with the recognition of his skills by the state through positions, privileges, access to official circles and, notably, the endorsement by the Académie, an institution exquisitely epitomized by Liliane Hilaire-Pérez as the ‘state administration of proven public utility’.60 He had almost, and without Morellet’s help, made his way … until the Revolution decided otherwise.

Conclusion A genuine case study in cross-Channel hybridity involving technical and industrial know-how, scientific skills and theoretical achievements, William Playfair’s activity in Paris at the very end of the ancien régime, his meandering path towards patronage and the translation of his works, crucially addresses the problematics of protection and clientism. It also provides an illustration of the various, sometimes overlapping, sometimes parallel, socializing processes at stake in the official circles and public spaces devoted to the promotion of scientific education and economic and technical modernization. If the failed initial scheme secured a conventional ‘patron–broker–client’ relationship, the process leading to Playfair’s fleeting success, notably the French translation of the Political and Commercial Atlas and the Essay on the National Debt in the spring of 1789, provides significant insight into the ways in which social barriers might be bypassed.61 Beneath the apparently rigid and ‘traditional’ orders, ranks and social boundaries of pre-revolutionary France, there was obviously room for alternative paths. In this respect, Playfair, one of the many illustrating the impact of individual circulations of middlemen and go-betweens, makes a 59 Journal de Paris, vendredi 22 janvier 1790, trans. J.-F. Dunyach. 60 Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, L’Invention technique au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), p. 50. 61 Sharon Kettering, ‘The Historical Development of Political Clientelism’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18: 3 (Winter 1988): 419–47; see also Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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strong case for the revision of the classical and hierarchical top-down and centre–periphery perspectives as the driving forces of patronage and the circulation of ideas in the ancien régime. This history of Playfair in France blurs the distinction between the direct and indirect diffusion of knowledge in the European Enlightenment.62

62 See Stéphane Van Damme, À toutes voiles vers la vérité. Une autre histoire de la philosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Seuil, 2014) and Antoine Lilti, L’héritage des lumières - Ambivalences de la modernité (Paris : Seuil/Gallimard, 2019).

9

The Printing Press and Colonial Newspapers in the Lesser Antilles Francesco A. Morriello

A

s the number and activities of printing presses proliferated so spectacularly during the second half of the seventeenth century, so did the nature and reach of their activity. So much has been evident in the preceding chapters: that the presses increasingly provided governments, military personnel, religious officials, merchants, finance agents, investors and many others with the ability to reproduce texts and disseminate them to varied reading audiences. Much journalism developed from the conveyance of business news, and the history of indigenous presses in many colonies, and especially in the Caribbean, reflected the hunger for news of financial and commercial conditions and activities. Caribbean plantation economies in particular became centres of extraordinary global profit, and financial news became imperative. The growth of plantation economies exhibited a close relationship to the growth of publishing industries that served imperial goals.1 What has not been as stressed so far, whether concerning financial, religious or political publications, is the speed with which printed production and then, especially during the eighteenth century, circulation might be undertaken. The speed of production and circulation was also startling in comparison to scribal methods. Considerations of speed, however, become more complex as other material conditions, and notably shipping and cargo loading, changed, a transformation often driven by the new needs of expanding and increasingly far-flung colonial territories and global trading and financial relationships. 1 John J. McCusker, Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (1997); and John J. NcCosker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism (Amsterdam: Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief, 1991).

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A fundamental aspect of the reconfiguration of time and space in the traffic in books and print over this period is the changing relationship between the metropole and the distant recipient of its goods – but where developments in the ‘outpost’ (as seen in fascinating focus in Chapter 6) increasingly offered challenges in the interpretation of received materials or even challenged and reshaped the relationship itself. During the eighteenth century, London alone hosted almost 650 printing businesses,2 while in Paris some 1,224 printing, publishing and bookselling establishments operated between 1788 and 1813. Approximately 47 printers and 179 booksellers and publishers worked in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution.3 The contrast with the metropolitan book trades and those of the British and French colonies is all the more dramatic, therefore. Despite Europe’s reliance on the printing press, its introduction to the Caribbean colonies came much later. In 1718 (twenty-three years after Petiver learned of Hans Sloane’s preparation of his printed catalogue of plants in the island4), Jamaica became the first British island to receive a printing press. In the case of French possessions, Saint-Domingue first maintained a press in 1724, although because of restrictions from the colonial governments it took decades before its printing houses operated on a regular basis. Nevertheless, colonial officials soon appreciated the benefits of having a local press, relieving them of reliance on the importation of printed items and documents from Europe, especially in terms of the publication of items such as official notices, government records and mercantile contracts. Printing presses soon travelled beyond the Greater Antilles, appearing in islands across the Lesser Antilles, including Martinique in 1727, Barbados in 1731 and Guadeloupe in 1764. By the mid-eighteenth century, and as financial as much as political needs grew, the production and reception of local print became a regular part of daily colonial life across the Caribbean, with printers in many of these islands founding their own newspapers, each relying on a myriad of local and foreign sources for information. In comparison with the major islands of the Greater Antilles and despite the significance of these developments, scholarship on the broader history of printing in the Lesser Antilles remains largely neglected. Many existing studies are also very dated. Outside of the important but specific studies of the origins of financial journalism, scholarly attention to British and 2 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 120. 3 Carla Hesse, ‘Economic Upheavals in Publishing’, in Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (eds), Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 92. 4 See above, p. 24.

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French Caribbean printing has focused primarily on the two colonies with the largest producers of print, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. These two colonies were responsible for the greatest volume of individual newspapers and the largest number of operational presses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing studies also tend to focus on either the British or the French islands; rarely on both.5 And, despite a re-emergence of this area of study in recent years,6 the focus on Caribbean printing operations is often secondary to arguments about political or scientific discourse.7 Another difficulty which has thwarted more detailed study of printing in the Lesser Antilles is the notable disparity in the numbers of presses across each island. In Jamaica, for example, some forty printers operated in 1800; in the same year, Barbados boasted two.8 In the French Caribbean, many of the locally generated printed works came out of Saint-Domingue, rather than from the smaller islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Moreover, in comparison to the British, French colonial presses were heavily controlled and moderated by the respective local governments, requiring exclusive royal privileges to operate printing houses. The privileges limited the number of establishments printers might 5 For works on printing and newspapers published in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean, see: Douglas C. McMurtrie, Early Printing in Barbados (London: Privately printed, 1933); M.J. Chandler, ‘Barbados’ First Paper Appeared in 1731’, IPI Report 15: 11 (Mar. 1967); Bradford F. Swan, The Spread of Printing: The Caribbean Area (Amsterdam: Abner Schram, 1970); John Lent, Third World Mass Media and their Search for Modernity: The Case of Commonwealth Caribbean, 1717–1976 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1977); Roderick Cave, Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies (London: Pindar Press, 1987). For such works in the French Caribbean, see: Jacques Gazin, Elements de bibliographie générale, méthodique et historique, de la Martinique (Fort-de-France: E. Leroux, 1926); Lenis Blanche, Contribution à l’histoire de la presse à la Guadeloupe (Basse-Terre: Government of Guadeloupe, 1935); Gérard Lafleur, La presse en Guadeloupe (Basse-Terre: Archives départementales de Guadeloupe, 1997); Marie-Antoinette Ménier and Gabriel Debien, ‘Journaux de Saint-Domingue’, Revue d’histoire des colonies 36 (1949): 424–75; Clarence Brigham, ‘Cabon’s History of Journalism in Haiti’, American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, n.s. 49 (19 Apr./18 Oct. 1939). 6 Jeremy Popkin ‘A Colonial Media Revolution: The Press in Saint-Domingue, 1789– 1793’, The Americas 75: 1 (Jan. 2018): 3–25. 7 For contemporary works referring to printing in the British and French Caribbean, see: James E. McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue and the Old Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 8 Swan, The Spread of Printing, pp. 14, 17–18.

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open. However, this changed after the French Revolution, which prompted a surge in colonial papers, especially in Saint-Domingue. What did not change was the fragility and ephemerality of so much of the new production. Much of the original print generated in the Caribbean has not survived. Especially during the eighteenth century, many colonial newspapers have missing years and decades of interrupted print runs. This chapter examines the emergence and spread of colonial printing and newspaper production across three proximate British and French islands in the Lesser Antilles: Barbados, Martinique and Guadeloupe. The printing and dissemination of newspapers were difficult processes. Colonial printers were beleaguered by competition from other journals, by government surveillance and intervention and by logistical problems in the dissemination of printed material, ranging from inclement weather to incessant warfare in this age of revolution. These setbacks, when combined with the colonists’ increasing desire for information amid the escalating military and revolutionary conflicts of the late eighteenth century, encouraged a new appreciation of print in all three islands. The printed productions of these closely situated islands bore distinct similarities as well as differences. This study draws on surviving print runs of newspapers published across the Lesser Antilles from the years of their foundation until the close of the Napoleonic Wars. It will illustrate how the conflicts gripping the wider Atlantic world between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fundamentally shaped the structure of information circulation (and especially that beyond the financial) across the islands.

The Advent of Printing in the Lesser Antilles As there were far more British than French colonial possessions in the Caribbean in this period, so the volume and circulation of print in British possessions was far greater than that in the French. The first printing press established in Jamaica in 1718 arrived with the printer Robert Baldwin, who founded the first British colonial newspaper, The Weekly Jamaica Courant. The newspaper was printed as a four-page issue, with foreign and business news included on the front page. There was a significant amount of room allotted for the current trading prices of commodities, such as sugar, coffee, tobacco and indigo, among others. The following pages were led by local news among the colonies, then an extensive advertisement section for various goods and services, and finally, a section dedicated to runaway slaves. This last section provided readers with the names of the slaves, where they had escaped and whom they could contact for a possible reward. This general formula would soon become the standard format for most British and

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French Caribbean newspapers in the ensuing decades, especially as such print runs became more regular, detailed and customized to the needs and desires of subscribers. In terms of colonial printing, Barbados is of particular importance, as it was one of the first colonies in the Lesser Antilles (including islands in both the Leeward and Windward Isles) to both receive a printing press and publish a local newspaper. The first printing press arrived in Barbados in 1731, approximately thirteen years after printing began in Jamaica and around the same time that presses were set up across select islands in the Lesser Antilles, including Martinique, which saw its first press delivered some four years earlier, in 1727. These two islands were early in their receipt of presses; many other islands in this area received theirs much later. Antigua, for example, did not receive a printing press until 1748, when it was brought to the colony by Thomas Smith, who worked under Benjamin Franklin prior to his arrival in the Caribbean. Franklin’s impact on Caribbean printing extended to printers in other islands as well, such as Samuel Keimer, who, like Smith, also worked for Franklin in Philadelphia before his move to Barbados in 1729. Grenada received a printing press in early 1765, over thirty years after Barbados, when it was introduced by William Wayland. There is mention by contemporary press historian and founder of the American Antiquarian Society, Isaiah Thomas, that there might have been an earlier press, although physical evidence of the printed material it produced is non-existent. Like all other printing presses across the British and French Caribbean, the establishment of the press was accompanied by the introduction of a colonial newspaper, which served as the official mouthpiece for the colonial government. In Grenada, this took the form of the Royal Grenada Gazette, although the island later featured additional newspapers, such as Matthew Gallager’s Weekly Courant in the 1790s.9 Printing presses and their newspapers also catered to the current needs of the incumbent government. Alexandre Midleton’s printing operations amid Grenada’s brief annexation by the French in 1779, for example, included the production of a series of French books at Saint-George.10 Similarly, the Leeward island of Dominica also received its printing press in 1765, when it was established in Rouseau by printer William Smith, who simultaneously founded the newspaper The Dominica Gazette. The Gazette, like many other Caribbean papers, 9 Roderick Cave, ‘Notes towards the History of Printing and Related Trades in the West Indies’ (Kingston, Jamaica: Department of Library Studies, University of the West Indies, 1975), p. 9. 10 Swan, The Spread of Printing, p. 29.

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underwent several name changes, starting with The Freeport Gazette or the Dominica Advertiser in 1767 and The Freeport Gazette or the Dominica Chronicle in 1771. Printing presses and colonial newspapers continued to appear in succession across other British islands in the Lesser Antilles. St Vincent established its printing operations in 1767,11 while in the Bahamas the press came much later to Nassau, when it was introduced in 1783 by printer John Wells, a Loyalist from Charleston, South Carolina, who fled to the Caribbean after the British evacuation near the end of the American War of Independence.12 St Croix received its first press in 1770; Bermuda sometime just prior to the July 1784 first printing of the Bermuda Gazette by printer Joseph Stockdale; Trinidad in 1786; and St Eustatius’s first news­ paper appeared in 1789.13 Some British colonies did not receive printing presses until well into the nineteenth century. Before then, these colonies relied on presses in nearby islands to publish any required print material, which was then transported to their intended locations for distribution. The Virgin Islands, for example, did not receive a press until the nineteenth century, relying on the presses at Antigua and St Kitts to carry out their printing needs. The Turks and Caicos Islands did not have their own press until as late as 1845, when it was established by Samuel Nelmes.14 Montserrat’s first press arrived even later in the nineteenth century. One of its first known newspapers, the Monserrat Chronicle, was published at Plymouth in 1875.15 As in other smaller islands, Monserrat’s most substantial work, the Laws of Montserrat from 1668 to 1778, was not actually composed in the island, but printed elsewhere in the Caribbean before its distribution.16 Paralleling the printing history of the British islands, the first printing presses to arrive in the French Caribbean did so in the Greater Antilles, with their establishment in Cap Français and Léogane in Saint-Domingue in 1724 and 1725, respectively. The presses were set up there by Dijon printer Joseph Payen. While Payen did manage to secure the required privilege for 11 Jeremy Dibbell, ‘The Caribbean and Bermuda’, in Michael F. Suarez, SJ and H.R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Book: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 711. 12 Cave, ‘Notes towards the History of Printing and Related Trades in the West Indies’, p. 5. 13 Dibbell, ‘The Caribbean and Bermuda’, p. 711. 14 Swan, The Spread of Printing, p. 29. 15 Howard S. Pactor, Colonial British Caribbean Newspapers: A Bibliography and Directory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 83. 16 Swan, The Spread of Printing, p. 29.

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this operation and published the colony’s first locally produced work, the Code Noir, his enterprises were closed down after he was caught producing pornographic works. Printing in Saint-Domingue experienced a lull until 1742, when there was another failed attempt. In terms of a regularized printing operation, this did not come about until 1763 in Cap Français and 1765 in Port-au-Prince, although the latter press was devastated by an earthquake in 1770 and did not get off the ground again until 1788.17 Like Saint-Domingue, printing in the French islands of the Lesser Antilles was varied and reflected in the disparate founding dates of the printing presses in their major islands. While Martinique received its first printing press not long after Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe did not receive its press until nearly four decades later, in 1764. Like their counterpart in the Greater Antilles, the early years of printing in Martinique and Guadeloupe were not entirely regularized. Gaps in publication years remained a constant feature until the second half of the eighteenth century. Printing presses were not introduced in Saint Barthélemy until 1799, whilst Saint Martin did not have its own press until the twentieth century, along with other smaller islands in the British Caribbean including Tortolla, Anguilla and St John.18 Despite the discrepancies in the dates and volume of print material published, the diverse cultural impact of printing in three of the largest British and French Caribbean islands, Barbados, Martinique and Guadeloupe, provides invaluable insight into how printing operated outside of the Greater Antilles. At issue is the exact content of what was published and how this related to the turbulent social and political changes resulting from the French Revolution, the ensuing Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, all of which introduced larger and more comprehensive Caribbean newspapers, despite their remoteness from Europe.

The Proliferation of Printing Presses and Colonial Newspapers in Barbados Barbados was a significant player in the emergence and proliferation of printing in the Lesser Antilles. In 1731 it became the first island in this area to receive a printing press, as well as to establish its own colonial newspaper.19 Barbados’ first printer, David Harry, worked with Samuel Keimer as his apprentice in Philadelphia before they both moved to Bridgetown, 17 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, pp. 97–8. 18 Dibbell, ‘The Caribbean and Bermuda’, p. 711. 19 Although Isaiah Thomas asserts that the press first arrived in 1730, no surviving documentation supports this; see Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, 2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1810), p. 385.

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whereupon their positions were reversed. When the printing enterprise suffered financially, Harry sold his equipment and ownership of the company to Keimer and returned to Philadelphia. Keimer became the chief printer in Bridgetown and published the colony’s first newspaper, The Barbados Gazette, which began with two issues printed each week but later retrenched to a weekly edition.20 Printing in the Caribbean was never an easy business and fiscal problems remained an ever-present reality for printers. A common issue faced by printers on the island from the earliest printing establishment onwards was collecting payment from newspaper subscribers. Colonial newspapers were sold on a subscription basis, whereby patrons placed a subscription for a set amount of issues, usually for a half or a full year. This allowed printers to anticipate the number of copies needed to be printed on a weekly or biweekly basis. The problem was that very few patrons enjoyed the capital to pay for an entire run of issues up front. Patrons therefore paid with credit, which proved challenging to collect, especially for smaller printers. Samuel Keimer experienced this frequently enough to include an editorial piece in The Barbados Gazette lamenting how subscribers had long received copies of his paper without paying for it – and also showing no intention of doing so.21 Another concern facing printers was libel, something that was especially problematic when the plaintiffs lived in the same colony. The hazard was exemplified by a charge made against Keimer for defamatory libel by a member of the King’s Council. While the printer and editor was not formally convicted by the attorney general, he was still required to keep the peace for a total of six months.22 Few copies of Keimer’s original Gazette print run survive, but of those that do, such as No. V, it is evident that even the earliest Barbados papers modelled their formats after journals in America and Europe. The newspaper bore the standard four-page format bifurcated in two separate columns with the sections devoted to local affairs, business news and foreign news organized by place of origin and date. The front pages commonly featured information pertaining to a wide spectrum of business and financial interests, particularly with regard to the purchase and sale of sugar. Much of the remaining article space was devoted to military news and foreign affairs updates and was followed by literary reviews and an advertisement section located at the back of the paper, which included the sale of books, garments and other goods and services. The books so advertised comprised military 20 Thomas, History of Printing in America (1810), p. 386. 21 McMurtrie, Early Printing in Barbados, p. 12. 22 Lent, Third World Mass Media, p. 30.

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and weapons guides, as well as English dictionaries, whose contents were noted as ‘designed for the Benefit of Young Scholars, Tradesmen, Artificers, Foreigners and the Female Sex, who would learn to spell truly; being so fitted to every Capacity, that it may be a ready and continual Help to all that want an Instructer [sic]’.23 The inclusion of these targeted audiences for Caribbean books helps to shed light on the demographics of a colonial readership in eighteenth-century Barbados, which comprised readers of different ages, sexes, occupations and nationalities. However, there was no mention of race, which was particularly important, given the increasing population of free people of colour in Barbados over the course of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, this general newspaper format continued well after Keimer’s death in 1738 and extended to other papers that developed as direct competitors to The Barbados Gazette, such as The Barbados Mercury, which was founded in 1762 by George Esmand and Company. Like the Gazette, which continued to be printed throughout the eighteenth century, as well as most newspapers printed in the British and French Caribbean, the Mercury was established in the largest colonial town, Bridgetown.24 In 1763, after the conclusion of the international conflict of the Seven Years’ War, the format of newspapers in Barbados was transformed, allowing more information to be disseminated to subscribers. The Barbados Mercury, for example, featured three columns as opposed to the two-columned formats used in earlier decades, along with larger pages and smaller type, allowing much more information to be included each week. The change gave the editors more space to include news updates from additional foreign and local sources. The 1 February 1766 edition of the Mercury featured news on varied topics pertaining to Europe, including finance, agriculture, torrential rain and fires, military and ecclesiastic affairs, pirate attacks and political updates. Given the recent war, much of the news focused on France and Britain, with smaller sections devoted to information from Rome, Lisbon, Parma, Cadiz and Hamburg, among others. Moreover, the paper promoted further interaction from local readers with the inclusion of letters to the editor, George Esmand. Many such letters appeared on the front page. Local affairs in Barbados were also given expanded space, with more comprehensive reports from the colonial assembly meetings and more extensive lists of ships registered at the Custom House with their arrivals, 23 The Barbados Gazette (no. V) 6 Nov. 1731 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) (hereafter AAS), p. 3. 24 Thomas, History of Printing in America, p. 389.

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departure schedules and next ports of call. Even the advertisement section was enlarged to provide more details of available goods and services, as well as information on up-coming slave auctions and notices for the capture of escaped slaves.25 After the deaths of George Esmand in 1771 and of his partner, William Walker, in 1773, ownership and editorial responsibilities of the Mercury transferred to John Orderson. Orderson’s printing company was run by himself until his retirement and thereafter by his son, also John, who took over the printing house. The Mercury stayed within the Orderson family company for decades afterwards, including after John junior’s death in 1798 and until his surviving co-partner, Isaac Williamson, cut off his connections with the newspaper, allowing it to transfer formally out of the Orderson family’s control in 1810.26 During this time, the Mercury maintained the new format that favoured the publication of as much foreign and local news as was possible, given the available news sources. In editions printed in the 1770s, for example, news updates from Constantinople were placed on the front page, followed by the latest ministerial appointments made in London. In addition, the advertisements became more varied in their offerings, with more specialized descriptions of available goods and services, such as plantations and other real estate properties for sale or rent, wagons and horses for rent and timber for sale.27 The onset of military conflict prompted an increase in the publication of news concerning the conflict itself, which helped satiate colonial readers’ demand for the latest news updates. In the later decades of the eighteenth century, this was especially noticeable in relation to the American War of Independence. In the issue of 2 September 1775, The Barbados Mercury included an editorial piece taken from the 13 July 1775 edition of the New York Gazetteer, which lamented, at the beginning of the war, the political contest with Britain and the disagreements over taxation and trade. Information on the escalating conflict flooded the newspaper’s pages, which also included a full-length reprint of ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North America’, which had met at the General Congress in Philadelphia before the colonists took up arms.28 The choice of news sources in this edition is interesting, as the editors of the Mercury 25 The Barbados Mercury, vol. IV, no. 35, 1 Feb. 1766 (AAS). 26 James C. Brandow et al. (eds), Genealogies of Barbados Families: From Caribbean and the Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1983), pp. 428–9. 27 The Barbados Mercury, vol. IX, no. 15, 1 Feb. 1770 (The National Archives UK, London) (hereafter TNA), pp. 1–4. 28 The Barbados Mercury, vol. III, no. 694, 2 Sept. 1775 (AAS).

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chose to include reproductions of information from newspapers printed in the American colonies, rather than London. This provided readers in Barbados with information about the conflict from the perspective of American colonists, rather than reliance on the view from metropolitan papers. There are several factors that may have contributed to this phenomenon, including the experience that many Caribbean printers had gained through working in the print trade in North America, with certain printers fleeing from the colonial mainland during the War of Independence itself. These printers were familiar with the news sources and printing networks in North America and applied their skills to the production of print material in the Caribbean. Another factor, and a prominent one, was the close proximity between the Caribbean and the other American colonies when compared with the 4,500 miles distance to Europe. The relative closeness to the American mainland allowed updates on the political and military situation from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that were more frequent than the news from Europe, which was almost three months’ sailing voyage from the Caribbean. Over the course of the war and in the years thereafter, the Barbados papers continued to include both American and British news sources in their pages, with a significant amount culled from letters and newspaper clippings. For example, in the Mercury of 5 June 1784 the newspaper included citations from numerous American news sources. Among these was a letter received from Boston concerning a convention to be held at Dedham, a dispatch from Charleston, South Carolina detailing the arrival of a ship at port from Antigua, a letter from New York explaining the passing of a bill and one other despatch received from Philadelphia outlining the payment of bills of credit of Congress.29 In the subsequent issue of the Mercury, the newspaper included a spread received from London that detailed the intricacies of selecting a Prime Minister in Britain and then followed up by the proclamation ‘Long Live the King’. The inclusion of both American and British sources, as well as clear indications of monarchist support, indicate that while the Barbados press did collect and publish information from sources from both sides of the Atlantic, this did not necessarily pose a problem for the press while the colonial government remained staunchly in support of the monarchy. This loyalty was reflected in the Mercury’s mastheads, which evolved from merely printing the newspaper’s title to providing a bolder version that featured an iconographic representation of the British royal coat of arms. 29 The Barbados Mercury, vol. I, no. 1149, 5 June 1784 (John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, Providence, RI) (hereafter JDRL), unnumbered page.

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News on military and political affairs was not the only feature of newspapers which also reflected the strong literary culture of colonial residents in Barbados. John Orderson senior was himself a self-confessed bibliophile and organizer of the island’s Literary Society, of which he was the president, secretary and librarian. The printer advertised the Society’s weekly meetings in the Mercury, with the hope of attracting new members. At the meetings, members could discuss books while enjoying refreshments as well as pay membership fees owed to the Society. Many fees were in long arrears, an issue that Orderson knew only too well from the colonial printing world.30 In The Barbados Gazette, such appreciation for the literary arts was reflected in the inclusion of various anecdotes, antidotes and advertisements for arrays of newly imported books on a variety of subjects including medicine, history, travel and dictionaries. These titles included Bryan Edwards’s History of the West Indies, John Coote’s History of England, William Guthrie’s Geography, Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution, John Owen’s Travels and more.31 After the conclusion of the war, Britain was once again embroiled in a military conflict with France during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), which eventually spread from the battlefields in Europe to the oceanic sea lanes and bays surrounding the Caribbean. The conflict had a particularly strong impact on the colonial press. The Wars, like the earlier Seven Years’ War, brought both economic disruption and economic and political opportunity, as evident with the increased use of the press as a mouthpiece and instrument for the local government. In a 1797 edition of The Barbados Gazette, the newspaper included an advertisement on its front page calling for ‘Able bodied Men of Colour. Any number of men of the above description who are free and willing to enter as soldiers in the service of His Majesty; shall on so doing receive from the subscriber the sum of thirty pounds this currency.’32 In this regard, the press helped the colonial government in whatever capacity it required, whether it was soliciting recruitment of soldiers to join the war effort or disseminating information on the various battles unfolding across the different locations around the wider Atlantic world. In this same issue, the Gazette provided readers with updates on a naval confrontation between the British and French fleets off the coast of Brest, including the number of troops and ships in the area.

30 The Barbados Mercury, vol. I, no. 1150, 12 June 1784 (JDRL), unnumbered page. 31 The Barbados Gazette, 16 Mar. 1797 (AAS), p. 3. 32 The Barbados Gazette, 16 Mar. 1797 (AAS), p. 1.

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Another important transformation in the colonial press in comparison to the early eighteenth century was the press’s emphasis on impartiality and journalistic integrity. On the very front page, directly beneath its masthead, The Barbados Gazette included the following notice: ‘They who conceive that our News-papers are no restraint upon bad men, or impediment to the execution of bad measures know nothing of this Country.’33 This assertion that the press was steadfast in its attacks against enemies of the state was further amplified by the newspaper’s inclusion of a separate notice later on in the same issue, asserting that the paper will remain ‘impartial’, as well as ‘confidential’ where matters of security are concerned. With regard to the former description, its impartiality was conditioned by its unwavering devotion as a ‘Friend of Government, of Freedom, of Virtue and every species of improvement’. Although the newspapers were not entirely impartial in their presentation of news, they did strive towards other benchmarks, such as journalistic integrity in terms of the sources from which they collected their information, as well as the speed by which it was disseminated to subscribers. For example, the Gazette assured readers that it contained ‘The Earliest Intelligence collected from the most authentic sources’,34 underscoring the newspaper’s insistence on collecting and distributing news and information to an eagerly awaiting reading public. This desire for more information delivered faster than before only increased in subsequent years, as Britain and France engaged in yet another conflict, the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). The newspapers in Barbados continued to be published during the conflict, among them The Barbados Mercury, which by 1814 had acquired the added title, ‘and Bridge-Town Gazette’. By this time, the paper was no longer under the stewardship of the Orderson family and appears to have reverted to the Walker family, from whom the Ordersons had first acquired the Mercury. While William Walker & Co. was officially listed as the newspaper’s printer, this operation was likely to have been run by the son or other relation of William Walker Sr., who had died more than forty years earlier. Nevertheless, the Mercury provided readers with meticulous information concerning the war with Napoleon, so much so that the size of the font had to be decreased so as to allow for a larger volume of news to be printed each week. The 4 June 1814 edition reveals that the Mercury divided the Napoleon-related news into sections, with reproductions of despatches received from London concerning Acts of Indictment charges put forward against 33 The Barbados Gazette, 16 Mar. 1797 (AAS), p. 1. 34 The Barbados Gazette, 16 Mar. 1797 (AAS), p. 4.

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Napoleon following his forced abdication with the Treaty of Fontainebleau (11 April 1814). There were also updated lists of the current military commanders, news of ships arriving at Barbados’s port amid the ongoing wars, government Acts passed in both Britain and France and ground-level news postings from Europe in a separate section entitled ‘Bonaparte’s Last Bulletin’.35 There was even a column detailing what life on the island of Elba was like, given Napoleon’s impending exile there. Moreover, with the bulk of the news sources being dated in early April and appearing in Barbados newspapers in early June, it is evident that the papers had certainly increased the speed by which they obtained their news, shaving off an entire month from travel times across the Atlantic ocean. Terms of the ensuing peace agreed with France continued to be published in the following issues of the Mercury, providing readers with the latest information that technology could provide at the time.36 From small, pamphlet-sized newspapers with brief snippets of foreign and local news to large, biweekly journals featuring the latest updates gleaned from sources all over the Atlantic world, the colonial newspapers, as well as the printing houses that produced them, experienced a substantial surge in growth from their introduction in 1731 to the end of 1815. The onset of a series of military conflicts, from the Seven Years’ War, to the American and French Revolutionary Wars and subsequently the Napoleonic Wars, facilitated leaps in the impact of print in Barbados. The island’s press included more information from a greater number of sources, encouraged increased engagement with readers in its publication of opinion pieces and letters to the editors and strove to print the news faster than ever before, all of which only continued to develop in the post-emancipation period.

The Proliferation of the Printing Press and Colonial Newspaper in Martinique and Guadeloupe In the French Caribbean, Martinique was the first colony after SaintDomingue to receive a printing press, which was conveyed there by one M. Devaux in 1727. However, regular printing operations did not take place until decades later, when printer Pierre Richard established operations in the colony in conjunction with his participation in establishing the colonial postal service. This service proved important in facilitating the distribution

35 The Barbados Mercury and Bridge-Town Gazette, 4 June 1814 (AAS). 36 The Barbados Mercury and Bridge-Town Gazette, 7 June 1814 (AAS).

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of the newspaper across the island.37 As in the British colonies, printers in the French Caribbean required a brevet d’imprimeur, a printing licence that allowed them legally to carry out such operations. However, one of the greatest challenges in the study of early printing in Martinique is that many of the original print runs of newspapers published in the island have not survived to the current day. Similar loss affects the productions of Guadeloupe, with the bulk of survivals dating from the later decades of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the sources that have survived provide an intriguing glimpse into how French colonial printing developed in relation to the difficulties but also opportunities presented by the French Revolutionary Wars. In the context of Martinique specifically, the colony’s flagship newspaper, the Gazette de la Martinique, was founded in 1785 by Pierre Richard and continued until about 1792. Most of the surviving editions of the Gazette are dated from between 1788 and 1790, with most of the earlier editions lost. Although this means that we are unable to chart much about the early development of Martinique newspapers, those surviving do shed some light on the impact of the French Revolution on the form and function of the colonial newspaper. In examining issues from the paper’s 1788 print run, for example, it is evident that the Gazette de la Martinique was structured very much like its counterparts in the British Caribbean, with a four-page format that included foreign, local and business and financial news, followed by general notices, lists of arrivals and departures of notable passengers, advertisements and runaway slave notices. The Gazette was accompanied by a supplemental edition which expanded upon general notices pertaining to Martinique, including local gossip, postings for the sale of available property and more in-depth descriptions of runaway slaves in the colony.38 The Gazette, like other newspapers throughout the British and French Caribbean, served as an extension of the colonial government, providing news and information that was moderated and vetted by the government before being released to the reading public. The 1790 edition of the paper provided readers with updates regarding the actions of the National Assembly in the early years of the French Revolution, devoting an entire section to the Assembly discussions and the changes it sought to implement towards both religious and secular officials. Other foreign news included mention 37 Alain Nabarra, Dictionnaire journaux gazettes (1600–1789) (Voltaire Foundation: University of Oxford), 599: http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0518-gazette-de-la-martinique, accessed 12 Nov. 2019. 38 Supplément au No. XXVI, 26 June 1788 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris) (hereafter BnF), pp. 113–14.

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of an earthquake that devastated a palace, cathedral and churches across Florence, whilst local updates described the arrival of a rescue ship at Fortde-France in Martinique.39 There were no articles that directly criticized either the metropolitan or colonial governments, underscoring the paper’s use as an instrument for colonial officials. In 1788, the Gazette de la Martinique was joined by another newspaper printed in the colony, the Gazette nationale et politique, established in Saint-Pierre by printer J.-B. Thounens, who was known to print works for other French colonies and particularly those in the Lesser Antilles such as Saint-Lucie (St Lucia). The newspaper, like its predecessor, very much reflected the ruling political system in the metropole, which by April 1793 was the National Convention. The 2 April edition of the journal was adorned with republican slogans, its editors choosing to follow the publishing date with the addition, ‘Second Year of the French Republic’. Moreover, the Gazette included a section near the middle entitled, ‘Avis patriotique’ or ‘Patriotic Notices’, which delved into the actions of ‘true patriots’ seeking to protect the conservation of not only France, but also the colonies. One such patriot was one Monsieur Aucane, who was described as a citizen first and foremost, as well as a friend of the Convention and French Republic.40 The attention to language was another important distinction between the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary newspapers in Martinique. In a 1788 edition of the Gazette, the paper largely avoided politically charged language, choosing instead to categorize its general bulletins to local residents as ‘Government Notices’ and ‘Diverse Notices’.41 News was presented according to foreign and local sources and divided as such in the opening pages of the newspaper. However, the French Revolution had a clear impact on the type of language used by the editors, which thus placed the term ‘citoyen’ or ‘citizen’ before the names of political actors it mentioned in its pages, such as Citizen Leopold Humblot, Citizen Ducert, Citizen Leblanc and Citizen Raux. All these individuals were listed in sequence in the same notice section.42 This change is significant in that it stresses the extent to which newspapers continued to align themselves with the colonial government, despite its transformation from one form of government, a monarchy, to another, a republic. This printing trajectory bore several similarities to Martinique’s neighbour to the north, Guadeloupe. While the islands of Guadeloupe, especially 39 40 41 42

Gazette de la Martinique, no. I, 7 Jan. 1790 (BnF), p. 6. Gazette nationale et politique, vol. VI, no. ix, 2 Apr. 1793 (AAS), p. 35. Gazette de la Martinique, no. XXV, 19 June 1788 (BnF), p. 107. Gazette nationale et politique, vol. VI, no. ix, 2 Apr. 1793 (AAS), p. 35.

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Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, did not receive a printing press until 1764, almost four decades after Martinique, they did begin regularly publishing a local newspaper roughly around the same time as Martinique, with its first newspaper, the Gazette de la Guadeloupe, having been established on 1 January 1788. The pre-revolutionary paper followed the same format as the Gazette de la Martinique, with the masthead bordered by an illustrated frame. The issue date was printed using the same font as the Martinique paper. Structurally, the newspaper featured foreign news first, followed by local news, government notices, general notices, advertisements and finally, runaway slave notices. Also like Martinique, presses in Guadeloupe required official approval from the government in the form of royal privileges, which bestowed the printer with the title of ‘Imprimeur du Roi’ or ‘The King’s Printer’.43 The Gazette was soon joined by another in Guadeloupe, entitled Affiches, announces et avis divers de l’Ile Guadeloupe, whose first issue came out in Basse-Terre in September of 1789 and continued to be published regularly until around August of 1790.44 Unlike its counterpart, the Gazette, the Affiches served more as a notice pamphlet for merchants on business news and the prices of commodities rather than a news source covering foreign and local affairs. Its opening pages provided subscribers with a list of the current bread prices in the different areas of Guadeloupe, from BasseTerre to Trois-Rivières, Petite-Goyave and Pointe-à-Pitre, among others. The same pricing model was then applied to other commodities, including different gradations of sugar, rum, molasses, cotton, coffee, flour and cacao. The subsequent page also included pricing guides, but for different food commodities imported from France, such as wine, butter and beef, all of which were organized according to the specific port cities from which they hailed.45 Rounding out the newspaper was a series of general notices that concerned local residents, as well as a section devoted to runaway slaves. Unlike Martinique, Guadeloupe has far fewer surviving newspapers from the period during and immediately after the French Revolutionary Wars and it is therefore difficult to examine the extent to which the conflict affected the production and reception of its printing. Nevertheless, a sole existing copy of another Guadeloupe newspaper published in 1804 does provide some insight into the transformation of its journals at the 43 Gazette de la Guadeloupe, no. XXII, 29 May 1788 (BnF), pp. 87–90. 44 Lowell Joseph Ragatz, A Guide for the Study of British Caribbean History, 1763–1834: Including the Abolition and Emancipation Movements (vol. 3) (Washington: U.S. Printing Office, 1932), p. 401. 45 Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers de l’Ile Guadeloupe, no. XVII, 24 Dec. 1789 (BnF), p. 66.

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advent of the Napoleonic Wars. The Journal officiel de la Guadeloupe et Dépendances was printed at Basse-Terre at the Print House of the Republic, with its forty-fourth issue produced on 22 August 1804.46 By comparing this edition with two separate Guadeloupe gazettes printed in the late 1780s and early 1790s, it is immediately apparent that there was a substantial shift in the Journal’s structure and scope. Starting with its choice of date, the newspaper opted to adopt the format of the Republican calendar (4 Fructidor, an 12 de la République), with the same dating format used throughout the newspaper’s content. There was also a heightened emphasis on dividing foreign news into sections according to nationality – and here there was a drastic increase in the amount of news collected from foreign sources. In this single issue alone, there were news updates collected from Spain, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Venice, the Helvetic Republic and Napoleon’s own short-lived sister nation, the Ligurian Republic, which consisted of both Genoan and Ligurian territories. These were all placed on the front page of the paper, while the journal moved the commodity prices to the rear, underscoring its emphasis on providing readers with the most up-to-date news to connect them with events shaping the wider Atlantic world. This was especially important, given that France was entering its second year of the Napoleonic Wars, with the French having taken Hanover the year before, in 1803. There was, however, one constant that connected this newspaper to all those others previously printed across the Greater and Lesser Antilles: the paper continued the tradition of serving as an instrument of the state. The newspaper indicated that its contents were first vetted by the interim colonial prefect of Guadeloupe, Simeon Roustagnenq, before it made its way to publication. This disclaimer was included not once, but twice in the same issue, under the same section concerning local news, illustrating how the press came under even closer moderation by the colonial government in the midst of Napoleon’s rise to power.

Conclusion Developments in the production and reception of printing in the British and French Caribbean took place amid one of the most tumultuous periods of the region’s history with the onset of multiple wars and revolutions, all of which changed the ways in which information was collected and disseminated. However, the introduction of the printing press and proliferation of locally published newspapers across the Lesser Antilles was a slow 46 Journal Officiel de la Guadeloupe et Dépendances, no. LXIV, 22 Aug. 1804 (AAS).

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and varied process in comparison with such phenomena in the Greater Antilles. In Barbados, Martinique and Guadeloupe, which were among the most economic and strategic colonies in the Lesser Antilles, the British and French colonial newspapers were more limited in terms of the volume of information they could provide, as well as in the number of sources from where they received their news. While the format of the papers remained constant in terms of their four-page structure cordoned off in sections devoted to foreign, commercial, financial and local news, lists of important passengers, general notices, advertisements and runaway slave notices, in the second half of the eighteenth century local and foreign news started to appear more frequently, with the foreign intelligence sourced from an increasing number of nations. Advertisements began to include illustrations to bring greater attention to the content. The newspapers began including editorials and letters from readers in an attempt to bolster engagement with them in the hopes of facilitating the procurement of sales, all the while expanding the connections between colonial residents. In the French Caribbean, the newspapers experienced a significant transformation in the way they used language. Words emerged that reflected the social and political movements associated with the French Revolution. However, these transformations did not come about during peacetime, but in times of conflict, as colonial residents strove to be updated on the latest news of the revolutions and wars waging across the Atlantic world. Most significantly, while the Lesser Antilles did not have as many newspapers as those printed in the Greater Antilles, those that they did produce provide a more complete understanding of the ways in which information circulated in the wider Caribbean. Printers sought to disseminate increasing amounts of information, even though they were beleaguered by a series of hindrances including faulty payments from subscribers, government moderation of what they printed and delays in travel time for information to make its way from one side of the world to the port cities across the Lesser Antilles. Despite these setbacks, the printing presses, as well as the newspapers they produced, expanded and increased in detail over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and especially during periods of revolutionary and military conflict, connecting individuals with news and information shaping daily life not only in the Caribbean but across the wider Atlantic world. The relationship in that form and function of the colonial newspaper, and in particular with its implications for governance within the colonies in Revolutionary later years of our period, is given further consideration (for the Spanish Caribbean and South America) in the next chapter.

10

Newspapers and the Atlantic Revolutions: The Circulation of the Gaceta de Madrid in the Spanish Caribbean Cristina Soriano

I

n July 1795, the Council of the Indies in Madrid revised the charges that the General-Captain of Venezuela, Pedro Carbonell, made against Juan Bautista Olivares, a mixed-race pardo musician from Caracas who had been sent to Spain. Carbonell accused Olivares of disturbing the tranquillity of the region by reading seditious materials to others and writing texts in which he supposedly referred to revolutionary ideas. After analysing Carbonell’s letters, the Council decided to follow the regular legal procedure, appointing members of the Justice Chamber in Cádiz to conduct Olivares’s trial.1 The judges in Cádiz investigated Olivares’s written correspondence and reading materials. They particularly inquired about his reading habits and preferences; they asked him if he had read, copied and circulated documents on the French Revolution or about republicanism. He answered that he had not read any papers regarding this issue, except for ‘the Gaceta de Madrid and the testament of the King of France’.2 The judges were not 1 ‘Auto en Cádiz sobre la Acusación del Capitán General de Venezuela a Juan Bautista Olivares, 31 de Julio de 1795’, AGI (Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla), Caracas, 346 and ‘Respuesta del Fiscal sobre caso de Juan Bautista Olivares, junio de 1795’, AGI, Caracas, 15. 2 See ‘Declaración de Juan Bautista Olivares, acusado de promover la intranquilidad pública, haciendo circular ideas sediciosas de libertad e igualdad, trasladado a Cádiz, donde se le siguió declaración indagatoria’, AGI Caracas, 346.

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surprised that Olivares had read about the French Revolution in the popular Gaceta de Madrid, as many readers in Spain had learned about the Revolution through the pages of this peninsular official newspaper, widely read in different corners of the kingdom.3 A few months later, Olivares was released and able to return to Caracas; the judges in Cádiz could not confirm that Olivares was in fact an insurgent planning to encourage insubordination in Venezuela.4 Through the judicial investigation, Olivares showed that the sources of information he had consulted to learn about Atlantic politics were much the same sources that everyone in both Spain and Spanish America used and knew well. He also demonstrated that reading Spanish official newspapers was not a crime and not even an act of defiance towards colonial authority. However, local authorities in Venezuela felt threatened by Olivares’s readings and knowledge and, as a result, officials fabricated all kinds of accusations to call the attention of imperial officials to a situation that was getting out of control: the increasing circulation of news about the French Revolution and the Saint-Domingue rebellions and the danger that the spread of this information represented for the tranquillity and peace of the Spanish possessions in America.5 Between 1789 and 1800, the increasing circulation in the Spanish Caribbean of texts and rumours about the Atlantic Revolutions – including the American, the French and the Haitian Revolutions – exacerbated fears of racial confrontation and political conflict. Ideas of liberty and equality from the French Revolution reached the towns and ports dispersed in the Caribbean basin and the turmoil of Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe compounded local political anxieties. Colonial officials and White elites in Cuba, Venezuela, coastal New Granada and in Santo Domingo began to pay more attention to the actions and the words of mixed-race, free Black and enslaved people and to reconsider their relations with these subordinated groups. At the same time, these officials and elites increased their vigilance over the lower-status communities of colour, trying to isolate them from external influences and sources of information.6 Such controlling actions, 3 For a detailed quantitative analysis of the reading public of the Gaceta de Madrid, see Elisabel Larriba, El público de la prensa en España a finales del siglo XVIII (1781– 1808) (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2013). 4 ‘Representación de Consejo de Indias, 6 de octubre de 1795’, AGI, Caracas, 15. 5 For a complete analysis of Olivares’s case, see Cristina Soriano, ‘“A True Vassal of the King”: Pardo Literacy and Political Identity in Venezuela during the Age of Revolutions’, Journal of Atlantic Studies, Global Currents 14:3 (2017): 275–95. 6 Several historical works have analysed the impact of revolutionary information in the Spanish Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions, see Ada Ferrer, ‘Noticias de Haití

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however, became very difficult because news about the revolutions flooded the region. Even official newspapers from Spain offered extensive and up-to-date information about the revolutionary events. What exactly did residents of the Spanish Caribbean learn about the Atlantic Revolutions from the Gaceta de Madrid? What kind of information about the revolutions was published in this newspaper? And what effects did this information have in the Spanish Caribbean? This chapter analyses the role that newspapers, and particularly the Gaceta de Madrid, played within the complex network of media and information that developed in the Spanish Caribbean during what is often termed ‘the Age of Revolutions’. The following argues that, despite all the efforts made by colonial agents to contain revolutionary information that might spark sedition and insurgency in the Spanish Caribbean, the popular official Gaceta offered detailed news on the Atlantic Revolutions and became a constant source of concern for the colonial government. By the close of the eighteenth century, it became very clear to colonial officials that Spanish America – and the Caribbean region in particular – was not a perfect extension of Spain: its socio-racial complexity and particularities, and its open and immediate exposure to the revolutionary theatre, required different measures of control and strategies to manage public information. Under turbulent circumstances, Spanish American vassals were not to be trusted and it was therefore critical to conceal the facts, or at the very least to offer distorted versions of them.

Spanish Enlightenment and Newspapers in the Spanish Atlantic A new generation of newspapers and political journals extended the range of political commentary and reflection in eighteenth-century Europe and North America, and, for the first time, according to Andrew Pettegree, en Cuba’, Revista de Indias LXIII:229 (2003): 675–94; Maria Dolores González-Ripoll, Consuelo Naranjo, Ada Ferrer, Gloria García and Josef Opatrný (eds), El rumor de Haití en Cuba: temor, raza y rebeldía, 1789–1844 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2004); Alejandro E. Gómez, Le spectre de la Révolution noire: L’impact de la révolution Haïtienne dans le monde Atlantique, 1790–1886 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013); Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018) and Cristina Soriano, Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, Diálogos Series, 2018).

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‘newspapers played a vital role not only in recording but in shaping political events’.7 In the Low Countries, England and France the commercial news market developed and expanded to play a decisive role in determining popular opinion. The huge expansion in this new media created a reading public that was more open to sharing political opinions and challenging traditional structures of power. According to Pettegree, by the end of the eighteenth century people in Europe had changed the ways they consumed news and this had a decisive influence on their political participation.8 Several historical studies have analysed the role of newspapers and political journals in the revolutionary years of the United States (1763–83) and France (1789–98).9 In the British colonies of North America, newspapers accounted for almost 80 per cent of all late-colonial imprints by title; and printers of newspapers played a crucial role in the revolutionary process. As charted in the previous chapter, printers themselves became a strong and critical force in shaping the communication networks of the nascent Republic and modelling the ways by which the new citizens might participate in politics.10 In the case of the French Revolution, the surge of newspapers, broadsheets and pamphlets in Paris was impressive: in 1788, for example, printers of the capital were publishing four journals; by 1790 around 330 were being published. The great majority of these papers were entirely devoted to politics; many described in careful detail the seemingly endless heated sessions of the National Assembly, while others encouraged readers to participate actively in revolutionary politics.11

7 Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News, How the World Came to Know about Itself. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 326. 8 See also, Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Brendan Dooley (ed.), The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity on Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). 9 The number of papers published in the United States doubled between 1763 and 1775 and again in 1790. Newspaper publication became one of the most important props of the American publishing industry. See Pettegree, The Invention of News, ch. 16. 10 See Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench (eds), The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1980); Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Carol Sue Humphrey, ‘This Popular Engine’: New England Newspapers during the American Revolution, 1775–1789 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992). On the crucial role of printers in the American Revolution, see Joseph Adelman, Revolutionary Networks. The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2019). 11 See Pettegree, The Invention of News, ch. 16, also Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (eds), Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800 (Berkeley, CA: University of

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In Spain, the European Enlightenment influence was channelled through the Bourbon reforms, a series of state reforms that intended to stimulate manufacturing, commerce and technology to modernize Spain, while also promoting education and the expansion of knowledge among the general population. Spanish intellectuals who embraced reformism supported the growth and expansion of periodical publications that sought to provide potential readers and listeners with access to education and what they conceived as ‘useful knowledge’, information able to promote and activate the economy of the Spanish empire. Many Spanish authors wrote about the benefits of periodical publications to society.12 Writers were clear that newspapers, gazettes and journals offered multiple benefits for the expansion of knowledge and the formation of an educated society: newspapers were relatively inexpensive, they were produced rapidly and regularly and items within were presented succinctly.13 Numerous historical studies have analysed the spread, character and popularity of eighteenth-century Spanish periodical publications and newspapers.14 The extraordinary number of new newspapers founded in Spain during this period attests to the role of Spanish reformism in

California Press, 1989) and Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). 12 See, for example, the works of eighteenth-century intellectual reformists such as Julián de Velasco, Efémerides de la ilustración de España (Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Caballero, 1804); Manuel Aguirre, ‘Discurso sobre la conveniencia de educar al pueblo para gobernarlo mejor’, Correo de Madrid 167 (1788): 955–8; Juan Pablo Forner, Amor de la Patria: Discurso que en la junta general publica que celebra la real sociedad económica de Sevilla el día 23 de Noviembre de 1794 leyó (Sevilla, 1794), 51–3. 13 Inmaculada Urzainqui, ‘Un nuevo instrumento cultural: la prensa periódica’, in Joaquín Alvárez, François López and Inmaculada Urzainqui (eds), La república de las letras en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1995), pp. 125–214. 14 For a comprehensive study of eighteenth-century Spanish newspapers and periodical publications, see Francisco Aguilar Piñal, La prensa española en el siglo XVIII. Diarios, revistas y pronósticos (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1978) and Henry F. Schulte, The Spanish Press, 1470–1966 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968). For more specialized approaches, see Alejandro Pizarroso Quintero, ‘La prensa en España y en Europa a caballo entre dos siglos: Panorama comparado’, in Antonio Morales Moya (ed.), 1802: España entre dos siglos (Madrid, 2003), 3, pp. 295–320; Inmaculada Urzainqui, ‘Un nuevo instrumento cultural: la prensa periódica’, and ‘Periodista – espectador en la España de las Luces. La conciencia de un género nuevo de escritura periodística’, El Argonauta español [online], 6, 2009 and Larriba, El público de la prensa en España.

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fomenting a new media of information and literary practices.15 Charles III (1759–88) and Charles IV (1788–1808) of Spain both volubly favoured the spread of newspapers in their kingdom, regarding these periodical publications as important and effective vehicles to educate the population and encourage the formation of the healthy public opinion said to be promoted by enlightened absolutism – a public opinion that would be supportive of the monarchy and earn the loyalty of the people.16 Historians of Spanish newspapers have also studied the practices of control and censorship that increased during the eighteenth century. Aware of the danger of the more critical trend of the French Enlightenment, the absolutist monarchs encouraged the Council of Castile and the Inquisition to monitor the content of periodicals printed in Spain and its provinces. 17 Newspapers and journals could have easily promoted antimonarchical or blasphemous ideas, instilling confusion in their readers. In Madrid, for example, many periodicals and gazettes copied extracts and ideas from French literary pieces that expressed critiques against the monarchy and the nobility.18 The revolutionary events in France at the end of the century were also to represent new challenges to the Spanish Crown, which for some decades had maintained a balancing act between encouraging the broadcast of public information and maintaining effective control. Antonio Calvo Maturana offers a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the debates that the proponents of Spanish enlightened absolutism confronted in relation to information and public opinion at the end of the ancien régime. He contends that Charles IV, in particular, ‘was more inclined than any previous Spanish monarch to use the means of communication at his disposal to shape public opinion’.19 Given that some decades earlier the Crown had already established a more open and transparent communication with the reading public, the editors of the Gaceta in particular were now convinced that secrecy and silence could no longer be part 15 See Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Apuntes para un catálogo de periódicos madrileños desde 1661 al 1870 (Madrid, 1894) and Arthur Hamilton, ‘The Journals of Eighteenth-Century Spain’, in Hispania, 21:3 (1938): 161–72. 16 Antonio Calvo Maturana, ‘Is it Useful to Deceive the People? The Debate of Public Information in Spain at the End of the Ancien Régime (1780–1808)’, The Journal of Modern History 86:1 (2014): 1–46. 17 Calvo Maturana, ‘Is it Useful to Deceive the People?’ pp. 5–7. 18 See Marcelin Defourneax, Inquisición y censura de libros en la España del siglo XVIII. (Madrid: Taurus, 1973); Gérard Dufour, ‘La Inquisición y la Revolución Francesa’, in Repercusiones de la Revolución Francesa en España (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1990), pp. 545–54; and Fermín de los Reyes, El libro en España y América, legislación y censura (siglos XV–XVIII), 2 vols. (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2000), vol. 2. 19 Calvo Maturana, ‘Is it Useful to Deceive the People?’ p. 5.

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of their newspaper’s communicative strategies because both might weaken the trust of the reading public. In summary, Calvo Maturana argues that the Bourbon dynasty intensified a two-pronged process: the consolidation and protection of royal power, and its ornamental adaptation to the liberal Enlightenment creed. The state’s public communication strategies within the Spanish peninsula responded to both concerns. At the same time, newspapers and periodical publications proliferated in the Spanish American cities and towns on the other side of the Atlantic. A vast number of historical works have studied and analysed the characteristics, diffusion and reach of these local newspapers.20 Eighteenth-century newspapers printed in Mexico City, Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Lima devoted significant space to news copied verbatim from Madrid newspapers. Such newspapers offered a means to overcome the geographic and cultural gaps that separated outlying populations from the metropolitan centre. As historians have also demonstrated, local publishers in eighteenth-century Spanish America increasingly tried to make their editions actual analogues of European journals. Printer-publishers, however, also adapted the formats and style of their publications to local communities and concerns, offering more information related to colonial realities.21 In recent decades, an emerging Atlantic World historiography has paid close attention to the commercial relationships and trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians have analysed the ways by which transoceanic traders such as those already examined in this volume shaped this world through the 20 One of the first and most complete studies of Spanish American newspapers is the work of José Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América durante la dominación española (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosof ía y Letras, 1940). See also Antonio Cacua Prada, Orígenes del periodismo colombiano (Bogotá: Editorial Kelley, 1991); Pablo Calvi. ‘The Trial of Francisco Bilbao and Its Role in the Foundation of Latin American Journalism’, Information & Culture 51:4 (2016): 532–49; Jean Pierre Clément, Bourgeoisie créole et Lumières: le cas du ‘Mercurio Peruano’(1790–1795), Ph.D. dissertation, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, 1983; David González Cruz, ‘El tratamiento de la historia en los periódicos de la América hispana (1722–1802)’, e-Spania [online journal], 26, published Feb. 2017; Carlos Miró Quesada, Historia del periodismo peruano (Lima: Librería Internacional, 1957); Luis Reed Torres and María del Carmen Ruiz Castañeda (eds), El periodismo en México: 500 años de historia (México: Edamdex, 1995); Victor M. Uribe-Uran, ‘The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42:2 (2000): 425–57. 21 See Torres Revello, El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América and Larriba, El público de la prensa española, pp. 201–2; a full catalogue of newspapers and periodical publications published in Spanish America is found in Sara Nuñez de Prado et al., Comunicación social y poder (Madrid: Universitas, 1993), pp. 101–25.

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exchange of commodities and services. This perspective has encouraged scholars to explore the movement of goods, people and information within the Atlantic networks and how these connected the different communities located in distant corners of the Atlantic world. Historians of the book, in particular, have offered comprehensive studies of the presence and influence of Spanish books in America, the networks of importation and the relevant connections that existed between printers in Spain and Spanish America.22 As discussed earlier, a rich historiography also shows how eighteenth-century Enlightenment authors and Spanish Reformism promoted a significant development of the news industry on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic. Nonetheless, the influence and impact of Iberian Peninsula newspapers in Spanish America and, conversely, of Spanish American newspapers in the Peninsula have received little attention. Partly, these studies are few, owing to obvious methodological limitations: newspapers and periodical publications retained little monetary value. As a result, such items were rarely registered in the lists of goods imported to the American ports and, given their minor importance, they passed unnoticed by port agents. With the exception of subscription registers, there are few sources available that allow identification of the presence and influence of Spanish newspapers in Spanish America. The dramatic events of the French and the Haitian Revolutions and their impact in Spain impelled colonial officials in Spanish America to pay closer attention to the kinds of readings and discussions undertaken by their residents. Numerous denunciations and colonial reports reveal that Spanish newspapers such as the Gaceta de Madrid, El Mercurio Histórico Político, El Correo de Ciegos and several other periodical publications proved very popular and widely read in the Spanish American provinces. Given that many of these newspapers offered detailed news of the events in France and the French colonies, colonial authorities began to question the ways 22 José Luis Martínez, El libro en Hispanoamérica. Origen y desarrollo (Madrid: Fundación Germán Díaz Sánchez Ruipérez, 1987); González Sánchez and Carlos Alberto New World Literacy: Writing and Culture Across the Atlantic, 1500–1700 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011); Agustín Lluís, Mónica Baro and Pedro Rueda-Ramírez, Edición y propaganda del libro. Las estrategias publicitarias en España e Hispanoamerica (siglos XVII–XX). (Madrid: Calambur, 2018); Rueda-Ramírez, Pedro, ‘Libros a la mar: El libro en las redes comerciales de la carrera de Indias’, in Antonio Castillo Gomez (ed.), Libro y Lectura en la Península Ibérica y América: siglos XIII a XVIII (Valladolid: Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 2003), 189–208; and ‘Las redes comerciales del libro en la colonia: “peruleros” y libreros en la Carrera de Indias (1590–1620)’, Anuario de estudios americano 71 (2014): 447–78 and El libro en circulación en el mundo moderno en España y Latinoamérica, vol. 26, Biblioteca Litterae (Madrid: Calambur, 2012).

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by which the Spanish Crown managed public information and the need to establish different restrictions in the American possessions. Although colonial authorities were unable to censor or control what was published in Spain, they felt the urgency to interfere with what was read by the public in the colonial provinces and regularly reminded authorities in Spain of the vulnerability of the American possessions during revolutionary times.

The Circulation of Newspapers and the Atlantic Revolutions While trying both to break an old practice of silence and secrecy and to keep the Spanish peninsular public informed, Charles IV became deeply concerned about the effects of the French Revolution and its propaganda on Spain’s American territories. In September 1789, he was informed that members of the National Assembly of Paris were trying to smuggle into Spanish America a seditious manifesto that would ‘shake the power of Spanish dominion among its inhabitants’. Immediately, the Spanish First Minister, the count of Floridablanca, sent a royal decree to the governors of the Spanish provinces in America ordering them to guard against the importation and diffusion of any texts that might ‘promote Independence and anti-religion’. Between 1789 and 1790, the Spanish monarch issued several royal decrees restricting the entry of French books and newspapers, prohibiting those with content considered dangerous to religion, due subordination and the social order.23 Likewise, in 1790, the Council of Castile prohibited the introduction of several French newspapers, revolutionary catechisms and books relating to the French Revolution.24 In December 1790, the General-Captain of Venezuela wrote a report in which he stated that ‘within the last four months, several newspapers, journals and broadsides from Paris, but printed in the French islands, had 23 ‘Real Cédula para que en los Reinos de Indias e Islas Filipinas se publique y observe el Edicto del Gobernador de Roma en que se manda a recoger el libro Segunda Memoria Católica, 1789’, Reales Cédulas, IV, 174–83; ‘Real Orden del 24 de septiembre de 1789’, AGN (Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas, Venezuela), Reales Ordenes, X, 140; and ‘Real Orden para mandar a recoger papeles esparcidos por individuos de la Asamblea Nacional de Francia’, AGN, Reales Ordenes, X, 198–9. 24 The Council of Castile also prohibited French catechisms like ‘Catecismos Francés para la Gente del Campo’, French letters like ‘The Manfiesto Reservado para el Rey Don Carlos IV, que Dios guarde y sus sublimes ministros’, and several books such as La France Libre and Des Droits et Devoirs de L’homme. For the most complete history of censorship and prohibition of printed materials in Spain (15th–18th centuries) see de los Reyes Gómez, El libro en España y América, legislación y censura (siglos XV–XVIII), vol. 2.

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been introduced in Tierra Firme’,25 and might cause serious harm to the population. Similarly, several official reports from all the provinces of Spain – including the American territories – declared that despite governmental efforts French books and papers were making their way into the hands of curious and avid readers. In response, the king issued another royal decree on 10 September 1791 where he stated: ‘The introduction of any letters or seditious papers contrary to the principles of public fidelity and tranquillity is strictly prohibited.’ Those flouting this decree were to be prosecuted for the offence of disloyalty. Local authorities were made responsible for controlling the circulation of these materials and sending copies to the Council in Madrid.26 Newspapers and periodical publications favoured the development of more flexible and extensive circuits of communication between Europe and America. Information circulated rapidly and freely from one province to another and from one country to another. Travellers to Spanish American cities and ports frequently carried several European newspapers and gazettes in their baggage. Such newspapers contained European court gossip, military and diplomatic reports, political and moral essays, news about the ships and the goods arriving from America into the European ports, articles on fashion, scientific discoveries, poetry and lists of newly printed editions and book recommendations. A close look, for example, at Venezuela’s inventories of private libraries and travellers’ baggage reveals the high presence of newspapers and other periodical publications. Approximately 18 per cent of the post-mortem inventories in the city of Caracas recorded between 1770 and 1810 mention newspapers or periodical publications such as semanarios (journals). The library of Juan Vegas Vertodano, a planter and property owner in Caracas, contained an entire shelf of manuals and ‘diverse scattered papers, gazettes and journals’ collected and classified over the course of decades. The merchant Juan Joseph Mintegui also possessed an important library that included dictionaries, books of history, politics, commerce and administration, and several gazettes and newspapers from Spain and the Caribbean. In 1797, the merchant Manuel Montesinos y Rico left an impressive library containing ‘43 volumes of Gazettes, nine packets of mercurios [like 25 ‘Representación del Presidente de la Real Audiencia de Caracas, sobre papeles sediciosos, Diciembre 1790’, AGN, Gobernación y Capitanía General, XLIII, 96–7. 26 ‘Real Cédula de S.M y Señores del Consejo, en que se prohíbe la introducción y curso en estos Reynos de qualesquiera cartas o papeles sediciosos y contrarios a la fidelidad, y a la tranquilidad pública, y se manda a las Justicias procedan en este asunto sin disimulo y con la actividad y vigilancia que requiere; en la conformidad que se expresa’ (Madrid: Imprenta de Vda. De Marín, 1791).

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‘gaceta’, a generic newspaper title] and several numbers of the Gaceta de Madrid and the Gaceta de México’. 27 In most of these cases, the owners had amassed entire collections of periodical publications, many bound together and archived in specific sections of their libraries. Although there are very few mentions of newspapers in commercial cargoes, it was certainly more common to find newspapers and journals in travellers’ luggage. In 1770, Don José Carlos Agüero, who travelled to Caracas to serve as governor of the province, carried several boxes of books. These included religious texts, volumes on politics, law, administration and governance and several issues of the official newspapers Gaceta de Madrid and the Mercurio Histórico-Político.28 In other cases, individuals requested specific newspapers from the Peninsula. In 1775, for instance, Don Pedro Martín de Iriarte and Don Juan de Argaín wrote to Don Jorge Araurrenechea in Cádiz to request more than sixty books and several ‘Gacetas, Mercurios and Guías de Forasteros’.29 Readers in different Spanish Caribbean towns such as Caracas, La Guaira, La Havana, Cartagena and Santo Domingo enjoyed access to a diverse array of newspapers and journals from Spain and Spanish America. Periodicals such as El Semanario Erudito (Madrid), El Semanario Económico (Madrid), El Mercurio Histórico-Político (Madrid), El Semanario de Agricultura (Madrid), La Gaceta de Madrid (Madrid) and La Gaceta de México (México City), among others, were frequently found in local private libraries and in the personal belongings of travellers arriving in Venezuela. Moreover, a detailed historical study of subscription lists for Spanish newspapers made during the last decade of the eighteenth century suggests that Spanish Caribbean residents were avid readers of Spanish newspapers. Residents in La Havana, Cartagena, Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico paid regular subscriptions to receive El Semanario Erudito (Madrid), Correo de Ciegos (Madrid), Correo mercantil de España e Indias (Madrid) and the literary journal Memorial Literario.30 In addition, foreign newspapers such as the London Gazette, the London Journal, the Pennsylvania Gazette and various French periodicals were

27 AGN, Testamentarías, 1797V, 1797M, 1802M, 1809C. See also Soriano, Tides of Revolution, ch. 2. 28 ‘Registro del Navío San Gabriel de la Real Compañía Guizpuzcoana de Caracas, 2 de enero de 1770’, AGI, Contratación, 1693. 29 ‘Registro del Navío San Carlos de la Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas que salió para La Guaira el 10 de mayo de 1775’, AGI, Contratación, 1694. 30 Larriba, El público de la prensa de España, pp. 192–3.

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found during government searches of baggage and homes in the province.31 Many of these newspapers provided Spanish Caribbean readers with detailed information about international politics. How were these foreign newspapers first smuggled into the Spanish Caribbean? Records reveal that the open and easy access that foreigners had to Spanish Caribbean regions facilitated the entrance of these materials into Spanish Caribbean urban centres and ports. Locals who travelled frequently, as well as foreign visitors, brought books, gazettes and newspapers to coastal towns and cities and shared them with locals in private meetings and discussion groups. The record of denunciations made to the Inquisition in Cartagena, Caracas and Maracaibo reflects the commonly shared idea that foreigners spread subversive periodical texts and documents.32 In December 1789, Venezuela’s captain general, Don Juan Guillelmi, warned the authorities in Madrid that since the month of August ‘gazettes, dailies and supplements from or about France, providing news about current events in Paris, have entered Venezuela’. According to Guillelmi, the ‘evil designs’ of these texts represented a danger to the captaincy. As a result, he was ready to use all possible means to protect the province from the ‘revolutionary contagion that has shaken the world’.33 During the same years, Cuban colonial authorities, including the Governors of Havana and Santiago, worked tirelessly to confiscate foreign newspapers (especially French and British) that might spread word of the revolutionary events in France. Authorities were convinced that newspapers represented significant sources of information whose contents might then easily be spread by word of mouth among the population, including illiterate groups who relied on spoken readings and oral debates.34 Colonial authorities were obviously concerned about the circulation of revolutionary information among the local population and Spanish Caribbean readers tried to avoid liability by accusing foreign sources or by citing, as an excuse, their insatiable curiosity. In several of their confessions to the Inquisition, readers mentioned that they owned foreign newspapers 31 ‘Informe de la Real Audiencia sobre lectura de libros y papeles sediciosos relacionados con la sublevacion de la Guaira, 1797’, AGI, Caracas, 432, 434 and 436; AGN, Testamentarías 1770–1810. 32 ‘Cuadernillo de denuncias al Secretario del Santo Oficio’, AAC (Archivo Arquideocesano de Caracas), Santo Oficio, Carpeta II. See also Soriano, Tides of Revolution, ch. 2 and Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, p. 89. 33 ‘Expediente de la Intendencia relativo a asuntos de Francia’, AGN, Diversos, LXVI, 290–5. 34 Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror. Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 53–4.

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or prohibited texts for two main reasons. Some readers wrote that they needed to learn about the current state of events in Europe and the Americas; others, that it was clear to them that the advancement of their local businesses and commercial activities depended on the kind of information to which they had access. In their opinion, these readings never subverted their loyalty to the Crown and to the religious institutions, as they were able to differentiate useful information from dangerous indoctrination. In such cases, however, what really concerned the colonial authorities was the possibility of such readings reaching large subordinated groups and of inciting them to rebel. Officials came to believe that, in meetings and tertulias, foreign newspapers and texts were not only read aloud but also transcribed and reproduced manually. In 1793, for example, Captain General Carbonell criticized the Governor of Cumaná, Don Vicente Emparan, for having allowed a French visitor, Antonio Arteman, to visit his district from the island of Trinidad. The governor believed that Arteman was ‘infused with perverse ideas, with hateful maxims that he intends to spread among locals’. He also accused Arteman of bringing seditious newspapers from the French colonies on his trips to the mainland and of transcribing copies of these newspapers for the residents of the region.35 Colonial officials of the Spanish Caribbean believed that their provinces, located in the heart of the Caribbean basin, represented an easy target for republican propagandists willing to do anything to extend the fires of the revolutions to Spanish American possessions. Frequently, foreign merchants and local traders brought boxes of prohibited books, pamphlets and leaflets and introduced them secretly into the coastal mainland, where they always found curious and avid readers. Port authorities were not completely loyal to the Spanish government and often used their official position to collect and spread foreign newspapers and subversive documents. But were foreign newspapers the only texts spreading revolutionary information and encouraging political debates among locals? Colonial agents spent time and energy trying to control the circulation of foreign newspapers and loose papers, but a closer look at the circulation of Spanish newspapers reveals a more complex picture: one in which Spanish official newspapers might have inadvertently incited local curiosity and educated Spanish Americans about the Atlantic Revolutions. 35 ‘El Gobernador a Vicente Emparan’, AGN, Gobernación y Capitanía General, XLIX, 213; also quoted in William J. Callahan, ‘La propaganda, la sedición y la Revolución Francesa en la capitanía general de Venezuela’, Boletín histórico 14 (May, 1967): 177–205 (p. 184).

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A Troublesome Source of Revolutionary Information: La Gaceta de Madrid (1777–1804) In his popular book Teatro Crítico Universal, the famous Spanish writer Fray Benito Gerónimo Feijóo alerted readers to the dangers of blind trust in newspapers and gazettes: ‘Political dishonesty,’ he wrote, ‘brings evil into this world … As long as wars exist among the powers, the gazettes of each Kingdom will exaggerate the advantages of their realm, while minimizing their losses.’36 Despite their inherent unreliability, Feijóo believed that Spanish gazettes, and in particular the Gaceta de Madrid, could be useful for readers because they were more trustworthy than other newspapers from France and England. Since 1661, the Gaceta (as it was usually referred to) had been the official journal of Spain. Until 1778 it was a weekly newspaper, but it became biweekly thereafter, usually printed every Tuesday and Friday. The Spanish government had recruited a team of functionaries to edit, produce and administer this popular newspaper that covered a great variety of topics from Court affairs to political news, information about European wars (with special attention to those won by Spain), as well as the life of the members of the royal family and some literary advertisements.37 The Gaceta also contained ‘news of wars, changes of ministries, of royal marriages, births, deaths and of great court functions’38 from other European kingdoms that were collected weekly by dispatches located in important foreign capitals such as London, Paris, The Hague, Vienna, Warsaw and Rome. At the end of each issue, the Gaceta included a list of the ships that had departed Spanish ports for different locations in the colonial possessions. By mid-eighteenth century, the Gaceta de Madrid was a newspaper printed in a quarto format, usually containing four leaves as eight printed pages. The Gaceta was organized in three main parts, headed by a concise and brief section reporting on the health of the Royal family. The first part, entitled ‘Government Report’, offered a summary of official news and information about the Court of Madrid, and sometimes it included Royal decrees or proclamations. The second part was entitled ‘Non-Official News’, and it 36 Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, Theatro crítico universal, o discursos varios, en todo género de materias, para desengaño de errores communes, dedicado al General de la Congregación de San Benito de España (Madrid: Lorenzo Francisco Mujados, 1726–39), vol. 8, discourse V, ‘Fábulas Gazetales’, pp. 61–84. 37 Inmaculada Urzainqui ‘Periodista – espectador en la España de las Luces’; I.L. McClelland, ‘Disturbing Effects of the Periodical Press’, in Ideological Hesitancy in Spain, 1700–1750 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 138–47 and Hamilton, ‘The Journals of the Eighteenth Century in Spain’. 38 Hamilton, ‘The Journals of the Eighteenth Century in Spain’, p. 161.

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contained news related to the rest of the world; this section was organized in subtitles with the names of the cities or towns in the world where the news was collected, and in this way readers could easily identify the specific geographical regions the newspaper was reporting about This section usually ended with reports on Spanish news. The third and last section was dedicated to advertisements.39 Published biweekly and printed with modest materials, the Gaceta de Madrid was not particularly expensive to produce and was therefore a relatively cheap newspaper. Each number bore a cost of approximately four or five cuartos (which was also the price of one pound of cumin, or half a pound of raisins in the Spanish Caribbean). Because of its easy accessibility, wide distribution and simple format, the Gaceta became a very popular newspaper in Spanish America, one that was easy to access and understand by the reading public. According to Lisabel Larriba, by 1781 an average of 9,000 copies for each number of the Gaceta were printed in Madrid. That means that every week around 18,000 copies of the official newspaper were published and distributed in Spain and its American possessions. Spanish readers did not buy the Gaceta by subscription, given that most of them (80 per cent) preferred to buy in the streets.40 The Gaceta de Madrid was also a well-known newspaper in Buenos Aires, La Havana, Cartagena, Lima and other major Spanish American cities. By the 1780s, approximately 7 per cent of the total number of the newspaper printed were sent every year to Spanish America. Of these, La Havana claimed almost 65.9 per cent of submissions, followed by Buenos Aires (17 per cent), Guatemala (4.6 per cent), Lima (3.8 per cent), Cartagena (3.6 per cent), Puerto Rico (2.5 per cent) and Santo Domingo (1.5 per cent).41 This means that more than 75 per cent of the copies of the Gaceta de Madrid despatched to Spanish America arrived in the Caribbean region. According to Larriba, the regularity and consistency of the supply to America of this official newspaper – along with the Mercurio Histórico y Político – confirms that there was an avid and interested American reading public waiting to read each number. The revolutionary events by the end of the 1780s must have awakened in readers and listeners more interest in European newspapers. From the perspective of colonial authorities, however, was the Gaceta de Madrid a reliable source of information to keep the colonies informed and calmed? 39 Sara Nuñez de Prado, ‘De La Gazeta de Madrid al Boletín Oficial del Estado’, in Nuñez del Prado et al. (eds), Comunicación social y poder (Madrid: Universitas, 1993), pp. 147–60. 40 Larriba, El público de la prensa Española, pp. 67–70. 41 Ibid., pp. 200–1.

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Or did this periodical publication encourage an unsuspected political awareness among colonial readers and listeners? Like many other European journals, Madrid’s Gaceta could not avoid recounting the events of the Atlantic Revolutions. In several issues, for example, the Gaceta reported on the American Revolution and the political climate of the young republic. Perhaps because Spain had aided United States’ independence, the official newspaper presented these changes in a very positive light. Most of this reporting was done in Philadelphia. One issue, for example, included a two-page summary of George Washington’s address to the citizens of Philadelphia on 9 December 1790. In his speech, Washington discussed the economy of the fledgling republic and emphasized the need to achieve economic independence and political stability. In another issue, published in the same year, the Gaceta reported that ‘agriculture and commerce, industry and maritime commerce are all making important progress in [the United States]. The great number of goods produced in these States that are offered to European markets is clear proof of this.’42 The publishers of the Gaceta de Madrid might have thought that a favourable depiction of the United States aligned well with the basic precepts of Bourbon reformism in Spain. Such reformism emphasized agricultural activities, liberal commercial policies, the education of the population and the development of new industries. Sharing information about these themes might incite Spanish readers to follow the good example of the United States. From the perspective of Spanish American readers, however, these reports risked a different meaning: the economic progress of the United States could easily have been understood as the direct result of the American achievement of full independence from the British Empire. The political message contained in Spanish periodicals, then, could be interpreted in strikingly different ways, depending on the reader’s geographic location and social and political background. Focused, perhaps, on new ideas of commercial and financial journalism, Spanish publishers (and censors) in Madrid seemed unaware of this possibility of different interpretations despite regular warnings by colonial officials that this influx of information could have unexpected outcomes in the American

42 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 13, 15 Feb.1790, 103 and Gaceta de Madrid, no. 61, 2 Aug. 1791, 533. On news about the American Revolution in Spain, see Luis Angel García Melero, La Independencia de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica a través de la prensa española. Gaceta de Madrid y Mercurio Histórico Político. 1763–1776. Vol. 1, Trabajos monográficos sobre la Independencia de América (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos exteriores, DGRC, 1977).

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territories.43 Royal authorities in Madrid seemed to have been oblivious to the contrasting effects that some news in the Gaceta might induce in the distant American territories. After the dramatic events of the summer of 1789 in France, however, the Spanish Crown prohibited the importation of all newspapers, written texts and even objects into Spanish territories that alluded to the revolutionary events.44 Spanish-language newspapers published in France were banned from all Spanish territories because they contained ‘falsity and aimed to disturb the fidelity and tranquillity that must exist in Spain’.45 These regulations not only affected the importation of texts from France and other European nations but also restricted the use of information from or about France in Spanish periodicals.46 It was a common practice among Spanish publishers to include extracts, news or reports from French newspapers, journals or literary pieces in their periodicals, but after 1790 the Council of Castile prohibited the printing of any news about France.47 Given that some decades earlier the Crown had already established a more open and transparent communication with the reading public, the editors of the Gaceta, in particular, were convinced less that secrecy and silence would be effective strategies than that they might damage the trust of the reading public. Antonio Calvo Maturana shares an interesting episode that occurred between 1789 and 1790, when two candidates, hoping to become the new editors-in-chief of the Gaceta de Madrid, drafted 43 ‘Observaciones de un Ciudadano … by José Ignacio Moreno’, AGI, Caracas, 434 and ‘Representaciones que remite el Gobernador de Caracas sobre noticias sediciosas, y sublevaciones. 22 de junio de 1799’, AGI, Estado, 67, No. 67. See also García Melero, La Independencia de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica; Rosas Lauro (ed.), El miedo en el Perú, siglo XVI al XX (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2005). 44 ‘Real Orden del 24 de septiembre de 1789’, AGN, Reales Ordenes, X, 140 and Novísima Recopilación, Note 15, Book VIII, Title XVIII. Law XIII. See Soriano, Tides of Revolution, ch. 2. 45 ‘Orden del Consejo prohibiendo la introducción y curso del “Correo de París o Publicista Francés”, no. 54, 5 de enero de 1790’, quoted in de los Reyes Gómez, El libro en España y América, p. 627. 46 ‘Real Cédula de su Majestad sobre introducción en el Reyno de papeles sediciosos y contrarios a la fidelidad, 10 de septiembre de 1791’, published in Gaceta de Madrid, no. 74, 16 Sept. 1791, 665–72. 47 See Philip Deacon, ‘La libertad de expresión en España en el período precedente a la Revolución Francesa’, Estudios de Historia Social I–II, nos. 36–7 (1986): 17–21 and María Aurora Aragón, Traducciones de obras francesas en la Gaceta de Madrid en la década Revolucionaria (1790–1799) (Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad de Oviedo, 1992); on the erasure of France from Spanish publications, see de los Reyes Gómez, El libro en España y América, p. 632.

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statements about how they would operate the newspaper as a political tool.48 The proposal of one of the candidates argues for a greater official transparency in the ‘News of the Kingdom’ section of the newspaper; he insisted that hiding important events (even if these were disastrous) was not convenient because it could affect the public’s trust in the official newspaper and ultimately in the king. As Calvo Maturana concludes, the candidate’s proposal ‘reveals a Spanish public that demands trustworthy news … Silence undermines the credibility of the periodical and detracts from the information it does contain.’49 By 1790, the Gaceta de Madrid was the only non-literary Spanish newspaper that was not closed down, and for three years the newspaper avoided offering detailed information about the French Revolution. Between 1789 and 1793, the Gaceta provided its readers with information about European politics and some belligerent conflicts, but avoided giving information about the event that seemed central to these conflicts. As Gil Novales states, ‘until 1793 the French Revolution does not exist for la Gaceta’.50 By the end of 1792, the Gaceta began to offer some news that allowed its readers to perceive an increasing conflictive environment in France, with details of the king’s mounting difficulties and the potential eruption of a new political order; but there was no direct mention of the Revolution. On 8 February 1793, the Gaceta published the last will and testament of Louis XVI, opening a new phase in the way that information about the Revolution was presented to readers. The editors adopted a decidedly negative view of the Revolution in France, but nonetheless, provided precise information and detailed descriptions about the main political debates, events and protagonists. After the execution of the Louis XVI in January 1793, and despite the abrupt interruption of communication between France and the rest of Europe, the Gaceta dedicated a significant number of pages to the Revolution.51 It described the chaos that reigned in the Paris Convention, ‘where any plebeian – including women – could raise their voices and make the most insane demands’. In the following months, the news about France highlighted the chaos that reigned in that country, 48 Calvo Maturana, ‘Is it Useful to Deceive the People?’ p. 21. ‘Sobre mejorar la Gaceta de Madrid’, Madrid, 26 Jan.1789, in AHN (Archivo Histórico Nacional), Consejos, leg. 11.280, exp.6. 49 Calvo Maturana, ‘Is it Useful to Deceive the People?’ p. 21. 50 Alberto Gil Novales, ‘La Revolucion Francesa a través de la Gaceta de Madrid’, in Estudios deciochistas en homenaje al Profesor José Miguel Caso González (Oviedo: Instituto Feijoó de Estudios del siglo XVIII, 1995), pp. 347–64 (p. 347). 51 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 11, 17 Feb. 1793, 86–7, Gaceta de Madrid, no. 53, 28 June 1793, 619.

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with food scarcity and looting and violence spread in the main cities. The editors of the Gaceta also offered information on how the events in France affected Spain and the measures that Spanish vassals should take to avoid revolutionary contagion.52 Violent Republicans, the Gaceta claimed, proposed the ‘most abominable and bloody measures’, promising death for all those who dared oppose the revolution and threatening to redistribute the riches of all nobles among the pueblo.53 Although the Gaceta insisted on presenting the French Revolution as one of the darkest episodes in France’s and Europe’s history and repeatedly described the events in France as chaotic, anarchic and irreligious, it nonetheless spread information about the important political outcomes of the Revolution, such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the new constitution.54 Many Spanish American readers, such as the pardo musician from Caracas, confessed that they learned about the French Revolution through the pages of the Gaceta. Historian Ada Ferrer, for example, notes that the Captain General of Cuba, the marquis of Someruelos, expressed his concerns in regard to the public circulation and spread of the Gaceta in different corners of the island of Cuba.55 The Gaceta de Madrid also offered detailed information about the events unfolding in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The first news about slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue appeared in an issue published in November 1791. The news travelled from Jamaica via London and then to Madrid. People in Jamaica heard about a significant slave insurrection in the north of Saint-Domingue thanks to a letter written by a French official who implored British colonial officials for help to control the movement. The article noted that more than ‘360 armed blacks’ had ‘set fire to all the masters’ houses and destroyed sugar and coffee plantations … More than 200 plantations were reduced to ashes and nearly 300 whites were killed.’56 At the end of 1791, the Gaceta announced, ‘the colony of Saint-Domingue has been shaken by the crimes and atrocities committed by the slaves, many of whom are still hiding in the mountains’. The newspaper added that French island colonies such as Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia were also experiencing insurrections and general disorder.57

52 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 21, 12 Mar. 1793, 188, 191–5. 53 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 53, 2 July 1793, 620; Gaceta de Madrid, no. 55, 9 July 1793, 649–50, Gaceta de Madrid, no. 58, 19 July 1793, 693–4. 54 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 67, 20 Aug. 1793, 827–8. 55 Ferrer, ‘Noticias de Haití en Cuba’, 687–9. 56 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 94, 25 Nov. 1791, 856–7. 57 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 100, 16 Dec. 1791, 915.

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Between 1791 and 1793, the newspaper offered detailed information on the rebels, their military campaigns against plantations and masters and the proclamations of the revolutionaries. Some issues offered very detailed information about the chaos within the French colony. One issue in particular provided the number of White people who died at the hands of the rebels (150 White men, 48 White women and 18 children), the 353 sugar and coffee plantations which were burned, together with the 94 others which were completely destroyed and the two villages completely razed to the ground.58 The narrative definitely created deep fears of racial war among white Spanish colonists, while encouraging expectations of a potential radical change to the supply of sugar in the global market. These accounts vividly offered an image of Saint-Domingue’s rebels as an important social force liable to change the fate of the island. Although for Peninsular readers the reality of Saint-Domingue and the turbulent Caribbean seemed distant and exotic, for Spanish Caribbean readers these realities were just around the corner. The events were so close indeed, that readers could contrast the news carried by the Gaceta with the rumours and information derived directly from French soldiers and refugees, prisoners and Black corsairs who visited Spanish American ports and shared their own views of the Saint-Domingue rebellions.59 Later, as Saint-Domingue Black rebels and the French National assembly were able to negotiate agreements, the Gaceta also offered news about the abolition of slavery by the French National Assembly in 1794 and about the movements and decisions of revolutionary Black leaders such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean François Rigaud. In October 1804, the Gaceta announced: ‘On January 1st the Generals and Chiefs of Saint-Domingue proclaimed Jean Jacques Dessalines perpetual Governor of the island … All the Generals swore to resist France and to die before submitting themselves to its domination.’60 It is therefore clear that, despite the Spanish Crown’s warning about the publication of news of the republican revolutions, the official newspaper continued offering information and details about their outcomes. Readers in different regions of Spanish America had wide access to the Gaceta and used it as a source for their own political debates and discussions. To its colonial readers, the information carried by the newspaper seemed crucial to the redesign of their economic and commercial plans.

58 See Gaceta de Madrid, no. 104, 30 Dec. 1791, 949. 59 See Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia; Scott, Common Wind: Afro-American Currents; and Cristina Soriano, Tides of Revolution, ch. 3. 60 Gaceta de Madrid, no. 56, 7 Oct. 1804, 604.

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Colonial authorities in Spanish America expressed their concerns about the content and circulation of the Gaceta de Madrid in America. Cuban authorities, for example, came to see the Gaceta as a serious problem and the Captain General of Cuba, marquis de Someruelos, wrote to Pedro Cevallos, the Spanish Minister of State to urge that the government use more restraint in what it chose to publish, as it was clear that he was unable to control Cuban readership. The newspaper, he reported, ‘was sold to the public and everyone buys it and it circulates well among the blacks’.61 In Venezuela, colonial officials and Church representatives also expressed concerns about how carelessly editors of Spanish newspapers treated topics that could affect the tranquillity and calmness of the Spanish provinces, where the presence of mixed-race pardos, free Black and enslaved people comprised a real threat to social order and subordination. For them, the order and harmony of the province was a clear priority, and one well above any commercial strategy. Colonial authorities were aware that Spanish newspapers and journals were not the only available source of information. Spanish Caribbean readers also enjoyed access to foreign newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets and letters that were smuggled through Caribbean connections. These ephemeral texts arrived at the ports and cities by different means: first, there were Spanish and foreign visitors and also temporary travellers who brought these written texts with them and shared them with locals in private meetings and discussion groups,62 and second, smuggling became a further and very effective way to introduce texts onto the mainland. Frequently, foreign merchants and local traders smuggled boxes of prohibited books, pamphlets and booklets and introduced them secretly into the ports and cities. These prohibited printed materials circulated locally because of internal and external – specifically Caribbean – networks of circulation of texts that agents could not constrain. Colonial authorities found many prohibited texts, pamphlets and broadsides in the libraries of White priests, rich planters, military officials and merchants. These individuals defended themselves by alleging that their educational background and high social status had equipped them with the ‘correct understanding’ to comprehend complex and even prohibited texts. Many such readers firmly argued that written texts (and prohibited ones in 61 Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, p. 185. 62 On many occasions in which Venezuelans were accused of reading prohibited books or papers, they defended themselves by saying that these were brought to their attention by foreigners who encouraged them to read these texts and even left copies at their homes. ‘Cuadernillo de denuncias al Secretario del Santo Oficio’, AAC, Santo Oficio, Carpeta II.

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particular) should not be read by inferior social groups, such as mixed-race pardos, free people of colour, enslaved and indigenous subjects, who were said to lack the intelligence to differentiate good texts from bad and might, as a result, misuse these written materials and incite movements against the colonial government.63 The fear of a racial war in the Spanish Caribbean increased tensions and encouraged colonial officials to ask for different communication and public information strategies by the Crown. For the officials, Spanish Caribbean readers (and listeners) were unprepared for a more open and transparent public opinion. In Spanish America, colonial authorities distrusted the public and clearly feared the emergence of an ‘American’ public opinion critical of colonial rule and entertaining ideas of disobedience and insubordination.

Conclusion During the final decade of the eighteenth century, the flow of news to and within the Spanish Caribbean about revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic was constant and unavoidable. Much of this news, however, came as inserted in Spanish newspapers, such as the Gaceta de Madrid. In fact, it is not surprising to find in several records that residents of Spanish Caribbean towns and ports reported to the authorities that they first learned about the French and the Haitian Revolutions in the pages of the Gaceta, which circulated freely in port towns and cities. Colonial officials believed this to be an absolute neglect on the part of the Spanish printers and authorities, who seemed unaware of the particularities of the American world: in the colonial peripheries, political information could have different reverberations than in the metropole. In colonial slave-based societies like those of Venezuela, Cuba and New Granada, colonial agents seemed to be much more aware of the danger of spreading news about France and Haiti than were those in Madrid.64 Historical records show that in the Spanish Caribbean an accessible and versatile public sphere was grounded in a wide variety of material texts and social networks of information that escaped the control of the colonial state and that were available to almost all social and racial groups. Colonial authorities in the Spanish Caribbean paid close attention to the kind of texts that circulated in their provinces, but also to their real and 63 ‘Respuesta de los miembros de la Universidad de Caracas con respecto a los efectos de las Gracias al Sacar’, in Cortés, El régimen de las gracias al sacar, vol 2., pp. 190–5. 64 ‘Observaciones de un Ciudadano by José Ignacio Moreno’, AGI, Caracas, 434 and ‘Representaciones que remite el Gobernador de Caracas sobre noticias sediciosas, y sublevaciones. 22 de junio de 1799’, AGI, Estado, 67, no. 67.

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potential readers, listeners and diffusers. It was relatively clear to them that the geographical closeness of these regions to the theatre of the Atlantic Revolutions represented a real threat to colonial rule in Spanish America. It was therefore contradictory and problematic for the governing authorities that an official newspaper like the Gaceta de Madrid was able to provide the Spanish Caribbean people with a constant and accessible source of information about the revolutions, republicanism and Black emancipation. According to colonial officials, authorities in Madrid seemed unaware of the danger that these news represented. Finally, in July 1804, the Minister of State, Pedro Cevallos, instructed the newspaper’s editor to stop printing articles about slave insurrections and Black rebels’ victories in the pages of the Gaceta. Ultimately, it became clear to the Spanish authorities that the publication of this information posed a huge risk to the security of European rule in America.65

65 Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, p. 196.

PA RT THR EE

Multiple Diffusions

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Cross-Cultural Circulations and Orientalist Knowledge: Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale and its Editions Despina Magkanari

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s earlier chapters have established in different ways, the revival of global approaches in historical research has brought fresh attention to transnational and long-distance connections and their impact on knowledge production. Consequently, the study of different modes and vectors in the interaction and circulation of ideas and knowledge, along with different ways of interpretation and reappropriation, have emerged as promising subjects of study. It has begun to be acknowledged that the cross-cultural encounters, and in particular the exchanges with Asiatic civilizations, have been crucial for the development of scholarly production in Europe during the early modern period. Some studies have addressed the role of Orientalist scholars as intermediaries and suggested that their works opened up new perspectives for an understanding of eighteenth-century scholarship. However, the study of Orientalist scholarship remains a marginal domain within that of the so-called ‘Republic of Letters’ and the mapping of these global, cross-cultural, boundary-crossing circulations needs further exploration.1

1 For an overview on the exchanges between Europe and Asia, see Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 4 vols. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965–98). Some approaches on Orientalism taking into account these various interactions include, in particular, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism and the Ancien Régime (Oxford and New

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This chapter therefore examines the circulation of Oriental knowledge in the Enlightenment, focusing on a major Orientalist work of the late seventeenth century, Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, and on its several later editions during the second half of the eighteenth century. This analysis engages with the intellectual as well as the material, situating them both in the context of Western scholarship and cross-cultural encounter during this critical period for the global history of Orientalist knowledge. Our purpose is, in the first place, to examine the diversity of agencies, spaces and practices involved in these editorial projects. The study thus focuses on the investigation of the interaction between local and long-distance exchange, the networks and practices involved in the making of the Bibliothèque orientale, and it particularly points out the role of local agency (Oriental scholars) and the involvement of non-academic actors, revealing unexpected places of knowledge production and circulation. Tracing the ways in which local knowledge is negotiated and reconfigured, this study shows that the perspective of the Bibliothèque orientale, in its various versions (and both the methodology of the authors and the editorial decisions that have given a new form to the work), places it at the intersection of different historiographical traditions (Ottoman, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, European). Additionally, the investigation considers the interaction of material, economic and political realities with knowledge circulation. It thus investigates the challenges and filters of different types (political, religious, economic and corporate) related to the production, circulation and validation of knowledge, as revealed in the case of the later editions of the Bibliothèque orientale. It considers, in particular, issues relating to print strategies, non-authorized editions (1776, Maastricht; 1777–79, The Hague) and then addresses the impact of editorial form on the circulation of knowledge. The chapter then explores the relation between material form and intellectual development and examines how the study of both the form and the content of these reprints, and in particular the official later edition (Paris, 1781–83), can help us to grasp the articulation between the editorial practices and the demands and expectations of an expanding audience during the late Enlightenment. This case study offers the opportunity to examine the relation between scholarly production and the broader public and to scrutinize the modes of appropriation, negotiation and adaptation, the horizons of reception as well as the social contexts which make possible but also influence such circulations. In doing so, this analysis responds to a major challenge for the transnational history of knowledge: York: Berg, 2008) and Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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how to combine the spatial approach with a diachronic study by seeking to locate the entanglement of various temporalities in knowledge circulation and reception.

The Bibliothèque orientale and the Muslim Historiographical Tradition Barthélemy d’Herbelot (1625–95), a French Orientalist scholar who had learnt Oriental languages for exegetic analysis, as was usual during this period, had never travelled to Asia. He had lived and worked in Italy, however, where he met members of the local Oriental communities in order to acquire a practical knowledge of the Oriental languages.2 In the early stage of his career, he was a client of notable patrons, including Nicolas Fouquet (1615–80) in Paris, the famous Superintendent of Finances (1653–61) under Louis XIV and who had been disgraced in 1661, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II de Medici (r. 1621–70), who sponsored him during his stay in Florence (1666–70).3 However, his subsequent professional career took place within the royal institutional network. From 1670, he served as secretary-interpreter of Oriental languages at the Royal Library and as royal censor and in 1692 was appointed Professor of Syriac at the Royal College. His trajectory allows us to track changes in the organization of knowledge during the reign of Louis XIV, under Colbert’s administration. It was then that state patronage gradually replaced more informal forms of assistance to scholars.4 Colbert’s policies towards Oriental studies, in particular, sought to implement a series of institutional innovations conceived to meet the needs both in practical and scholarly fields: the creation of a school for practical learning of Oriental languages (École des jeunes de langues), in 1669, the reorganization of the Oriental section of the Royal Library and the aborted creation of an academy intended to include the study of both Oriental languages and the Bible. Even if motivated by the 2 For biographical information, see Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel comprenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des peuples de l’Orient (Paris: La Compagnie des Libraires, 1697), pp. 22–3 (‘Éloge de Monsieur D’herbelot fait par Monsieur Cousin, Président à la Cour des Monnoyes’). Only a few traces of his correspondence are conserved, mainly in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). 3 On seenteenth-century French patronage, see Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); on Medici patronage, see Edward L. Goldberg, Patterns in Late Medici Art Patronage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 4 Robert Damien, Bibliothèque et État. Naissance d’une raison politique dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).

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desire to affirm royal glory, these changes echo, at the same time, a general orientation in the late seventeenth-century economy of knowledge production in Europe, which attributes a key role to scholarly societies, most of which were academic institutions. The promotion of the ‘localization’ of scholarly practices5 and the implementation of collective ways in the validation of knowledge and its recognition by peers were responses to the new exigencies of specialization, experimentation, an increase of information and the need to collect, organize and diffuse data.6 It seems that Barthélemy d’Herbelot was linked with many scholars and men of letters of his time and that he had attended several learned assemblies. In Paris, between 1670 and 1680, he participated in the learned circles close to Mabillon and the Maurists of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près, one of the most important centres of the scholarly community and an important relay point in the circulation of information within the ‘Republic of Letters’. He was thus familiar with the erudite model of history practised by these scholars. This model, in contrast to narrative historiography, focused on the criticism of sources and the collection of a corpus of textual or material evidence. This was the model that d’Herbelot had in mind while studying a foreign intellectual tradition, and his work compels us to consider seriously the contribution of the Catholic scholarship of late seventeenth-century France in the study of extra-European cultures. Published posthumously, in 1697, by d’Herbelot’s colleague and friend Antoine Galland, the Bibliothèque orientale is a compendium of the history, geography and other aspects of Asiatic civilizations, based on original sources in Persian, Arabic and Turkish (Fig. 11.1).7 Compiled over three decades, this monumental work marks a turning point in the process of the 5 On the meaning of the term ‘localization’, see Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, ‘The Place of Knowledge. A Methodological Survey’, Science in Context 4 (1991): 3–21. 6 James E. McClellan, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); David S. Lux, ‘The Reorganization of Science, 1450–1700’, in Bruce T. Moran (ed.), Patronage and Institutions. Science, Technology and Medicine at European Court, 1500–1750 (Rochester: The Boydell Press, 1991), pp. 185–94. 7 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1697. For a presentation of this book, see Nicholas Dew, ‘The Order of Oriental Knowledge: The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale’, in Christopher Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 233–52 (p. 237); idem, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, pp. 41–80 and 168–204. Cf. Alexander Bevilacqua, ‘How to Organise the Orient: D’Herbelot and the Bibliothèque Orientale’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LXXIX (2016): 213–61; idem, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), ch. 4.

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intellectual autonomy of Oriental studies, so far associated either with the biblical studies or the practical needs of Europeans in Asia (trade, diplomacy, religion). D’Herbelot’s scholarly treatment of Muslim sources is a sort of legitimization of this kind of evidence for history writing, in a period when Western scholars remained reluctant to engage, partly because of religious prejudices and partly because of epistemological concerns related to questions over the reliability of these sources. More than 180 Oriental manuscripts, conserved in different European libraries (especially in the Royal Library in Paris, in the Laurentian Library in Florence, the Vatican Library or in his own collection) were used by d’Herbelot.8 His work thus benefited from resources accumulated in the European capitals through Eurasian networking and circulations, as well as from the progress in the study of Asiatic languages. In this regard, his book summarizes not only a lifetime’s effort by one individual, but also the collective activity that allowed the creation of Oriental collections and the production of explicatory and standardizing dictionaries and grammars (or ‘grammatization’9) for Oriental languages in modern Europe. Indeed, a closer look at the realization of this project reveals the different mediations of local agency and the ways in which local knowledge was negotiated and adapted.10 One of the most important sources for the Bibliothèque orientale is the work entitled Kashf al-Zunūn ‘an asāmī l-kutub wa-l-funūn, by the Ottoman scholar and official Hadji Khalfa, known also as Katib Celebi (1609–57).11 This work had reached the Royal Library in 1682, thanks to the mediation of Antoine Galland, who was deeply involved in the official network for the acquisition of information and material, books and manuscripts, coordinated by Colbert since the 1660s. Galland and other French agents had been particularly active in the Ottoman Empire creating 8 For a detailed presentation of his sources, see Henry Laurens, Aux sources de l’orientalisme. La Bibliothèque orientale de Barthélemi d’Herbelot (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 1978), pp. 49–61. 9 The term used by Sylvain Auroux to designate a research programme inspired by general grammar and the constitution of linguistic tools external to individuals; that is, the process of the production of dictionaries and grammars, which constitutes, according to Auroux, a kind of technological revolution and has enabled a wider cultural transfer, La révolution technologique de la grammatisation: Introduction à l’histoire des sciences du langage (Liège: Mardaga, 1994). 10 This analysis nuances Said’s view on the authority of Herbelot’s work. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 63–7. 11 On this scholar, see Eleazar Birnbaum, ‘The Questioning Mind. Katib Chelebi, 1609–1657. A Chapter in Ottoman Intellectual History’, in Emmet Robbins and Stella Sandhal (eds), Corolla Torontonensis: Studies in Honour of Ronald Morton-Smith (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1994), pp. 135–58.

Fig. 11.1. Title page of the original edition of the Bibliothèque orientale (Paris, Compagnie des Libraires, 1697, in-folio). © Rostock University Library, CIa-2.

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contacts with local communities. It was during his stay in Istanbul that the Kashf al-Zunūn had been presented to Galland by an Ottoman scholar close to Katib Celebi, Hüsseyun Hezarfenn. Thus, d’Herbelot’s work was largely enabled both by the work of a local scholar and by networks created by the French administration. Additionally, d’Herbelot’s work is primarily based on Oriental compilations and anthologies, and, in this sense, on the work of local scholars. In the Bibliothèque orientale, the material is organized in articles presented in alphabetical order and not in a narrative form. This rather unusual mode of presentation for a historical work may well have been inspired by the Occidental and the Oriental historiographical traditions. The bibliothèque genre exists both in the humanist tradition of compilation12 and in the Oriental tradition. In fact, Hadji Khalfa’s work itself was a bibliothèque, which d’Herbelot had effectively translated and incorporated into his own book. While not engaging in any detailed source criticism, d’Herbelot’s commentaries and translations aimed at making Muslim civilizations accessible to an Occidental audience and reveal several ways in which he negotiated and appropriated his material.13 The innovative approach introduced by the Bibliothèque orientale brought together different historiographical traditions (Ottoman, Arabic, Persian and European) and this is reflected in both its bibliothèque form and its content.

Νew Editions and the Encounter with the Chinese Historical Tradition By 1714, the edition of the Bibliothèque orientale was already sold out and, since its publication in the late seventeenth century, there had not been a further edition for several decades. The book was to be found mainly in central libraries or in collectors’ libraries, while its price on the second-hand market was extremely high.14 In 1758, in a notice on Barthélemy 12 Roger Chartier, ‘Bibliothèques sans murs’, in Culture écrite et société. L’ordre des livres (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), pp. 107–31 [also in idem, L’ordre des livres. Lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIVe et XVIIIe siècles (Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa, 1992)]. Cf. also, Helmut Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis und Bibliotheca selecta. Das Problem der Ordnung des gelehrten Wissens in der frühen Neuzeit (Köln: Böhlau, 1992). 13 Despina Magkanari, ‘Circulations interculturelles et construction des savoirs à l’époque moderne: l’Europe, l’Asie, et l’émergence des savoirs turcologiques aux XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles’, unpublished doctoral thesis, EHESS-Paris, 2019, pp. 419 ff. 14 ‘La Bibliothèque Orientale est donc sans contredit un des Ouvrages qui a exigé le plus de recherches & de connoissances sur les moeurs des Peuples de l’Orient: aussi eut-elle, lorsqu’elle parut, le plus grand succès. Depuis un demi-siecle, ce Livre

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d’Herbelot, Father Goujet says that ‘this Book has become rare & expensive for a long time’ (que depuis longtemps ce Livre est devenu rare & cher) and expressed the wish that a new edition of the Bibliothèque orientale be released.15 However, the first reissue of the work appeared only in 1776, almost eighty years after the original edition. This was a pirated edition, published in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, a country specializing in such business during the eighteenth century,16 and took the format of the original edition, in a one-volume folio.17 This was only the beginning, and a second unauthorized edition followed in the next year, this time from The Hague (1777–79) (Fig. 11.2), undertaken by Jean Neaulme (1694–1780).18 The son

15 16

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étoit devenu très-rare; on ne le trouvoit que dans les grandes Bibliothèques, ou dans celles des Amateurs. Le prix excessif qu’on mettoit aux exemplaires qui paroissoient de temps en temps dans le commerce, a inspiré à des Libraires étrangers l’idée d’en faire de nouvelles éditions.’ Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 6 vols. (Paris: Moutard, 1781–3), 1: v–viij (‘Avertissement de l’Editeur’), p. vi. Claude-Pierre Goujet, Mémoire historique et littéraire sur le Collège royal de France (Paris: Augustin-Martin Lottin, l’aîné, 1758; Genève: Slatkine reprints, 1971), p. 158. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L’Apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958), pp. 297–8, 371. Since the seventeenth century, the establishment in France of a rigorous censorship and the stranglehold of Parisian booksellers on authorized publishing encouraged the development of illegal printing activities in the provinces and the importation of publications from abroad, in particular from countries with more liberal regimes, such as the Republic of the United Provinces. Although an international copyright agreement was only introduced in 1886, and technically these editions were not ‘breaking the laws’, the term ‘pirated’ has been extensively used by book historians (D.F. McKenzie, David McKitterick, James Raven and others) to mean reprinted without authority. Cf. Darnton’s recent book Pirating and Publishing. The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). These practices aroused the ire of those to whom the original privileges belonged, that is the members of the Community of Booksellers and Printers of Paris. It was only in 1777 that, following the evolution of property rights in England and Holland, a kind of Code of literary property was introduced in France, distinguishing the rights of booksellers and those of authors. On the perception of the contemporaries, see, for instance, the following extract from the editor’s preface of the Parisian ‘official’ edition of the Bibliothèque orientale (1781) : ‘Ces éditions, faites sans l’aveu du Propriétaire de l’Ouvrage, lui ont fait apercevoir les dangers de sa négligence, en abandonnant, pour ainsi dire, aux presses étrangeres l’avantage de réproduire un Livre qui jouit d’un succès aussi mérité.’ Herbelot (1781–83), 1: v–viij (‘Avertissement de l’éditeur’), p. vi. (Italics are mine). Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale (Maastricht: Dufour et Roux, 1776) [suppl. 1780]. Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 4 vols (The Hague: J. Neaulme and N. van Daalen, 1777–79) [suppl. 1782]. It was under the name of ‘Jean Neaulme in The Hague’ that the bookseller Duchesne published in 1762 the first edition of Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which had not received any official nor tacit permission. See

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of Huguenot refugees, Neaulme had been established as a bookseller in the city since 1718, publishing mostly French books for the international market and organizing book sales. For this project he associated with the bookseller Nicolas van Daalen (1716–87), based in the same city. The Hague edition experiments with a new, handy quarto format in four volumes, and presents some material improvements (the paper, the fonts and the ink), as well as some improvements in the content. These included the correction of errors, a rearrangement in alphabetical order (for example, the additional articles included in pages 941 to 1032 of the original edition were now placed in the first part in alphabetical order) and the improvement and extension of the table of contents. A portrait of the author was also included. However, the most important contribution of this edition is the corrections and additions to the original edition. In his notice, Father Goujet had already suggested that a new edition of the Bibliothèque orientale should integrate the corrections, notes and additions of several scholars. This reminds us that the Bibliothèque orientale belongs to the kind of collections referred to as ‘works in progress’, requiring updating. In this way, they resembled the periodicals that began to develop at about the same time.19 Indeed, this editorial project based in The Hague was conceived as a transnational collective venture focusing on the updating of the Bibliothèque orientale. The creation of a new edition aimed to incorporate the results of new research on the history of Asia. This meant, on the one hand, the integration of the notes and remarks made by scholars during the decades following the first edition of the book, and, on the other hand, the contribution of contemporary scholars, to whom an open invitation was launched by the publishers in 1777.20 The invitation to scholars in the Prospectus announcing the project and launching the subscription proved relatively unsuccessful. The reason might also be that, due to the low number of subscriptions, the publisher might have not been able to pay all possible contributors. Eventually, the only contributions were those by two famous Orientalists, the Dutch Henri-Albert Schultens and the German Johann Jacob Reiske, whose additions formed a Supplement published in

Sabine Juratic, ‘Paris et le livre au siècle des Lumières’, Histoire et civilisation du livre 5 (Nov. 2009): 45–62 (p. 52). 19 Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity. The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Harwood: Chur, 1995), p. 119. 20 [Nicolas van Daalen], Plan de souscription selon lequel Nicolas van Daalen se propose de reïmprimer la Bibliothèque orientale; par Herbelot en trois volumes in quarto (The Hague: [Nicolas van Daalen], 1776), p. 2. I am indebted to Nicholas Dew for allowing me access to a copy of this document conserved at Princeton.

Fig. 11.2. Title page of the first volume of The Hague edition of the Bibliothèque orientale (The Hague, J. Neaulme & N. van Daalen, 1779, in-quarto). © Rostock University Library, CIa-3(1).

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1782.21 Henri (Heindrick)-Albert Schultens (1749–93) was the grandson of the famous Dutch Orientalist Albert Schultens (1686–1750), considered as the founder of comparative Semitic philology and the renovator of Oriental letters in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. Johann Jacob Reiske (1716–74), who studied at the University of Leipzig, followed the courses of Albert Schultens, before leaving in 1746 for Germany where, two years later, he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Arabic Language in Leipzig.22 In fact, by the time of launching the subscription Reiske had already died, but the edition was based on the notes he had made on the pages of his copy of the Bibliothèque orientale, as well as on his manuscripts, acquired by the publisher.23 However, the essential part of the additions to the original edition of the Bibliothèque orientale is found in the first part of the Supplement.24 These additions concern the unpublished and extensive work of a French Jesuit missionary in China, Claude Visdelou, in particular his ‘Observations sur différents articles de la Bibliothèque orientale’, containing critical remarks on some articles in d’Herbelot’s work and mostly in relation to Central Asian topics25 and his ‘Histoire de la Tartarie’ (‘History of Tartary’), a historical synthesis on Central Asia, which constitutes, moreover, the major part of the volume.26 The second part contains one more text by Visdelou (‘Monument du christianisme en Chine’)27, and two texts by Galland,

21 Cf. Table 4, Suppl. II, or vol. 4b, paginated pp. 681–764. 22 Balagna Coustou José, L’imprimerie arabe en occident (XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1984), pp. 105, 107–8, 111; Gerald J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning. The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 313. 23 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–79, 1: 5–8 (‘Avertissement des libraires’), p. 8 and 4: 681–3 (‘Avis aux lecteurs’, by H.A. Schultens), pp. 682–3. 24 Cf. Table 4, Suppl. I or vol. 4a. 25 Claude Visdelou, ‘Observations sur ce que les Historiens Arabes et Persiens rapportent de la Chine et de la Tartarie dans la Bibliothèque Orientale de Mr. D’Herbelot’, in Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–1779, 4: 8–45 ; idem, ‘Suite des observations’, in Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–1779, 4: 296–366. 26 Claude Visdelou, ‘Histoire abrégée de la Tartarie contenant l’origine des peuples, qui ont paru avec éclat dans ce vaste pays, depuis plus de deux mille ans; leur religion, leurs mœurs, coutumes, guerres & révolutions de leurs empires, avec la suite chronologique et généalogique de leurs empereurs …’, in Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–79, 4: 46–296. 27 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–79, 4: 370–431 (‘Monument de la religion Chrétienne trouvé par hazard dans la ville de Si-gnan-fu, métropole de la province de Xensi en Chine, traduit du Latin & accompagné d’une Paraphrase & de Notes, ainsi que de la description de l’Empire romain selon les Chinois’).

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which, however, bear no comparison with the importance of Visdelou’s studies and moreover had already been published previously.28

Claude Visdelou and Missionary Reconfiguration of Oriental Knowledge Claude Visdelou (1656–1737) was one of the six French Jesuit missionaries (the ‘King’s mathematicians’) sent to China by Louis XIV in 1685 during a period of warfare in Europe and during the reign of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) of the Manchu Qing dynasty.29 Kangxi, who in 1692 had issued an Edict of Toleration of Christianity in the Chinese Empire, assigned an important role to Jesuit missionaries in his project of centralization.30 In fact, since their arrival in China in the sixteenth century, the Jesuits had tried to infiltrate the Chinese Empire, both through their employment at the imperial court – owing to their scientific and technical qualifications – and through an accommodation strategy involving the encouragement of language learning, the cultural adaptation of missionaries and the favourable interpretation of Confucianism. This strategy, followed also in other extra-European districts, had led to criticism of these methods in Europe and had resulted in the theological dispute already noted31 and known as the Chinese Rites Controversy.32 Visdelou was actively involved in this controversy, but aligning himself with Rome’s position and contesting the accommodation strategy adopted by his own Order.33 Forced to leave 28 These were published for the first time in 1694 in a collection entitled Les Paroles remarquables, les bons mots, et les maximes des Orientaux with five editions before 1730 (as well as an English translation). 29 For biographical information, see especially Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, ‘Visdelou Claude’, in Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, ed. Louis-Gabriel Michaud, 82 vols. (Paris: 1811–49), 49 (1827) [also in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Nouveaux mélanges asiatiques (Paris: Schubart and Heideloff, 1829), 2: 244–51]. Cf. Isabelle Landry-Deron, ‘Les Mathématiciens envoyés en Chine par Louis XIV en 1685’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 55 (2001): 423–63. 30 Catherine Jami, ‘Pékin au début de la dynastie Qing: capitale des savoirs impériaux et relais de l’Académie royale des sciences de Paris’, Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine 55: 2 (2008): 43–69. 31 See above, pp. 109, 115, 124–5. 32 For an introduction to this subject, see David E. Mungello (ed.), The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994). 33 On his position, see John W. Witek, ‘Claude Visdelou and the Chinese Paradox’, in Edward J. Malatesta and Yves Raguin (eds), Images de la Chine. Le contexte occidental de la sinologie naissante (Taipei and Paris: The Ricci Institute, 1995), pp. 371–85 and Sabina Pavone, ‘Dentro e fuori la Compagnia di Gesù: Claude Visdelou tra riti cinesi e riti malarici’, in José Martínez Millán, Pablo Esther Jiménez and Henar

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China after a twenty-two-year sojourn, he took refuge in India, joining a French Capuchin monastery in Pondicherry in June 1709, where he lived and worked until his death in 1737. Visdelou had an excellent mastery of the Chinese language, learnt in the field, given that at the time there was no such teaching in Europe. In India he had carried with him several Chinese books34 that he used to compose several works which dealt with religious, philosophical and also historical matters. The reissue of the Bibliothèque orientale includes only part of his work.35 The Chinese annals had already been used by Jesuit missionaries in China to write the history of the empire. However, Visdelou was the first European scholar to point out the existence of a corpus which could serve to write the hitherto unknown history of the peoples of Central Asia. He used extensively a historical encyclopedia entitled Wenxian tongkao, written during the Song dynasty by the Chinese scholar Ma Duanlin (c.1254–c.1323).36 However, more importantly, Visdelou’s enterprise was firmly rooted in a rich Chinese historiographical tradition and attempts to translate local knowledge – produced by the Chinese bureaucratic system and official historiography – into a knowledge that aspired to the universal. In his additions to the Bibliothèque orientale, Visdelou aimed at completing, but also correcting, d’Herbelot’s work, based exclusively on Muslim sources, by using Chinese sources.37 Moreover, in his Histoire de la Tartarie (probably entirely written in India and finished in 1719), Visdelou embarked on a project far more ambitious than the fragmentary observations on some articles in d’Herbelot’s book. He proceeds to a historical synthesis on the history of Central Asia, affirming that the Chinese sources make this possible, in spite of the lack of local textual sources because the district had mostly been inhabited by nomads. His works are seminal to the study of the historiography of the Turco-Tatar world, as well as to the

34 35 36

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Pizarro Llorente (eds), Los Jesuitas: Religion, politica y educación (siglos XVI–XVIII) (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2012), pp. 943–60. F. Thomas, ‘Lettre du R.P. Thomas de Poitiers …’, in Norbert De Bar-Le-Duc RP, Oraison funèbre de Monseigneur de Visdelou jésuite, évêque de Claudiopolis, vicaire apostolique en Chine (Cadix [Avignon]: Antoine Pereira, 1742): 145–7 (p. 146). For an inventory of his works, see Karl Friedrich Neumann, ‘Claude Visdelou und das Verzeichniss seiner Werke’, Zeischrift der Deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft herausgegeben von der Geschäftsführen, 4 (1850): 225–42. See Abel-Rémusat, ‘Visdelou Claude’. For a general overview of Chinese traditional historiography, see Charles S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961) [1st edn: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938]. Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–79, 4: iii–vi (‘Avis de l’auteur’), p. vi.

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history of Oriental studies in general.38 Although he recognizes the importance of d’Herbelot’s legacy, Visdelou’s work marks a double breakthrough with respect to the latter, both in terms of the sources used and the method employed. Indeed, the arguments used to highlight the qualities of Chinese sources are remarkably modern (geographical and temporal proximity and direct testimony) and point to new ways of negotiating local knowledge. Visdelou’s writings enriched these new editions of the Bibliothèque orientale and, more generally, the knowledge of the East, with a fresh perspective that provided a new version encompassing Chinese historiographical tradition and integrated the pre-Islamic history of Central Asia and of the Far East.

Circulations and Blockages Visdelou was in close contact with Rome, engaging in correspondence since 1712, while his writings on Chinese religion and philosophy were sent to the Propaganda Fide in 1728 and were likely to have been used for the composition of the two bulls issued by Pope Benedict XIV (in 1742 and 1744) condemning definitively the Chinese rites.39 We also know that Visdelou sent his historical writings to Europe and it seems that these texts circulated in Parisian academic circles. According to the testimony of Jean-Baptiste Bourgignon d’Anville (1697–1782), geographer to the king, Visdelou’s manuscripts were probably in the hands of Jean-Roland Malet (1675–1736), a member of the French Academy from 1714, who had previously been Visdelou’s student.40 D’Anville, who was responsible for preparing the maps which were to accompany the Description of China, a collective Jesuit publication edited by Jean-Baptiste du Halde in 1735, acknowledges that he had himself used the precious manuscript of Visdelou’s ‘History of Tartary’ and he repeatedly refers to the Jesuit’s work. Moreover, Visdelou’s translation of the famous Nestorian inscription found in Singanfou, China (known as

38 On Visdelou’s pioneer role in the emergence of sinology see Abel-Rémusat, ‘Visdelou Claude’ and Neumann, ‘Claude Visdelou‘. 39 On this dispatch, see Claude Visdelou, ‘Lettre aux Cardinaux de la Propagation de la Foi (Pondicherry, 20 Jan. 1728)’, in Antoine Gaubil, Le Chou-King, un des livres sacrés des Chinois, ed. by Joseph Deguignes (Paris: N.M. Tillard, 1770), pp. 404–6. 40 Jean-Baptiste Bourgignon d’Anville, Mémoire sur la Chine (Pékin [=Paris]: chez l’auteur, 1776), pp. 33–4. D’Anville had also consulted another Visdelou manuscript, his Latin translation of the history of the Mongols.

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the Xi’an Stele or the Nestorian Stele) is published in the Journal de sçavans in 1760.41 However, Visdelou’s works circulated beyond the Parisian academic milieu, given that it was in the Netherlands that Neaulme acquired Visdelou’s manuscript from the marquis of Fénelon (Gabriel-Jacques Salignac de la Motte-Fénelon, c.1688–1746), grand-nephew of the famous archbishop of Cambrai and Louis XV’s ambassador to the United Provinces (1724–44). The marquis of Fénelon had bought Visdelou’s manuscript in The Hague, from his own secretary, Mr. L’Abbé de la Ville, for the price of 400 guilders, a sum high enough to justify the claim that this was the only existing manuscript.42 It comprised four quarto volumes of about 1,200 pages in total and also included another text by Visdelou which, deciphered with a magnifying glass, turned out to be a translation and commentary on the Nestorian inscription of Singanfou. Neaulme does not report the exact date of the acquisition of Visdelou’s manuscript (he only states that this acquisition took place more than thirty years earlier) but he certainly bought it before the death of the marquis de Fénelon in 1746. Moreover, Neaulme states that this acquisition had initiated the project for the reissue of the Bibliothèque orientale and that in consulting on this subject he had been encouraged by some men of letters: Guillaume-Jacob’s Gravesande (1688–1742), Dutch physicist, geometer and philosopher, Elie de Joncourt (1697–1765), pastor and professor of philosophy in Bolduc and Prosper Marchand (1678–1756), literary critic, journalist, historian and bookseller of Paris and then of the United Provinces, where he took refuge in 1709 after his conversion to Protestantism.43 All three men belonged to the same milieu and had collaborated in the Journal littéraire, published in The Hague (1713–27). Later, they had founded the Journal historique de la République des lettres (three volumes published in Leiden by Haak and Luchtmans in 1732–33). Some years later, we find the same individuals advancing another publishing project, the biography of François de Salignac de la Motte-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, commissioned by the marquis of Fénelon, edited by Prosper 41 ‘Traduction du monument chinois … par M. Visdelou …’, Journal des sçavans, juin 1760, pp. 340–52. A note specifies that the manuscript would have been acquired recently by ‘M. Petit, conseiller de la Cour des Monnoies’ and that it contained also Visdelou’s ‘Observations on the Bibliothèque orientale’. Ibid., p. 342, n. 1. 42 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–79, 4: iii–vi (‘Suite de l’Avertissement des libraires…’), pp. iii–iv. The silver guilder or Dutch florin (gulden or fl.) was the national currency in the United Provinces. 43 Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Prosper Marchand et l’histoire du livre: quelques aspects de l’érudition bibliographique dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle, particulièrement en Hollande (Bruges: Sinte Catharina, 1978).

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Marchand and published in 1747 by Neaulme. Given that Gravesande had died in 1742, it can be inferred that at that date Neaulme was already in possession of Visdelou’s manuscript. In total, it took more than thirty-five years for Nealme to complete his editorial project, despite being encouraged by his friends and collaborators. In the first place, the delay resulted from technical problems. Unable to undertake the project on his own, Neaulme had tried, in 1753, to sell Visdelou’s manuscript to a Parisian bookseller. This bookseller associated with four others in order to try to print the new edition of the Bibliothèque orientale, without additions, while keeping Visdelou’s manuscript as his own property. Such associations allowed to Parisian booksellers, protected by the renewal of the privileges, to undertake costly prestige editions and to launch subscriptions, making it possible to share the manufacturing costs and to reduce the costs of storage. All those Paris associates had, however, died before the project came to fruition and so Neaulme had recovered the manuscript and offered it instead to Nicolas van Daalen. In order to overcome van Daalen’s hesitations, Neaulme proposed to associate himself with the project even though he had been retired from the editorial business since 176344. He acknowledged that an improved and augmented edition of the Bibliothèque orientale was for him ‘the last monument of his zeal’ and his intention ‘to take to the grave the sweet satisfaction of having contributed to the good of the Republic of Letters’.45 But this delay also meant that, in spite of the quality of his work, Visdelou’s texts were not published until four decades after his death. According to the nineteenth-century German sinologist Karl Friedrich Neumann (1793–1870), the long delay was because of Visdelou’s position on the Chinese Rites Controversy and his subsequent banishment by order of his own Order.46 On closer examination, however, this hypothesis seems far from satisfactory. Not only do his historical writings seem to have circulated – and even quite rapidly – outside Jesuit circles, but Visdelou’s case is far from exceptional. Although the ways in which missionaries acquired and used knowledge (linguistic and scientific practices, the study of textual sources, and direct observation) were primarily pragmatic and intended to serve evangelization, they also contributed to the production of scholarly 44 Despite the concurrence, associations also emerge between pirate publishers on specific projects, in order to share the costs and risks. This is particularly effective in the speculative context of piracy, where timing is crucial. See Robert Darnton, ‘The Science of Piracy: A Crucial Ingredient in Eighteenth-Century Publishing’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 12 (2003): 3–29. 45 Herbelot, 1777–9, 1: pp. 5–8 (‘Avertissement des libraires’), p. 6. 46 Neumann, ‘Claude Visdelou’, p. 226.

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knowledge through the traditional information-gathering system of the res publica literaria. In particular, the case of the Jesuits in China is often considered as emblematic of the collaboration between the so-called Republic of Letters, states and churches for the advancing of knowledge about the extra-European world. The case illustrates the interconnection and indeed different ways of collaboration and the exchange of information between different spaces of knowledge production, especially the nexus between missionaries and metropolitan scholars. Nonetheless, the writings of Jesuit missionaries often met with a sceptical reception in Europe and, with the exception of the editorial projects of the Society of Jesus, missionary works generally failed to get into print. This was due to both political and religious issues, but also to an implicit competition in the authority of validating knowledge. Jesuit books were criticized for failing to meet scholarly standards, with evidence often disputed and the credibility of Jesuit scholarship questioned. It was only during the last decades of the eighteenth century, especially after the proscription of the Society of Jesus by Rome in 1773, that non-clerical Oriental scholars began to take a serious interest in Jesuit works. It was in that context that Visdelou’s work was published in the late eighteenth century. Visdelou’s case enriches recent debate on the importance of missionary knowledge,47 especially about the role of missionaries as go-betweens and as vectors of local knowledge, but also about their role in the production of a secular scholarly knowledge and the related question of the complex relations between the religious and the societal.48 Transporting us from imperial China to papal Rome, Louis XV’s France and the Netherlands, the circulation history of Visdelou’s texts also points out the global and complex circulations in the process and timing of knowledge production, inviting us to reassess both its means and material aspects and the different types of challenges, whether political, religious or academic – and also the many different timings of the circulation itself.

47 See, for instance, Charlotte Castelnau-l’Estoire et al. (eds), Missions d’evangélisation et circulation des savoirs, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Madrid: Casa de Velásquez, 2011); Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat and Jean Leclant (eds), L’œuvre scientifique des missionnaires en Asie (Paris: AIBL/De Boccard, 2012). 48 See Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) [1st edn 1975; English trans. The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)], p. 175. Cf. Steven J. Harris, ‘Confession-building, Long Distance Networks and the Organization of Jesuit Science’, Early Science and Medicine. A Journal of the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-Modern Period, 1, 3 (Jesuits and the Knowledge of Nature), (1996): 287–318 (p. 290).

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A Late Publishing Success Initially, Neaulme tried to launch his edition by subscription.49 The price of subscription for the four volumes was twenty-four Dutch florins (guilders) for copies on Dutch paper, and thirty-six Dutch florins for a luxurious edition on large paper.50 Half of the price was payable upon subscription, and the remainder upon receipt of the volumes. However, this plan failed and the publishers undertook the expenses.51 As announced in the periodical L’esprit des journaux (vol. XI, November 1776, p. 395), printing started in August 1776 and 500 copies were printed on Holland paper and 50 on large paper, that is, less than a third of the number of copies of the original edition. Throughout the eighteenth century, bookseller-publishers hesitated to undertake large print-runs, that is, of more than 1,500 copies.52 Precautions had been taken in order to ensure that the value of the edition was maintained. These include a fixed-in-advance number of copies and price. These copies were all numbered not by printed number, but in writing, together with the signature of the bookseller (‘numerottéz non par Chiffre, mais par écrit, avec la Signature du Libraire’), while the bookseller reserved the right to dispose as deemed suitable of the copies not claimed by the subscribers three months (at the latest) after publication.53 Another significant point relating to the value of the edition concerns further commitments from the publisher. First, he declared that in case there was an augmented edition of the Bibliothèque orientale published by another publisher, his new additions would also be included in the Supplement under preparation. Second, he projected an edition of the Bibliothèque orientale for those who had subscribed for the Dictionnaire encyclopédique. Thus, the Bibliothèque orientale, which was also entitled (since the original edition) ‘Dictionnaire universel’, could be added to the Dictionnaire encyclopédique. It is interesting to note, by the way, that even in the case of pirated editions, printers and booksellers acted as ‘credit makers’,54 trying to gain the confidence of the public.

49 [Van Daalen], Plan de souscription. 50 The paper, which then represents half of the production costs, or even more, depending on the size of the print run, is often cheaper outside of France. 51 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1777–79, 1: 5–8 (‘Avertissement des libraires’), p. 7. 52 See Febvre and Martin, L’Apparition du livre, p. 334; and Raven, Business of Books, pp. 304–8. The average print run in France was between 1,000 and 2,000 copies, while the thirty-six volumes of the Encyclopedie were printed at 8,000 copies. 53 [Van Daalen], Plan de souscription, p. 2. 54 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book. Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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The publishers had hoped to encourage scholars to contribute to the Supplement by offering them payment.55 This might well mean that they were optimistic about meeting the expectations of the public and accruing some profits. In this, they were proved right: despite the initial failure of the subscription, their edition of the Bibliothèque orientale met with success. Visdelou’s texts and the integration of knowledge about Eastern and Central Asia had brought a new dynamic to d’Herbelot’s work. According to his initial plan, in 1779 Neaulme published a new edition of the fourth volume as a supplement, this time in folio and used to complete the previous folio editions of the book.56 Its success is confirmed by a new reprint of this supplement, published the following year, in 1780, in Maastricht.57 This was also in folio but with the text printed in two columns, almost certainly because of economic considerations, the double columns reducing by half the number of pages in the volume. The editions of the Bibliothèque orientale produced in the United Provinces in the second half of the eighteenth century attest to the reawakening of interest in this work in the late Enlightenment. A book which was for many years an instrument used mainly by specialists and scholars, had eventually reached a larger audience.58 This can be explained both by a greater interest on the part of European readers in the Orient and by the editorial success of the bibliothèque genre. These imposing ‘libraries’ constitute, together with encyclopaedias and dictionaries, a major activity of the great bookselling-publisher companies of the eighteenth century. The period is often referred to as the ‘age of dictionaries and encyclopaedias’.59 55 [Van Daalen], Plan de souscription, p. 2. 56 In this rare folio volume, the text is surrounded by a frame. It also integrates (pp. II– IV) the ‘Avertissement des Libraires’ of the quarto edition (vol. 4: 5–8), as well (pp. 529–600) the revised table of contents of the same edition. The additions of Shultens and Reiske are paginated pp. 605–62, and are preceded (pp. 603–4) by Schulten’s ‘Avis aux lecteurs’. 57 Herbelot, 1780; this Supplement does not contain the general table and the additions of Reiske and Schultens. 58 This analysis in the longue durée and the stress on publishers’ choices, proposes an interpretation to the gap between Dew’s and Bevilacqua’s views on the reception of the Bibliothèque orientale in Europe. Trying to object Said’s position that the Bibliothèque orientale has been a powerful instrument of representation of the Muslim Orient, Dew points out the difficulties that occurred in its reception. On the other hand, Bevilacqua considers the Bibliothèque orientale as ‘a successful instrument of knowledge which continued to be used for an impressively long time’. Bevilacqua, ‘How to organise the Orient’, p. 215. 59 Chartier, Culture écrite et société, p. 113. For some aspects of the reception of the work, see Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, pp. 169 ff.

Maastricht

The Hague

Herbelot

Herbelot (vols. 1–3) / Visdelou; Galland (vol. 4a = Suppl. I) / Reiske; Schultens (vol. 4b = Suppl. II)

Visdelou; Galland

Visdelou; Galland

M. D… [=Desessarts]

Maastricht New (pirated) edn

The Hague Revised & augmented (pirated edn)

Supplement Neaulme New edition of Supplément I (pirated edn)

Supplement Maastricht New edition of Supplément I (pirated edn)

Paris (official edn) Paris

Maastricht

The Hague

Paris

Herbelot

Original

Location

Author / Editor

Edition

Moutard

Dufour & Roux

J. Neaulme & N. van Daalen

J. Neaulme & N. van Daalen

1781–83

1780

1779

1777–79 (suppl. II 1782)

1776

1697

Compagnie des Libraires Dufour & Roux

Date

Publisher

Table 11.1. Editions of Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale.

octavo

folio

folio

quarto

folio

folio

Format

6: 1 (1781) / 576 2 (1783) / 591 3 (1783) / 566 4 (1782) / 555 5 (1783) / 560 6 (1783) / 605

1 / 247 + index

1 / 520 + index

1 (1777) / 663 2 (1777) / 753 3 (1778) / 625 4a (1779) / 764 4b (1782) / 93

1 / 927 + index

1 / 1032 + index

Volumes / Pages

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Financial and practical considerations might also explain why there was no sustained investment in a properly critical edition of the Bibliothèque orientale. Bookseller-publishers limited themselves to making certain additions or to expanding some articles, without correcting authorial errors of fact or date. In particular, they did not attend to critical work or to harmonizing the various parts that made up the book. Eighteenth-century scholars had pointed out the need to undertake this work, but their concerns strengthened in the early nineteenth century.60

The Bibliothèque orientale Addressed to the General Public These editions of the Bibliothèque orientale published in the 1770s in the United Provinces aimed to fill the gap caused by the rarity of the initial edition, and of course to make profit by this occasion. Their commercial success prompted the Paris publisher to give an official reissue of d’Herbelot’s book in 1781–83, almost ninety years after its first edition.61 This edition, intended for a wider public, confirms the unusual success of the book in the late Enlightenment. In 1789, the edition was reissued by Claude Poinçot in Paris with a new title page. Success was further confirmed by the publication in 1785–90 of a German translation of the book by the German Orientalist and professor of theology at the University of Giessen, Johann Christoph Friedrich Schulz (1747–1806).62 The Parisian edition of 1781–83 presents some differences compared to previous editions, with two significant editorial choices. Firstly, the publisher opts for the smaller, more compact octavo format in six volumes, which is proposed at an affordable price. The use of this format is considered more appropriate for a book that is no longer seen as a specialized scholarly book, but ‘as a book of history, as a collection of anecdotes, & 60 Joseph-Marie Quérard, La France littéraire, ou dictionnaire bibliographique des savants, historiens et gens de lettres de la France, ainsi que des littérateurs étrangers qui ont écrit en français, plus particulièrement pendant les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, 12 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1827–64), 4 (1830): 81–2. In the early nineteenth century, Nicolas Perron projected an updated edition of the Bibliothèque orientale, but he failed to convince a publisher. See Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950) [new edn: 2014; English trans.: The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)]. 61 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1781–83. 62 Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 6 vols. (Paris: Poinçot, 1789); idem, Orientalische Bibliothek oder Universalwörterbuch, welches alles enthält, was zur Kenntniss des Orients notwendig is, 4 vols. (Halle: Johann Jacob Gebauer, 1785–90).

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finally as a book of pleasant literature’ (‘comme ouvrage d’Histoire, comme Recueil d’Anecdotes, & enfin comme Ouvrage de Littérature agréable’).63 This movement in favour of a smaller and handier format – if in a larger number of volumes – seems to begin under the Regency and continues in the next generation, while the folio format was mostly reserved for scholarly publications and collections.64 Furthermore, there is a significant change to the content. While the previous editions, in keeping with the original intention of the author, were in the tradition of the bibliothèque genre, this is actually an abridged version of the original edition. Unlike the bibliothèque genre, aiming at the exhaustive and the universal, the ‘abridgement’, another major literary genre of the eighteenth century, proceeds in the opposite way, operating by elimination, sorting and reduction, all aiming to retain the essential information.65 Thus, in the reissue of the work in 1781–83, the Bibliothèque orientale is ‘reduced to its historical and literary riches’ (‘réduite à ses richesses historiques & littéraires’)66 in order to meet the bookseller-publisher’s requirements: to produce a work for a polite readership (‘à l’usage des gens du monde’). This implies eliminating all these elements which had no place in an edition targeting a larger audience ‘intended for all kinds of classes of Readers’ (‘destinée pour toutes sortes de classes de Lecteurs’). Among the eliminated elements were the dissertations on Oriental languages, on their grammars and the pronunciation of common terms and the bibliographic notes that d’Herbelot had taken by Haji Khalifa. Two further categories of deleted entries concerned topographical descriptions. These were readily avail­ able in specialized books of geography (testimony to the specialization and progress of knowledge in this field) and the extensive references to Qur’anic commentators (attesting to declining religiously motivated interest in the Muslim Orient). The bookseller-publisher intended to print all these articles in a separate supplement, available by subscription in case of such demand. It seems, however, that this supplement was never published, suggesting that interest in the work now came from a wide range of readers and not from specialists. The presentational innovations suggest that this edition was targeting a wider audience and that this had a major impact on the status of the work. As developed in the arguments of D.F. McKenzie and extended 63 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1781–83, 1: v–viii (‘Avertissement de l’éditeur’), pp. vi–vij). 64 Henri Duranton, ‘La diffusion d’une nouvelle histoire: les avatars de Clio au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 44: 3–4 (1991): 359–74 (pp. 366–7). 65 Chartier, Culture écrite et société, p. 113. 66 Herbelot, 1781–3, 1: v–viii (‘Avertissement de l’éditeur’), pp. vii, viii.

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by contributors to this volume, the interplay between the ideas and the materiality of the text steered meaning and reception. On the one hand, a new way of reading the text is proposed, while, on the other hand, the bookseller-publisher modified the content to make it conform better to its new form.67 The Paris reissue of the Bibliothèque orientale reproduces Visdelou’s ‘Histoire de la Tartarie’, a decision, according to the editor, resulting from the ‘importance and merit’ of this work.68 However, this is an abridged version which omits in particular the philosophical reflections formulated by the author and related to his religious convictions, and also the dynastic tables included in the previous editions. These were undoubtedly judged too specialized for the general public. The major particularity of this edition, however, is that Visdelou’s text was not published as an addition to d’Herbelot’s original version. Under the new arrangement, the remarks that Barthélemy d’Herbelot had shared in two articles, ‘Turk’ and ‘Atrak’ (plural of ‘Turk’), are united within one article ‘Atrak’, while Visdelou’s ‘Histoire de la Tartarie’ is placed under the article ‘Turk’. Henceforth, this entry now amounts to more than 400 pages (vol. 6, pp. 1–452), about two-thirds of the volume, which counts 605 pages in total. This is certainly an astonishing length for a dictionary article, moreover it should be a surprise for the reader to encounter such a length in the article ‘Turk’. The main editor of the Parisian edition of 1781–83, in charge of the abridgements and the additions, is not explicitly named. The front cover mentions only ‘Mr. D…, member of several academies’. In his Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes, Antoine Alexandre Barbier (1765–1825), personal librarian of Napoleon Bonaparte from 1807, attributed the work to Nicolas Toussaint Lemoyne Desessarts (1744–1810), French lawyer, bookseller and bibliographer, who was the author and editor of several compilations.69 The attribution is credible, given that these two literary men knew each other well and, at the very time when Barbier was composing his dictionary, they collaborated in the reissue of an older work of Desessarts, the Nouvelle Bibliothèque d’un homme de goût, published in 1808–10.70 Moreover, it seems 67 Donald F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning. The Case of William Congreve’, in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabien (eds), Buch und Buchhandel in Europa in achtzehten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Dr Ernst Hauswendell und Co, 1981), pp. 81–126. 68 Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, 1781–83, 6: 1–452 (‘Turk’). 69 Antoine Alexandre Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes, 4 vols (Paris: Imprimerie bibliographique, 1806–8), 1: 64 [2nd edn, 4 vols. (Paris: Baroin l’aîné, 1822–27)]. 70 Nicolas Toussaint Lemoyne Desessarts, Nouvelle Bibliothèque d’un homme de goût, 4 vols. (Paris: chez Desessarts, 1798) [also in collaboration with Antoine Alexandre Barbier, 5 vols. (Paris: Duminil-Lesueur, 1808–10)].

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that after the edition of the Bibliothèque orientale, Desessarts continued his collaboration with Moutard editions for a project undertaken earlier by another publisher.71 Desessarts and Barbier both belong to the milieu of ‘half-writers’ (‘demi-littérateurs’ or ‘écrivailleurs’, according to Louis Sébastien Mercier’s terminology),72 that is, the cohort of translators, compilers, bibliographers, lexicographers, librarians, earning their living by composing these bibliothèques, encyclopedias and dictionaries published by the great publishing companies during the Enlightenment period. These less famous individuals, if not major actors, nevertheless played an important role in the circulation of knowledge in the eighteenth century. It is significant that the new arrangement of the text, implying an identification between the history of Tartary and the history of the Turks, did not accord with Visdelou’s geographical and historical perception, which, rather, represented Central Asia as a multi-ethnic space. On the contrary, Desessarts’s view privileged a single ethnic element and presented the history of Tartary as a history of the Turkish peoples. In other words, in Desessarts’s reading, there is no longer any question of this being a history of a geographical district. Instead, he presents a history of a ‘nation’. When arriving at the entry ‘Turk’, the reader finds a historical account of the Turkish people that extends over almost 2,000 years. This editorial initiative, misinterpreting Visdelou’s ideas, together with the arguments that Desessarts presented in support, clearly signifies the role that was gradually being attributed to the Turkish peoples in the history of Asia. The name of the author of the text no longer matters. Rather, knowledge is considered validated and able to circulate as a field of knowledge detached from the author of the utterances. Such ethnic identification resulted in fact from the research carried out by the French Orientalist and academician Joseph Deguignes (1721–1800). Desessarts knew Deguignes’s work and had inserted in his Siècles littéraires a complimentary biographical note about it.73 Desessarts’s intervention was thus the result of his own ‘translation’, and 71 Nicolas Toussaint Lemoyne Desessarts, Causes célèbres, curieuses et intéressantes de toutes les cours souveraines du royaume avce les jugemens qui les ont décidées, 30 vols. (Paris: P.G. Simon, 1773–83) [and also 15 vols. (Paris: Moutard, 1785–87)]. 72 Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, 8 vols. (Amsterdam: 1782–83), cited in Chartier, Culture écrite et société, pp. 111–12; cf. Caspar Hirshi, ‘Compiler into Genius: The Transformation of Dictionary Writers in Eighteenth-century France and England’, in André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, Martin Stuber and Philippe Rogger (eds), Scholars in Action. The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 1: 145–72. 73 Nicolas Toussaint Lemoyne Desessarts, Les Siècles littéraires de la France, ou Nouveau dictionnaire, historique, critique, et bibliographique, de tous les écrivains

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adaptation for the wider public, of the scholarly work of three Orientalists of different generations and backgrounds.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the dynamics and the complexity of knowledge circulation in the global context of the eighteenth century. The study of the Bibliothèque orientale, a late seventeenth-century work, and its further editions in the late Enlightenment has allowed exploration of the geography and economy of Orientalist knowledge during this period, its trans-European and global circulation and an entangled perspective of the history of Orientalism. By means of this case study we have considered how knowledge was imported, translated and reconfigured, while examining the associated vectors, places and practices, scrutinizing the material forms of the texts, as well as their social and cultural bases. In particular, this study has highlighted the role of different kinds of actors and networks, emphasizing local dynamics and the constant dialectic between these and the processes of circulation. This analysis of the different editions of the Bibliothèque orientale has thus focused attention on the mediation of actors less directly concerned in scientific professionalization (including publishers, administrators, missionaries, diplomatic agents, collectors, bibliographers), pointing out the connections between scholarly and other social groups and practices. Moreover, the mapping of the geographies of knowledge circulation has revealed multiple variables, many located outside Western Europe, and the existence of uncertain and complex negotiation processes. This compels us to consider seriously the complexities of and limitations to cross-boundary knowledge circulation, and also the difficulties arising in the exchange between different social groups – for instance, between academic circles and ecclesiastical institutions, caused by political and religious conflicts and resulting contested authority. While revealing the failures, this study has shown that they did not prevent the creation and circulation of knowledge about extra-European countries and peoples during the later Enlightenment. The Bibliothèque orientale was for several decades a book read by scholars, essentially Oriental specialists, often in the library of a former patron of letters, a nobleman or a man of state who had acquired this prestigious français, morts et vivans, jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, 7 vols (Paris: Desessarts, 1800–3), vol. 3 (1800).

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book for his collection. While it remained a valid instrument for organizing knowledge of the Muslim world, the book’s audience progressively stretched beyond the scholarly community to reach a polite and increasingly less learned readership. Both its content and its form seemed more attractive in a period when more European readers showed an increased interest in remote lands, and in particular in the Orient. The Bibliothèque orientale responded also to two publishing trends of the period: dictionaries and travel literature. This chapter has shown how publishers’ and editors’ initiatives and decisions played a crucial role in the late success of the Bibliothèque orientale, offering the public handier, less expensive and revised (augmented or abridged) editions, but which also affected the book’s content and reception. In sum, the history of the different editions of the Bibliothèque orientale enhances our understanding of the complex relationships in both space and time between material form and content and the transformation and adaptation of knowledge in relation to the expectations of different readerships.

12

The Diffusion of the Qur’an in Private Libraries, 1665–1830 1 Alicia C. Montoya

I

n October 1691, ten months after the death of the Amsterdam mathematics professor Alexander de Bie, his widow, Maria van Dijck, put up for sale his library of some 1,200 books. The auction took place on the afternoon of 3 October in De Bie’s canal house on the Beschuitmarkt (in Amsterdam’s present-day Red Light district, on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal). Described on the title page as ‘Clarissimi ac Doctissimi Viri D. ALEXANDRI de BIE.P.M. Philosophiae ac Mathematices Professoris Amstelaedamensis Expertissimi’, de Bie had accumulated a largely typical professorial book collection that, as might be expected, contained sizeable numbers of books on mathematics, astronomy and related topics. Besides books, however, the catalogue also listed thirty-three lots of mathematical and astronomical instruments and a small but noteworthy collection of Oriental manuscripts: fifty manuscripts in Arabic, an additional twenty-four incomplete Arabic manuscripts in quarto, fifty-nine Persian manuscripts and four quarto manuscripts whose language the cataloguer – presumably the publisher, the Amsterdam academic bookseller Petrus van den Berge – was unable to identify (‘mss. libri lingua oriental in-4 incognitio Charactere’).2 1 This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement no. 682022. 2 CATALOGUS INSTRUCTISSIMAE BIBLIOTHECAE Clarissimi ac Doctissimi Viri D. ALEXANDRI de BIE.P.M. Philosophiae ac Mathematices Professoris Amstelaedamensis Expertissimi CONTINENS Omnis Generis Facultatum & Linguarum Optimos & Praecipuos Authores, nec non plurima Manuscripta Arabica. Persica. ut & aliarum Linguarum Orientalium, item Instrumenta Astronomica & Mathematica

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Among De Bie’s manuscripts, the catalogue listed four Arabic copies of the Qur’an, two in folio format (‘Alkoran Arabicae’), one of which carried supplementary notes, and two in quarto (both ‘Alkoran Arabicae’). In addition, the catalogue reported one copy of Theodor Bibliander’s 1543 Latin translation of the Qur’an, which was in fact a reissue of a medieval paraphrase in an undated Basel edition, Leiden University professor Thomas Erpenius’s 1617 edition and translation of the twelfth sura (sūrat Yūsuf ) and Christian Ravius’s bilingual version of the first two suras, originally published in Amsterdam in 1646. What exactly does the presence in De Bie’s library of these five Qur’ans – seven if we include the partial editions – represent? De Bie’s biography provides some initial clues. Following his appointment in 1653, supposedly at the instigation of Christian Huygens, as mathematics professor at Amsterdam’s Atheneum Illustre – the predecessor of today’s University of Amsterdam – De Bie lectured on logic, philosophy, navigation and astronomy as part of his teaching duties. But besides his position as professor of mathematics, De Bie also tutored students in private, specializing in the Oriental languages. Of this latter activity, we have no evidence other than a passing reference and his library auction catalogue. But mathematicians frequently had a special interest in Oriental languages, particularly Arabic. Historians have noted ‘an admiration among scholars for the scientific writings, the treatises on medicine, astronomy and mathematics, produced by the Arabs in the Middle Ages’.3 Seventeenth-century Arabists such as Ravius, who published a Dissertatio mathematica in 1639 and Leiden University professor Jacob Golius, the author of an Arabic lexicon published in 1653, combined their lingusitic interests with a particular affinity with mathematics. In this sense, De Bie was participating in a well-established, if by this date slightly outmoded, seventeenth-century intellectual tradition. Beyond the purely biographical approach, however, broader questions emerge about the intellectual background shaping the taste of this individual collector. The five Qur’ans, after all, sat on De Bie’s shelves next (Amsterdam, 1691), p. 30. Scans of the catalogue are available online at Karel Bostoen, Marieke van Delft, Otto Lankhorst and Alicia C. Montoya (eds), Book Sales Catalogues Online (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2015), online: https://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/book-sales-catalogues-online [accessed July 15, 2020]. Transcribed, enriched and text-searchable data from this catalogue is available from the database of the European Research Council-funded MEDIATE project (Measuring Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe, 1665–1830), www.mediate18.nl. 3 Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 2004), p. 14.

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to hundreds of other titles. These other titles not only reflected De Bie’s interest in mathematics; they also betrayed a progressive, pro-Cartesian outlook and a support for the new astronomical theories of Galileo that might justify considering him a member of early Enlightenment circles in the Dutch Republic.4 Interest in the Qur’an was especially pronounced in these groups,5 and was strengthened by the central role played by the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and Oriental scholarship at the University of Leiden and elsewhere in the shaping of Orientalist discourse. How did the intellectual groundwork provided by these early Enlightenment networks shape subsequent attitudes toward the Qur’an and Islam in the course of the eighteenth century? In what ways did this intellectual tradition change when exported to the rest of Europe and as it interacted with other home-grown traditions? By adopting a comparative, quantitative approach and by examining the contents of several hundred private libraries sold at auction in Europe before 1830, this chapter aims to shed new light on these questions, probing in particular the vexed relation between book materialities, the so-called Enlightenment movement, scholarly and popular Orientalism and libraries as vectors for the transnational circulation of ideas. In doing so, this chapter makes no attempt at comprehensive coverage of the entire period stretching from the 1660s to 1830. Instead, the focus is on a few significant moments and, in particular, on the crucial, initial decades of a radical Enlightenment movement in Europe, during which the first full translation of the Qur’an in a European vernacular was undertaken by the French diplomat and Orientalist André du Ryer. Comprehensive coverage is impossible within the constraints of the present study, but also because 4 On De Bie’s intellectual allegiances, see Dirk van Miert, ‘Alexander de Bie’, in Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Bart Leeuwenburgh, Paul Schuumman, Han van Ruler and Michiel Wielema (eds), The Dictionary of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Philosophers, (London and Oxford, 2003), pp. 102–3. 5 There is a vast literature on Enlightenment interest in the Qur’an and the relation between the Qur’an and the early Radical Enlightenment in particular. On Enlightenment interest in the Qur’an, see Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford, 2009); Jan Loop, ‘Islam and the European Enlightenment’, in David Thomas and John Chesworth (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 13. Western Europe (1700–1800), (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2019), pp. 16–34; and for a more synthetic historical overview, John V. Tolan, Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton, NJ, 2019). On Orientalism and Enlightenment more generally, see Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2018). For a recent exposition specifically of the relation between the Qur’an and the Radical Enlightenment, see Martin Mulsow, ‘Socinianism, Islam and the Radical Uses of Arabic Scholarship’, Al-Quantara 31:2 (2010): 549–86.

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of current lacunae in sources and existing scholarship. More importantly, the period inaugurated by the publication of George Sale’s epoch-making English-language translation of the Qur’an in 1734 marks a new, distinct phase in European Qur’an receptions. Colonial expansion overseas began to inflect reading culture in new ways, as well as appreciation of the Qur’an and its literary and ideological qualities.6

Bibliometric Approaches: Qur’an Editions in the MEDIATE Database Until recently, it was difficult to gain a full, comparative overview of private book ownership across Europe during the long eighteenth century. To remedy this knowledge gap, a European Research Council-funded project has been creating, since 2016, a bibliometric database of book information drawn from a corpus of 600 digitized and fully searchable printed catalogues of private libraries sold at auction in the Dutch Republic, the British Isles, France and Italy between 1665 and 1830. This database, MEDIATE (Measuring Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe, 1665–1830) contains data extracted from smaller and medium-size catalogues, or catalogues generally numbering fewer than 1,000 lots. These therefore represent, in terms of size, the lower 50 per cent of the corpus of extant private library auction catalogues.7 This corpus of data on smaller libraries will eventually enable historians to document the reading and collecting preferences not only of the most well-known collectors and intellectuals, whose libraries have in many cases already been studied by 6 This is also why the present chapter does not engage with Edward Said’s important – but not altogether uncontroversial – claim that ‘a great deal of what was considered learned Orientalist scholarship in Europe pressed ideological myths into service, even as knowledge seemed genuinely to be advancing’. While his analyses shed light on the period from the mid-eighteenth century onward, their usefulness for study of the earlier period, which has many specificities and complexities of its own, is more debatable. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978), p. 63. 7 As calculated by Rindert Jagersma, about 50 per cent of extant Dutch private library catalogues fall into this size range. It is at present still difficult to calculate the percentage of British and French catalogues that do so, given the lack of an inventory of all extant catalogues for those regions. One of the MEDIATE project’s aims is to provide the first such union catalogue, in a separate database, BIBLIO (Bibliography of Individually-owned Book and Library Lists Online). For an overview of the material, see Helwi Blom, Rindert Jagersma and Juliette Reboul, ‘Printed Private Library Catalogues as a Source for the History of Reading’, in Mary Hammond (ed.), Edinburgh History of Reading: Early Readers (Edinburgh, 2020), pp. 249–69.

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scholars, but also less prominent, relatively more obscure readers – even if, for the most part, they still belonged to social and intellectual elites. Among a motley array of library owners, ranging from schoolmasters and clergymen, sawmillers and insurance brokers, to Catholic archbishops and novelists, the dataset (at July 2020) includes also – purely coincidentally, given the criteria used to randomly select the initial MEDIATE corpus – the collections of two published Qur’an translators, the Dutch Mennonite translator-polymath Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker, whose library was sold at auction in Amsterdam in 1683, and Anglican translator George Sale, the author of the first English-language translation of the Qur’an, whose library was the object of a public sale in London in 1737 that included both books and manuscripts. The MEDIATE corpus was drawn up to ensure an even distribution of collections for the period after 1700, by which date the practice of selling private libraries by auction had become well established in all the regions studied by the project.8 For the earlier period, Dutch catalogues are predominant, since this was the only country, aside from Denmark – which is not covered by the MEDIATE project – in which the practice of auctioning libraries had gained commercial traction before 1700. The July 2020 dataset includes 90 collections from the period 1665–1700 (60 Dutch, 20 British, 10 French), 150 collections from the period 1701–50 (50 for each of these three regions), 180 collections from the period 1751–1800 (60 for each of the three regions) and 90 collections from the period 1801–30 (30 for each of the three regions).9 In addition, the dataset includes 32 Dutch Hebrew-language collections from 1662–1831 and 10 Italian collections from 1701–1839 (3 from 1701–50, 2 from 1751–1800, 5 from 1801–30).10 Among the 530,000 book items currently recorded in the MEDIATE database, there are 267 (or possibly 268) individual copies of the Qur’an.11 8 The collection count differs slightly from the catalogue count because some catalogues contain multiple collections, while conversely, some collections were not sold all at once, but were the object of multiple catalogues drawn up at different moments. 9 Including one colonial Dutch collection, sold in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in 1731, one colonial British collection, sold in Boston, MA, in 1693 and one British collection sold in 1831. 10 The remaining eight catalogues are from the northern French border region, or present-day Belgium, and from Spain, but because their numbers are too small to warrant statistical comparisons, these are omitted from the dataset used in this chapter. 11 On early modern and eighteenth-century engagements with the Qur’an, see, among others, Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (New York, 2013).

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The exact number depends on the identification of the book described as ‘Mason’s Alcoron’, listed under the heading ‘Divinity, English Folio’s and Quarto’s’ cited in the auction catalogue of the library of the Puritan divine and one-time Rhode Island resident Samuel Lee and sold in Boston, Massachusetts in 1693.12 Because faulty rendering of unfamiliar titles was common in catalogues, this may well be a misprint for ‘Mahon’s Alcoran’, referencing the medieval name under which Muhammad was sometimes known and thereby making this one of the earliest copies of the Qur’an recorded in the British American colonies. The 267 certain Qur’an editions comprise either the complete text in the original Arabic or in translation, or the text of one or more suras in Arabic or in translation, or other publications that contain substantial excerpts of the Qur’an. This last category is also included because, until the publication of André du Ryer’s groundbreaking L’Alcoran de Mahomet in 1647, no full translation of the Qur’an had been available to readers in Europe, other than reworked versions of Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin paraphrase-translation; subsequently, partial or excerpted versions long continued to play a role in providing European readers access to the text.13 These Qur’an editions figure in 183 individual libraries, roughly one third, or 33 per cent of the total corpus of libraries in the MEDIATE database. Of the editions of the Qur’an that are reported, 230 are complete translations. About one quarter, or 49 of the collections reporting an edition of the Qur’an, list two or more copies. To provide some context to these numbers, the single title that appears most often in the library catalogues, the Bible, is reported in 530 of the 560 libraries, or 95 per cent of all libraries, while the total number of Bibles identified so far is an impressive 7,213. All of the Qur’an-holding libraries also record multiple versions of the Bible, including individual books such 12 London native and religious author Samuel Lee migrated to New England in 1686, where he became minister in Bristol, Rhode Island. He left his books and manuscripts to his four daughters (one of whom was to marry Cotton Mather), who sold them two years after his death in captivity in Saint-Malo. THE LIBRARY OF The Late Reverend and Learned Mr. Samuel Lee. CONTAINING A Choice Variety of Books upon all Subjects (Boston, 1693), p. 4. 13 Included in the count are the following partial translations, or books containing sizeable extracts from the Qur’an: Juan Andrés, Confusión de la secta mahometica (Valencia, 1515); Matthias Friedrich Beck, Specimen Arabicum (Augsburg, 1688), Thomas Erpenius, Historia Josephi Patriarchae (Leiden, 1617); Thomas Erpenius, Rudimenta Linguae Arabicae (Leiden, 1620); Theodoricus Hackspan, Fides & Leges Mohammedis (Altdorf, 1646); Johann Georg Nissel, Testamentum inter Muhamedem Legatum Dei et Christianae religionis populos olim initum (Leiden, 1655) Guillaume Postel, De orbis terra concordia (Basel, 1544); and Christian Ravius, Specimen or Prima tredecim partium Alcorani Arabico Latini (Amsterdam, 1646).

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as the Psalms and Jewish as well as Christian Bibles. The most frequently reported single author, Cicero, appears in 407 catalogues, or 73 per cent of the total number of catalogues in the corpus, with 2,455 individual copies of his works. Cicero is followed by Ovid, Virgil and Horace and a spate of other classical authors or religious best-sellers, such as Thomas à Kempis’ perennial Imitation of Christ. The vast majority of authors, however, follow far behind, with 99 per cent present in fewer than 140 libraries, or one quarter or less of the total corpus. While 267 individual copies may therefore at first sight seem like a meagre harvest, in fact this puts the Qur’an among the top 1 per cent of titles, in terms of the number of library auction catalogues that report a copy of it during the long eighteenth century. This makes the Qur’an one of this period’s most steady and reliable best-sellers. Within this broad dataset spanning the period from 1665 to 1830, or the long eighteenth century, in three different parts of Europe, there are some notable geographical differences. In the total MEDIATE corpus, the absolute number of editions of the Qur’an is highest in Dutch auction catalogues (121 occurrences), followed by British ones (80 occurrences) and then French catalogues (48 items). This corresponds to the overall catalogue distribution in the MEDIATE database, in which Dutch catalogues are over-represented (200 Dutch catalogues, excluding Hebrew-language catalogues, versus 150 French ones). However, when the sample is limited only to catalogues published after 1700, the date from which numbers of catalogues for the three geographic regions begin to even out, differences become less salient: editions of the Qur’an are still most frequent in Dutch catalogues (66 items), but these are followed more closely by British (57 items) and French library catalogues (44 items). How can this relatively pronounced Dutch interest in the Qur’an be explained? One clue may lie in the fact that because of the specific history of auctioning practices in the Dutch republic and the early dominance established in this field by Leiden academic booksellers, the private libraries sold at auction there more often belonged to owners who had moved in scholarly or academic circles than the population of British and French collectors. This hypothesis will be explored below, when we look more closely at the professional and religious profile of Qur’an owners. In addition to geographic differences, there were also temporal fluctuations in interest in the Qur’an. From the early eighteenth century, the absolute number of Qur’ans reported per library decreases, even if in relative terms; that is, in terms of the number of libraries reporting one or more editions of the Qur’an, figures remain comparable throughout the period – with a slight, but statistically insignificant, increase in interest at the beginning of the period, in the years 1675–99 and at the end of the period, in the

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years 1800–30.14 At the same time, partial translations or excerpted versions were increasingly replaced by full translations direct from the Arabic. The two libraries reporting the largest number of Qur’an editions, that of British theologian Brian Walton in 1683 and of Dutch mathematician Alexander de Bie in 1691, listing respectively twelve and eight Qur’an editions, both date from the seventeenth century. Seventeenth-century libraries that report copies of the Qur’an are without exception scholars’ libraries, and the editions listed sometimes include Arabic manuscripts as well as scholarly editions of a single or a few suras. By contrast, only a single eighteenth-century library, that of Alexandre-Louis-Marie Pétis de la Croix, interpreter and secretary of Louis XV and Professor of Arabic at the Collège de France, and sold in Paris in 1756, lists a sizeable number of Qur’an editions: four, markedly fewer than his seventeenth-century predecessors. This appears to indicate a shift from a seventeenth-century, scholarly approach to the Qur’an, based on close engagement with the text and revealed by the presence of multiple editions in collections, at times in the original Arabic, to a more superficial, belle-lettrist or amateur encounter with the text, most often mediated through a vernacular translation. Conversely, the decline in numbers of Qur’an editions per collection may also reflect, beyond readers’ interests (or even broader reading-culture shifts from purported intensive to extensive reading practices),15 booksellers’ assessment of the market for second-hand books. As editions and translations of the Qur’an became more common, booksellers and, increasingly, professional auctioneers responsible for drawing up catalogues gave this work a less prominent place in their catalogues, preferring instead to foreground newer, more rare or more valuable titles. This was especially the case after the publication of Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet in 1647 and the succession in ensuing decades of subsequent editions and new translations. Some anecdotal evidence for this scenario is indeed provided by the increasingly cavalier way in which the Qur’an was listed in catalogue lots – when these were not, in fact, descriptions of composite volumes or 14 This is evidenced by the fluctuating rank of the Qur’an on the best-seller list. It is number 37 in the period 1675–99 (out of a total of 7,460 authors), then drops to number 50 in the half-century 1700–49, dropping further to number 66 in 1750–74 and then starts to rise again, to number 43 in 1775–99 and then to number 28 – its highest position in the period covered by the MEDIATE corpus – in the years 1800–30. 15 As in Rolf Engelsing’s famous ‘reading revolution’ hypothesis. For a critical overview of this debate, see Reinhard Wittmann, ‘Une révolution de la lecture à la fin du XVIIIe siècle?’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental (Paris, 1997), pp. 355–91.

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Sammelbände, separately printed items that were bound together by the owner.16 While only one of the complete Qur’an translations in the catalogues before 1700 is included as part of a larger lot or Sammelband,17 this practice became increasingly frequent during the course of the eighteenth century. Between 1700 and 1830, the Qur’an appears twelve times as part of a composite lot or Sammelband. These occurrences range from thematically ordered lots, such as the lot described as ‘Oorsprong, Geboorte, Opvoeding en Leere van Mahomet, Amst. 1627. Arabische Alkoran. 1641’ in the library auction catalogue of Remonstrant clergyman Paulus Verryn, sold in Amsterdam in 1728, to miscellaneous lots of supposedly left-over titles, such as the lot described as ‘Hollandsche Ezopus Mahomets Alkoran Napelsche Beroerte’ in the library of Amsterdam physician Abraham van Moerbeek, auctioned in 1788. In a few cases, combinations may reflect more grounded intellectual judgements, such as the lot bringing together Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet, an Orientalist fiction by Henri Lambert d’Herbigny, marquis de Thibouville, Le Danger des passions, ou anecdotes syriennes et égyptiennes (Paris, 1758), the works of Epictetus and one other unidentified volume in the catalogue of the library of Londoner E. Eyre, sold in 1792.18 Thrown in with a diverse range of other books, the Qur’an appears in some of these examples almost as an afterthought and suggests that by the end of the eighteenth century the book had become widespread enough no longer to merit special mention in the catalogues. 16 In most cases, it is unclear whether lot descriptions refer to separate volumes sold together, or to separate items bound together by the owner; only in some later catalogues did booksellers add details about this practice. Binding items together to create a Sammelband was a very common and as yet relatively understudied practice in the early modern period that reveals much about how readers organized and interacted with their books. It has been estimated that one quarter of all print publications that survive from the sixteenth century exist in this form: Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia, 2013). 17 In Alexander de Bie’s 1691 library catalogue, which lists a lot described as ‘Faulhabern vom Gog und Magog und Sweygern der Turken Alkoran &c.’ The second item appears to refer to Solomon Schweigger’s 1616 translation of Castrodardo’s 1547 translation of Theodor Bibliander’s 1543 translation of Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin translation of the Qur’an. 18 The lot is described as ‘Alcoran de Mahomet, par du Ryer, Haye. 1685. Danger des Passions, 2 tom, 1757.—Epictecte, French and Greek, par Villebrune, Paris, 1783 and I more’. A CATALOGUE OF THE TRULY VALUABLE AND ELEGANT COLLECTION OF PICTURES; Framed and unframed Drawings; A LIBRARY OF BOOKS; PRINTS and BOOKS of PRINTS, & c. By the most esteemed ancient and modern MASTERS, Which are the sole Property of E. EYRE, Esq; of Mary-le-Bone, RETIRING INTO THE COUNTRY (London, 1792), p. 9.

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From a broader book-history perspective, finally, decreasing numbers of Qur’an editions per collector might also be a corollary of the more general spread and democratization of book ownership during the eighteenth century. Not only were there fewer Qur’ans per collector in the late eighteenth century than previously, the Qur’an editions were also less scholarly and more popular kinds. Given that the most enduring interest in the Qur’an was that of confirmed scholars, the relative decrease in the proportion of collectors who were learned individuals also affected the kinds of books available on the second-hand book market. While 27 (out of 247) of the libraries sold at auction before 1750, or 11 per cent, belonged to scholars, this only held for 21 (out of 314), or 7 per cent of the libraries sold from 1750 onwards. Similarly, while only one of the Qur’an editions sold before 1700 was featured in a female-owned collection, or a type of collection typically associated not with professional, scholarly reading but with personal taste and reading for pleasure,19 the number rises thereafter, with four female Qur’an owners between 1752 and 1812. Significantly perhaps, this qualitative shift in readerly engagement with the Qur’an seems to parallel similar trends that have been noted regarding Enlightenment interest in Judaism and the decline of scholarly Hebraism, whereby ‘intensive study of Jewish texts during the seventeenth century, mutated during the Enlightenment into a widespread fascination with Jewish rituals and themes’.20 In other words, interest in the Qur’an appears to shift from a scholarly, theological focus to a less learned, more ‘middlebrow’ focus on the Qur’an as a relatively accessible product of a foreign culture.

Early Qur’an Owners: Clergymen and Orientalists It will come as no surprise that overall, the collectors who kept one or more editions of the Qur’an in their library belonged very largely to two professional groups that also frequently tended to overlap: Orientalists and clergymen. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, interest in the Qur’an developed primarily in a religious context, akin to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christian Hebraism. Orientalist and Qur’an scholarship was a subsidiary interest in sources and textual traditions, such as Arabic accounts of the life of Jesus, or the so-called Infancy Gospel 19 On the female gendering of the eighteenth-century ‘choice library’ or bibliothèque choisie, see my ‘Building the bibliothèque choisie, from Jean Le Clerc to Samuel Formey: Library Manuals, Review Journals and Auction Catalogues in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Arthur der Weduwen, Andrew Pettegree and Graeme Kemp (eds), Early Modern Book Trade Catalogues (Leiden, 2021), pp. 426–62. 20 Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003), p. 8.

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accounts paralleled in the Qur’an and deemed likely to support or enrich traditional biblical scholarship. This meant that theological interest in the Qur’an did not necessarily translate into real engagement with Oriental cultures, other than as an instrument of a missionary, proselytizing agenda. This is underlined by the polemical anti-Islam stances taken even by such knowledgeable translators as Lodovico Marracci, the author of the most scholarly Qur’an translation produced before the nineteenth century. Several of the names of the collectors in the MEDIATE corpus are well known to historians of biblical and Orientalist studies. These include the Anglican theologian and Cambridge professor of Arabic, Edmund Castell, and the Paris professor of Oriental languages, Alexandre-Louis-Marie Pétis de la Croix. However, there are also some surprising absences. There is, for example, no Qur’an attested in the catalogue drawn up for the 1831 auction of the books of arguably the most well-known English Orientalist of all, William Jones, together with the books of his wife, Anna Maria (née Shipley).21 Yet this catalogue does report other standard Orientalist fare such as Thomas Erpenius’s Arabic grammar, his edition of George Elmacin (Jirjis al-Makīn)’s Historia saracenica (Leiden, 1625) and (the subject of the preceding chapter) Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (Paris, 1697). More tantalizingly, the catalogue also records the presence in Jones’s collection of manuscripts such as ‘Hamasa, a Collection of Antient Arabian Poetry, in Arabic, 2 vol. A Very Curious Manuscript’, a manuscript of Saʿdī’s Boston,22 one of the Arabian Nights, containing 222 tales,23 and a manuscript described as ‘Aba Hajaleh, Sucardan As’ Soltham, Manuscript’, of which Jones was supposedly planning a critical edition.24 Finally, the 21 This is not a catalogue of the complete library: Jones had previously bequeathed a large part of his manuscripts to the Royal Asiatic Society, as attested by two printed catalogues from 1798. Juliette Reboul has convincingly argued that this later auction catalogue represented primarily the library holdings of Anna Maria Jones, an overlooked scholar in her own right: ‘Forever in his shadow: (Re)establishing female intellectual identities through the study of book collecting and writing practices’, paper presented in July 2019 at ISECS conference, Edinburgh. 22 Described as ‘Sadi Boöstan sive Hortus (Liber Elegantissimus) Persice, cum Interpretatione Turcica Shemei, Manuscript.’ CATALOGUE OF THE LIBRARY OF THE LATE SIR WILLIAM JONES, Judge of the Supreme Court of Bengal and President of the Asiatic Society; WITH THE BOOKS ADDED SUBSEQUENTLY TO HIS DEATH, BY HIS WIDOW, LADY JONES (London, 1831), p. 17. 23 Described as ‘The Arabian Nights Entertainments, in Arabic, Manuscript, written in a very neat Arabic hand, vol. 1 and 2 in 1 vol. This Ms. contains 222 Nights.’ CATALOGUE OF THE LIBRARY OF THE LATE SIR WILLIAM JONES, p. 18. 24 A note in the catalogue adds that ‘From a Manuscript Note it appears that Sir W. Jones thought very highly of this “curious Work,” and even entertained an intention

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catalogue also mentions his own published works, such as Al Sirajiyyah, or Mohammedan Law of Inheritance (Calcutta, 1792) and Mahomedan Law of Succession to Intestates, Arabic and English (London, 1782). In other words, it is very unlikely that the absence of a copy of the Qur’an indicates a lack of familiarity with the work. Given booksellers’ negligence in reporting editions of the Qur’an in later eighteenth-century catalogues, it is conceivable that a Qur’an (or more than one) was among the dozens of unidentified books also included in the Jones sale. Unidentified books were, indeed, routinely included in most sales.25 Orientalist pursuits often merged into theological ones and several of the clergymen collectors were also Orientalists, of an amateur or more professional disposition. In addition to celebrated Orientalists such as Jones or Pétis de la Croix, lesser-known figures also make their appearance among the population of Qur’an owners, such as Twickenham vicar George Costard (1710–82). Costard’s Orientalist interests are evidenced by several Arabic manuscripts in his collection and by his own notes taken from works kept in other libraries. These include works in a lot described as ‘Tabula Chronologica ex Abulfedae Hist. generali in Bibl. Bodl. a Geo. Costard transcripta’ and two fragments of the Qur’an in Kufic script, described as ‘Fragmenta quaedam Al-Korani vetusto Arabum Charactere Hamyaritico nempe, sive Cufensi, DCCC circiter abhinc Annis conscripta, & adhuc inter Cod. MSS. Narcissi Marsh, No. 2. in Bibliotheca Bodl. adservata, 8vo.’ and ‘Part of the Koran, in the Cuphick Character, from a wooden Table, framed’.26 These Orientalist theologian-collectors frequently belonged to the same learned networks. Brian Walton and Edmund Castell, for example, collaborated in preparing Walton’s Polyglot Bible, while William Jones entertained a wide-ranging correspondence with collaborators across the Anglophone world. Clergymen are the single largest professional group among Qur’an owners. Of the 150 owners with available biographical information, 62, or fully 41 per cent practised a profession related to religion, ranging from of printing it.’ CATALOGUE OF THE LIBRARY OF THE LATE SIR WILLIAM JONES, p. 17. 25 The Jones–Shippey catalogue lists 699 book items, of which 60 are unidentified and described with such terms as ‘A Lot of Odd Volumes’ or ‘and 6 more’. 26 A CATALOGUE OF THE LIBRARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INSTRUMENTS, Of the late Rev. and Learned GEORGE COSTARD, A.M. VICAR of TWICKENHAM and formerly of Wadham College, Oxford, DECEASED; Author of History of Astronomy; Observations on the Book of Job and other Works of Science and Criticism. The Oriental Books and MSS. in this Collection, it is presumed, are particularly deserving the Attention of the Learned and Curious (London, 1782), pp. 19–20.

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simple parish priests to Catholic archbishops, eminent theologians, rabbis and a dayan, or rabbinic judge, of the Portuguese Jewish congregation in Amsterdam. The high representation of religious professions among Qur’an owners compares to the much smaller proportion (21 per cent) of library owners in the total MEDIATE corpus who held religious office. And that the Qur’an itself fits naturally into the kind of collection of theological books amassed by religious professionals in the course of their pastoral and scholarly activities is reflected by its standard inclusion in the catalogues under categories such as ‘Libri theologici’.27 In some cases, the categories are especially specific, as in the catalogue of the library of Catholic canon and abbé Jean-Baptiste Souchay, sold in Paris in 1747. This catalogue listed his copy of Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet under a subcategory of THEOLOGIE described as ‘Theologiens Heterodoxes; Erreurs singulieress & Religion Mahometane’.28 Such evidence, taken together, seems to support the theory that interest in the Qur’an was primarily fuelled by theological research, given that, like knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic offered access to new texts relevant to the doctrinal history of Christianity. As Alexander Bevilacqua has written about what he has termed ‘an Arabic-reading Enlightenment’, or ‘a moment of intercultural possibility’ spearheaded by Orientalist theologians, ‘scholars argued that the God of the Qur’an was the same God of the Christian Bible and Islam came to be seen by many as a more intellectually sound version of Christianity because it did not require belief in the doctrine of the Trinity’.29 Taking these ideas further, some scholars have argued that interest in the Qur’an was an important part of a Radical Enlightenment debate about religion that sought to renew or even replace Christianity with more rational forms of faith. In particular, Unitarian movements that traced their intellectual genealogy at least as far back as the heretical claims of the sixteenth-century humanist Michael Servetus, sought support for their views in a reading of Islam as an anti-Trinitarian, civically minded

27 For example, in the library of Hebraist Ralph Cudworth, auctioned in London in 1691 and that of Gerard Schaak, of unknown profession, sold in Amsterdam in 1748. 28 In some cases, however, the categories make no mention of religion at all. This is obviously the case for categorization systems based on the format or language of books, but beyond these, editions of the Qur’an are sometimes found under ‘Historiens’ (Ghewiet 1645) or even ‘Belles-lettres. Polygraphes et épistolaires’, in the case of a complete set of Claude Savary’s works that also included his Qur’an translation (Lecocq 1820). 29 Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, pp. 1, 6, 3.

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reform movement.30 Similarly, Hamilton and Richard have noted of the earlier, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century generation of French Orientalists that ‘there is no doubt that a high proportion of them had some connection with the broad circle of more or less free-thinking intellectuals known as the libertins érudits’.31 The evidence from the MEDIATE corpus is slightly more ambiguous, and to date only 20 per cent of the collectors in the MEDIATE database have been assigned a religion and certain historical minority groups may be more easily identified than others precisely because of their exceptional status. Nonetheless, we can observe that, despite claims about the supposedly dangerous content, or the forbidden or illegal status of early Qur’an translations, there is no sign of this in the library catalogues.32 None of the Dutch catalogues, for example, with one or more copies of the Qur’an and also including a separate category of ‘Forbidden books’ consigned the Qur’an to that section. The Libri prohibiti category was also most likely a commercial stratagem to attract buyers, rather than a serious indication of any real danger booksellers may have run in selling this kind of material.33 On the other hand, however, certain religious groups historically associated with the Radical Enlightenment did appear to own copies of the Qur’an more frequently than others. Although the religious affiliation of only 67, or 37 per cent of the population of Qur’an owners are currently identifiable, Protestants, particularly Remonstrants and especially Huguenots, appear over-represented.34 Remonstrants’ free-thinking views and libraries, as well as those of the broader Collegiant movement, have been 30 A position elaborated, among others, by Mulsow, ‘Socinianism, Islam and the Radical Uses of Arabic Scholarship’. 31 Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies, p. 16. 32 Castrodardo’s Italian translation was proscribed by the Index Tridentinus in 1564, Bibliander was careful to preface his own 1543 translation with disclaimers by none other than Luther and Melanchthon, while Du Ryer’s translation of the Qur’an also attracted the attention of the royal censors. Pier Mattia Tommasino, ‘Giovanni Battista Castrodardo’, in David Thomas and John Chesworth (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 6. Western Europe (1500–1600) (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2014), p. 507; Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies, p. 55, n. 166. 33 Interestingly, this practice seems to be limited only to Leiden-based booksellers, raising the possibility that booksellers might have used this strategem to pique the curiosity of the large population of students in that city, in whom, perhaps, they saw potential buyers. 34 Of those owners with known religions, 16 are Anglican 15 are Protestant (with no more specific denomination), 13 are Catholic, 7 are Huguenot, 6 are Jewish, 4 are Mennonite, 3 are Remonstrant and 1 each Calvinist and Baptist. Put somewhat differently, these numbers represent, respectively, 73% of all Anglicans identified so far

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amply documented.35 As for Huguenots, historians have long recognized their leading role in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century transnational Republic of Letters, both as cultural mediators and as key figures in the book trade, as publishers, translators and authors of influential review journals and other publications. Huguenots represented the international intelligentsia who heralded certain strands of Radical Enlightenment, as demonstrated by Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel.36 Religious mediation between different confessional traditions, leading in some cases to open religious contestation, appears to fit easily into this mandate.

Languages and Translations: Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet The eighteenth-century evolution of a scholarly interest in the Qur’an to a more popular curiosity is also reflected in the prevalence of vernacular translations, especially during the later period covered by the corpus. Thus, of the eighteen Arabic-only versions of the Qur’an – both printed editions and manuscript copies – twelve are reported already in collections sold before 1700. Of those eighteen Arabic versions, five are the Abraham Hinckelmann edition, published under the title Al-Coranus, sive Lex islamitica Muhammedis, filii Abdallae pseudoprophetae, as published in Hamburg by Schultz-Schiller in 1694. The remaining thirteen Arabic versions are described in vague terms such as ‘Alcoran Arabicè’ in the collection of Amsterdam clergyman Andreas Lansman, sold in 1667, and only rarely in more detail. Possibly the richest Qur’an-related collection in the MEDIATE corpus is the one assembled in the mid-seventeenth century by the eminent Anglican theologian and Bible translator Brian Walton. Besides full Qur’an editions, his 1683 auction catalogue lists several manuscripts of individual suras:

• Alcoranus Arabicè cum interlineari Versione Persicâ. 4to. • [Greek] 30. partium Alcorani pars 9na. Arabicè, contineus Suratam 7. & 8. 4to. • Alcoranus Arab. cum Vocalibus. 8vo.

in the MEDIATE dataset, 100% of the ‘Protestants’, 48% of the Catholics, 87% of the Huguenots, 15% of the Jews, 50% of the Mennonites and 75% of the Remonstrants. 35 Andrew C. Fix, The Dutch Collegiants and the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 342–58. 36 Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (Lafayette, LA, 1981); Israel, Radical Enlightenment.

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• Alcorani pars Arabice cum vocalibus. 8vo. • Aliquot Suratae Alcorani Arab. 12mo. • Aliquot Suratae Alcorani. Arab. • Alcorani dimidium Arab. 16to. • Prima Tredecim partium Alcorani Arab. Lat. Castelli Sol Angliae Oriens.37

In addition to Arabic manuscripts of the Qur’an, a few catalogues record manuscripts of tafsīr or Qur’anic commentaries, such as the ‘Teesir fi Sureti Fatihe id est Explicat. primi Capitis Corani’ or ‘Kjetab el Wasihy regulae Gramm. sive Crisis in primum Caput Corani’, both listed in Alexander de Bie’s 1691 auction catalogue and the ‘two books about some chapters from the Alkoran’ and ‘Tassier [sic], Alkoran or explanation about the Alkoran’ reported in the library of East Indies clergyman Pieter (or Petrus) van der Vorm, sold in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in 1731.38 As a side note, this last library, that of Pieter van der Vorm, also illustrates how interest in the Qur’an evolved. Complementing his work as a pastor in the East Indies, successively in Ambon (1689), Honimoa or Saparua Island, in the Moluccas (1690) and Batavia (1698), Vorm became an adept Orientalist and corresponded with Utrecht professor Adriaen Reland, to whom he sent manuscripts he had sourced in the East.39 From the mid-eighteenth century and following earlier missionary activity, colonial officers and military men increasingly make their appearance as Qur’an collectors. Thus, in 1728, the auction catalogue of the library of the Dutch West India Company official and Admiralty official Hendrik Swart lists a copy of Glazemaker’s Dutch translation of the Qur’an. In 1777, the auction catalogue of the library of George Colebrooke, Member of Parliament and one-time director and chairman of the East India Company, reveals that he owned a copy of Sale’s The Koran. And in 1813, the library auction catalogue of Louis 37 The first part of this lot is Christian Ravius’ Prima tredecim partium Alcorani Arabico Latini: ubi textus Arabicus absque punctis sumtus (Amsterdam, 1646), while the second is a tract by Edmund Castell. 38 In the Dutch original, ‘Twee Boekjes over eenige Cappittelen uyt den Alkoraan’ and ‘Tassier, Alkoraan of uytlegging over den Alkoraan’. CATALOGUS VAN Verscheide wel geconditioneerde, zo Hebraeische, Griekse, Arabische, Chaldaise, Maleydse, Mallabaarse, Latynse, Fransche, Engelsche als Nederduytsche BOEKEN, Nagelaten by Wylen De Eerw: PETRUS van der VORM, In zyn Leven Ordinair Bedienaar des Goddelyken Woords (Batavia, 1731), p. 16. 39 His biographer J. Herderscheê mentions a ‘Compendium theologiae Moh., secundum mentem Schafacorum. Conscriptum Arabice, cum versione interlineari’ in this context. P.C. Molhuysen and P.J. Blok (eds), Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek (Leiden, 1918), vol. 4, p. 1411.

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Baraguey d’Hilliers, an army general who fought in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, accompanying Bonaparte to Egypt in 1798, mentions on the very first page a lot or Sammelband, number 8 of 471 lots containing ‘L’Alcoran de Mahomet, trad. de l’arabe par Durier. Amsterdam, 1746, 2 vol. in-12, v. m. – / La vie de Mahomet, par Boulainvilliers. Amsterdam. 1731, in-12, v. fil.’40 Significantly, the lot is filed under the category ‘Theology, Jurisprudence’, immediately before Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois (Paris, 1748), suggesting the new, administrative uses to which knowledge of the Qur’an might also be put.41 In the biographies of these collectors, colonial interest initially fuelled by trade and religion is thus gradually transformed into more active, imperialist incursions into the Orient, epitomized by Napoleon’s Egypt campaign, with the concomitant need to find practical means and legislation to govern this new empire. As Ziad Elmarsafy writes in his analysis of Claude Savary’s 1783 translation of the Qur’an, ‘there are few more momentous “applications” of European learning about Islam than Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Although the Middle East was not invaded by texts and few Orientalists could have been conscious of the use to which their work would be put, there is no gainsaying the impact of the improved understanding of the Orient on the success of Napoleon’s campaign.’42 This provides a new context, indeed, in which to view the presence of the six Qur’an translations by Claude Savary reported in the catalogues. In all these cases, these appear to be owners whose professional obligations had taken them to the colonies, where they inevitably came into contact with other religions. Increasingly, it appears, interest in the Qur’an was primarily motivated not by scholarly or theological considerations but by the practical needs of empire. This is perhaps the period, then, in which Orientalism as defined by Edward Said, that is, as a means ideologically to bolster European political agendas overseas, can really be said to make its appearance.43 40 NOTICE DES LIVRES ET CARTES DE LA BIBLIOTHÈQUE DE FEU M. LE GÉNÉRAL, COMTE BARAGUEY-D’HILLIERS, COLONEL GÉNÉRAL DES DRAGONS, GRAND AIGLE DE LA LÉGION D’HONNEUR, etc. (Paris, 1813), p. 1. 41 Baraguey d’Hilliers himself played an important role in the French imperial administration as governor of Venice in 1808, governor of Upper Catalonia in 1810 and governor of Smolensk in 1812. He did not stay in Egypt, despite his assiduous preparations. He later became the father-in-law of General Damrémont, governor-general of Algeria, demonstrating the depth of such colonial affiliations. 42 Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an, p. 143. 43 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, new edn with new preface (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first edn, 1978), establishing the term as a conceptual description of the West’s commonplace negative and demeaning representation of the East or Orient.

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Finally, besides the multiple Qur’an translations, some later eighteenth-century library auction catalogues list other related material. Examples of this are the ‘Ex Tabula lignea ex Syria mandata ad Bibliothecam Publicam Leidensem. V. Corani, Cap. 112. framed and glazed’ listed in the previously mentioned auction catalogue of the library of George Costard, sold in 1782, and the ‘Prières Mahometanes, en Langue Arabe, commentées en Langue Turque, MS. 24mo’, curiously recorded in the auction catalogue of the library of Londoner John Henderson, which was sold in 1830, but further listed no other Qur’an edition or related items.44 Besides full versions of the Qur’an, a number of printed editions of single suras, sometimes in bilingual editions or in contexts indicating they were intended to be used for language-learning purposes, are attested in the catalogues. The most frequently cited is Thomas Erpenius’s bilingual edition of the twelfth sura. The work compared the original Arabic, Robert of Ketton’s medieval translation and Erpenius’s own literal translation and was published as Historia Josephi Patriarchae ex Alcorano Arabicè in 1617. This edition figures in twelve collections, substantially more than a later publication by Erpenius, the 1620 edition of his widely used Arabic grammar, Rudimenta linguae arabicae, in which he included a version of the sixty-fourth sura. Erpenius’s 1620 grammar book figures in five collections, although the real tally may be substantially higher, given that descriptions of this work in the catalogues often provide no information on the specific edition.45 Finally, another volume that features four times in the catalogues is Christian Ravius’s Prima tredecim partium Alcorani Arabico Latini (Amsterdam 1646), which contains an introduction to the Qur’an in Latin, with some Arabic excerpts in Hebrew script. The remaining Qur’an editions are all translations. The most frequently listed language is French, followed by Dutch, Latin, Italian, two Persian translations and a single Hebrew Qur’an. Besides Brian Walton’s bilingual Arabic–Persian manuscript, cited above, the other Persian translation is reported in the library of English baronet and Member of Parliament Roger Meredith, whose library was auctioned in Maidstone in 1739. Listed under the octavo volumes, the catalogue laconically reports ‘Part of the Alchoran, a Persian MS’. The Hebrew translation appears in the Amsterdam catalogue of the library of an anonymous Jewish collector whose library was sold at 44 CATALOGUE OF THE LIBRARY, PRINTS, DRAWINGS, PICTURES, Gems, Bromes, Antiquities COINS AND MEDALS, OF THE LATE JOHN HENDERSON, ESQ. OF CHARLOTTE STREET, FITZROY SQUARE (London, 1830), p. 7. 45 Erpenius’ Rudimenta linguae arabicae is reported fourteen times in the catalogues, in thirteen collections. Counted here are only those unambiguously described as the 1620 edition.

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auction on 1 February 1758 and whose catalogue reports a quarto manuscript version of the Qur’an described as ‘‫אלקוראן למחמד תורת הישמעאלים בלשון‬ ‫( ’הקודש‬transliterated: Alkoran le-mahmed torat ha-ismaelim be-lashon ha-kodesh), or ‘The Qur’an of Mahmed, the Torah of the Muslims in the holy language’. This might be a manuscript copy of a seventeenth-century translation from Bibliander’s Latin version by Jacob ben Israel Levi from Salonika, or alternatively, in a more unlikely but tantalizing scenario, the Hebrew translation made from Glazemaker’s Dutch version by Dutch East India Company officer Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort and copied by the copyist David Isaac Cohen of Berlin, in Kochi, India, sometime between 1754 and 1773.46 The Qur’an edition found most frequently in the library auction catalogues is the 1649 translation by André du Ryer, originally published in a fine quarto edition in Paris by Antoine de Sommaville. This was the first complete translation direct from the Arabic to reach publication since Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin paraphrase. The MEDIATE database records sixty-six copies of this translation, in twelve different editions,47 lending certain credence to Alastair Hamilton’s and Francis Richard’s claim that this was ‘one of the great best-sellers of its day’.48 The editions reported range from the original Paris edition to an edition published in 1770 in Amsterdam and Leipzig. The most frequently cited is the original quarto edition, published in Paris in 1647, together with two The Hague duodecimo editions, printed by publisher-bookseller Adriaen Moetjens (the elder) in 1683 and in 1685 (six occurrences each). The first occurrence of Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet is in the catalogue of the library of Campen grammar school rector Johannes Wilhelmus Wendbeil, sold at auction in Leiden

46 In St Petersburg a Hebrew Qur’an is preserved that was copied in 1653 in Amsterdam and was based on Levi’s translation. The Indian manuscript theory is rendered problematic by the appearance of the same manuscript almost a century later, in 1831, in the Persian city of Meshhed. I am grateful to Anna de Wilde for her precious aid in figuring out this reference. On Hebrew Qur’an translations, see Aleida Paudice, ‘Hebrew Translations and Transcriptions of the Qur’an’, in Abdelwaheb Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds), A History of Jewish–Muslim Relations. From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton, 2013), p. 640. On the Kochi manuscript, see Myron M. Weinstein, ‘A Hebrew Qur’an Manuscript’, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore, 10: 1–2 (1971–72): 19–52. 47 These are, according to the catalogues: Paris, 1647; Paris, 1649; Paris, 1651; Paris, 1672; The Hague, Moetjens, 1683; The Hague, 1685; The Hague, 1693; Amsterdam, 1719; Antwerp, 1719; Amsterdam, Pierre Mortier, 1734; Amsterdam, 1746; and Amsterdam–Leipzig, 1777. 48 Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies, p. 93.

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in November 1666; the last is in the catalogue of Utrecht burgomaster Johannes van Doelen, sold in 1829. Moetjens’ 1683 edition introduced a characteristically Dutch novelty by including an original illustration, a frontispiece by Huguenot engraver Herman (or Armand) Paddebrugge depicting Muhammad reading the Qur’an. The practice of adding illustrations to Qur’an translations would later be taken up in Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker’s Dutch translation of Du Ryer’s translation, which was first published in 1657 by Amsterdam publisher Jan Rieuwertzs under the title Mahomets Alkoran en Tweevoudige beschrijving van Mahomets leven and went through seven editions between 1657 and 1734. In the 1696 reissue by the Amsterdam publisher Timotheus ten Hoorn, known today primarily for his pornographic and controversial works, Ten Hoorn added six engravings by Caspar Luyken, four in the Qur’an translation and two in the additional material that Glazemaker appended to Du Ryer’s text. These appendices included a biography of Muhammad, a number of Midrashic tales and the ‘Questions of “Abdallah ibn Salam” or Book of a Thousand Questions’, a dialogue between Muhammad and a Jewish interlocutor that results in the latter’s conversion, which had first been published by Bibliander in his 1543 translation-paraphrase of the Qur’an. Glazemaker’s translation, in various editions, is reported forty-four times in the auction catalogues, making it the second most frequently reported translation after Du Ryer’s. It makes its first appearance in 1668, in the library of The Hague-based magistrate Pieter van Gelre, and a last mention in 1830, again in The Hague, in the library of Judge Wilhelm Godart Johan van Gendt. Despite these numbers, however, the success of this publication appears very much a local phenomenon, as it is reported almost exclusively in Dutch collections, with only a single exception: the auction catalogue library of the Flemish conseiller and avocat au Parlement de Flandres Georges de Ghewiet, sold in Lille in 1745. Two other Qur’an translations, finally, also appear, like Glazemaker’s, to be largely local phenomena. The first is the English translation of Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet, widely known as ‘the Turkish Alcoran’, which was first published in London in 1649 and has been variously attributed to Alexander, Hugh or Thomas Ross.49 According to Ziad Elmarsafy, this translation was a clear editorial success, ‘one of the more popular books of seventeenth-century England’.50 This claim is partially borne out by the MEDIATE database numbers, for the title is indeed reported nineteen times in the catalogues, all of them in 49 On this attribution, see Clinton Bennett, ‘Alexander Ross, Hugh Ross, Thomas Ross’, in Thomas and Chesworth (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations, vol. 8, pp. 290–320. 50 Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an, p. 9.

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the British Isles.51 The first mention of the Ross translation is in the 1683 catalogue of Brian Walton; the last is in the Newcastle auction catalogue of the library of insurance broker Fenwick Boyd, sold in 1821.The second Qur’an translation that similarly appears to be primarily a local success is the groundbreaking translation published by George Sale in 1734.52 This was, after Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet, only the second translation to be published in a European vernacular that had been made directly from the Arabic. Widely hailed as ‘a landmark in the European study of Islam’, this is ‘the first translation of the Qur’an in a European language not framed as a means to refute Islam or to ‘expose’ the errors of the Turks.’53 Sale’s translation appears twenty times in the British catalogues, but there is not a single appearance of this translation in any catalogue outside the British Isles. This is despite the well-documented use made of Sale’s translation by Voltaire in his own reconsideration of the figure of Muhammad, laying the groundwork for important Enlightenment debates on topics ranging from the ideal legislator (in which Muhammad often featured prominently) to the universal movement of history. Enthusiastic claims by modern-day scholars that ‘Sale’s was by far the more popular translation, even among those who read Latin’, appear unsubstantiated by the evidence in private library auction catalogues, at least when considered in a broader European, transnational perspective.54 The prevalence of Du Ryer’s translation in the private library auction catalogues, coupled with his book’s border-crossing, truly international appeal, suggests that his relatively faithful, commentary-free translation quickly superseded the competing translations available to seventeenthand eighteenth-century readers. These included most notably the truncated translation published by the Protestant scholar Theodor Bibliander in Basel in 1543, with a preface by Martin Luther, a foreword by Philip Melanchthon and additional supporting material by other authors to clearly frame the work and warn readers against its pernicious ideas. This translation is 51 Somewhat confusingly, both the Glazemaker and the English translation attributed to Alexander Ross mention Du Ryer as the original translator on the title page and are hence often recorded in the catalogues as Du Ryer’s translation. This has possibly led to undercounting of Glazemaker’s and Ross’s versions in the past. 52 Following upon the success of the illustrated editions of Du Ryer’s and Glazemaker’s translations of the Qur’an, the Sale translation published in 1734 also included illustrations. 53 Tolan, Faces of Muhammad, p. 160. 54 The statement is found in Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an, p. 63, but with no supporting evidence provided. See also Hamilton and Richard’s claim that ‘most educated Dutchmen would have read Sale’s English version of the Qur’an after 1734’. André du Ryer and Oriental Studies, p. 116.

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present in eleven copies in the MEDIATE corpus, all of them sumptuous folio editions, except for a single octavo edition. Other, later translations in turn drew on this version. They included Giovanni Battista Castrodardo’s Italian translation, published in Venice in 1547 by Andrea Arrivabene (who is sometimes confusingly cited as the translator),55 and Salomon Schweigger’s German translation, published in 1616 in Nuremberg. Castrodardo’s translation is reported in three of the MEDIATE catalogues,56 while Schweigger’s German translation appears twice, both times in Dutch catalogues auctioned in the 1690s (possibly suggesting, by its rarity, that this may have been the same copy circulating from one library to another).57 In the seventeenth century, only one other competing published translation was similarly based directly on the Arabic original. This was Lodovico Marracci’s erudite Latin translation, with accompanying Arabic text, published in Rome in 1698.58 Like Du Ryer, Marracci worked from the original Arabic, drawing in addition on the rich tradition of tafsīr or Qur’anic commentary in order to explain the more obscure points in the text. This translation is present in the MEDIATE corpus in eight copies, while Christian Reineccius’s abridgment of Marracci’s edition is reported in a further two libraries, bringing the total to ten. Although it might be expected that the appeal of Marracci’s version, as an 850-page, weighty folio work of meticulous scholarship, was restricted to an academic audience, in fact it appears in a wide range of libraries across Europe, from that of Orientalist scion Alexandre-Louis-Marie Pétis de la Croix to explorer and travel writer William George Browne, whose library was auctioned in London in 1814, and playwright François-Benoît Hoffman, whose library was sold in Paris in 1828 and who also owned a copy of Du Ryer’s translation which bore a series of handwritten annotations testifying to his readerly engagement with the text. Marracci’s version did seem to appeal especially to an international Catholic readership: all but Browne’s library belonged to Catholic owners, one of them a Polish count based in Paris, Thomas Gaston Jean, count Wengierski, two of them Italians and seven Frenchmen. In their seminal study of the impact of André du Ryer’s 1647 translation of the Qur’an on Orientalism in Europe, Alastair Hamilton and Francis 55 On Castrodardo, see Tommasino, ‘Giovanni Battista Castrodardo’, pp. 506–11. 56 Castell 1686, Collande 1753, Davoust 1772. Henceforth catalogue references are by the abbreviated name under which they can be found in the MEDIATE database. 57 De Bie 1691, Mylius 1694. The likelihood of this being the same copy may be lessened by the fact that the collections were sold by two different booksellers, in two different cities. 58 On the conception, writing and printing of this groundbreaking translation, see Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters, pp. 44–74.

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Richard have described Du Ryer not primarily as a scholar but as ‘a champion and above all a popularizer, of oriental literature, the forerunner of a literary genre which would become immensely popular in the eighteenth century’.59 They point out that Du Ryer chose to publish his translation not by an academic publisher, but by a well-known publisher of literary texts, Antoine de Sommaville, thereby consolidating his move ‘from the world of scholarship, of which he had been a part when he compiled his Turkish grammar in Latin, to the world of letters’.60 Because the Qur’an translation most often found in the catalogues is Du Ryer’s, this might suggest that readers were particularly sensitive to his literary approach and to the fashion for literary Orientalism that he helped to instigate. This hypothesis is not, however, completely borne out by the rest of the catalogue findings. The other major work that Du Ryer translated, the Persian poet Saʿdī’s Bustan, is reported thirty times in the catalogues. However, only one of those occurrences is Du Ryer’s own translation. This is described in the auction catalogue of the library of a certain Madame Delahaye, whose library was sold in Paris in 1776, as ‘Gulistan, ou l’Empire des Roses, Traité des Moeurs des Rois, par Muffadini Saadi, trad. du Persan, (par du Ryer). Paris, 1704, in-12’, wedged in between a French translation of Richard Steele’s Ladies Library and Jacques Joseph Duguet’s Institution d’un prince (London, 1740). Madame Delahaye’s late eighteenth-century library is instructive because in some ways it is exactly what the scholarly Orientalist libraries of the late seventeenth century were not. Rather than concentrating on historical or doctrinal considerations, its focus lies squarely on Orientalist entertainment, with popular titles such as Antoine Galland’s Mille et une nuits (Paris, 1704–17), François Pétis de la Croix (the younger’s) Mille et un jours, contes persans (Paris, 1710–12), Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s Mille et un quart d’heure (Paris, 1733), abbé Jean-Paul Bignon’s Abdalla fils d’Hanif (Paris, 1712), and other similar titles. Despite the presence of some two hundred religious titles, representing 23 per cent of the total library holdings, only two reference Islam, namely Adriaen Reland’s perennial best-seller De religione Mohammedica (Utrecht, 1705), present in a French translation, and Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers’ posthumous biography of Muhammad (Paris, 1730). As Madame Delahaye’s library demonstrates at a micro-historical level, there is not necessarily any overlap between a taste for Orientalist belles-lettres and ownership of a translation of the Qur’an. Indeed, while the library auction catalogues in the MEDIATE database report fifty-six occurrences of Galland’s Mille et une nuits, in the French original or 59 Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies, p. 50. 60 Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies, p. 51.

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in translation, twenty-five occurrences of François Pétis de la Croix’s Mille et un jours,61 and nineteen occurrences of the Fables of Bīdpāy or, as he was known in French, Pilpay (Paris, 1698), these are largely in libraries that reported neither Du Ryer’s Alcoran de Mahomet nor any other translation of the Qur’an. This suggests, then, that it was not the literary qualities of Du Ryer’s translation that were paramount in readers’ minds. Rather, other aspects might have appealed, such as the religious ideas developed in the text, its status as a work of historical significance or even its potential as a work of legislation to be applied to new parts of the world to be colonized.

Conclusion From the seventeenth-century Radical Enlightenment to the Napoleonic wars, from Amsterdam and Paris to Boston and Batavia and from collectors such as mathematics professor Alexander de Bie to Madame Delahaye, the data on the circulation of individual copies of editions and translations of the Qur’an in private libraries across Europe opens a window onto several related historiographic questions. Book materialities, it emerges, such as illustrations or inclusion in Sammelbände, provide important clues about processes of reception and cultural appropriation. Bibliometric, quantitative instruments, when used with the necessary caution, make comparison across borders possible, revealing exactly how specific editions of the Qur’an were transnational (or not). But just as importantly, the literary and intellectual networks in which books positioned themselves, as evidenced by the biographies and intellectual allegiances of their owners, tell us much about the changing uses throughout the course of the long eighteenth century to which this text could be put, from theological to administrative preoccupations. These bibliometric instruments also bring to the fore the complexities of linking a series of individual case studies to grand narratives about the spatial and temporal aspects of transnational encounters – including key terms such as ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Orientalism’ and ‘religion’. By introducing the micro-historical level and agency of specific readers, producers and agents in circulating books across different parts of Europe, in a wide range of highly personal, sometimes idiosyncratic ways, in short, this mosaic of individual stories above all demonstrates how inadequate the political concept of the nation-state is as a framework to understand how books reached and ultimately moved their readers.

61 All the translations, works of scholarship and original works of François Pétis de la Croix the younger together total fifty-four occurrences.

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The Unexpected Dynamics of Christian Text Transmission in Colonial South Asia and Myanmar Graham Shaw

B

efore writing, there were long and widespread traditions of oral composition and aural reception … So begins the litany of textual transmission as a ‘one-way’ linear progression: from orality–aurality to manuscript, print and now digital. This ‘technologically determinist’ continuum dictates that each succeeding technology replaces its predecessor, but research is making it more and more clear that an earlier mode or modes of transmission may not be abandoned altogether but persist in parallel to their successor in a reduced or subordinate role. The dissemination of Christian literature in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides a prime example of the way that different materialities and modalities of transmission could coexist to overlap and interplay. But let us begin at the other extreme, with a phenomenon that apparently propelled print to a stratospheric level of superiority. In July 1833 The American Tract Magazine carried a communication from the Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson in Myanmar lamenting the death of a Karen man and his wife ‘near the head of the Pa-tah river, who, though not baptized and never seen by any foreign missionary, both died in the faith’. The man’s dying wish to his friends had been to have the printed Burmese tract entitled View of the Christian Religion ‘laid on his breast and buried with him’. Judson was so moved by this incident that he composed a poem: ---------------------------------------- He never saw The book of heavenly wisdom and no saint Had told him how the sinner might be saved.

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But to his hut a little tract, a messenger of love, A herald of glad tidings, found its way: Borne over rapid streams and deep blue lakes Embower’d in trees and o’er the waving woods, Perchance upon the pinions of the breeze, At length it came. It was not like the bunch Of brittle palms on which he learn’d to read; Its letters were more nice, its texture fair; Its words – he wonder’d as he look’d on them. There was some holy love he never knew; There was a spirit breathing in each line. He felt unutterable thoughts, as now He scann’d the whole, now read each wondrous word. It told of God the Maker and of Him Who died for man’s salvation. He wept and pray’d and mourn’d a wretched life Of constant sin; and gave himself to God. -------------------------------------------- The hue Of death was on his cheek. His burning brow Told of the pain he felt. Still no saint was near To tell of joys to come. No man of God Stood by his bed to soothe the final hour. ------------------------------------ But he had peace. ‘When I am dead,’ he saith, ‘put ye the little book Upon my breast and let it go with me Down to my sepulchre. It taught me all That I have learn’d of God and heaven and hell. I love the man who wrote it and that God Who brought it to my home.’1

Judson was here celebrating a typical instance of biblio-conversion, a term coined2 to describe cases of conversion to Christianity apparently produced through the power of the printed word alone and, most importantly, independent of any human mediation whatsoever. Numerous instances of this phenomenon were recorded in the reports of missions operating in the Indian subcontinent and surrounding areas. However many men and women could be sent at any one time to propagate the Christian faith in this vast region, they were never enough to reach the entire population in person. Acknowledging this unhappy fact, the missionaries repeatedly 1 The American Tract Magazine, 8:7 (1833): 91–2. 2 See Graham Shaw, ‘A Slow, not Swift, Battle of the Books: Christian Literature in Nineteenth-century India’, Memoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture 6:2 (Spring 2015), www.erudit.org/revue/memoires/2015/v6/n2/1032709ar.html.

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imbued the tracts they printed with superhuman, almost magical powers of conversion. A particularly striking case of biblio-conversion was documented by the Serampore Baptist missionaries in Bengal circa 1821, showing that even the most obdurate Hindu zealot could not withstand the power of the Christian tract: At this period a fact, published by the Rev. William Ward, of Serampore, acted with almost electrical power on many Christian friends and led them to feel the value of a single tract when accompanied by the effectual blessing of the Holy Spirit. A Brahmin, recently baptized, had, while a heathen, taken a vow of perpetual silence and had kept this vow for four years; residing, during this time, at the celebrated temple of Kalee, near Calcutta. He was held in such reverence, that when he passed through the streets at Calcutta, the rich Hindoos hurried down from their houses and threw themselves at his feet, to worship him as a deity. He wore several necklaces made of the bones of serpents and his whole appearance was that of a being who had changed the human state and form. Let us look at this man for a moment. He possesses all the pride arising from his descent from the highest order in this country and the homage he receives from the adoring crowd. How sunk in all the brutality of the Jogee! How intoxicated with the fumes of an imagination which sees Deity in everything and everything in Deity and with the idea by which he identifies himself with God? How shall the Christian missionary obtain access to this man, who has retired to this celebrated sanctuary and who has, in fact, renounced all human intercourse? And how shall one ray of light enter such a mind – a mind stripped of all the attributes connected with choice, or even with thought? Must not we pronounce this man’s case absolutely desolate; and that he is, in the very worst sense of the apostolic declaration, ‘without hope’? and yet my venerable colleague, Dr. Carey, writes me, that this man, through a Christian tract in the Bengalee language, which somehow or other was introduced into his solitude, has given up his rank, the worship of his countrymen and all his nostrums and is become a humble Christian, receiving Christian baptism.3

3 William Jones, The Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society: Containing a record of its origin, proceedings and results, A.D. 1799 to A.D. 1849 (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1850), p. 418.

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The following passage from a letter by the American missionary Miron Winslow in the Jaffna peninsula, Sri Lanka, dated 12 June 1832, makes the tract’s anthropomorphic nature clear: Tracts can go where the Bible cannot. Their range is wider than that even of the missionary. They go without tiring, they preach without fainting and their voice is heard, again and again, in the stillness of night, as well as in the bustle of the day. They speak to the man alone – and speak to his bosom, when he has no pride of consistency or victory to maintain. He is overcome by a tract when he would dispute with a missionary. And they have also the advantage of speaking the native language correctly and to some extent idiomatically, which every missionary does not. Where, therefore, missionaries are so situated that they can prepare and send out suitable tracts among a considerable reading population, there is, I am persuaded, no method by which they can do more good, with so little money.4

To anthropomorphize the printed word in this way was extraordinary for those who so frequently and fervently condemned the ‘heathens’ they were targeting for their primitive superstitions and belief in magical properties. In so doing, the missionaries were unwittingly endowing printed tracts with the very powers which they routinely rebuked the Indian audience in a ‘primitive’ state for imagining such tracts possessed. For example, in the 1820s Rev. Charles Friend of the Church Missionary Society at Chunar near Mirzapur in eastern Uttar Pradesh was confronted by a group of hostile Brahmins: We were plainly and coarsely told, that we were great deceivers, who were about to ensnare the people. Anxious that we should not leave this band of idolaters without reading to them some portion of truth, I proposed that a tract should be read. No sooner, however, was that proposed, than the old man rose and said, ‘Nay, excuse me, I must make my salam; this may do for the bazaar, but it will not do here; we are not to be taken into your net; you will not make converts of us.’ Probably, superstition, as well as fear, prompted this conduct, for the natives declare, that there is a spell in our books.5

Tracts, with their short, sharp message and simple language, were regarded as even more effective at conversion than the Bible itself, as a

4 The American Tract Magazine 8 (1833): 26. 5 The Thirty-First Annual Report of the Religious Tract Society … (1830), pp. 28–9.

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member of the American Marathi Mission at Bombay commented in the early 1820s: The great body of the people would be likely to receive more instruction from a little tract, which they could read in 5 minutes, than they would from the entire New Testament; because they would be so much more likely to read it. And after they have read one tract, they are often anxious to get another and another. Soon they may read, if they can obtain it, the whole New Testament.6

For the missionaries, one beneficial by-product of recording these biblio-conversions was the encouragement it gave to evangelical organizations back in Britain to increase their funding to India, for instance the Religious Tract Society of London: In the year 1827, the Committee had several interviews with the Rev. Dr. Marshman, who had long labored with Dr. Carey and Mr. Ward at Serampore. He communicated the most gratifying information as to the extensive circulation of tracts. One statement he made deserves a permanent record in this volume. ‘Portions of the scriptures and tracts have had something to do in the conversion of almost every individual who has joined the Christian church in India.’ Such a testimony, confirmed by many missionaries, strengthened the faith of the Committee and during 1827 about 1000l. were devoted to this scene of their labours.7

By contrast, Judson’s somewhat disparaging phrase above, ‘the bunch of brittle palms’, (‘brittle’ not only in a physical but by implication in a spiritual sense also) epitomized the missionaries’ dismissive attitude towards the long-established palm-leaf (ola) manuscript tradition. The talipot palmleaf was widely used as a writing surface not only in many parts of India itself (Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and the whole of south India) but also in the ‘Greater India’ cultural sphere, including Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Most closely associated with Hinduism, it was also adopted pre-paper by Buddhism, Jainism and even Islam in some locations. In describing the physical characteristics of the palm-leaf manuscript and the working of the Indian scribe, the Irish Wesleyan Methodist missionary William Arthur in Mysore, south-west India, was in no doubt whatsoever

6 Ninth Annual Report of the American Tract Society, M,DCCC,XXIII … (1823), p. 23. 7 Jones, Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society, p. 424.

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as to its inferiority to the Western printed book as a carrier and transmitter of text: The native books are written on the leaves of the palmyra-tree, which are from nine to eighteen inches long and from two to three broad. Each leaf is pierced with a round hole, through which runs a cord, serving to bind them altogether, but permitting them to be held loosely when the book is used. They can only be multiplied by copying; and the writing is performed by an iron style, like a large skewer, which is held upright in the hand and scrapes marks on the soft leaf. The writer proceeds rapidly; his letters are well formed; and though both sides of the leaf are deeply indented, there is never a perforation. But however you may admire the scribe, his book-making is slow and expensive; and, when finished, it is a clumsy thing, compared with the compact and beautiful production of the printer. In elegance, portableness and economy, the European book at once asserts its superiority. The natives are sensible of this: they admire it amazingly. It is as great an advance in literature, as in travelling the locomotive is on the stage coach. They covet a book; and I have seen them, on receiving one, squat them down then and there and begin to pore over those pages so mysteriously multiplied and yet so unaccountably correct.8

Of course there were frequently unavoidable situations leading to the temporary suspension of mission press operations in South Asia. On the materials side, scarcity of paper was a constant problem. Because locally produced varieties were found unsuitable for taking printed impressions, supplies had to be routinely imported from Europe or America, with subsequent interruptions and delays. Lack of funding also frequently brought tract and book production to a complete halt as political events outside India took effect. For example, the Gunboat War of 1807–14 between Denmark-Norway and the British Navy prevented monies reaching India from both Denmark and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London, and, later, the American Civil War of 1861–65 meant that the scale of grants from American mission societies was reduced for several years. Unrest within India itself could also have a severe impact, witness the total destruction of several mission printing-offices at Agra and elsewhere in north India during the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. Given that so many missionaries in South Asia began their operations without use of a printing press, many, at least initially, had little option 8 A Mission to the Mysore with Scenes and Facts Illustrative of India, its people and its religion (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1902), pp. 139–40.

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but to put aside their distaste and make use of the palm-leaf tradition, despite the taint of its intimate association with Hinduism. This was the case with the very first Protestant missionaries to India, the Halle-trained Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, who established themselves in the small Danish colony of Tranquebar on the Coromandel Coast below Chennai (already noted as a place of peculiar European book interest in Chapter 4 of this volume9). The inescapable priority of the Tranquebar missionaries was to learn the languages which would enable them to communicate with the local population. These languages were Tamil and the debased form of Portuguese which had become the lingua franca of commerce throughout India and whose acquisition presented a somewhat easier (but still demanding) challenge to the missionaries. The first Westerner to publish a grammar in the early nineteenth century described it thus: It is no longer that impressive and melodious medium by which the genius of Camoens has immortalized the enterprizing spirit and intrepid valour of his countrymen. It has sunk into a barbarous jargon, scarce intelligible to a native of Portugal, which hitherto no one has dared, or designed, to reduce under grammatical form.10

Because it was understood by many Indians, this ‘Indo-Portuguese’ could conveniently act as an ‘intermediary language’ between the missionaries’ native German and Tamil until such time as their grasp of the local vernacular became strong enough for direct communication and composition in it. Within just three months after their arrival in India on 9 July 1706, they had already encountered and engaged with the indigenous book-making tradition, as Ziegenbalg reported on 16 October: We have … through God’s assistance set out all the Christian teachings in simple and clear Portuguese and afterwards had them translated into Tamil; so that through the copying and distribution of very many examples the same may be made known among these heathen.11 9 See above, p. 100; the late eighteenth-century Rajah of Tanjore proved a notable collector of books and manuscripts. 10 X. Berrenger, A Grammatical Arrangement on the Method of Learning the Corrupted Portuguese, as Sspoken in India (2nd edn) (Colombo: Government Press, 1811), unnumbered first page of preface. 11 Translation of: Haben wir … durch göttlichen Beystand die gantze Christliche Lehre einfältig und deutlich in Portugiesischer Sprache auszusetzen, und nachmals in die Malabarische translatiren zu lassen; damit durch Abschreibung und Vertheilung sehr vieler Exemplarien selbige unter diesen Heiden bekant werden. (Merckwürdige

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The men the missionaries employed to translate those Christian teachings from Portuguese into Tamil and to write them out on palm-leaves were referred to as ‘kannakappels’ (i.e. Tamil kanakkupillais) or Tamil scribes (‘Malabarische Schreiber’). But they were much more than accomplished copyists: they were secular rather than religious scholars, holding an important position in administration at the local level as village accountants responsible for maintaining land records.12 In translating for the missionaries, they supplied the necessary interface between the European and indigenous systems of knowledge and in so doing fulfilled the role which later became the preserve of Indian Christian converts, first as translators and then as authors of original pieces in their own right. Ziegenbalg evidently studied the Tamil scribal technique at close quarters, leading to this meticulous description: Writing with quill and ink is unknown to the Tamils. Instead they take palm-leaves in the left hand and an iron stylus in the right hand and write with it as fast as we write with a quill on paper. But nevertheless it requires much practice to be able to write with the same hard stylus from morning till evening while holding the palm-leaves loosely in the left hand without allowing the hand to rest on anything occasionally. On their left thumb they have a long nail with a notch cut into it into which they customarily lay the bottom part of the stylus; while they hold the top part with all five fingers of the right hand. The olas or palm-leaves they hold with the four fingers of the left hand and put the thumb in which the stylus rests on top of the leaf and continually push the leaf forward bit by bit until a line has been written, when they then grasp it again from the beginning.13 Nachricht aus Ost-Indien … die andere Auflage (Leipzig und Franckfurt am Mayn: Verlegts Joh. Christoph Papen, 1708), p. 30). 12 See A.R. Venkatachalapathy, ‘“This Great Benefit”: Print and the Cultural Encounter in Eighteenth-century Tranquebar’, in Esther Fihl and A.R. Venkatachalapathy (eds), Beyond Tranquebar: Grappling across Cultural Borders in South India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2014), pp. 475–95 (a revised version of ‘“Written on Leaves in the Malabarian Manner”: Print and the Cultural Encounter in Eighteenth Century Tranquebar’, Review of Development & Change XIV:1 & 2 (Jan.–Dec. 2009): 131–46). 13 Translation of: Die Malabaren wissen nicht mit Feder und Tinte schrieben, sondern sie nehmen die Palm-Blätter in die lincke Hand und einen eisern Griffel in die rechte Hand, und schreiben damit so geschwind als wir mit der Feder auf Papier schreiben. Gleichwol aber gehört eine grosse Ubung dazu wenn einer Tag für Tag von Morgen bis zum Abend mit dergleichen schweren Griffel schreiben und die Palm-Blätter schwebend in der lincken Hand halten soll ohne die Hand einigesmal auf etwas ruhen zu lassen. An dem lincken Daumen haben sie einen grossen Nagel, darinnen sie eine Kerbe geschnitten und das Vordertheil des Griffels drein zu legen pflegen; das

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From Ziegenbalg’s next words it is clear that he even tried his own hand at writing with a stylus on palm-leaf. This could only have been for the purpose of contributing personally to the multiplication of Christian texts on palm-leaves for distribution to the Tamil population: Indeed I can also write using the same method, but I haven’t really had the need to, since I can dictate everything for the stylus to my Malabar scribes, so I haven’t really practised it diligently; but were I willing to exercise in a different way, I would dare myself to [be able to] write after eight days as readily with the stylus as with the quill.14

After incising the text was completed, Ziegenbalg observed that the whole surface of each leaf was smeared with oil which would then be wiped off, remaining only in the grooves which the stylus’s sharp point had created: That the letters appear black on the palm-leaves sent [to you] and that the remaining [surface] is yellow comes from a kind of oil which is a mixture of saffron, burnt tinder and other ingredients. This kind of oil makes the books durable and the script legible, while otherwise everything would look white and could not be read speedily by an untrained [eye].15

Just four months later the work of the Tamil copyists had widened in scope, as Ziegenbalg elaborated in a letter dated 16 February 1707. They were still being used to make multiple copies of Christian texts which were partly to be distributed among the local Indian population and partly to Hintertheil aber halten sie mit allen fünf Fingern der rechten Hand. Das Olie oder die Palm-Blätter halten sie mit den vier Fingern der lincken Hand, und setzen den Daumen darinnen der Griffel lieget, oben auf das Blat, und schieben das Blat immer weiter fort, bis eine Zeile geschrieben, da sie es wieder von vorne angreiffen. (Dritte Continuation des Berichts derer Königl. Dänischen Missionarien in Ost-Indien … (Halle: in Verlegung des Waysenhauses, 1713), p. 127.) 14 Translation of: Auf dergleichen Weise kan ich zwar auch schreiben aber weil ichs nicht eben von nöthen gehabt, sondern alles meine Malabarischen Schreibern in den Griffel dictiren können, so hab ich mich nicht so gar fleissig drinnen geübt: jedoch getraue ich mir in 8. Tagen so fertig mit den Griffel zu schreiben, als mit der Feder, wenn ich mich anders exerciren wolte. (Ibid.) 15 Translation of: Dass aber auf den übersandten Palm-Blättern die Buchstaben schwartz und das übrige gelb gewesen, solches kommt von einer Art Oehl die mit Saffran und gebrannten Zunder nebst andern Materien vermischet wird. Solches Oehl machet die Bücher dauerhafftig und die Schrifft leserlich, da sonst alles weiss ausssiehet, und von einem geübten nicht so bald gelesen werden kan. (Ibid.)

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be retained for the use of the Tranquebar congregation and the missionaries themselves, primarily as teaching texts in the school for Tamil children which they had established. In addition, the scribes were tasked with making copies of the Tamil manuscripts which the missionaries were gradually accumulating, bought or borrowed, albeit with some difficulty, from Indian owners (mostly Hindu but with some Muslim also) and from rival Roman Catholic priests operating on the Coromandel Coast. Of course, delegating to Hindu scribes the responsibility for ensuring that Christian texts were copied accurately with grammatical correctness ran the risk not just of accidental error but also, more seriously, of deliberate ‘spiritual sabotage’, which the missionaries with their understanding of Tamil still only at a rudimentary level were in no position to detect.16 One historian of missions has even suggested that ‘the native copyists took a delight in introducing mistakes into the most important passages’17 to undermine the Christian message and thus the conversion project. This problem of scribal accuracy occasionally persisted into the nineteenth century, as, for instance, an 1838 account of the American Mission in Sri Lanka reported: A few years since, the only tracts distributed in the district of Jaffna, were written on the ola. A single writer could make only four or five copies in a day and rarely made one that was perfectly accurate.18

By 1714, when the Tranquebar missionaries printed a catalogue of the library which they had installed in their Jerusalem Church, its contents included 156 volumes of Hindu theology, philosophy and medicine, fourteen works of Catholic doctrine and twelve Islamic texts, all on palm-leaves. 16 Translation of: Wurden … Malabarische Schreiber angenommen, um uns diejenigen Bücher abzuschreiben, die wir in dieser Sprache von den Malabaren, und zum Theil von den Papisten, mit Mühe bekommen konten. Auch haben selbige nachmals beständig diejenigen Bücher, so von unserer Christlichen Evangelischen Religion in solcher Sprache geschrieben sind, vielfältig abcopeyen müssen, theils zur Ausstreuung unter die Heyden, theils auch zu unserm und der unsrigen Gebrauch. Dessgleichen hat man diese Schreiber auch dazu nöthig gehabt, dass sie uns die Malabarische Bücher vorgelesen, und geschrieben, was man ihnen in den Griffel dictiret, auch was man schriftlich in dieser Sprache gearbeitet hat, in guter Correction und Ordnung erhalten. (Sechste Continuation des Berichts derer Königl. Dänischen Missionarien in Ost-Indien … die andere Edition (Halle: in Verlegung des Waysen-hauses, 1715), p. 227. 17 Julius Richter, A History of Missions in India … translated by Sydney H. Moore (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908), p. 107. 18 Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, presented at the twenty-ninth annual meeting … 1838 (Boston: Printed for the Board, 1838), p. 92.

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The catalogue also allows us a glimpse of the scale and scope of the Christian works which the missionaries had got translated into Tamil and copied onto palm-leaf (‘escritas em oles’). They ranged from biblical translations through tracts, sermons and prayers to catechisms for use in the mission’s Tamil school. Twenty-five titles were listed:19 Compendium of theology

A general letter to the Tamils

Theology complete in 34 articles

Various letters to the Tamils

The New Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Various letters sent from Europe to the new Christians of the Church of Jerusalem in Tranquebar

The first two Books of Moses, namely Genesis and Exodus

A letter from Madras to the members of the Church of Jerusalem in Tranquebar

The story of the Old Testament

The Way of Salvation

The Gospels and the Epistles arranged according to Feast Days and Sundays

The rites of the Danish Church

Christian morality

The Book of Psalms arranged for European melodies

26 Discourses on the Articles of Faith

The Book of Psalms arranged for Tamil music

11 Sermons on various topics

Christian prayers

14 Discourses on the Articles of Theology

Short questions on the whole of Christian doctrine

The story of Christ

A Catechism with questions and answers

Sciagraphy of the four principal religions of the world

The Christian rules of life

The history of the Church in questions and answers

For the next few years the number of copyists whom the Tranquebar missionaries could employ fluctuated according to the amount of funding they had available.20 In 1709 seven kanakkupillais were sitting at work in

19 Translated from the Portuguese in Catalogo dos livros que se achaõ na bibliotheca da igreja chamada Jerusalem em Tranquebar (Tranquebar: na estampa dos Missionarios Reaes de Dennemarck, anno de 1714), pp. [11–12]. 20 Solcherley Schreiber hat man noch bis dato bey diesem Wercke nöthig: aber wegen der äusserlichen Umstände ist deren Zahl bald grösser bald kleiner gewesen, je nachdem wir Hülffe oder Mangel an Gelde gehabt haben. (Sechste Continuation des Berichts …, p. 227).

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the same hall as the catechists;21 the next year there were generally no fewer than twelve, busy multiplying copies in order to meet the missionaries’ ever-increasing demand for distribution.22 The efforts of the professional scribes were being supplemented, at no extra cost, by those of the pupils in the mission’s Tamil school. The timetable of lessons for 1709 included writing practice from one to two o’clock in the afternoon, the pupils being taught first to draw letters in the sand and, once that had been mastered, progressing to learning to write with a stylus on palm-leaf.23 The same strategy of copying on palm-leaves was adopted by later missions in difficult moments. When, for example, a printer from the United States arrived in Sri Lanka in 1820 and was promptly ordered by the British Governor, Sir Edward Barnes, to leave within fifteen days, the American mission in Jaffna had perforce to revert to the indigenous book-making tradition, as Levi Spaulding reported: We commenced with new energy the preparation and distribution of tracts on the ola (palm leaf ). We employed those schoolmasters and pupils who could write a fair hand and gave a pice (⅜d.) for each full closely written four-pages tract. These were carried in our hands and sometimes for a time they were strung on a small cord and swung on the horse’s neck.24

The high costs of employing professional scribes meant that the primary argument advanced by the Tranquebar missionaries for requesting a printing press was an economic one, Ziegenbalg writing as early as 22 August 1708:

21 Die 7. Kannakappel oder Malabarische Schreiber, so die Bücher von unserer Christlichen Religion abcopiren, sitzen im Sahle wo catechisiret wird. (Vierte Continuation des Berichts derer Königl. Dänischen Missionarien in Ost-Indien … die andere Auflage (Halle: in Verlegung des Waysenhauses, 1714), pp. 158–9.) 22 Das vielfältige Abschreiben der Malabarischen Bücher, als wozu anjetzo überhaupt zwölff Malabarische Schreiber gehalten warden, damit man einige Büücher im Vorrathe habe, die man jezuweilen den Heyden geben könne. (Fünffte Continuation des Berichts derer Königl. Dänischen Missionarien in Ost-Indien … (Halle: in Verlegung des Waysenhauses, 1713), p. 187.) 23 Von 1. Bis 2 Uhr lernen sie nach der Malabarischen Art im Sande schreiben: und die, so hierinnen schon geübt sind, lernen mit dem eysernen Griffel auf Palm-Blätter schreiben. (Vierte Continuation des Berichts …, p. 157.) 24 Quoted in John Murdoch (comp.), Catalogue of the Christian Vernacular Literature of India: With hints on the management of Indian tract societies (Madras: Caleb Foster, 1870), p. 172.

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We heartily wish to be supplied with a Malabarick and Portuguese printing-press, to save the expensive charges of getting such books transcribed, as may serve our end in carrying on this work. I have hitherto employ’d six Malabarick writers in my house, which, considering our present circumstances, will prove too chargeable at last. ’Tis true, those books which we get from the Malabar heathens must be entirely transcribed, or else bought up for ready money, if people will part with them; but such as lay down the grounds of our holy religion and are to be dispersed among the heathens here, must be carefully printed off for this design.25

It would be another four years, however, before a press arrived, on 16 September 1712, the gift of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London. Likewise, without sufficient funding to acquire a printing press at the outset of his mission, William Carey’s mentor, John Thomas, the first Baptist missionary in Bengal, created Christian manuscripts by his own hand in the 1790s, but on paper rather than palm-leaf: [He] was accustomed to write upon slips of paper, in his own admirable Bengali calligraphy, striking Scripture texts and then to distribute them through his hungry audiences.26

But even in the nineteenth century many missionary societies, when establishing new spheres of operations in South Asia, still did not initially include provision for a printing press, even though by then it was recognized as the great engine of conversion. This was especially surprising, given the more recent archetype of the Serampore Mission Press established in 1800 and widely regarded by missionary societies as the model to follow. For instance, an American missionary in the Jaffna peninsula wrote in the early 1820s: We visit from 2 to 8 families in a day. Sometimes we take long journeys and are out 6 or 8 days; taking with us, some of the boys from the schools. At such times particularly, we feel the need of tracts. Passing through villages where the Gospel was never before heard, we find hundreds who can and who would read, had we books, or 25 Propagation of the Gospel in the East: being a further account of the progress made by some missionaries to Tranquebar, upon the coast of Coromandel, for the conversion of the Malabarians … Part II. The second edition (London: printed; and are to be sold by J. Downing, 1711), p. 7. 26 Arthur C. Chute, John Thomas, First Baptist Missionary to Bengal, 1757–1801 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Baptist Book and Tract Society, 1893), p. 73.

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tracts, to give them. But alas, we have none! No Bible, no tract, to show the poor heathen how to flee from the wrath to come. The only tracts which we have ever had, have been written upon the olla and procured, of course, at a great expense. Perhaps in all our missions, we have distributed 200, obtained in that way. O that we could get a supply printed. Into how many villages could the Gospel be sent by means of tracts. How many souls, by a single tract, might be saved from endless misery.27

In Odisha, before the first operation of a press in 1838, the English Baptist missionaries at Cuttack routinely used tracts as an adjunct to public preaching. It was linguistically less demanding on the missionaries to read to an audience from an established printed text, rather than having to extemporise a speech at the risk of diluting or diminishing the essential points to be communicated. That same text could then be distributed for the reinforcement of a consistent Christian message through reading. As Charles Lacey noted: The distribution of the Scriptures and religious tracts has been extensively effected, both in Cuttack and in the country round. The opportunities for disposing of these have been after preaching. On these occasions from five to twenty have been given to such as have been able to read them. We have had some thousand copies of an excellent tract called ‘The Jewel Mine of Salvation’, written out on the tall [i.e. talipot palm] leaf and distributed. This method has the advantage of being easily understood; for the natives are not used to a printed character.28

That last point, indicating that it was the printed character rather than the manuscript hand which posed greater problems of legibility, was one frequently echoed in mission reports. The ‘standardized’ letter forms cast in fonts of type designed by European eyes tended to differ from the more cursive forms that were familiar to Indian eyes from traditional scribal hands. For instance, in his journal of itineration along the Mahanadi River in December 1835, the Rev. William Brown of Cuttack wrote: 22nd. – Stayed last evening at a village named Bhagapura; we visited it, when [the elderly convert] Dittarree preached and a few books were distributed. The people had never before heard the Gospel, nor 27 Ninth Annual Report of the American Tract Society …, pp. 23–4. 28 Amos Sutton, A Narrative of the Mission to Orissa: (the site of the temple of Jugurnauth); supported by the new connexion of General Baptists in England (Boston: published by David Marks for the Free-Will Baptist Connexion, 1833), p. 282.

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seen our books: they at first scrupled to take them, saying they could not understand such wonderful things; and their being in the printed character and on paper instead of tal leaf, increased the apparent difficulty. We however talked kindly to them and they took some tracts, promising to study them and understand them if possible – May a divine blessing attend them!29

The Secretary of the Jaffna Tract Society at the mid-point of the nineteenth century, here offering the opposite view, was in the minority: A few individuals … continued to circulate a few thousand tracts written on the olla; but these, besides the inconvenience of not always being legibly written and being liable to many errors in transcribing, did not prove so acceptable to the people as printed books.30

There were even occasions when the missionaries, letting their evangelical ambition run ahead of their acquisition of local linguistic and literary knowledge, opted for the wrong script in which to print for a particular audience. The most famous example was perhaps William Carey’s A Grammar of the Mahratta Language. The first edition of 1805 was much criticized for employing the Devanagari (Marathi Balbodh) character, as a result of which, as the East India Company surgeon Robert Drummond commented, it ‘is in very few hands here and in fact only a small proportion of that nation can read the Balbodh or Nagree character in which its parts are illustrated’.31 This error was corrected in the second edition (Serampore 1808), being printed in the more cursive Modi script, which was familiar from having been long used for the transactions of the Maratha government as well as among the merchant classes. Even when printed tracts or portions of Scripture were available, the quantity was often insufficient to meet the demand, and missionaries found that Indians were creating ‘new’ manuscripts from ‘old’ print: Another [missionary] mentions that having lent a Teloogoo New Testament, not only was it read by the person who had borrowed it, but he and his brother-in-law commenced copying it, that they might be able to keep it in manuscript.32 29 The Calcutta Christian Observer V:viii (Aug. 1836): 386–7. 30 Jones, Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society, pp. 452–3. 31 Illustrations of the Grammatical Parts of the Guzerattee, Mahratta & English languages (Bombay: Printed at the Courier Press, 1808). 32 Contributions towards a History of Biblical Translations in India [Reprinted from the Calcutta Christian Observer.] (Calcutta: printed for the Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society), 1854), p. 14.

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The English Baptist John Chamberlain also heard of the same phenomenon from one of his converts in relation to printed copies of the Urdu New Testament: A convert of his own mentioned that on a visit to Delhi, hearing of a number of people congregated in one place, busily employed reading, he went to them and found them perusing the Word of God in Hindustani. On questioning them, the convert learned that some of them had received copies of the book at the Hurdwar fair, where Mr. Chamberlain was in the habit of distributing such works and that on looking into them, they were so interested that they copied them in manuscript for the use of others.33

The American missionary John Jay Lawrence at Dindigul south-west of Chennai, was surprised to encounter an Indian trader with a check-list of Christian publications written out on palm-leaf for his personal reference: In a tour I made to Pulney in November, a merchant in Palcanooth, after having conversed a while on religious truth, produced an olla containing a list of some twenty tracts which he had collected and showed a good acquaintance with some of the important truths of Christianity. He declined taking several tracts because he already had them. The sincerity and manly freedom with which he conversed and his strong desire for an entire set of our publications, induced me to hope much for him. ‘Is not this a brand plucked from the burning?’34

In Myanmar also the same ‘on-copying’ practice was observed, as the American Baptist Eugene Kincaid recorded in his journal on 9 September 1833 in relation to the Burmese tract View of the Christian Religion: Two young men, from a district little to the west of Tuong, called early this morning to get a few books. Their father had got the ‘View’ on Rangoon; several of the neighbours had copied it on palm leaf; the head man of a Karen village, who could read Burman, procured a copy and the villagers frequently assembled to hear it read.35

As mentioned in that quotation, the widespread indigenous tradition of communal reading (and its result: group listening) was seized upon by the missionaries as a major stratagem for overcoming the otherwise seemingly 33 Ibid., p. 117. 34 Thirtieth Annual Report of the American Tract Society … (1844), p. 123. 35 Twenty-First Annual Report of the American Tract Society … (1835), p. 42.

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insuperable problem of illiteracy. It only required a single literate person in a particular locality, commonly the village schoolmaster, for a text to be successfully transmitted to an entire community. What group reading to a collective audience achieved therefore we might term ‘indirect access to literacy’ or ‘literacy by proxy’. Here is a typical instance of the texts of printed tracts being read out to a village community, by James William Gordon of the London Missionary Society itinerating west of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh in 1846: Aug. 21. – Remained at Rayaveram, under a shady tamarind-tree, close to the village. Having arrived late last evening, could do nothing with the people; so after commending my servants and myself to the care of Him ‘who never slumbers or sleeps’, I retired to rest and rose in the morning much refreshed. From an early hour in the morning until three o’clock, I was busily engaged with many people from the village, so that there was no need for me to go far for a congregation. The tracts read to-day were, ‘Spiritual Instruction’, ‘On Caste’ and ‘Juggernaut’. The people heard gladly and but little opposition was manifested.36

Whenever possible, delivering the reading of a tract or biblical portion was entrusted to Christian convert-workers for their greater fluency in the language and closer innate rapport with the audience. For instance, the American Presbyterian Benjamin Clark Meigs at Tellippalai in the Jaffna peninsula noted: My native helpers are constantly supplied with tracts and continue the practice … of distributing them among the people – in the highways – at their houses – in the bazaars and at festivals – in short, wherever they meet with persons desirous of receiving them. They [act] not only as tract distributors, but as tract readers among the people.37

At group readings, what most impressed the missionaries was the Indians’ great capacity for memorization, based on the traditional method of teaching in Hindu schools (pathashalas), that is, hearing the teacher recite a text a single line at a time, the pupils saying the line back to the teacher, going onto the next line and so on, gradually ingesting the words through the frequent repetition of this process. To cite just two examples from

36 The Missionary Magazine and Chronicle XI:cxxxiv (July 1847), 110. 37 Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the American Tract Society … (1838), p. 71.

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Bengal, the first being from the Baptist missionary George Pearce stationed at Chitpur, a suburb of Kolkata: I once, when travelling, unexpectedly found two persons in a field to whom I had given tracts, reading them to several of their countrymen, who were listening with attention … At another time, on enquiring whether the tracts had been read which I had given, a young man repeated, from memory, a part of the tract entitled, The Essence of the Bible.

The second is from an unnamed Serampore missionary: At Sumgura I got a knot of hearers at the chowkey and read to them by lamp-light, concluding with prayer. They mentioned that a Brahmun in the village had got a tract about five years ago and one man, who had heard it often, repeated parts of it (The True Refuge); and on my sending for him he came and just as the fire in the hearth blazed he recognized me as having given him the tract. He too repeated several couplets relative to the eternal punishment of sinners, the inefficacy of the Ganges and Jumna waters to wash away sin and the eternity, power, &c. of the true God. Of course I was delighted with these proofs that our books are read and their truths discerned, but my joy moderated at the Brahmun’s coldness when I offered him more books.38

That same rote method of learning was used very successfully by the missionaries for teaching Christian texts to the pupils in the mission schools, as this account showed: In the beginning of the year, 2000 copies of Watts’s First Catechism, in Canarese, were printed at Madras; and there has since been drawn up and translated a tract, in the same language, entitled, ‘The Incarnation of Christ,’ in which the vanity of seeking salvation in any other way than that which the Gospel points out, together with time necessity, nature and excellency of the divine atonement, is set forth. The Rev. J. Hands, just before leaving the Presidency, kindly superintended the printing of 2000 copies of this tract. Thus your Committee have, in the past year, been furnished with 4000 Canarese Tracts. This is only the embryo. What shall the full growth be? We hope the Great Head of the church will condescend to render these tracts a very extensive and eminent blessing. Nearly half of the first 2,000 are now circulated 38 Periodical Accounts of the Serampore Mission. New series. Volume I from January 1827 to December 1833 inclusive (London: Parbury, Allen and Co., 1834), p. 64.

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in the different native schools attached to the Bellary Mission and in others of the surrounding country, at the distance of from 1 to 360 miles. You will be pleased to hear that 130 of these Pagan youths have committed the whole of the above tract to memory and can repeat it verbatim.39

Once they had formed a sufficient ‘mental library’ of Christian texts through memorization, the mission school pupils could then be deployed as assistants to the European missionaries in tract distribution and recitation: The necessity of raising up native helpers for the missionary work has induced us to employ the orphan youths under our care in the study of English and the native languages and for the present at least to give up the manual labor system, except in so far as such exercise may promote their health and habits of industry. The mornings of each day are spent by the boys in the English school and during four hours of the afternoon they are engaged in the study of the Hindustani and Persian languages. The Scriptures and other religious books being chiefly used, their knowledge of divine truth would compare favorably with that of the best educated of their age in Christian lands. They have now committed to memory with great accuracy the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and nine chapters of Luke, Brown’s Catechism and the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism – all in Hindustani; and on these they are examined every Sabbath evening.40

In their evangelical enthusiasm again, the missionaries sometimes mistook the commonly encountered phenomenon of memorization for the actual ability to read, such as this from Eli Noyes of the American Free Baptist Society stationed at Baleshwar in northern Odisha during the 1840s: For some time past I have felt that I must give you some account of the increasing demand for religious tracts in the zillah [i.e. district] of Balasore. According to the last census this zillah contained half a million. This, with the countries of several rajahs on the west, containing more than as many more, forms the field of our mission. We have explored a good part of this field, every where distributing tracts and more than once they have led poor heathen to apply to us for a more perfect knowledge of the way of life through a crucified Redeemer. All 39 The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle XXIX (1821), p. 198 (quoting the Second Annual Report of the Bellary Auxiliary Tract Society). 40 The Fifteenth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in the United States of America (1852), p. 35.

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except the very refuse of the people are readers and are always anxious to obtain our books. From the questions and objections we hear, we have good reason to believe that the books are generally read and understood. Forty or fifty miles from our station, we not unfrequently hear persons repeat whole pages from the tracts that have fallen into their hands.41

Sometimes Indians would recite a whole Christian text back to missionaries in order to ‘prove’ their worthiness to be given more books and tracts, as witnessed by Rev. George Theophilus Bärenbruck of the Church Missionary Society at Madras: A Brahmin, who last year received the tract on the Judgment, came this year and repeated the whole contents of the tract, requesting another supply. In the same manner several other heathen did and promised us, if God spared their lives, to come and tell us the contents next year, to ensure to themselves the gift of new tracts.42

On one occasion the English Baptist missionary William Bampton in Odisha at Puri, site of the infamous Hindu temple of Jagannatha, was astonished to have his reciting from memory of a catechism text corrected by a member of his audience with keener powers of memorization and recall: I went to preach in a village and the inhabitants would, I thought, have heard very well, had it not been for the buffoonery of a man who seemed to be the chief person in the place. I had at this time no books with me; but the contents of a catechism happening to be uppermost in my mind, I made it the basis of my discourse; before I finished, however, I either left out something that was in the tract, or deviated from the exact order in which it was written and this same man stopped and corrected me; thus affording full proof that, however little he might be impressed, he had, notwithstanding, attentively read the publication in question.43

In some cases, the Brahmins’ opposition to the distribution of tracts was not wholly spiritual, but partly economic. They saw this activity as a threat to one strand of their traditional income: donations derived from devotees coming to hear them recite or sing Hindu sacred texts in the temple. In one instance the text in question was the Kandhapuranam, the Tamil version 41 Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the American Tract Society … (1842), p. 52. 42 The Thirty-First Annual Report of the Religious Tract Society … (1830), p. 34. 43 Ibid., p. 31.

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of the Sanskrit Skandhapurana telling the exploits of Shiva and his warrior son Murugan, composed by Kachiyappar, a priest at Kanchipuram in the eighth century. The American missionary John Scudder in Madras learned of this from two of his Indian Christian convert assistants, Periatamby and Amurasingham: In Matherkel, after conversing on divine subjects with the people and giving away some tracts, a Brahmin came up angrily to me and said, ‘The padrees [sic] are our great enemies; for by giving away tracts they have destroyed our means of getting a living. The profits derived from reading the Contapuranum we have ceased to reap through their instrumentality. It will be necessary for us to leave this country and go to another … People do not now give so much money as formerly to the temples and to their Brahmins. As some of the Brahmins do not get so much as formerly, they declare that we give tracts to the people to their injury, though we profess to give them for their good. When we give tracts many receive them with gladness and read them carefully. Some come from a distance to beg them. In some temples where the Contapuranum is read, the people do not go to hear it as formerly.44

In the course of their daily evangelizing routines, the missionaries often witnessed public religious performances, when preaching and distributing tracts, for instance, at the entrances to Hindu temples. There were many rich and deeply embedded traditions involving text and music, especially associated with the annual round of festivals and fairs, Muslim as well as Hindu,45 ranging from solo performances such as kirtan and ghazal to forms such as bhajan with direct audience participation through a call-andresponse structure.46 The love of sung text with musical accompaniment also extended into Sikhism with shabad kirtan, the singing of hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib. Such traditions demonstrated the value the human voice could add to the words written on the printed page, its power as an interpretative medium for bringing a text to life. All this led the missionaries to see hymnody as an important element in their conversion strategy. At 44 The Thirty-First Annual Report of the Religious Tract Society (1830), pp. 51–2. 45 A guide to these specifically designed for use by Christian missionaries was published, viz. John Murdoch, Hindu and Muhammadan festivals. Compiled from Wilson, Wilkins, Crooke, Sell, Hughes and other writers (London, Madras and Colombo: The Christian Literature Society for India, 1904). 46 See, for instance, Alan M. Guenther, ‘Ghazals, Bhajans and Hymns: Hindustani Christian Music in Nineteenth-century North India’, Studies in World Christianity 25:2 (2019): 145–65.

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first they were content simply to produce translations into Indian languages of the Christian hymns with which they were familiar, that is, written in European metres and set to European tunes. Let us take the example of the earliest Christian hymnal in an Indian language, the Tamil Hymnologia damulica (Nanappattukalin posttakam). When first printed at Tranquebar in 1715 it had contained just forty-eight versions of hymns Ziegenbalg and Plütschau knew from their native Germany; by the sixth edition of 1779, the Tranquebar hymnal, ‘larger and more correct’ (auctior et emendatior), had expanded to 308 items; and by the twelfth edition of 1863 the number of hymns stood at 374. Later, several collections of translations of English hymns into Tamil were published, for example by the Madras Religious Tract Society in 1831, 1839 and two in 1848 (one for adults, the other for children), and five hymnals by the Jaffna Tract Society by 1854.47 But it became clear that these hymns did not hold a powerful spiritual appeal for Indian converts. However distasteful such a change appeared to many mission societies, a more syncretistic approach was required: the cultural appropriation of Indian poetic metres and musical forms. As John Murdoch, the ‘godfather’ of Indian missiology, commented: In general, hymns to English tunes are not appreciated by Tamulians. Compositions adapted to national music are greatly preferred. Their use in public worship was at first opposed by many missionaries. The associations were said to be bad in many cases; the absence of a devotional spirit was alleged; the music was said to be tame and wanting in character. On the other hand, it was asserted that soon the associations would be Christianized; that many hymns expressed deep religious feeling; that some of the tunes were very beautiful and that whatever might be their relative merits as musical compositions, the taste of the people should be consulted … They are particularly adapted to village congregations in which the people are sometimes entirely ignorant of English music.48

The first missionary to act on this realization was Edward Webb of the American Madura Mission. To undertake a serious study of Indian musical forms he moved to Tanjore and came under the influence of the Christian convert poet Vethanayaga Sastri, who had ‘composed a large number of pieces suitable for divine service’. The result was a volume of Tamil sacred lyrics printed at Madras in 1853, which proved an immediate 47 John Murdoch, Classified catalogue of Tamil printed books, with introductory notices (Madras: The Christian Vernacular Education Society, 1865), p. 10. 48 Ibid., pp. 11–12.

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success. A competition was launched offering prizes for the best Christian hymns in Indian metres and some 400 submissions were received, from which Webb edited and published a collection of 281 at Madras in 1860. The first edition of 1,500 copies was soon exhausted and another of 2,000 was issued in 1864.49 The prose texts of successful tracts were also adapted for being not simply read but sung out loud. Noting this, Alfred Augustus Newhall Jr of the American Baptist Telugu Mission at Hanamkonda in Telangana hoped fervently that hymn-writers and composers of hymn tunes of the stature of the renowned Americans Philip Paul Bliss and Ira David Sankey would eventually emerge from among the Indian Christian community: A people who are so universally fond of music, who sing, rather than read their sacred writings, who put even their treatises upon mathematics into verse and chant the very alphabet itself, who sing to quiet their children or to entertain themselves while travelling, who keep time with the oar or the pestle or the gravel-pounder to the cadence of some plaintive melody, will surely not be indifferent to music employed in the proclamation of Christian truth … The singing of the Telugu tract on ‘Idolatry’ will arrest the attention of many who consider themselves too wise to listen, seriously, to a simple prosaic statement of the same truth. The ‘Golden Garland’, ‘Poetical History of Salvation’ and ‘Jewel Mine of Salvation’ owe their popularity, largely, to the fact that they are adapted for singing … Translations, like European tunes, may, often, be very useful, as a temporary expedient, but, in order to be acceptable and valuable in the highest degree, the hymns should be the work of native authors, in true native style, adapted, as no translation can ever be adapted, to the feelings, aspirations, difficulties, errors and dangers peculiar to natives … Let us, unitedly and earnestly, pray for the outpouring of the spirit of song upon some Telugu Bliss or Sankey, who shall be able to give to this people a body of soul-stirring Gospel melodies.50

At the end of divine services or even open-air hymn-singing sessions, pamphlets containing the printed texts of hymns could be handed out to the audience to reinforce their appeal and effect, as at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala in 1875:

49 Ibid. 50 The Indian Evangelical Review: A Quarterly Journal of Missionary Thought and Effort XIII:L (Oct, 1886): 235–6, 239.

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The Trevandrum Religious Tract Society have published several leaflets, etc. of which we have specimens. Some are English and some contain Christian lyrics, on one side in Malayalim and on the other in Tamil, so as to suit all parties, as both languages prevail in Travancore. The missionaries frequently sing the hymns at open-air preaching; and then distribute these handbills so that the people may learn to sing them also. A plan worthy of imitation.51

Like the reading aloud of tracts, the singing of hymns was found in various parts of India to be best performed by Indian Christian converts rather than by the missionaries themselves. In Bengal, for example: An important effort is in progress to develop the use of sacred song as an evangelistic instrument among the churches of Bengal. Early in the present year the Calcutta Tract Society asked the Free Church of Scotland to allow Babu Modhan Ludan Sarcar, one of their evangelists, who is a poet and a good singer, to visit such churches and missions as might invite him and exercise his talents for kathakata [story-telling, narrating] and sacred song. The Free Church Mission generously responded to this request. His first visit was made to the churches of the Baptist Mission at Bakarganj in August last. The Revs. G. Kerry and J. Martin were witnesses of the effect of the kathakata and singing upon the non-Christians as well as Christians and have expressed their great satisfaction at the manner in which this gifted brother recites Scriptural facts and sings popular Bengali hymns.52

The missionaries were keen to imitate the traditional singing of Hindu sacred texts as closely as possible and viewed the composition and singing of hymns by Indian converts as a primary creative channel through which a truly indigenous Christian literature would gradually emerge: The reciting of the Ramayana and Mahabharata is much appreciated by Hindus and it is well that a capable man has risen up to recite the Bible in a manner suited to the national taste … The singing of the Gospel … is a very important means of its dissemination … We are glad to see that attention is now being more and more drawn to the subject. We know of no mission where it is made more prominent than by the American Marathi Mission in the Bombay Presidency. One of the members of the native Christian community, Mr. Krishna R. Sanglé, has developed great poetical as well as musical talent and 51 The Indian Evangelical Review … II:VII (Jan. 1875): 388. 52 The Indian Evangelical Review … IV:XIV (Oct. 1876): 241.

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for the past ten years has given much time and study to these subjects. The hymns which he has written in native metres form quite a book by themselves and are very popular among the native Christians; and not only so, – they are extensively used by preachers on the street and elsewhere, for the purpose of attracting an audience, in the first place and of interesting it when gathered.53

It was even suggested that missionary societies should consider hiring professional readers to give regular public performances of Christian texts to match and even outdo those habitually held by the Hindu and Muslim communities: But as it is not to be expected, that persons of rank will find leisure to spread the information, it seems therefore necessary that a further step should be taken to publish it to the people at large; that all may know, that the Sacred Scriptures are within the reach of those who desire them. It is presumed, this may be done in a way perfectly inoffensive; and consentaneous to the usages of the East. The Mahometans have everywhere appointed readers of the Koran, who read aloud the book from beginning to end. The Hindoos have Poranees, who perform the same office in reading the Shasters and no offence has been given or taken by either. In the same manner, the Christian Scriptures might be read publicly, without incurring the smallest opposition. The Mahometans rank our Scriptures among ‘the heavenly books’ and the Hindoos are disposed to tolerate every religion. It will be easy for the chaplains and others, to employ and superintend several public readers at each station and the expense will be inconsiderable. Eight or ten rupees per month will be a sufficient salary for the reader; and a small open shed, erected in the neighbourhood of the public market place, raised about one cubit from the ground and costing not more than 20 or 30 rupees, will be all the equipment necessary, for the accommodation of the reader. The readings may be regulated by the superintendent, with respect to the portions to be read and the time of reading. The readings may be continued two hours in the morning and two hours towards the close of the evening of each day. The reader may be furnished with copies of the Scriptures for sale, or for distribution gratis, according to the discretion of the superintendent, who will renew regular supplies from the Bible Depository at Calcutta. 54

53 Ibid. 54 Reports of the British and Foreign Bible Society, with extracts of correspondence, &c. Volume the second, for 1811, 1812 and 1813. Reprinted from the original reports (London: printed for the Society, 1813), p. 161.

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This echoed a suggestion which had been made to the Baptist missionary Charles Lacey at Baleshwar on Christmas Day 1842, with reference to performances of the ‘Bhagbot’ (the Bhagavatapurana), the text recounting the lives of the incarnations (avataras) of the Hindu god Vishnu: To day we started to Bolaswer market. It is so called from its vicinity to a new temple of Mahadabe. The idol’s name is Bolaswer, from Bol, strength and Eswar, god, – the god of honour … The brahmins objected and argued, but made little out to their own satisfaction. These brahmins have not been in the habit of having their religious doctrines tested. The people have been accustomed to pay them the deference of obedience and worship without inquiry; consequently they were soon confounded and very angry. Today some of them felt more than they dare express, lest they should prove to others that they can be angry, like ordinary men and vile sinners. About three p.m. more than a thousand people came together and a large number crowded around us under a tree to hear what we had to say. For two hours we preached without interruption, taking turns in the same place. After we had done and had distributed books, some came to us to have them explained and others proposed that we should sit down and read or chant the books and show their meaning: we consequently remained some time among them. The suggestion to read the books over and explain them, as the people read the Bhagbot, was a useful hint and we shall sometimes act upon it.55

At the same time, Protestant missionaries were very wary of going too far in the direction of organizing public performances. For them, the annual Hindu rituals of taking idols of local gods out of their temples and in procession through the streets smacked of Roman Catholicism, from which they were always concerned to distance themselves. As William Arthur observed in Mysore: The Romanists have long had a mission at Bangalore. The only effects of it which came under my notice were these: one day when entering the pettah, near the fort, I observed a rude erection, something like the booths built by mountebanks in fairs and on asking what it meant, was told that it was the Christians, who were getting up a play, in connexion with some of their religious feasts. From the hints I received as to the subject, it appeared to be, the holy family, or the Saviour’s history. The Romish priests have carried into India the profane habit obtaining in Popish countries of making the holiest themes of Scripture subjects 55 The General Baptist Repository and Missionary Observer V n.s. (1843): 286.

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for the drama and the Hindus learn to judge of the purity and the dignity of our religion, from barbarous theatricals.56

To Arthur, such activity was totally repugnant: a ‘slippery slope’ which was simply replacing one form of detestable idolatry with another: One morning in approaching the same gate, I overtook an old man and began my conversation with him in a way which was very much my custom, by asking, ‘Who is your god?’ He said, Nanagay Antownay dayvaru, ‘Antownay is my god.’ I observed that, of all the gods with whose names I was familiar, I had never heard of that one before and repeated my question. He simply replied, ‘Antownay is my god.’ Puzzled, but resolved to learn who this new god was, I said, ‘What caste are you of?’ ‘I am of the Roman caste’, said the man; and in a moment I saw that the strange name was Anthony, that Portuguese saint being a favourite among his fellow countrymen in India. Still, it seemed impossible that the man could mean what he had said; and I asked, ‘Do you say that he is your god?’ ‘Yes’, replied this Christian, Antownay dayvaru, ‘Anthony is God.’ I asked where he was, what made of and what size. He said he was in the chapel, made of clay, about as high as his breast and painted white, yellow, black and red. ‘But’, I asked, ‘have you no other god?’ ‘No.’ ‘What, no other god but Anthony?’ his dogged reply was, ‘They talk about Maryama [i.e. the Virgin Mary]; but Anthony is the god.’ This is a melancholy, a horrifying fact.57

The Protestant missionaries in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar had, quite literally, ‘put their faith in print’. This was a natural and perfectly understandable inclination, given print’s intimate association with the development of Protestantism in Europe, from the circulation of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses in the early sixteenth century to the explosion of evangelical book- and magazine-publishing in Britain and America in the early nineteenth. An inculturation strategy, pursued so successfully by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci in China despite contemporary criticism from his co-religionists, held no appeal. The missionaries were well aware of the success of indigenous non-print traditions in promulgating religious teachings and strengthening popular faith in South Asia, but even when forced to adopt them temporarily, they did so with considerable reluctance and distaste. Ironically, print in all its forms would increasingly be deployed against the 56 William Arthur, A Mission to the Mysore; With scenes and facts illustrative of India, its people and its religion (London: Partridge and Oakey; Glasgow: M’Combh; Dublin: Orr, 1847) p. 170. 57 Ibid., pp. 70–1.

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Christian missions by the established religions of the region. But perhaps a more subversive approach, a stealthy Christian encroachment on those traditions, might have been a more productive strategy. A lesson could well have been learnt from at least one case of biblio-conversion and its consequences, as reported by the Swiss Alphonse François Lacroix of the London Missionary Society. A group of people in Bengal had adopted Christian beliefs without even realizing it, imagining that they were following a ‘guru’ who was preaching a new brand of Hinduism, unaware that he had been ‘converted’ by reading missionary tracts: Some native preachers, from Serampore, went recently into the interior to proclaim the gospel and visited a large native town where a fair was being held. A Hindoo, who heard them speak of Christianity in the bazaar, exclaimed, ‘Well, you are teaching the very doctrines which my Gooroo is teaching me!’ On inquiring who this Gooroo was, he replied that he was a merchant from the district of Coniollah [Khulna?], who had come to the fair to purchase articles of trade and that he was then actually in the neighbourhood. The native preachers sought this Gooroo out and learned from him that he had never heard the gospel from any missionary, in fact, that he had never seen one; but that some tracts had found their way, together with a copy of the Gospels, into his possession. These, he said, he perused attentively and soon became convinced of the error and sin of idolatry and of the truth of Christianity. He gave up his idols and commenced speaking to his neighbours about the new way of salvation which he had found. Twenty-five individuals have already joined themselves to him, having all renounced idol-worship. With these he daily reads some of his tracts, when at home; and, on the Lord’s day, a portion of the ‘Great Book’, as he calls the Gospel and prays with them.58

58 Jones, Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society, p. 448.

14

Robert Morrison at the End of the Enlightenment: Collecting Books in Early Nineteenth-Century China Cynthia Brokaw

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n 23 March 1824, after serving seventeen years as a missionary in China, Robert Morrison returned to England on leave. With him aboard the ship Waterloo were 10,000 fascicles of Chinese books, comprising over nine hundred titles. Morrison estimated the value of the works, ‘many of which were obtained with great difficulty, as the Chinese government make it illegal for the natives to sell their books to foreigners’, and many of which ‘were scarce and expensive’, at ‘upwards of £2,000’.1 Hoping to alleviate his countrymen’s ignorance of a country that was becoming increasingly important to Britain, Morrison planned to donate his collection to Oxford or Cambridge in return for a commitment to establish a professorship in the Chinese language ‘for the instruction of individuals desirous of studying it, for religious, or other purposes’.2 Neither Cambridge nor Oxford was interested. Unable to find a taker, Morrison deposited the collection at the London Missionary Society before he returned to China the following year. His collection languished there for more than ten years, until – finally – in 1837, three years after Morrison’s death, the newly established University College London grudgingly agreed to establish the professorship in Chinese in return for the collection. The professorship was allowed to lapse after only five years, however; and there

1 Equal in 2023 to £233,956. 2 Eliza A. Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, 2 vols. (London; Longman, 1839), 2: 253.

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is little evidence to suggest that the collection was put to use in any systematic teaching of Chinese or about China until late in the century.3 Here, appropriately, perhaps, in the last chapter to this volume, we seem to have come to the end of the Enlightenment. We are clearly in a very different time and a very different place from late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, when readers (particularly French readers) eagerly snapped up the Jesuits’ latest accounts of China; when Jean Baptiste Boyer could, in 1741, dedicate his Lettres chinoises to Confucius, ‘the greatest man the universe has produced’;4 and when interest in China (and other ‘Oriental’ countries) was strong enough, as described earlier in this volume, to propel the decision, in the early 1780s, to publish Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale in an edition for ‘the general public’.5 Of course at issue here is place as well as time: British thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment had never been quite as enamored of China as Continental intellectuals. To be sure, David Hume, relying on Jesuit writings for information about China, had suggested in 1752 that the Chinese government might serve as a model for Europe. But a few decades later, in 1776, Adam Smith – relying then on reports from Scottish merchants of the East India Company – was far less enthusiastic, expressing doubts about what he perceived to be the static quality of the Chinese state.6 And by the late eighteenth century, even on the Continent, doubts were being raised about the accuracy of the very positive Jesuit accounts of China. In fact, Morrison was born not into the Enlightenment but into the last stages of the still powerful Evangelical Revival, the Protestant movement that swept Britain and, as the Great Awakening, the British colonies in North America, beginning in the 1730s and 1740s. By the time of Morrison’s birth, the peak of the movement had passed, but several of its key tenets – the importance of personal conversion experienced as a new birth, 3 The sad early history of the chair in Chinese that Morrison had hoped to establish is told in T.H. Barrett, Singular Listlessness, A Short History of Chinese Books and British Scholars (London: Wellsweep, 1989), pp. 68–75. The collection remained at University College London until 1922, when it was transferred to what is now the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. For a history of the collection, see Andrew C. West’s excellent Catalogue of the Morrison Collection of Chinese Books (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1998), pp. vii–xv. 4 See Chapter 5, Trude Dijkstra, ‘The Lettres Chinoises and its Shaping of Contrasting Perceptions of China’. 5 See Chapter 11, Despina Magkanari, ‘Cross-cultural Circulations and Oriental Knowledge: Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale and its Editions’. 6 Phil Dodds, ‘“One Vast Empire”: China, Progress, and the Scottish Enlightenment,’ Global Intellectual History 3:1 (2018): 47–70.

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the keen awareness of sin, a commitment to a high standard of personal morality, the drive to draw others into the Christian fold – had entered the Protestant religious mainstream. In his long reflections in his letters and journal on his own shortcomings and in his appeals to the transforming love of Christ, Morrison reveals himself as very much a product of the Evangelical Revival. This is even more the case in his repeated claims that only Protestant Christianity could rescue the Chinese not only from eternal damnation but also from the ‘envy and malice, deceit and falsehood’, the ‘cold metaphysical inhumanity’ that he saw everywhere in China.7 The contrast to the Jesuit missionaries of the Enlightenment, in terms of goals and approach, is striking. Wholesale salvation of the Chinese masses is Morrison’s aim. The absolute truth of Christianity and the civilization that it had created obviated the need for any accommodation with – or even respect for – Chinese ideas, ethics, and beliefs. Other significant changes, including the growth of commercial capitalism, an ardent faith in the benefits of free trade, and imperialist expansion, had also shifted British interest in and engagement with Qing China. The changes had put paid to any notions that the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers might have cherished about the superiority of Chinese government or culture. British and European demand for Chinese products had increased hugely since the beginning of the Enlightenment. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, British traders of the East India Company (EIC), which owned the monopoly on the China trade, were confined to just one port, Guangzhou, in south China. Frustrated in their desire to expand their access to other ports and the interior, the British factors generally adopted an aggressive and even hostile stance to the Qing government; the Qing emperor was expected to accommodate all British demands. Morrison often records his displeasure with the conduct of the EIC factors in Guangzhou, and he complained in particular about their disgraceful ignorance of the Chinese language. Nonetheless, Morrison seems to have shared the factors’ general sense of the inferiority of Chinese government, society, and culture.8

7 Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 273. 8 Morrison is not wholly critical of China; he sees some merit in some Confucian moral values and on occasion credits a Qing official with intelligence, even wisdom. But overall the picture that he paints of China and the Chinese character is a negative one. See, for example, Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 144, 77; and Morrison’s extended critique of China and the Chinese in A View of China, for philological purposes: containing a sketch of Chinese chronology, geography, government, religion & customs, designed for the use of persons who study the Chinese language (Macao: printed at

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Despite such attitudes, we can find in Morrison’s book collection some remnants of Enlightenment thinking. His efforts to form a collection that represented the works of literate Chinese of all statuses were the product of a kind of ethnographic thinking, if shaped, to be sure, by his Protestant Christian mission. He believed that the most widely read works by Chinese authors would reveal the interests, customs, beliefs, and habits of thinking of the Chinese people to the outsider. Jesuits and earlier Catholic missionaries, intent on converting the highly educated elite, had focused study on the Confucian Classics and the sciences of the elite (astronomy and mathematics), but Morrison sought to know the whole range of topics, ideas, beliefs, and linguistic registers at play among all social statuses in the early nineteenth century. If anything, he was more interested in the reading tastes of literates not part of the highly educated and highly privileged elite. This chapter, then, straddles Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment engagement across cultures. It also examines not a single book, not several editions of a book, not a technology of textual reproduction, but a whole book collection. After a brief overview of Morrison and the various ways in which he served as a conduit for the transmission of technologies, print genres, and ideas between Qing China and Europe, the following focuses on his method of collecting books, which relied heavily on the assistance of Chinese; the insights that the collection provides about Chinese publishing and book culture in south China in Morrison’s day; and the unusual features of the collection that reveal the depth and breadth of Morrison’s engagement with China.

Robert Morrison, 1782–1834 It is difficult to imagine a more prolific agent for the transcultural transmission of knowledge than Robert Morrison, pioneering Anglo-Scottish Protestant missionary to China. The range of his contributions is impressive: in introducing the Western print technologies of letterpress printing and lithography to China, he helped to transform the technology of knowledge transmission in that country. In founding the first Chinese monthly, he initiated a movement that led to the establishment of a new genre of knowledge transmission in China – the modern periodical. In establishing an Anglo-Chinese college for the teaching of Chinese to Westerners and English to Chinese, he created a stable institution for the transmission and production of knowledge across cultures. In editing the first the East India Company’s Press by P.P. Thoms; London: published and sold by Black, Parbury and Allen, 1817), pp. 121–6.

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Chinese–English (and English–Chinese) dictionary and authoring many study aids for students of Chinese, he laid the groundwork for the professionalization of sinology in Great Britain. In publishing a variety of articles and books, in both Chinese and English, introducing China to England and England to China, he attempted to develop some degree of mutual understanding (admittedly with limited success). Finally, in compiling the first systematic collection of Chinese books, Morrison provided Western students of China with a remarkably comprehensive view of contemporary Chinese learning and book culture. It is of course true that as one of the first Protestant missionaries to China in the early nineteenth century, Morrison took as his first goal not as much the transmission of knowledge as the transmission of the Christian faith. All his projects were designed primarily to promote Christianity in China. He aimed to provide either the means for the production of the Bible and Christian tracts in Chinese or the institutions and teaching materials that aspiring British and American missionaries might employ to study China and the Chinese language. Born in 1782 to a family of humble status (his father was a boot-tree maker), Morrison displayed in his early youth little interest in either scholarship or religion. At the age of sixteen, however, he experienced a spiritual conversion. Hoping to gain as direct an experience of Christ as possible, he engaged Latin, Greek, and Hebrew tutors to teach him the languages of the Scriptures. He also began to think of becoming a missionary. In 1804 he joined the London Missionary Society (LMS) and was sent to Mr. David Bogue’s Academy in Gosport for training. Bogue emphasized training in languages for his students so that they could preach to foreigners and translate the Scriptures: ‘to learn the language of the heathen is necessary’.9 In response to a call from the LMS, Morrison volunteered to be the first missionary to go to China. After a brief period supplementing his language courses at Gosport with the study of medicine, astronomy, and Chinese in London, he left for China on 31 January 1807, finally arriving in Guangzhou (Canton) on 7 September. Except for a roughly two-year leave in England in 1824 and 1825, Morrison spent the remainder of his life in Qing China. The hostility of the Qing imperial government to Christian missionaries (and, indeed, most Westerners) made his life difficult. At times, when tensions between the British merchants in Guangzhou and Qing officials became too sharp, Morrison was forced to move briefly to Penang or Malacca, and more routinely to 9 Christopher A. Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), p. 37.

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Macao, where the official presence of the Portuguese blunted somewhat the force of Qing restrictions. Morrison found very early on that he could not expect much formal support from the EIC in Guangzhou; although men attached to the British Factory were often individually helpful to Morrison, finding him accommodation and lending him books. Officially, however, the EIC was hostile to missionaries whose activities, in violation of Qing law, threatened the social stability essential to the maintenance of the China trade.10 Macao offered much greater security than Guangzhou, and Morrison eventually established his residence there, but even there he was by no means free of harassment by either Portuguese Catholics hostile to Protestantism or Qing officials suspicious of all Christians.11 Early in his missionary career, Morrison also suffered financial difficulties. He found the salary paid by the LMS inadequate to support the costs of board and lodging, the hire of servants and teachers, and the purchase of books. This difficulty was eased in 1809, when the EIC, recognizing that Morrison’s Chinese-language skills were by then far superior to those of most EIC factors, hired him as the Chinese Secretary and Translator to the British Factory. It was a post that had the advantage of providing both a good income and regular, officially sanctioned entry to Guangzhou. In 1816, he served in this position for the Amherst Embassy to the Qing imperial court. Although the Embassy itself was a disastrous failure, the appointment meant that Morrison’s talents were widely recognised.12 The EIC even supported the publication of his Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–23), recognizing the value of such a work to merchants as well as to missionaries. But the relationship between Morrison and the EIC was never smooth. The Directors of the Company in London tried to dismiss him in 1815, although the Select Committee in Guangzhou, aware of how useful his services had become, never enforced the dismissal. And Morrison, in his letters and journal, repeatedly lamented how the time spent working for the Factory distracted him from his primary goal.13 10 Su Jing 蘇精, Malixun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban 馬禮遜與中文印刷出版 (Taibei: Xuesheng shuju, 2000), pp. 82–7. 11 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 287, 356–9. 12 This was not the last time the British government appealed to Morrison for assistance. When, in 1834, the British government sent Lord Napier to China to break the monopoly of the EIC, he appointed Morrison his ‘Chinese Secretary and Interpreter’. Morrison died only two weeks after the appointment. 13 This is a highly selective biography, emphasizing the challenges that Morrison faced in his missionary work and in his efforts to persuade his fellow countrymen to learn Chinese and about Chinese ways; for fuller (laudatory) accounts, see Marshall Broomhall, Robert Morrison, A Master Builder (New York: George H. Doran

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Surrounded, then, by governments, institutions, and powerful economic concerns hostile to his presence, forced to shuttle back and forth between Guangzhou and Macao (and at times even farther afield), it is a wonder that Morrison was able to accomplish all that he did. Indeed, it is clear that, although he can justly be named the prime mover in all the projects outlined above, in each he was heavily dependent on a variety of partners and collaborators.14 The LMS-appointed William Milne (1785–1822), who arrived in Macao in 1813, was Morrison’s primary missionary partner. Milne, before his untimely death, oversaw many of Morrison’s printing projects, aided in his translation of the Bible, edited the periodical Cha shisu meiyue tongjizhuan 察世俗每月統記傳 (English title: Chinese Monthly Magazine), and ran the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca.15 Peter Perring Thoms (1791–1855), a London printer hired to oversee the publication of Morrison’s dictionary, also played a crucial role in the manufacture of metal moveable type for that project.16 Most importantly, however, Morrison was dependent, in his efforts to learn Chinese and in all his translation and printing projects, on Chinese helpers. Notable among them were Rong Sande 容三德 (Yong Sam-Tak)17, his first teacher in London18; Li Chating 李察庭 (Lee Tsak-Ting), a lower-examination degree holder who taught him the Cantonese dialect, literary Chinese, and

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Company, 1925); and, more recently, Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China. Financial support was provided, first, by the London Missionary Society (although Morrison complained frequently that it was inadequate for his needs) and, later, when he became an employee, the EIC. The Bible Tract Society and private individuals also often helped to defray the expenses of several of Morrison’s publication projects. Milne arrived in Macao in 1813, but after only three days there was expelled by the Portuguese to Guangzhou. He ultimately shifted his operations to Malacca (then a Dutch colony), which Morrison and he saw as a more secure site for the founding of a college and a press; see William Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years of the Protestant Mission to China: … Accompanied with Miscellaneous Remarks on the Literature, History and Mythologie of China (Malacca: Anglo-Chinese Press, 1820). Patricia Sieber, ‘Universal Brotherhood Revisited: Peter Perring Thoms (1790–1855), Artisan Practices, and the Genesis of a Chinacentric Sinology’, Representations 130:1 (Spring, 2015): 33–9. Here and throughout, I use the Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese names and put the Cantonese romanization in parentheses. Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 77, 79–80, 81–2; when he met Rong Sande again in Guangzhou, Rong became an excellent friend, introducing Morrison to teachers and helpers and, at least once, warning him to leave Guangzhou in order to avoid detention by the Qing authorities, Su Jing, Malixun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban, pp. 57–64.

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calligraphy19; Ge Maohe 葛茂和 (Ko Mow-Ho), the literatus who taught him guanhua 官話 or Mandarin, worked with him on the dictionary, and edited and proofread his translation of the Bible20; the three Cai 蔡 (Tsae) brothers, who transcribed texts for Morrison and/or assisted in the printing of the dictionary21; and Ting Qua (Teen Qua), the bookseller who guided his book purchases.22 In working with Morrison, these men were risking arrest and even execution; the Qing imperial government forbade 19 Su Jing, Malixun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban, pp. 64–5. John Chalmers, in his ‘Sketch of the Canton Protestant Mission’, Chinese Recorder (1 May 1876), p. 174, gives the name as Li Shigong 李十公 (Li Shap-kung). Chalmers notes that Li was one of the two Chinese men depicted as assisting Morrison with the translation of the Bible in the engraving of the George G. Chinnery painting and frontispiece to Morrison’s Memoirs. Li is seated at the table on the left; Chen Laoyi 陳老宜 (Ch’an Lo-I) stands between Morrison and Li and leans over the table with a sheet of text in his hand, apparently checking it against Li’s transcription. Little is known of Chen other than that he taught Morrison and assisted on the Bible translation project after Ge Maohe fled Macao to evade arrest by the Qing authorities in 1817. For a fuller discussion of Morrison’s patron–client relationships with his Chinese teachers and collaborators, see Thor Strandenaes, ‘Anonymous Bible Translators: Native Literati and the Translation of the Bible into Chinese, 1807–1907’, in Stephen Batalden, Kathleen Cann, and John Dean (eds), Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804–2004 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2004), pp. 126–33. 20 Su Jing, Malixin yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban, pp. 69–75. Morrison also had other Mandarin teachers: Yun Guanming 雲官明 (Abel Yun Kowin-Ming), a Catholic convert whom Morrison came to distrust; Gui Youni 桂有霓 (Kuei Une), who had to be dismissed because he could not get along with the other members of Morrison’s household; a mysterious ‘Mr. Li’ 李先生; and Zhu Qing 朱清, also a teacher at the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca. Su Jing, Malixun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban, pp. 66–9, 75–8. For variant readings of the Chinese characters for the names of these teachers and helpers, see Li Zhigang 李志剛, ‘Malixun dui shijiu shiji Yingyu shijie Hanxuejia zhi gongxian yu yingxiang’ 馬禮遜對十九世紀英語世界漢學家之 貢獻與影響, ‘Daofeng’ Hanyu shenxue xuekan 《道風》漢語神學學刊 3 (Autumn, 1995): 91. 21 Cai Xuan蔡軒, 1787–? (Tsae Heen, also Low Heen and A-heen), Cai Ke 蔡軻 (Tsae K’o, also A-fo; d. 1818), and Cai Yun 蔡運 (Tsae Yun, also A Yun). The Cai ancestral home was on Henan 河南 (Honam) Island, the site of Haichuang Temple 海幢 寺, which operated a major printing establishment. Cai Xuan was known to have contacts there, while Cai Ke was a printer by trade; he also became Morrison’s first Christian convert. See below for the sizable number of works in the Morrison Collection which were printed at Haichuang Temple. Sieber, ‘Universal Brotherhood Revisited,’ p. 34. 22 Council for World Mission/London Missionary Society, South China, Journals, South China, Journals: Journal 4, 15–29 Oct. 1807, cited in Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China, p. 110.

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Chinese to teach foreigners their language or to assist foreigners in the illegal printing or purchasing of Chinese texts. Much scholarship has already examined Morrison’s role in the introduction of Western print technology to China,23 his dictionary compilation,24 his translation of the Scriptures and Christian tracts,25 his participation in periodical publication,26 and his role in establishing the Anglo-Chinese College.27 The focus in this chapter is on his book-collecting activities, specifically the arduous process of building the collection – illegally – over a period of sixteen years. The following considers the collection’s relationship to the world of commercial publishing in Guangzhou, the major centre of the far south; the peculiar nature of the collection as an expression of Morrison’s ethnographic approach; and its place in the context of European knowledge of China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.28

23 Su Jing, Malixun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban, is the definitive work on this topic. See also Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), pp. 25–43. 24 Tan Shulin 谭树林, Malixun yu Zhong Xi wenhua jiaoliu 马礼逊与中西文化交流 (Hangzhou: Zhongguo meishu xueyuan chubanshe, 2003), pp. 57–83; Xian Wu and Liren Zhang, ‘Robert Morrison and the First Chinese-English Dictionary’, Journal of East Asian Libraries, 147:3 (2009): https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jeal/vol2009/ iss147/3; and Huiling Yang, ‘The Making of the First Chinese–English Dictionary: Robert Morrison’s Dictionary of the Chinese Language’, Historiographia linguistica 41:2/3 (2014): 299–322. 25 Tan Shulin, Malixun yu Zhong Xi wenhua jiaoliu, pp. 98–138. Jost Oliver Zetzsche, The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or the Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 45 (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1999), pp. 31–58. 26 Su Jing, Malixun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban, pp. 153–70; Tan Shulin, Malixun yu Zhong Xi wenhua jiaoliu, pp. 231–75; Roswell S. Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press, 1800–1912 (Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing Company, 1966), pp. 17–23. 27 Tan Shulin, Malixun yu Zhong Xi wenhua jiaoliu, pp. 194–230; Brian Harrison, Waiting for China: The Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca, 1818–1843, and Early Nineteenth-Century Missions (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1979). 28 To my knowledge there is no analysis of Morrison’s book collection, now housed at SOAS, University of London (and partially at the University of Hong Kong) in any language. Fortunately, the excellent catalogue by West (see above, note 3) provides the basis for the partial analysis here.

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Building the Collection Almost immediately on his arrival in Guangzhou in September 1807, Morrison started purchasing books to aid his study of Chinese. In a letter dated 4 November he described the economies he had made in board and lodging in order to save money and then explained: On things that relate to the fulfilling the design of my mission, I have been more liberal, viz., in obtaining the means of acquiring Chinese literature, that, if spared in the world, I may be able to assist in putting into that language the book of God. Not knowing how long I may be permitted to continue here, I have purchased a few Chinese books, paper, pencils, &c.29

It was dangerous, however, for Morrison to attempt to make purchases himself, to leave the protection of the Thirteen Factories, to which all Western residents of China were restricted, and to visit bookstores in Guangzhou. The book district was located in the centre of the old walled city of Guangzhou; the Thirteen Factories, in the distant southwestern suburb, outside the city wall. Morrison was even fearful of revealing that he was in possession of Chinese books. He notes several times that whenever Chinese people visited him he had to rush to conceal his Chinese books or any evidence of Chinese writing.30 Books ‘cannot be obtained except by stealth’ because of government restrictions, he explains in a letter to the treasurer of the LMS. He was, then, largely dependent on his Chinese servants, teachers, and amenable booksellers to procure books for him; these helpers he rewarded with ‘small presents’. 31 This arrangement created its own problems. In the same letter, Morrison complains that he was cheated by a ‘person whom I employed to obtain a few books from within the city’. Feeling, perhaps, that Morrison’s ‘small present’ was not sufficient to compensate for the risks he ran in purchasing Chinese books for a foreigner, the man overcharged him by about thirty dollars.32 Eventually Morrison came to accept that he would have to ‘pay high for [Chinese books], as it is a matter of favour to have them at any price’.33 In fact, his Chinese helpers were running a far greater risk than he was in supplying a foreigner with books. One of his first servants, identified 29 30 31 32 33

Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 183. For examples, see Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 155, 161. Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 183. Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 161–2. CWM/LMS, South China, Journals: Journal 4: 24 Oct. 1807; cited in Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China, p. 110.

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only as ‘Cooshing’, was caught trying to smuggle a Chinese almanac into Morrison’s home. In terror of what might happen to him, he forced Morrison to burn ‘the two or three sentences which he had before given me in the Chinese language’.34 Perhaps the servant remembered that the Chinese who had presumed to aid James Flint in writing a petition to the throne in 1759 had been executed by imperial command. Others of Morrison’s helpers were luckier or more watchful. An unnamed local was able to procure several Chinese almanacs for Morrison in mid-September. In late October, his servant A-Tso was able to purchase a 40-fascicle history of China. On 11 November, Li Chating, one of his first teachers, dared to take Morrison to second-hand bookstores in the countryside, distant from the government seat in the walled city, so that he might see for himself what was on offer; Morrison reports purchasing works like the Commentaries and Sub-commentaries on the Five Classics (Wujing zhushu 五經註疏), which would have been one of the major textbooks of Morrison’s education in the Confucian Classics.35 Early the following year, one of his servants managed to purchase for him a copy of the Four Books, thereby completing his set of the essential texts of the canon.36 Even more fruitful were relationships that Morrison forged with booksellers like Ting Qua, who was willing to sell him a number of Chinese texts,37 or the unnamed book merchant who procured for him ‘an old civil list and a pamphlet to teach the Chinese English’.38 34 CWM/LMS, South China, Journals: Journal 3: 15 Sept. and 4 Oct. 1807; cited in Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China, p. 111. 35 CWM/LMS, South China, Journals: Journal 4: 7, 11, 20 Nov. 1807; cited in Su Jing, Malixun yu Zhongwen yinshua chuban, p. 65; see also Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China, p. 110. By this time, the Confucian canon included Thirteen Classics. The Four Books (Sishu 四書), comprised two of the thirteen (the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius) and two excerpts from one of the other Classics (the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, both from the Record of Rites), formed the basic textbook of education in China; it was memorized by students after mastering basic literacy primers and before turning to the Five Classics (Classic of Songs, Classic of Changes, Classic of History, Spring and Autumn Annals, a set of three ritual Classics). There is no edition of the Wujing zhushu in the Morrison Collection, although it contains three other editions of the Five Classics. 36 CWM/LMS, South China, Journals: Journal 6: 6 Jan. 1808; cited in Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China, p. 221, note 16; there are several editions of the Four Books in the Morrison Collection. 37 CWM/LMS, South China, Journals: Journal 4: 15–29 Oct. 1807; cited in Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China, p. 110. 38 CWM/LMS, South China, Journals: Journal 6: 5–7 Jan. 1808; cited in Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China, p. 110. Morrison frequently mentions working with booksellers to arrange the woodblocks to be cut for the publication of

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Despite the challenges that Morrison faced in collecting books, he seems to have made impressive progress within a fairly short time. In addition to the Confucian Classics, he early acquired a copy of a work that was to be critical to his success as a translator and dictionary compiler: the 32-fascicle Kangxi Dictionary (Kangxi zidian 康熙字典), published by imperial command in 1716. This ‘new’ dictionary, he notes happily, was far superior to the older dictionary ‘now in disuse’ that had formed the basis of the Latin–Chinese dictionary on which Morrison had relied in London.39 By 11 December, he reports, ‘I have now obtained betwixt four and five hundred volumes, on language, religion, philosophy, medicine, [the Chinese] code of laws, and history.’ He does add, however, that the smaller size of the average Chinese volume conveys the mistaken impression that his collection is larger than it is.40 Morrison here alluded to the different materiality of Chinese books; his ‘volumes’ were Chinese ce 冊, fascicles that were bound separately, with paper covers stab-stitched with thread to clusters of folded folio pages. One title could be made of anywhere from one to hundreds of fascicles.41 By October of the following year, Morrison reports having a ‘companion and tutor’, one of whose tasks was ‘obtaining books’. This man was probably Cai Xuan 蔡軒 (1787–?), who, on account of his good calligraphy, Morrison also employed to transcribe texts. Toward the end of 1809, he announced, amid complaints about the difficulty of learning Chinese, that he had managed to translate ‘the first two elementary books of the Chinese, beside the first two books of [Confucius]’ – that is, the Greater Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean, two of the Four Books – ‘with part of the third, the

his Christian tracts and their distribution to other provinces; see Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 351–2. 39 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 164; he brought this Latin–English dictionary with him to China; adding characters from the more complete Kangxi Dictionary, he used it as one of the sources of his own Dictionary. 40 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 183; he writes, ‘To speak of four or five hundred volumes, conveys to you an idea of something greater than the truth, in this instance. Chinese volumes will hardly average two hundred pages each, sometimes duodecimo, and at others a large octavo.’ 41 For a description of the physical form of Chinese thread-bound texts (xianzhuang shu 線裝書), see Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, ‘Paper and Printing’, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China 7 vols. (Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954–2004), 5, Pt 1: 222–34. In the 1870s or 1880s, the works in the collection were re-bound in Western-style binding. As West notes, this change protected the books from wear and tear (Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, xi), but it did destroy their original physical form and the flexibility and ease of use that is characteristic of Chinese string-bound texts.

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[Analects]’.42 And he had collected books ‘on the language; beside their classical, astronomical, geographical, books on law, historical, religious, anatomical, medical &c., to the number of 1229 volumes [fascicles], together with a number of pamphlets’. 43 By the time Morrison set sail for England with his collection in December 1823, that number had swelled to 10,000 fascicles.

The Morrison Collection and Publishing in Guangdong The only surviving record of the contents of the original Morrison collection – that is, the ‘10,000 volumes’ that Morrison accompanied to England in 1824 – is his own handwritten inventory, completed during his voyage home on 20 February 1824. This manuscript catalogue lists a total of 1,114 entries, which Andrew West, the modern cataloguer of the collection, estimates ‘represent some 900 distinct titles’, once duplicate titles are subtracted.44 The first point that must be noted about the collection, other than its size, is its impressive range; as West notes, it ‘is one of the largest and most extensive collections of Qing dynasty books to have ever been accumulated by a single individual’.45 It spans the four major divisions of Chinese bibliography: Classics (jing 經), History (shi 史), ‘Masters’ or Philosophers (zi 子), Literature (ji 集), and a fifth added in the Qing, Collectanea (congshu 叢書); and the major subject categories that these divisions embrace. Table 14.1 breaks the titles into topical categories in accord with these divisions.46 42 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 268. That is, he has translated portions of the Four Books; see above, note 19. 43 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 268. 44 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. viii. While in London, Morrison tasked one of his servants with cataloguing the collection, but that catalogue (Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 295), if it was ever completed, has not survived. The current Morrison Collection at SOAS does not contain all of the records in Morrison’s inventory; West lists 159 different records missing from the collection in the Appendix to his catalogue (pp. 371–5). The current collection also contains some works (40 records) that do not appear in Morrison’s inventory; and others (27 records) that were published after 1824 and thus must be later additions to the collection (p. xxiii). Most of the ‘records’ are individual titles, but some are collections of pamphlets or single sheets. 45 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. xvi. 46 The chart is based on the list provided in West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. xvi. I have added in parentheses the number of works that were included in the original collection (according to Morrison’s own manuscript inventory) but are no longer in the collection today; these are listed at the end of West’s Catalogue (pp. 371–5). But because the bibliographical information for these listings is not complete, it has not been possible to categorize these works with any certainty – hence the question mark.

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Table 14.1. Categories of titles in the Morrison Collection. ‘Four [Five] Treasuries’/ Total Records (plus possible later additions in parentheses)

Records (possible later additions in parentheses)

Category

Total

Classics: 95 (114?)

Classics (Editions and Studies of the Classics

34 (+6?)

34 (40?)

38 (+13?)

38 (51?)

23

23

History

16 (+4?)

16 (20?)

Biography

20 (+2?)

20 (22?)

Government (Jurisprudence, Governmental Institutions, Military Affairs, etc.)

38 (+7?)

38 (45?)

Geography

36 (+6?)

36 (42?)

Antiquities

5 (+6?)

5 (11?)

Bibliography

1 (+1?)

1 (2?)

Confucianism

23 (+7?)

23 (30?)

Philosophical Daoism

3

3

Military Strategy

5

5

Agriculture

6

6

130 (+9?)

130 (142?)

14

14

Astrology and Divination

37 (+5?)

37 (42?)

Pastimes (Art, Calligraphy, Music, Games, etc.)

15 (+6)

15 (21?)

Philology (Dictionaries, Phonology, Vocabularies of Foreign Languages, etc.) Examination Essays History: 116 (142?)

‘Masters’: 514 (585?)

Medicine Astronomy and Mathematics

Collecting Books in Early Nineteenth-Century China ‘Four [Five] Treasuries’/ Total Records (plus possible later additions in parentheses)

Records (possible later additions in parentheses)

Total

13 (+1?)

13 (14?)

Anecdotes and Tales

30

30

Classified Encyclopedias and Dictionaries of Phraseology

22

22

Buddhism

120 (+16?)

120 (136?)

Daoism

92 (+20?)

92 (112?)

Category Miscellaneous Writings

Christianity Islam Literature: 152 (198?)

Prose and Poetry Letters Drama and Balladry Vernacular Fiction

Collectanea: 13

Collected Editions of Texts (covering more than one subject area)

1 (+7)

335

1 (8?)

3

3

41 (+6?)

41 (47?)

16

16

19 (+6?)

19 (25?)

76 (+21?)

76 (97?)

13

13

Morrison clearly envisioned the collection as one that would offer students and scholars a panoramic view of the Chinese book culture of his day. To a true Chinese bibliophile, the Morrison collection would have appeared utterly banal. Chinese book collectors, ever searching for rare editions from the Song (960–1279), Yuan (1279–1368), and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties and favoring private (sike 私刻) over commercial publications, would have been contemptuous of a collection that has been correctly characterized as representative of ‘the output of the contemporary commercial publishing industry’.47 Among the 402 works with explicit publication dates 47 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, pp. xvi–xviii. As West explains, Morrison did collect a few Ming editions, as well as some Qing-dynasty reprints of Ming editions.

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in the original collection, there are only three Ming editions, all from late in the dynasty.48 Well over half (61 per cent) of the dated works were published between 1796 and 1820, in the reign of the Jiaqing emperor. A considerable percentage (29 per cent) were published between 1736 and 1795, in the reign of Jiaqing’s father, the Qianlong emperor. Even worse – again, from the point of view of a Chinese bibliophile – was the fact that the overwhelming majority of Morrison’s books were products of commercial publishers. To be sure, the collection included eight facsimile reprints of prized Song editions, privately published by noted scholars, some active in the Guangzhou area in the early nineteenth century.49 The collection also includes some works published by either local governments or the imperial government (guanke 官刻). In the former category, there are gazetteers of Guangdong province and a few of its counties, customs regulations, an account of taxation in the province, and a record of the salt industry in Guangdong and its neighboring province Guangxi.50 Much more impressive are the imperially commissioned works printed at the Imperial Printing House (Wuyingdian 武英殿) and other government offices in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The collection contains thirty-four such titles, most of which are important reference works like the Treasury of Rhymes from the Hall of Honoring Literature (Peiwen yunfu 佩文韻府, 1711) or the Golden Mirror of Medical Orthodoxy, compiled at imperial command (Yuzuan yizong jinjian 御纂醫宗金鑑, 1742). It also includes, impressively, the 91-fascicle Collectanea in Moveable Type from the Wuyingdian (Wuyingdian juzhenban congshu 武英殿聚珍版叢書, 1774–76), a collectanea of previously lost works printed with wooden moveable type.51 This portion of the collection also includes the collection’s only color-printed texts, the Imperially Sponsored Picture of Plowing and Weaving (Yuzhi gengzhi tu 御 製耕織圖, Wuyingdian, 1696) and the Profound Investigation of Ancient Prose (Guwen yuanjian 古文淵鍳, Imperial Household Department, 1685). These respectable literati- and government-sponsored publications, together with eleven manuscript texts, constitute a very small part of the Morrison collection (some 11 per cent), however. The remainder of the collection are commercial publications (fangke 坊刻), generically (and routinely) scorned by Chinese book-lovers as likely to be full of errors and 48 West notes, however, that there are seven other works that may be Ming editions (one of which was printed with altered Ming-dynasty woodblocks); and ten works that are Qing dynasty reprints of Ming editions, printed from recut blocks. Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, xvii–xviii. 49 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. xx. 50 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. xx. 51 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, pp. xx–xxi.

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badly cut and printed on low-grade paper. But they certainly constituted the overwhelming share of the texts circulating in China Proper in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning a little over a century earlier, in the late Ming, a boom in commercial publishing (just one part of an overall commercialization of the economy) empowered for-profit publishers to expand their operations in response to an escalating demand for texts from a growing literate population enjoying new purchasing power. The turmoil of the Manchu conquest between the 1640s and 1660s slowed this development, but once the Qing had consolidated its control over China Proper in the early 1680s, commercial publishing prospered again. It flourished now not only in the lower Yangzi delta cities that had previously, in the late Ming, been the leading publishing centres – Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou – but in a variety of different regional metropolitan centres and, more surprisingly, in hinterland sites. Guangzhou, together with a major market town, Foshan (Guangzhou’s neighbour to the southwest), was one of these large metropolitan centres. By the late Qing, the city was second only to Suzhou in volume of book production; it was the publishing centre of the far south. The city was also the major port of the south and thus an important commercial entrepôt, attracting a large population of merchants and tradesmen. These individuals swelled the demand for books, particularly fiction and how-to guides, during the publishing boom of the late Ming and Qing. Guangzhou (and Foshan) was a conduit for the export to Southeast Asia of paper produced in Fujian and Jiangxi; publishers in the city were thus presumably able to count on easy access to paper used for printing.52 As a prefectural capital and the provincial capital of Guangdong province, Guangzhou was also an educational centre, the site of the Prefectural School (fuxue 府學), the Provincial Education Commission (tidu xueyuan 提督學院), and the compound hosting the civil service examinations for juren 舉人 status, the second of the three tiers of the system. There was therefore a natural demand from students for editions of the Classics, examination-essay cribs, and the wide range of other study aids that were the staples of commercial publishing. Before the mid-Qing, Guangzhou had not been known as a seat of learning and scholarship, but the founding in 1820 of the Sea-of-Learning Academy (Xuehai tang 學海堂) by the distinguished scholar-official 52 Christian Daniels, ‘Jūroku-jūshichi seiki Fukken no takegama seizō gijitsu – Tenkō kaibutsu ni shōjutsu sareta – seishi gijutsu no jidai kōshō’, 16–17 世紀の福建竹 紙裝造技術—天工開物に詳述された—裝紙技術の時代考証, Ajia Afurika gengo bunka kenkyū アジア. アフリカ語言文化研究, 30th Anniversary Commemorative Issue II, no. 48/49 (1995): 243–94.

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Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849) transformed the city into a centre of critical classical studies or Han learning, the hottest intellectual trend of the day. The publications of the Sea-of-Learning scholars were printed by the Academy, while the work of the Academy further stimulated publishing in the province. Not surprisingly, given that Morrison had almost no opportunities to travel outside of Guangzhou,53 his collection was shaped by his residence in that city. Roughly 76 per cent or 226 of the 297 works in the collection that list a place of publication were produced in Guangdong.54 The remaining works were either publications of the imperial government in Beijing or the products of commercial publishers in Beijing or the Jiangnan area, the other great publishing centre of the south.55 Of the titles published in Guangdong, 89 per cent were published in the provincial capital, identified variously as Guangzhou, ‘Guang city’ (Guangcheng 廣城), ‘Guangdong provincial capital’; Yuedong shengcheng 粵東省城; ‘Goat city’ or Yangcheng 羊城 (after the creatures who had rescued ancient Guangzhou from drought). Seventeen per cent of the works listing a place of publication were published in Foshan, a city noted for shops that published medical texts and popular fiction.56 The evidence from the Morrison collection suggests an active commercial publishing world in Guangdong and Foshan by the late eighteenth century at the latest.57 At least eleven houses of the twenty-nine named in the 53 Morrison did accompany the abortive Amherst Embassy to Beijing in 1816, serving as interpreter and translator for Lord Amherst and his party. Closely overseen by Chinese officials on the journey overland to Beijing, he was unable to visit the book centres of the south, Suzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou. The Embassy was expelled from the capital very shortly after arriving, and thus did not offer Morrison any opportunities to explore Liulichang, the huge book market that made the capital the book centre of the empire. 54 Because many works do not identify a publisher or place of publication, it is impossible to determine just what percentage of the whole collection was locally produced. 55 Information about place of publication is often incomplete (even when publishers are identified), so all these figures are necessarily tentative. Twenty-three works were published in Jiangnan; Suzhou was the major source, with eighteen titles. In addition, there is one work from Jian’an (Fujian), a major publishing centre in the previous dynasty, the Ming; one from Xiugu, Jiangxi; and three from difficult-to-identify sites. 56 One title was published on Hainan Island, a part of Guangdong province in the Qing. 57 This is well before book historians in China see Guangzhou emerging as a publishing centre. Drawing on references in books and catalogues, they see a marked proliferation of publishing operations only in the 1850s and note that it was only much later, in the Guangxu era (1875–1908), that the number of bookshops and publishing

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collection were publishing by the 1790s; and by the 1820s, all were active in Guangzhou or Foshan. In Guangzhou, bookshops were established in several distinct neighborhoods within the central Yuexiu district, which housed the major government offices of the province. In cities throughout China commercial publishers typically set up shop close to centres of education or examination where they attracted the attention of the students who provided them a ready market for their textbooks and examination aids. And so, too, in Guangzhou shufang clustered in three sites between the Provincial Education Commission and the Prefectural School: at Below Double Gate (Shuangmendi 雙門底), roughly a block away from the Prefectural School, there were six shops; West Lake Street (Xihu jie 西湖街), a short street south of and running westward from Below Double Gate, was home to six more shops; and Nine Stars Alley (Jiuyaofang 九曜坊), parallel to West Lake to the southwest and linked to it by one block – and just south of the Provincial Education Commission – was the site of yet another six.58 These shops, together with eight others that provided an address no more precise than simply ‘Guangzhou’, produced 116 of the editions in the Morrison collection. These shops were commercial houses, but two religious institutions also contributed to the Morrison collection. Sanyuan Palace (Sanyuan gong 三 元宮), a temple consecrated to the worship of the three highest celestial officials in the Daoist pantheon,59 operated a printing house which prohouses in the whole provimce topped two hundred. Chuban zhi 出版志, 69, Guangdong shengzhi 广东省志 (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1997), pp. 69–71. Zhang Xiumin dates the rise of commercial publishing to the 1850s, noting the proliferation of publishing houses from the Xianfeng through the Xuantong eras (1851–1911). Zhang Xiumin 张秀民, Zhongguo yinshua shi 中国印刷史 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1989), p. 556. But see also Patricia Sieber’s excellent ‘The Imprint of the Imprints: Sojourners, Xiaoshuo Translations, and the Transcultural Canon of Early Chinese Fiction in Europe, 1697–1826,’ East Asian Publishing and Society 3 (2013): 36–7. 58 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, pp. xviii–xix. West has identified twenty-nine shops, twenty-six in Guangzhou and three in Foshan. Of the Guangzhou shops, eight do not give an address more precise than simply ‘Guangzhou’. Decades later, John Henry Gray, archdeacon of Hong Kong, noted that Jiuyaofang was still, ‘owing to its close proximity to the literary chancellor’s yamun’, the site of ‘not only shops in which Chinese books are sold, but others, also, in which men are engaged in carving wooden printing blocks. The skill, which these men display in the execution of the work assigned to them, is, indeed, worth of observation.’ Walks in the City of Canton (Victoria, Hong Kong: De Souza & Co., 1875), pp. 464–5. 59 The Heavenly Official (Tianguan), Earthly Official (Diguan) and Water Official (Shui­guan), subordinate only to the Jade Emperor, the supreme Daoist deity, manage all phenomena in their respective spheres.

Fig. 14.1. Map of Guangzhou. The American missionary and cartographer Daniel Vrooman (1818–95) completed this map of Guangzhou (Canton) in 1860, well after Robert Morrison’s death, but it offers a clear representation of the sites of the city most important to Morrison’s book-collecting activities. The Thirteen Factories (1), on the north bank of the Pearl River, was the residence of the foreign merchants (and occasionally Morrison). His collection includes some works published at the Sanyuan Palace (2), a Daoist temple in the northern section of the city. The Buddhist Haichuang Temple (3), which operated a busy printing house, was a major source for many of the religious texts Morrison collected and for much of his knowledge of Buddhist practices. In the heart of the city, the major bookselling district, marked by the square, was located near the Provincial Education Commission (4), the Prefectural School (5); Nine Stars Alley (6), West Lake Street (7), and Below Double Gate (8). PD 1996. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, London Missionary Society map collection, item in the Public Domain.

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duced six works – either Daoist scriptures or confessional texts (chanwen 懺文) – in the collection. This temple was located at Yuexiu Mountain, in the heart of the Guangzhou walled city, and thus inaccessible to Morrison. Not so the other religious institution that helped shape his collection. Haichuang Temple (Haichuang si 海幢寺; Hoi Tong Zi), a Chan Buddhist temple on the far northwestern tip of Henan (Honam 河南) Island, faced the Thirteen Factories across the Pearl River. One of the grandest temples of Guangzhou, housing between one hundred and two hundred monks, Haichuang was noted for its great banyan trees, its exotic garden, the pigs and other animals that roamed the grounds freely (in accord with the Buddhist proscription against taking life), its library – and its ‘printing establishment’.60 It served as a gathering place for Cantonese literati and wealthy merchants interested in discussing Buddhist philosophy or literature with its many ‘poet-monks’.61 Distant from the city centre, it was also one of the very few sites Westerners were allowed to visit in the early nineteenth century; the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi decreed that they were allowed, in groups of fewer than ten, at the temple on only three set days a month (although it seems that this rule was not strictly enforced). Morrison was a frequent visitor, particularly interested in the temple’s bookshop and printshop, which he describes as follows: ‘(經坊) King fong [Jingfang], “The book room,” in which are religious and moral books for sale; some the property of the temple; and others merely placed there by booksellers for sale. Adjoining this is a Chinese printing office, where the curious may see the mode of printing from blocks of wood, or wooden stereotype, in China.’62 Morrison’s impressions of Buddhism and 60 Man-Shun Yeung, ‘Buddhist–Christian Encounters: Robert Morrison and the Hai­ chuang Buddhist Temple in Nineteenth-Century Canton’, in Pars Peter Laamann and Joseph Tse-Hei Lee (eds), The Church as Safe Haven: Christian Governance in China (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 74–82, cites the impressions of many Western visitors to the temple in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. William C. Hunter, in Bits of Old China (Taipei: Ch’eng-Wen Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 176–7, mentions the library and the ‘printing establishment, where the doctrine is perpetuated on wooden blocks, impressions from which are constantly made and distributed or sold …’. 61 Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2006), pp. 59–60. 62 Robert Morrison, ‘The Legend of the Jos-House, or Idol Temple, in Honan,’ The Indo-Chinese Gleaner 3:19 (1822): 236–7; cited in Yeung, ‘Buddhist–Christian Encounters,’ p. 95. Gray, Walks in the City of Canton, p. 62, described the printing office or shuju 書局 as it appeared in the 1870s: ‘Within its walls, Buddhistical works, chiefly liturgies, are, for the service of this, and other monasteries, printed. … In one chamber of this printing office, many wooden shelves are placed, and upon each of which,

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Buddhist practices were based to a large extent on what he observed at Haichuang.63 By the time Morrison arrived in Guangzhou, Haichuang had been running a publishing operation for at least a century and a half; his collection includes a Pure Land Buddhist text published by the temple in 1658. Buddhist texts were the temple’s primary output; and its Buddhist publications reached a broad audience, circulating in Vietnam, Indonesia, and other regions of Southeast Asia into the late nineteenth century. Certainly it supplied Morrison with the bulk of Buddhist texts in his collection: over 80 of the 120 Buddhist works were either cut at or printed from blocks held at Haichuang.64 These works were often published by subscription or by pious sponsors who earned merit by paying for the block-cutting and printing; one might also earn a little merit by paying to have copies printed off from already cut blocks. In its publishing activities, Haichuang embraced a relatively eclectic approach toward the texts it produced. Although the temple was affiliated with the Caodong 曹洞 branch of Chan Buddhism, it published texts from other Buddhist schools as well: Faxiang 法相, Huayan 華嚴, Tiantai 天台, and Pure Land. Nor did it publish only Buddhist texts; it produced also a treatise on military strategy, a primarily Confucian guide to self-cultivation, and a collection of the poetry of the Qing official Jin Shen 金甡 (1702– 82). These, all in the Morrison collection, were products of Haichuang. Interestingly, the temple also produced three works from its rival belief system, Daoism: one edition of The Way and Its Power (Daode jing 道德 經), the foundational work of Daoist philosophy; a scripture of immortality Daoism; and a treatise on Daoist cultivation. In terms of technology, the Morrison collection reflects clearly the dominance of xylography as the print technology of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Guangdong. Only five of the printed works in the collection are printed by wooden moveable type, and they are all editions produced by the Imperial Printing House. Very often the government was the only publisher that could afford to create and maintain the very large font of over 200,000 character-types required to print works in the Chinese language. Morrison himself also notes that the aesthetic effect of moveable-­ type printing was often disappointing. Pointing to one of the works in his collection, the Imperially Commissioned Account of the Pacification of the with much care, are arranged several tens of wooden printing blocks’; he goes on to describe the ‘very simple’ printing process. 63 Yeung, ‘Buddhist–Christian Encounters,’ pp. 88–97. 64 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. xix.

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Miao (Qinding ping Miao jilue 御定平苗紀略), he writes, it ‘was printed with moveable types; but it is by no means equal to good printing with wooden blocks, which are still, almost universally adhered to by the Chinese’.65 Nonetheless, the complete absence of locally printed moveable-type texts might suggest that the publishing industry in the province was rather conservative. Although in Morrison’s day woodblock printing was still unquestionably the major technology, wooden moveable-type printing was gaining practitioners among both commercial and private publishers in Jiangnan and Beijing.66 Morrison, preoccupied throughout his time in China with the best way of publishing and disseminating his Christian tracts and translation of the Bible, was deeply interested in Chinese printing technologies. Thanks to his colleague Milne, we have a relatively detailed description of woodblock cutting and printing, the kind of description that cannot be found in Chinese texts until over a century later.67 We also learn from Milne that, eager to begin the printing of one of his translations of Christian scripture into Chinese – and fearful of the dangers of hiring Chinese block-cutters – Morrison attempted to teach himself block cutting: In order, if possible to avoid the risk of trouble from the Government, he formed the idea of learning the art of Chinese printing himself; and accordingly in 1809, when the Acts of the Apostles were ready for the press, he procured a set of graving tools and began to cut. But he soon found that he was undertaking a task, the execution of which was quite incompatible with the more important labors in which he was engaged. The book of the Acts alone, would have required a good workman, about two hundred days, to complete it, without attending to anything else; and no foreigner, who had the art to learn, could have accomplished it in less than two years, admitting that his every waking hour had been devoted to the work. … There was therefore no alternative left for him, but to employ Chinese workmen, though he knew that the risk both to them and himself was great.68 65 Robert Morrison, A View of China, pp. 6–7. This work includes several notices about the history of Chinese printing. 66 Moveable type was first invented in China in the eleventh century, and at various times since then publishers experimented with wooden, bronze, earthenware and tin type; it was not until the late Ming that publishers began turning more frequently to this technology, and it was recognized that some texts such as genealogies were better suited to moveable type than woodblock printing. 67 Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years, pp. 225–30. The whole of Section XVII of this work, pp. 222–87, contains a thorough comparison of woodblock and letterpress printing, with particular attention to relative costs. 68 Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years, pp. 232–3.

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Morrison did in fact hire Chinese workers to cut the blocks for the Acts of the Apostles, and the work was printed in parts between 1810 and 1813. This was hugely expensive, however. Chinese cutters charged high prices because of the risks they ran in working for foreigners. It was also dangerous. Much to Morrison’s distress, one bookseller, hearing that Qing officials were searching for evidence of publishing by foreigners, destroyed a store of cut woodblocks for another portion of the New Testament. Working with Thoms, Morrison and Milne eventually turned to cutting – and then casting – metal moveable character types that could be used to print Chinese with English text. This was the method used to print Morrison’s Dictionary of the Chinese Language, printed in five substantial volumes between 1815 and 1823 at the East India Press in Macao. Until he was able to work with a printer who could cast Chinese character types, Morrison continued to employ Chinese block cutters, often at double the wage they normally earned. Beyond this, we learn little from Morrison’s correspondence or journals of the labor practices and relationships that supported the output of both the commercial publishing houses and the two temples. Block-cutters are named in some texts, but it is not clear whether they worked on their own, as employees of the publishing houses, or as employees of a block-cutting shop (kezi dian 刻字店). The latter was a workshop that cut blocks on commission for private individual or commercial publishers. Milne tells us cutters might be hired by the day: In the Hae-chang-sze [Haichuang Temple] printing office, opposite to the city of Canton, where a good deal of printing is carried on, they hire in workmen by the day as they want them; and I was told by the priests, that one cash is allowed per character, for the common sort used in handbills, and public notices of feast days, and tracts on subjects connected to the pagan worship, &c. About 800 cash go to a Spanish dollar.69

Occasionally the name of a shop is included in a text. The named shop was presumably a block-cutting shop such as the Zhishan tang 止善堂, which cut the blocks for three publications of the Xinjian zhai 心簡齋 publishing house. Commercial houses at that time functioned both as publishers (cutting, printing, and selling their own works) and as block-cutting shops. Both the Xinjian zhai and the Juxian tang 聚賢堂 cut blocks for the Haichuang Temple, which then held or owned the blocks (cang ban 藏版)

69 Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years, p. 235.

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as publisher. On one occasion, the relationship was reversed, when the temple cut blocks for the Xinjian zhai.

Book Collecting as (Christian) Ethnography Morrison provided no explanation of his philosophy of book collecting, other than to express the hope that his collection would provide students of Chinese, in particular missionaries, with materials for the study of the language and culture of China. This aspiration helps to explain the effort to build a comprehensive collection, one that was representative of the whole scope of Chinese book culture in his day. That he was fully aware of the full range of the Chinese book culture of the day is evident: They [the Chinese] … possess ancient and modern literature in great abundance; and an unlicensed press, and cheap books suited to their taste. With poetry, and music; and elegant compositions; and native ancient classics; and copious histories of their own part of the world; and antiquities, and topographical illustrations; and dramatic compositions; and delineations of men and manners, in works of fiction; and tales of battles and of murders; and the torturous stratagems of protracted and bloody civil wars. With all these, and with mythological legends for the superstitious, the Chinese … are, by the press, most abundantly supplied. Nor is their literature destitute of theories of nature, and descriptions of her various productions, and the processes of the pharmacopolist, and the history and practice of medicine.70

The collection does, in fact, contain works in all these categories. But it also has a distinctive shape and clear strengths and weaknesses. These reveal, in partnership with some of his writings about and activities in China, his specific book-collecting goals. Generally speaking, the whole collection reflects Morrison’s interest, not in fine books or the tastes of the highly educated elite, but in what ‘ordinary’ Chinese literates read. It is a collection for readers who wanted to understand the mundane assumptions, ingrained values, and everyday practices of the Chinese people – the people who were the new targets of Christian conversion in the early nineteenth century. As we have seen, the Morrison Collection contains some works of scholarly interest. A reader could at least begin to study for the civil service examinations with texts in the collection, even though it is doubtful that he would progress very far up the examination ladder. But the primary goal of the collection seems to 70 Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 272.

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have been to gather for the student of China the works that were accessible, and in some cases also very popular, among the ‘common readers’ of that vast population; it presents a kind of bibliographical ethnography of the Chinese homme moyen sensuel. Of course, given the restrictions on Morrison’s own book-purchasing activities, his collection was necessarily also shaped by the interests and literacy levels of those men who helped him compile it. These assistants included lower-level degree holders like Li Chating and Ge Maohe; commercial book dealers like Ting Qua; literate artisans like Cai Xuan and Cai Ke; and the semi- or marginally literate servants who collected popular almanacs for him. Clearly all these men, in their tastes and book choices, did shape the collection; their profiles made them very well qualified for the compilation of what was a wide-ranging but essentially ‘middlebrow’ collection with many ‘lowbrow’ additions.71 A brief glance at the distribution of different types of texts within the collection supports this description. The Classics division is rather sparsely populated, with just thirty-three editions, ten of which are the Four Books which are among the basic textbooks of schooling. These editions provide the long-standing orthodox commentaries on their respective texts, all necessary for examination study. There is almost no evidence of awareness of publications of ‘evidential research’ (kaozheng 考證), the major scholarly trend of the day, whose adherents challenged the accuracy and sanctity of the orthodox commentaries.72 This collection might have provided a novice examination candidate with the basic texts of the system, but it could never have met the needs of an advanced scholar or literatus absorbed in the hottest contemporary debates. Strikingly, the division includes twenty-three collections of examination essays. Although in common use as textbooks for teaching eight-legged essay writing, such collections were generally considered hackwork performed by impoverished scholars and were never admitted into the collection of a true Chinese bibliophile. Nonetheless, the examination essays had their uses for the insights they offered an outsider like Morrison into Chinese rhetorical strategies, modes of reasoning, and the demands of the civil service examination system. The Literature division also contains some instructive omissions and inclusions. There are surprisingly few poetry or prose collections from writers before the Qing dynasty. Yet Morrison collected a fair number of letter collections, most of which (eleven of sixteen) were designed as 71 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 329–30, 355–6. 72 The collection contains two philosophical treatises by Dai Zhen 戴振 (1724–77), one of the leaders of the evidential research movement.

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models for teaching correspondence, Again, these, like the examination essay collections, were not the kinds of texts that bibliophiles treasured but, rather, works very useful both to the student of Chinese and to the outsider hoping to learn the customs and patterns of social interaction in a foreign culture. Beyond the uneven Classics and Literature divisions, the Morrison collection is most distinctive for its strength in three areas: Chinese religions (particularly popular religions), medicine, and vernacular fiction.

Chinese Religions: Buddhism and Daoism It should not surprise us that Chinese religious texts, works of Buddhism and Daoism, make up the largest single portion of the collection. These 212 titles comprise almost one quarter of the whole, significantly dwarfing the number of texts devoted to Confucian teachings. Morrison clearly recognized the importance of Confucianism in Chinese society, but, less interested than the Jesuit missionaries of the Enlightenment in appealing to the elite, he regarded popular Buddhism and Daoism as the largest impediments to the spread of Christianity in China. For Morrison, as for most Protestant missionaries, Buddhism was the far graver threat because of its widespread appeal, strong institutional presence, and vigorous proselytizing efforts. Presumably in an effort to ‘know thine enemy’, Morrison collected more Buddhist works than any other religious texts, across all categories. Given the enormous size of the Buddhist canon (the Tripitaka), Morrison’s collection of sutras is very small, even though it comprises the largest portion of his Buddhist titles (53 of 120). The focus here is on the most widely read sutras of Chinese Buddhism (including the Lotus Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, and the Heart Sutra, some in multiple editions). There are single editions of a few other sutras and two popular apocryphal (that is, indigenous Chinese) works, Sutra of the Buddha of the Big Dipper (Foshuo tianzhong beidou gufo xiaozai yanshou miaojing 佛說天中北斗古佛消灾延壽玅經) and High King Avalokitésvara (Gaowang Guanshiyin jing 高王觀世音經). Morrison was equally attentive to Chan Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism, the major schools of his day; writings from those schools are evenly represented. Liturgical texts – invocations, ritual texts, and confessional texts – and monastic rules are also included. The sayings and writings of Buddhist masters most notably contain the recorded conversations and writings of one famous late Ming Pure Land master, Yunqi Zhuhong 雲棲祩宏 (1535–1615), and of three men who served as abbots of Haichuang Temple in the late Ming and Qing.

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Rounding off the Buddhist texts is a group of popular anecdote collections that illustrate the workings of karma. Daoism was perceived as a lesser threat, a view reflected in the proportion of Buddhist to Daoist works in the collection: 120 to 92. As mentioned, Morrison had one edition of the foundational philosophical work of Daoism, The Way and Its Power. But all his other Daoist texts belonged to the category of immortality (sometimes called ‘religious’) Daoism, the interpretation of Daoism that prescribed methods of purification – moral, spiritual, alchemical, meditative – leading to immortality. Morrison collected a smattering of immortality Daoist scriptures, primarily those devoted to the three celestial officials worshipped at Sanyuan Palace and their ruler, the Jade Emperor, the chief deity of the heavily populated Daoist pantheon. The collection also contains a few works of Daoist alchemy, biographies of Daoist (and some Confucian and Buddhist) sages and immortals, confessional texts, compendia of charms and spells that might be used to invoke the spirits or cure diseases. By far the greatest number of Daoist texts (fifty-eight), however, are moral tracts, works exhorting the reader to do good deeds and often offering the hope of rewards for such deeds (and the threat of punishment for bad deeds). Many of these works contain anecdotes and stories illustrating the power of supernatural retribution. The Buddhist and Daoist portions of the collection reflect Morrison’s interest in popular beliefs, rituals, and practices, rather than in the cosmological, metaphysical, or epistemological thinking that informed the Buddhist or Daoist (or, for that matter, Confucian) systems of belief. This is not to suggest that he did not understand these systems (and the differences between the many different strains within each system, particularly the Buddhist), but that he appeared to be most intent on understanding the popular appeal of the three teachings. In other words, he was most interested in the ‘superstitions’ and ritual practices, in particular the worship of many gods (in Morrison’s terms, the ‘idolatry’), that were most vigorously embraced by the common people. This suggestion is borne out in the writings on Chinese religions that he addresses to a Western audience. In a series of letters on Chinese religion published in the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle in 1825, Morrison proposes to explain ‘the religious opinions of the Chinese; and their system of precepts, intended by them to regulate the morals and manners of men’. He identifies the widespread belief in supernatural/ cosmic retribution (ganying 感應, ‘action and response’, in Daoist and Confucian contexts; yinguo 因果, ‘cause and effect’ or karma, in the Buddhist) as the unifying principle of Chinese religions. But there is otherwise little discussion of doctrine and certainly no allusion to the sophisticated

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epistemologies of the Buddhist schools. Instead, he harps on the idolatry of the common people, their faith in the efficacy of multiple gods, providing as evidence extensive translations from popular morality books like the Record of Reverence and Belief (Jingxin lu 敬信錄) and a tract written in the name of Lord Wenchang (Wenchang dijun 文昌帝君), whose worship was believed to bring success in the examinations. Almost from the moment of his arrival in China, Morrison railed against the religious practices of the Chinese, who ‘daily practiced the grossest idolatry. I have only been a fortnight here, and in addition to their offerings of fire, morning and evening, in every house, shop, boat, and huckster’s shed, I have witnessed four special days of idol-worship, and the worship of the moon.’73 He was also dismissive of the work of the Chinese monks and priests. In a work meant to introduce China to school children, he avers that Buddhist priests Do not preach nor teach: they do nothing but perform ceremonies, offer sacrifices, and recite prayers. They sell in the temples, books and tracts, exhorting the people to the performance of relative duties; not to eat flesh meat, to repeat very often the name of the Buddha, and to attend to many superstitious observances, by which means they say riches, and honours, and a numerous posterity and happiness after death, will be obtained.74

Here, the contrast with the Jesuits of the Enlightenment is marked. The Jesuits more or less ignored Buddhism, focusing on the mastery of Confucianism as a means of appealing to the Chinese elite. Morrison, less interested in the finer points of Confucian philosophy as interpreted by the highly literate elite, was preoccupied almost entirely with the popular religious ‘superstitions’, ‘idol’-worship, and ritual practices most prevalent among the population. His visits to Haichuang Temple gave him ample opportunity to observe Buddhism in action, and his collection of widely read sutras,

73 Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 138. The Memoirs contain many accounts of Morrison’s disapproval of Chinese religious practices; for a few more examples, see 1: 203, on worship at a temple to the Buddha of the North Dipper; 1: 208–9, on Chinese divination from bamboo slips; 1: 447–8, which may be Morrison’s description of worship at Haichuang Temple. 74 Robert Morrison, China, A Dialogue, for the Use of Schools: Being Ten Conversations, Between a Father and His Two Children, Concerning the History and Present State of That Country (London: J. Nisbet, 1824), pp. 79–80; cited in Yeung, ‘Buddhist–Christian Encounters’, p. 86.

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lives of immortals and sages, and popular morality books gave him deeper insights into the beliefs behind popular religious practices.75 Morrison’s large collection of moral tracts, both Buddhist and Daoist, and his frequent references to their efficacy suggest that he was also very interested in working out the best means of transmitting Christian values and practices to support his efforts at conversion. Almost upon arrival, he was struck by the ubiquity of pamphlets and tracts in Guangzhou. After just one week, he observed in the streets and alleys around the Thirteen Factories many people who, although obviously poor, were reading pamphlets. He speculates that these little books were the Chinese equivalent of the chapbooks sold by peddlers in the English countryside.76 Another two years’ residence further persuaded him that, given the high value placed on literacy in China, print was the best medium for attracting converts: ‘[T]he Chinese are a reading people, upon whose Pagan prejudices some impression might be made by the press.’77 Morrison at the same time also came to see that Western methods of proselytization were unlikely to work in China. Monks and priests in China, he noted, did not preach – at least not in the manner of Presbyterian ministers. Such observations, along with the hard, cold fact that he would almost certainly have been expelled from China had he tried to preach publicly in Guangzhou, help to explain Morrison’s decision, despite the initial vigorous objections of the LMS, to devote himself to writing and printing Christian tracts in Chinese rather than attempting to convert through oral sermonizing.78 It is easy to imagine that his interest in Buddhist and Daoist tracts was driven at least in part by a search for models that might be adapted to his Christian goal, as well as to understanding the beliefs and practices that were Christianity’s most powerful rivals in China.

Medicine The Morrison collection contains 130 titles on medical topics, the largest number in any of the subdivisions of the four treasuries. Almost one third of these titles are general discussions of medicine or collections of 75 Yeung, ‘Buddhist–Christian Encounters’, p. 86. 76 London Missionary Society Archives/China/South China Journals, Morrison’s Journal, 12 Sept. 1807; cited in Su Jing, Malixun yu Zhongguo yinshua chuban, p. 12. Morrison saw the Chinese as a ‘reading population’ and so believed that the only way to reach them was through tracts and the Chinese Bible. Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 298. 77 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 256. 78 Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 256, 417; 2: 494–5.

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Fig. 14.2a (right) and 14.2b (left). Three Worthies Meet the Immortal and Talk about the World, Newly Cut (Xinke sanxian yu xian tanshi 新刻三賢遇仙 談世), cover page. This short (one fascicle) work, although classified in the ‘fiction’ category, likely of interest to Morrison because of its contents, was an imagined discourse among representatives of the ‘three teachings’. The three worthies, representing Confucianism, argue that learning, intelligence, and virtuous behavior are what make a man. The Daoist immortal, Lü Dongbin 呂 洞賓, insists that life is fated; it is the balance of the five agents at a person’s birth that determines the course of his or her life. The third part, in which the bodhisattva Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara) puts forth the Buddhist view, is missing. Written in simple, punctuated Chinese, the text is occasionally interrupted with short verses that serve to summarize and highlight the arguments made in prose, as in the leaf on the left. The small size and poor production quality of this text (it is crudely – though clearly – cut and poorly printed on low-quality paper) suggest that this was a cheap work designed for widespread sale, or perhaps free distribution, to a broad readership of limited education. Given Morrison’s interest in producing Christian tracts in Chinese for a similar audience, he may have seen this work as something of a model. (Note that the title on the cover page, Guanyin Discusses the World with Lü Dongbin [Guanyin Lü Dongbin tanshi lu 觀音呂洞賓談世錄] is not the same as the title within the text; and the publisher has neglected to add his shop’s name in the box in the lower left – both additional signs that this was a product of the very lowest end of the publishing industry. It is unlikely that it would have survived had Morrison not sought texts of this sort for his collection.) RM c.500.y.2(4). Courtesy of the Morrison Collection, SOAS Library.

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the medical theories of famous physicians, all texts designed to introduce the basic principles of Chinese medicine. Prescription collections (fangshu 方書) are very well represented, with nineteen titles. The remaining titles are divided, more or less equally, among different categories of medical practice (internal medicine; external medicine; ears, eyes, mouth, nose, and tongue; gynaecology and obstetrics; pediatrics; acupuncture and moxibustion; health and well-being), materia medica, diagnosis, and case histories. In sum, the collection provides plentiful information on the general principles of Chinese medicine, an overview of works in a range of different fields of medicine, and many practical aids to the treatment of disease. There is a clear interest in the work of prominent physicians and scholars of the late Ming and early Qing; only about thirty of the titles were composed before 1500 (and most of these appear in editions that include commentaries from physicians writing in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries). Works of the great Han-dynasty scholar Zhang Ji 張機 (150–219) appear in several of the collections, but only two classical medical texts are included: the work that is the foundation of Chinese medicine, the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經, first century BCE?) and a collection of medical problems attributed to Qin Yueren 秦越 人 (c.407–310 BCE). The bulk of the medical titles also suggest the guidance of at least one person knowledgeable about the major works, controversies, and trends of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collection includes several medical works by Wang Kentang 王肯堂 (1549–1613), and several editions of ancient medical texts that he edited and had printed.79 Included, too, is Li Shizhen’s 李時珍 (1518–93) path-breaking Materia medica (Bencao gangmu 本草綱目), the model for all later works of that genre. Some partiality for a school of treatment prominent in the late Ming is revealed in the inclusion of works by the medical scholars Xue Ji 薛己 (1488–1558), Zhao Xianke 趙獻可 (late Ming), Zhang Jiebin 張介賓 (1563–1640), and Li Zhongzi 李中梓 (1588–1655), all internal medicine specialists and advocates of ‘warming and replenishing’ (wenbu 溫補) therapies, the hottest new cure of that day.80 (Notable, too, is the absence of more recent works

79 A high official in the Ming government, Wang published works on medicine, law and Buddhism privately at his studio, Yugang tang 郁岡堂. See Qu Mianliang 瞿冕 良, Zhongguo guji banke cidian 中国古籍半刻辞典 (Suzhou: Suzhou daxue chubanshe, 2009), pp. 524–5. 80 Liao Yuqun 廖育群, Fu Fang 傅芳, and Zheng Jinsheng 郑金生, Zhongguo kexue jishushi: Yixue juan 中国科学技术史：医学卷 (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1998), pp. 371–8; and Leslie de Vries, ‘The Dangers of “Warming and Replenishing” (wenbu

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by mid-eighteenth-century critics of late Ming ‘warming and replenishing’ therapies).81 As in the collection of writings on the Classics, there is little evidence of any awareness of or interest in works that reflect the impact of contemporary ‘evidential research’ scholarship on medical thinking, and in particular on its critical re-examination of ancient medical texts. To be sure, the collection does contain works by noted Qing physicians such as Ke Qin 柯琴 (fl. late seventeenth century), an expert on ‘cold damage’ diagnoses, and Ye Gui 葉桂 (1667–1746), an expert on febrile diseases. Also included is the great Qing compendium Imperially Commissioned Golden Mirror of Medical Orthodoxy (Yuzuan yizong jinjian 御纂醫宗金鑑, 1742), the basic reference work of orthodox medical practice.82 Overall, Morrison’s medical collection presents a solid but somewhat old-fashioned view of medical theories and approaches. In another way, however, the medical collection is very up to date. It reflects the popularizing trend in medical writing and publication that began in the late Ming and unfolded steadily through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The population explosion of the Qing created greater demand for medical practitioners at the same time that the swelling number of unsuccessful examination candidates created a pool of men of some learning eager to find a livelihood. Texts that such aspiring physicians used to study on their own became very popular (there were very few dedicated medical schools). Laymen were also attracted to popular texts promising do-it-yourself diagnoses and cures. Many of such texts were of little value, but some by relatively reputable physicians earned enduring popularity.83 Several texts in the Morrison collection fall into this category. Li Chan’s 李梴 Medical Primer (Yixue rumen 醫學入門, 1575) and Li Zhongzi’s Necessary Reading in Medical Orthodoxy (Yizong bidu 醫宗必 讀, 1637), were among the best-known introductions to medicine. The perennially popular Leigong’s Verses on the Concoction of Medicines (Leigong paozhi yaoxing fu 雷公炮製藥性賦) offered advice on the preparation of medicines in easy-to-memorize rhymes, which were commonly employed 溫補) during the Ming to Qing Epistemic Tradition’, Asian Medicine 10:1/2 (2015): 90–120. 81 Liao Yuqun et al., Zhongguo kexue jishushi: Yixue juan, pp. 383–90; and De Vries, ‘The Dangers of “Warming and Replenishing”’, pp. 90–120. 82 Liao Yuqun et al., Zhongguo kexue jishushi: Yixue juan, pp. 381, 389, 392–3. 83 As Xu Dachun 徐大春 (1693–1771), a noted Qing-era physician complained, many failed examination candidates or unsuccessful merchants turned to medicine as a means of making a livelihood; he believed that many of the popular medical texts of his day were the work of men ignorant of classical medical principles.

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in the writing of primers. Wang Ang 汪昂 (1615–1700?), a prolific editor who often composed his works in heptasyllabic verse, contributed several works, including one very widely used prescription collection, Medical Prescriptions, Collected and Explained (Yifang jijie 醫方集解, 1682).84 The relatively high number of prescription collections (nineteen) – very practical works of great use to Chinese physicians and laymen alike, but of little apparent use to Morrison or the audience for his collection – at first glance surprises. But Morrison did have a special interest in medical practice in China, even though there is little evidence that he was deeply knowledgeable of Chinese medicine. In London, he had studied Western medicine in preparation for his mission, but he seems to have had little opportunity to use this knowledge in China. In Guangzhou, however, in cooperation with a Chinese doctor, and at the behest of John Livingstone (d. c.1826), a surgeon for the EIC and an ardent horticulturalist, he took as one of his many projects the study of the Chinese pharmacy, eventually establishing a dispensary to serve the poor. Here is Livingstone’s account, written in September 1820: [Morrison] has purchased a Chinese Medical Library, consisting of upwards of 800 volumes, with a complete assortment of Chinese Medicines; and has engaged a respectable Chinese Physician and Apothecary, with the occasional attendance of an Herbalist (whose complete stock he purchased for my inspection), to explain the properties of the various articles which he (the Herbalist) collects and sells. In addition to this, the same gentleman instituted a Dispensary some months ago, for supplying the Chinese poor with advice and medicines, which he superintends himself from one to two hours every morning.85

Livingstone, who often observed the work at the dispensary, was frustrated by his ignorance of Chinese ‘popular notions regarding disease, and the effects of remedies,’ realizing that understanding these points was necessary to a comprehension of Chinese medicine. On these points I found Dr. Morrison’s sentiments accorded exactly with my own; and although he is familiar with the colloquial idiom of the Chinese, in the ordinary intercourses of life, and reads their polite Literature, he clearly comprehended, that it was necessary for us to 84 Liao Yuqun et al., Zhongguo kexue jishushi: Yixue juan, pp. 393–5. 85 Letter from Livingstone to William Milne, cited in Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 20–1.

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investigate Chinese Medical Systems, and attend long and carefully to the business of the Dispensary, before we could form a just estimate of Chinese medicine, or to explain correctly its technology.86

Presumably the core of the medical division of the Morrison Collection is represented by ‘the Chinese Medical Library’, purchased to inform Morrison and Livingstone’s investigations of Chinese medicine and pharmaceutics and to aid the work of the dispensary. As West argues persuasively, a manuscript in the collection, ‘Cases of Prescriptions Based on Pulse Diagnosis’ (‘Zhenmai fayao yi’an’ 診脈發藥醫案), the case notes of a Cantonese doctor named Li Jufan 黎巨㠶, is most likely the work of the Chinese physician who taught Morrison and Livingstone and ran the dispensary.87

Vernacular Fiction Perhaps the most surprising strength of the Morrison collection is its seventy-six titles in the ‘vernacular fiction’ division. It is easy enough to explain his interest in Chinese popular religion as necessary to his project of Christian proselytization: he had to know his competition. His interest in Chinese medicine also becomes understandable as medical study appeared to be seen as a necessary part of missionary training; that it was indeed a tool of mission activity is confirmed in Morrison’s establishment of a dispensary in Guangzhou. Vernacular fiction, however, the most popular – and racy and frivolous – entertainment literature of the late Ming and Qing, seems an unlikely interest of the apparently humorless and rather prim Morrison. He is quite explicit, in fact, about his distaste for works in this genre. On occasion, he acknowledged that the Chinese enjoyed a long tradition of belles-lettres (by which he meant works of prose, poetry, and some fiction in the classical language), but he was quite dismissive of entertainment literature: ‘the reader of [Chinese] light literature can learn little but folly or licentiousness’.88 In this opinion Morrison agreed with the judgment – or at least the public professions – of most Chinese literati of the day. Most were ostensibly too sophisticated and refined to enjoy fiction in the ‘vulgar’ language. Yet literature in this category (which included works in both the vernacular and simple classical Chinese) was extremely popular in the late Ming and Qing, and by no means just the preserve of hoi polloi.

86 Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 20–1. 87 West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. 108. 88 Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 495.

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Morrison’s book-buying agents collected a sampling of works that roughly reflected the major categories and development of entertainment literature published since the sixteenth century. He owned editions of the four great novels of the late Ming: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and The Plum in the Golden Vase; as well as editions of the major vernacular story collections of Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) and Ling Mengchu 凌濛初 (1580–1644), the leading late-Ming author-editors of such collections. He also possessed the major novels of the Qing: the great Dream of the Red Chamber (in two different editions) and the satirical novels The Scholars and Flowers in the Mirror; and a collection of stories by the early Qing humorist Li Yu 李漁 (1611–80). These works represent the finest products of late Ming and Qing fiction. But Morrison (or his agents) seems to have been striving for a collection of fiction that very broadly represented contemporary popular tastes, in all different topical categories.89 He purchased many undistinguished works that, although best-sellers at the time of their publication, are now dismissed as potboilers, vapid romances, or historical fantasies. His collection included a respectable historical novel set in the Eastern Zhou period (771–481 BCE), but also several less-respectable ‘elaborations’ of historical events written in the early and high Qing, works usually centered on a military hero (or band of military heroes). Such novels were very loosely based on a real historical figure who, against preposterous odds, defeats a powerful enemy, often with supernatural aid. These works, written, as one modern critic notes, in ‘a dreary, repetitive and monotonous “novelese”’,90 departed in their plots more and more spectacularly from the historical record over the course of the eighteenth century.91 Yet they were very popular – the Qing equivalent of the American beach read. Novels of the supernatural and the strange were similarly popular. It is, in fact, hard at times to distinguish between works about ‘heroes’ and works about spirits and demons. The overlap is often considerable, as in the late sixteenth-century 89 Most popular in the late Ming and Qing were historical romances, tales of the supernatural and strange, scholar–beauty romances, court-case stories and satirical novels. The novels in the Morrison Collection roughly correspond to the popular works produced by the Sibao commercial publishers, also suggesting he selected a representative sampling of contemporary popular fiction; see Cynthia Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2007), pp. 481–506. 90 W.L. Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction: The Formative Period (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), p. xi. 91 Examples are RN 313, 300, 375, 391 in West, A Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. 273.

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Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi 封神演義) or the Materia medica Annals (Caomu chunqiu yanyi 草木春秋演義, a narrative of an imaginary war between Han China and the Fan ‘barbarians’ in which the characters are named after materia medica). Both are in the Morrison collection.92 Morrison also collected several of the many sequels or continuations of the Dream of the Red Chamber; and a few court-case story collections, roughly equivalent to Western detective novels. The Morrison collection most accurately represents trends in contemporary fiction in its twenty-one titles in the ‘scholar–beauty’ (caizi jiaren 才 子佳人) romance genre, the largest number in the vernacular fiction category. First appearing in the late Ming, scholar–beauty romances reached the peak of their popularity in the eighteenth century. ‘At their best,’ one critic writes, ‘these novels … are reminiscent of eighteenth-century French comedies. At their worst, however, they are pedantic and soporific, Chinese equivalents of the dime novel.’93 Both extremes are represented in the Morrison collection. It contains works like The Fortunate Union (Haoqiu zhuan 好逑傳) and The Two Fair Cousins (Yujiao li 玉嬌梨), considered models for their depiction of virtuous love and marriage; and more inventive examples of the genre, like The Plum Flowers Twice (Erdu mei 二度 梅), which includes, as well as the required love story, a critique of political corruption. The collection, however, also contains works like Cry of the Five Phoenixes (Wufeng yin 五鳳吟), an account of one man’s voracious sexual appetite – and accumulation of numerous concubines – that ‘expresses no trace of true emotion or sincere love’.94 In fact, the Morrison collection contained several erotic or risqué novels,95 from the comic satire of scholar– beauty romances, The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rouputuan 肉蒲團), attributed to the major early Qing dramatist and short-story writer Li Yu, to Plum Blossom Shadows (Taohuaying 桃花影), a work of ‘pure’ pornography that ‘did not even bother, unlike many other novels of the same type, to place its story within a framework of supernatural retribution’.96 Doubtless these were the works Morrison was referring to when he dismissed Chinese 92 Other examples are RN 288, 145, 146 in West, A Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. 276. 93 Wilt Idema and Lloyd Haft, A Guide to Chinese Literature (Ann Arbor: Centre for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997), p. 227. 94 Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo baike quanshu 中国古代小说百科全书 (Beijing: Zhongguo dabaike quanshu chubanshe, 1993), p. 576. 95 These works, of which there were eight, are all now missing from the collection, probably, as West conjectures, stolen because of their contents. West, Catalogue of the Morrison Collection, p. xiv. 96 Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo baike quanshu, p. 530.

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entertainment literature as licentious as well as foolish, but it is something of a tribute to his determination to include as wide a range of texts as possible, to understand all aspects of Chinese culture, that these titles – which we have to assume would not have been approved by the LMS – appeared in his collection. Finally, of interest is the inclusion of fictional works (not just novels) of local appeal. In addition to a Cantonese opera, the collection contains two ‘wooden fish’ ballads (muyu shu 木魚書, prosimetric ballads sung to the accompaniment of fish-shaped wooden drums). Very popular among the Cantonese-speaking population of Guangdong, the ballads were performed by professionals and amateurs alike. Morrison was not the only foreigner interested in them. Thoms, the printer who oversaw the publication of the Dictionary, translated into English one of the most popular wooden fish ballads in the collection, The Flowered Note Paper (Huajian ji 花箋記). He published this edition on his return to London as Chinese Courtship, in Verse (London: Parbury, Allen, and Kingsbury, 1824).97 Other works in the collection, in their conception and setting, were products of Guangdong. New Book of Warnings to the Wealthy (Jingfu xinshu 警富新書, 1809) is a fictionalized version of a real case of arson and murder in early eighteenth-century Guangzhou. The tale dramatizes the role of a single virtuous official (among many corrupt officials) in finally resolving the case. Unofficial History of Lingnan (Lingnan waishi 嶺南外史, 1809), by the literatus Huang Naian 黃耐庵 (c.1750–c.1830), recounts the role that a late Ming scholar played in suppressing a rebellion of the Yao minority people. Although a work of fiction, it is based on a real event and the author’s research in local gazetteers. It appears to have been written explicitly for a regional audience as it includes Cantonese dialect words and songs; today, the Unofficial History is valued as a source of information on Cantonese customs. Why would Morrison include such a sizable collection of vernacular novels and stories in his library? Doubtless, he saw them as necessary to the 97 Thoms, unlike Morrison, was quite interested in Chinese literature, particularly popular literature. He became proficient in Chinese during his time in Guangdong and even after his return to England promoted knowledge of China; see Sieber, ‘Universal Brotherhood Revisited’, pp. 31–2; and especially, Sieber, ‘Location, Location, Location: Peter Perring Thoms (1790–1855), Cantonese Localism, and the Genesis of Literary Translation from the Chinese’, in Lawrence Wong-chi Wang and Bernhard Fuehrer , Sinologists as Translators in Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2015): pp. 127–68. It was Thoms’ translation of Flowered Note Paper that inspired Goethe’s Chinesisch–Deutsche Jahresund Tageszeiten (1827).

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formation of a truly representative collection of the Chinese book culture of his day. Here, too, the tastes of his Chinese collaborators probably came into play. This section of the collection contains elegant vernacular masterpieces like Dream of the Red Chamber, very popular narratives written in a mix of simple classical and vernacular Chinese like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and potboilers written in a monotonous but easy-to-understand ‘novelese’. There are works appealing to the lower-level literati, the literate block cutters and other craftsmen, and the servants Morrison employed in building the collection. He also seems, however, to have been interested in these texts as aids to understanding the different linguistic registers of the Chinese written language and to some extent the distinctive vocabulary and grammar of the Cantonese dialect. He clearly devoted thought to the register that should be used in translating the Bible into Chinese. He distinguishes three ‘kinds of style: a high, a low, and a middle style’. The high style, ‘remarkably concise, and considered highly classical’, is the language of the Confucian Classics, the Five Classics, and the Four Books. The low style is found in ‘most works of fiction of the lighter sort’, which ‘are written in a style perfectly colloquial’. The middle style, exemplified in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ‘a work much admired in China’ is his final choice. Although he acknowledges that the low style is ‘more easily understood by the bulk of the people’, he nonetheless prefers a slightly more elevated register for the Bible.98 Milne reports: [H]e decided on a middle style, as, in all respects, best adapted for a book intended for general circulation. On the one hand, it possesses something of the gravity and dignity of the ancient classical books, without that extreme conciseness which renders them so hard to be understood. On the other hand, it is intelligible to all who can read to any tolerable extent, without sinking into colloquial coarseness. It is not above the illiterate, nor below the better educated.99

In fact, Morrison decided to model the register of his translation on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, that exemplar of the middle register: Of the style of San-kwo [Romance of the Three Kingdoms], the Chinese speak in raptures. It may, indeed, as far as style is concerned, be considered the Spectator of China. Dr. Johnson said, that ‘he who would 98 Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years, p. 89; see Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 329–30; see also 2: 7–9. 99 Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years, p. 90; see Morrison, Memoirs, 2: 330.

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make himself perfect in a good English style, should give his days and nights to Addison.’ The same may be said of the San-kwo. The student of Chinese, who would express himself with ease and general acceptance, either in conversation or in writing, ought carefully to read and imitate the San-kwo.100

It seems that his collection of vernacular fiction, in addition to providing a broad sampling of Chinese entertainment literature, educated Morrison in the registers of the Chinese language and shaped his translation choices. Although he preferred the middling style for the Bible translation, he used the lower style, as ‘more easily understood by the bulk of the people’, ‘intelligible when read in an audience’, and ‘understood by the people without any paraphrastic explanation’, for the composition of his Christian tracts.101

Conclusion The Morrison collection represented an exercise in bibliographical ethnography. It was an investigation into the assumptions, rituals, habits, ethics, religious beliefs, knowledge systems, linguistic practices, and the whole lives of the Chinese people, particularly the common people, as revealed in a representative sampling of contemporary Chinese book culture. This ethnographic approach, perhaps most evident in Morrison’s collecting strategies, also informed many of his more direct efforts to inform his countrymen and women about China. He often turned to translation, rather than discursive explanation, apparently believing that the words of the Chinese people themselves, Chinese primary sources, as it were, were the most revelatory. The ‘Advertisement’ to his Horae Sinicae: Translations from the Popular Literature of the Chinese, states, This volume contains a selection from the books which are most generally read by the people of the vast empire of China, and regarded as the elements of morals and liberal knowledge…. [The selections exhibit] the literary taste of the Chinese, and what is considered a respectable mediocrity of attainment among them. Their prevailing sentiments are here developed, in documents of unquestionable fidelity; and no

100 Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years, 90; see Morrison, Memoirs, 1: 330–1; see also 2: 7–9. 101 Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years, pp. 89–90.

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inconsiderable light is thrown upon their characteristic manners, and their general tone of intellect and morals.102

The selections range widely, including the very popular Chinese primer, Three Character Classic; the foundational textbook of orthodox Confucianism, The Greater Learning; the story of the Buddha’s life; a brief injunction to sacrifice to the ancestors; a selection from a scripture of immortality Daoism; a tract in the voice of an ox exhorting people not to eat beef; and samples of Chinese epistolary correspondence. Another volume of translations presents several selections from the Peking Gazette, the official newsletter of the imperial court, a few poems, and a brief account of a kite-flying festival.103 It seems that almost any writing by a Chinese person might reveal insight into the culture and ‘the Chinese mind’. Even in his more discursive works, Morrison stays very close to his Chinese sources. Much of A View of China for Philological Purposes (1817) reads more or less as a translation of a Chinese annalistic history. It is Morrison’s systematic ethnographic approach that makes his collection – even more than its size – stand out from existing British collections of Chinese texts in the early nineteenth century. These collections – the Bodleian at Oxford, the Cambridge University Library, and the British Museum Library – had been formed from a variety of sources: random donations of texts picked up as ‘curiosities’ by travelers and merchants;104 gifts from private collectors, ignorant of Chinese, who employed agents to purchase exotic texts;105 and bequests from a few knowledgeable scholars who formed small specialized collections.106 In contrast, Morrison, under 102 Robert Morrison, Horae Sinicae: Translations from the Popular Literature of the Chinese (London: Black and Parry, 1812), pp. iii–iv. 103 Robert Morrison, Translations from the Original Chinese with Notes (Canton: East India Company Press, 1815). 104 Robert Kennaway Douglas, Catalogue of Chinese Printed Books, Manuscripts and Drawings in the Library of the British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1877), p. v. 105 Sir Thomas Bodley (1545–1613), founder of the eponymous Oxford library, for example, relied on his agents to purchase works which Dutch East India Company merchants had brought home from Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose collection formed part of the British Museum Library on its founding in 1753, also worked through third parties to obtain his books. 106 Joseph Fowler Hull (1800–25) bequeathed his collection of ‘Oriental’ books and manuscripts to the British Museum Library, but it is not clear what the nature of the Chinese portion of his collection was; it appears that Fowler Hull, although he was an impressive linguist, did not know Chinese. Similarly, William Marsden (1754– 1836), an employee of the EIC in Sumatra, also collected some Chinese texts; 159 works in Chinese, along with the rest of his extensive multilingual collection, were

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the guidance of his Chinese informants and collaborators, and present in China, had been able to shape a comprehensive collection representative of the commercial book market. The collection was thus representative of the textual knowledge broadly available to all Chinese readers, and most particularly to those of middling literacy in the early nineteenth century. Morrison, however, did not originate this ethnographic approach, although he did seem to be the first to apply it to the formation of an entire book collection. We can find hints of it early in the eighteenth century in sinological circles in France. As discussed in earlier chapters of this volume, the French had long been in advance of other continental Europeans – and far in advance of the British – in their interest in China and Chinese texts. The Bibliothèque du Roi (from 1792, the Bibliothèque Nationale) probably contained the largest collection of Chinese texts in all of Europe by the early nineteenth century, thanks in large part to long-standing collaborative efforts by Jesuit priests and Chinese merchants and literati (and a gift from the Kangxi emperor in 1697).107 The Bibliothèque du Roi appears to have been the first European library to have employed a Chinese curator: Huang Jialüe 黃嘉略 (1679–1716), better known in France as Arcade Houange, a Chinese Christian convert. Up to that point, sinologists had favored elite classical and scientific works. Huang, however, stimulated interest in Chinese popular literature by devoting some of his time to a partial translation of the ‘scholar–beauty’ romance The Two Fair Cousins into French.108 Houange’s motive for introducing The Two Fair Cousins to France seems to have been personal; he admired the work. But, at roughly the same time, as Trude Dijkstra and Despina Magkanari have described above (chapters 5 and 11), French sinologists and their Jesuit colleagues in China were also turning their attention to Chinese fiction; in the 1740s, the former were

bequeathed to King’s College on his death. Again, the exact nature of the collection is not clear. 107 Collection of Chinese texts began in earnest in the 1680s, thanks to contributions by Jesuit missionaries. Efforts accelerated under the leadership of Abbé Jean Paul Bignon (1662–1743), who took over the directorship of the Bibliothèque du Roi in 1719 (see also Chapter 12). Guided by Jesuits missionaries in China (Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare was particularly helpful), his own contacts in Europes’s learned societies, the French consul in Nanjing and agents of the Compagnie des Indes, Bignon initiated a systematic collection of Chinese works. Simone Salayé, La Bibliothèque nationale, des origins à 1800 (Genève: Librairie Droz S.A., 1988), pp. 124–6, 212–21. 108 For a fuller account of Houange’s life, see Sieber, ‘The Imprint of the Imprints’, pp. 39–53.

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requesting the latter to send home ‘whatever literary texts were held in high esteem among the Chinese’.109 With this expansion in the bibliographical vision of European sinologists came the publication of translations of Chinese drama and fiction into European languages.110 Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare (1666–1736) published L’Orphelin de la Maison de Tchao, a French translation of a very popular Chinese drama, The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao (Zhaoshi gu’er da baochou 趙氏孤兒大報仇, thirteenth century), in 1731. Thereafter retranslated several times into French and English, the drama was adapted for the English and the Italian stage. The Fortunate Union, one of the scholar–beauty romances collected by Morrison, was published in an English translation in 1761, and then in French, German, and again in English between 1766 and 1842. No less distinguished a translator than Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, the first holder of the chair in Chinese at the Collège de France, published a complete translation of The Two Fair Cousins in 1826. We have already mentioned Thoms’s translation of the chantefable The Flowered Note Paper (1824). Even Morrison participated in a modest way in this movement when he assisted the EIC factor John Francis Davis (1795–1890) in his translations of a Li Yu short story and selections of Chinese poetry, moral maxims, and proverbs.111 Noteworthy here is the explanation given by translators and editors for this sudden scholarly interest in Chinese popular literature. Thomas Percy (1729–1811), the editor of Hau Kiou Choaan, or The Pleasing History, a translation of The Fortunate Union published in 1766, promised in his preface that the work would reveal to the reader ‘the intire manners of the Chinese’, which ‘can only be thoroughly described by themselves’.112 Although Percy claimed – incorrectly – that the novel was ‘in the highest repute in China’,113 he argued that it was valuable not as much as a piece of literature

109 Sieber, ‘The Imprint of the Imprints’, p. 64. 110 For a fuller and much subtler analysis of the sinological embrace of Chinese fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Sieber, ‘The Imprint of the Imprints’, pp. 41–63; and Ling Hon Lam, ‘A Case of the Chinese (Dis)order? The Haoqiu zhuan and Competing Forms of Knowledge in European and Japanese Readings’, East Asian Publishing and Society 3 (2013): 71–8. 111 San-Yu-Low, or, The Three Dedicated Rooms (Canton: East India Company Press, 1815); Hien Wun Shooo: Chinese Moral Maxims, with a Free and Verbal Translation (Canton: East India Company Press, 1823); and Poeseos Sinensis Commentarii. On the Poetry of the Chinese (Macao: G.J. Steyn and Brother, 1834). 112 Percy, ‘Preface’, p. xix, Hau Kiou Choaan, or The Pleasing History (1766). 113 Percy, ‘Preface’, p. xi, Hau Kiou Choaan.

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as a faithful picture of Chinese manners, wherein the domestic and political economy of that vast people is displayed with an exactness and accuracy to which none but a native could be capable of attaining. To read in a Collection of Voyages and Travels; in a portion of Universal History; or in a Present State of any Country, an elaborate account of it, under the several heads of its customs, laws, government &c. drawn up by a foreigner however well acquainted with the subject, can convey but a superficial knowledge to the mind…. Those writers may give a dead resemblance, while they are careful to trace out every feature, but the life, the spirit, the expression will be apt to escape them. To gain a true notion of these we must see the object in action.114

The Fortunate Union, or, indeed, any Chinese novel, or perhaps any work written by a Chinese person, is therefore an ethnography, a text for anthropological study of ‘the whole system of the manners of a people’ that ‘can only be thoroughly known to themselves’.115 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) reveals that he was clearly of Percy’s mind when, in 1827, in his oft-cited remarks about world literature, he presumes, on the basis of his reading of one translated work of Chinese fiction, to know the character of the Chinese people: they are ‘more clear, pure, decorous’ than Europeans, but ‘without great passion or poetic flight’.116 Translations of Chinese novels and dramas became increasingly popular in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. As the opening of this chapter makes clear, Morrison’s bibliographical ethnography did not enjoy equal success – or, initially, any success at all. It is hard to interpret the early fate of the collection, gathering dust in the offices of the LMS for over a decade, as anything other than a failure in the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge. It was, perhaps, just too overwhelming: how much easier it was to imagine, as Goethe did, ‘the whole system of the manners of a people’ through the medium of a light romance, translated from the Chinese (albeit often considerably distorted in the process) into a familiar language.

114 Percy, ‘Preface’, pp. xv–xvi, Hau Kiou Choaan. See also Sieber, ‘The Imprint of the Imprints’, p. 62. 115 Percy, ‘Preface’, p. xvii, Hau Kiou Choaan. To make sure the reader does not miss this point, Percy stuffs his edition with notes and copious examples that explain how this humble novel revealed the ‘system of Chinese order’. 116 Lam, ‘A Case of the Chinese (Dis)order?’, p. 73.

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s this volume’s chapters have insisted, the transnational and global ambit is crucial to fuller understanding of the changing relationships between ideas and literary materialities in the Enlightenment world. More than sixty years after the publication of L’Apparition du Livre (‘The Coming of the Book’) by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, studies in what has become known as ‘book history’ have revolutionized the scope of biblio­ graphical scholarship. Until recently, however, the new ‘book histories’ remained largely bound by nationally or linguistically based frameworks. They all too rarely engaged with adventurous research, both ongoing and well-established but conducted outside Europe and North America, concerning other vehicles for the conveyance of thought, approaches to the history of material objects, and communication networks in broad cultural-­historical terms. Whether it be contrasting European literary perceptions of China, the construction of iconic images of a British past, or the sharing of knowledge of the Orient, at issue is the interplay between textual content and the physical design and material construction of written or printed materials. In different ways, the preceding chapters reveal how, at a critical period in global interchange, textual meaning and appreciation were filtered by materiality and paratextual disposition, by the relationship between images and printed and or written characters and by the further interventions of letterpress, engraving and other methods of textual replication – and crucially, the relationship between them. Such relationships entailed numerous and complex hierarchies and dependencies, whether in non-representational Qur’anic penmanship and engraving, inked talipot palm leaf, hand-painting on printed and translated statistical charts, Christian missionary tracts or woodcuts and poor-quality intaglio accompanying subversive or scandalous literature. As contributors to this volume

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have made clear, transformations and transpositions were multiple. The aim has been to combine understanding of the intellectual and the material in the creation, diffusion and reception of different editions in different formats and translated languages, including adaptations, abridgements, illustrations, dedications, commentaries, advertisements and annotations. All these aspects generate their own questions: how, for example, did translated editions which might already have subtly changed meaning from the original (especially if abridged), convey knowledge and understanding even more differently when repackaged and published (and sometimes after a gap of many years) in different regional or national contexts? What was the intellectual effect of different formats, varying quality of production, of serialisations or of being set within a large ‘library’ publication of multiple authors and works? Did, to give another example, images simply support the text, or was the text required to decode and explain the illustrations, or is the relationship interdependent, and in what ways? The chapters in this volume have offered insights which extend the discussion.

Diverse Instabilities A primary theme is the multifarious and unstable nature of the widely travelled European text, of its forms, genres and their change over this two-hundred-year period. In 1650 the techniques of letterpress printing by moveable type had advanced little since its commencement in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. Most presses were in fact still relatively underemployed, and wood-cuts rather than copperplates or other intaglio processes were the commonplace for the relatively modest illustration of books. By 1850 steam-driven presses, first introduced some thirty years before, together with lithography, stereotyping, high-quality engraving, steam-driven paper-making, industrial trade binding and many other technological advances, ensured a revolution in the volume, diversity and speed of print production across Europe and other territories around the globe. Also by the end of this period, the reach of Western books in the East and the collection of Eastern books in the West seemed, if not yet commonplace, far from unusual. The relative speed of despatch half-way round the world further impressed, whether it be the crossing of the Atlantic by the fictive but meant-to-be-plausible Vesuvious or the sailing of the Waterloo round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean and the South China Seas. The different reasons for books travelling in those different directions remained significant, however. Most striking is that the transformation in types of publication and the activities supporting and consequent upon them contrasts with the stability

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and deep-rooted continuity of comparable objects and modes in much of the rest of the world. The manner of textual construction, even before its physical manufacture and publication, included changes to information gathering and to different aspects of the writing process. Such changes contributed to decisions about and the appreciation of the material form in which thought and writing appeared. Thus, for example, the quest to improve natural knowledge as pursued by Petiver, Pontoppidan and Buffon, and their many associates and correspondents, was directly related to the intended novelty, quality and design of the resulting publications. The success or failure of the creation and transmission of news to distant parts similarly related to its formatting, typographical arrangement and design, and the policing and licensing – or not – of that form of publication. The advance in Europe of what we might call consumer societies over this period brought a very diverse realm of material culture to bear upon publication, from museums and libraries to the more indirect influence of the increased importation and exchange of luxuries. As featured in this volume, consumer goods imported from East and South Asia especially raised awareness of global contexts, while books and printed items served as the containers of knowledge alongside other intriguing material goods, luxuries and objects of desire and emulation. Confucius, indeed, was represented in both print and porcelain, in pamphlets and on wallpaper, associative relationships between ideas and materialities that invited not just discussion and evaluation but, as Sean Moore (Chapter 6) described, satire and innuendo. The relationship between very different material containers of knowledge in this period is a rich vein for further exploration. The material vessel that conveys ideas and is ‘the book’ is, for example, an often fragile object. Even the known loss, mutilation and damage of past writing is both immense and clearly related to the vulnerability of its material form. It was indeed against an appreciation of the fragility of books, that in these two hundred years of mounting inventiveness in different textual forms and genres, a new appreciation was fostered of the relationship between media and ideas. It was an appreciation that brought close attention and changes to the manner in which knowledge was conveyed. This is an association that deserves much greater research, but in this volume it is given generous consideration in studies of the often self-reflective means of the promotion and diffusion of knowledge in developing forms ranging from sequential periodicals and newspapers, to novels, works of history and natural history, missionary tracts and encyclopaedias, all with their own generic and stylistic subdivisions. As investigated above, developments in relating the form of a text to its objective involved the testing and breaking of conventions, creating or destabilizing a canon or association, and imparting recognition,

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authority and the pursuit of improvement and novelty. Thus the impact of grand folios can be compared across many of the preceding studies, certainly in the reception of sumptuous and very large Arabic copies of the Qur’an and the weighty and meticulously scholarly folio of Lodovico Marracci’s translation of the Qur’an, and even of Linde’s elegant London Pontoppidan, but also in sustained examples such as the 1779 supplemental folio of the Bibliothèque orientale published by Jean Neaulme in The Hague. Here was a folio form maintained even when pirated and abridged (as it was regularly in the early nineteenth century) with two columns in smaller type. Morrison’s collecting of books with clusters of folded folio pages also made him pause in appreciation of the different materiality of Chinese books, a folio ‘volume’ containing anywhere from one to hundreds of fascicles, and, as he reported back, of smaller dimensions than European equivalents. In other examples, the change of format sustained the publication of respected knowledge. Playfair’s original English folio edition contrasted to the different practicalities of the quarto Tableaux d’arithmétique linéaire, while numerous undertakings such as Galeazzi’s immense 32-volume Italian translation of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle maintained circulation in small duodecimo format and popular abridgements. In all, a key aspect is the success or otherwise of the interplay between subject and function, from the development of what ‘knowledge’ and ‘news’ were and how they were accepted, through the very means of their conveyance and reading, to the collecting and public dissemination of scientific discovery, natural history and economic thought, and even to the writing of fiction.1 And all of these interests were originally the concern of modest and private communication networks and not intended for more general circulation. In all cases, printed publication represented a hugely significant step change and one requiring careful thought about design and public registration.

Expansive Translations We need especial precision in understanding what was involved in the production, circulation and reception of translated texts and how those variances interacted with different materialities. Texts and ideas move across national, linguistic, ethnic, political and socio-economic boundaries and environments. Editions of the same work, translated into different languages, were often published in widely different formats. From Berthelet 1 See in particular John Bender, ‘Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment’, in Bender, Ends of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 21–37.

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to Hendrik Jansen, Jean-Baptiste Suard and the abbé Morellet, study of the individual translators, where these are known, offers particular insights into motivations and intellectual and social contexts. Sometimes the choice of translator was determined by the original author, more often by the publisher, and sometimes by a patron or circle of advisors sponsoring works and suggesting titles to translate, Translation also clearly heightened the potential for and impact of misreading, miscommunication, mistranslation and misappropriation. Publication in the vernacular either by choice (as by Pontoppidan) or via translation (as enabled by Galeazzi in Lombardy) aimed to make texts available, just as vernacular translations of the Qur’an encouraged new interest in Islam and, eventually, Ottoman lands and culture. The choice of a text for translation and the manner of its rendering translation is also moot. It is an issue extensively examined by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird (Chapter 3): that particular translations support an ideal or prejudice in the society that demands or is purposefully given the translation, but also that the translation is also conveyed in a particular material form to suit the transposition of ideas, the two in working conjunction. These new editions – reductions, abridgements, rearrangements and translations altering meaning – brought both general and particular commentary from published reviewers and occasionally from readers, even if most remained unaware of the exact history of collaboration between editor, printer, publisher and translator. Such transposition also offered opportunities for corrections (accurate or otherwise) and commentaries (pertinent or otherwise) to be made in translated editions. Examples examined in this volume range from the Neapolitan Italian contradictions of Buffon to the defensive commentary that prefaced and intervened in the German edition of Pontoppidan (but which was then deleted in the English). In many ways, translation was further linked to travel and to polyglot interest in activities. This was not simply seen in the parallel texts of the Bible but in new linguistic curiosity. Interest in collecting different language editions of the same book seems to have been led by the Bible but was repeated with different language editions of the Qur’an and of Oriental classics. The further search for vernacular terms for scientific and natural historical discovery and explanations created new words embodied in new forms. All contributed to the collection and standardization of language and grammar throughout Europe, from Ireland and Norway to Romania and the Balkans. The increased interest in language further supported the discovery, research and what has been called the ‘grammatization’ of non-European and unwritten languages. The production of dictionaries and grammars, and especially those in the Middle East and South and East Asia, added not simply to the volume of

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publication (and many dictionaries enjoyed immense print runs), but to new demands in typography, engraving and, later, lithography, and in book design features.2

Reappraisals of Content, the Paratextual and Genre With changes in format came rearrangements of contents, as examined in many of this volume’s chapters. Materials within articles, for example, were reorganized in an alphabetical order and not in a narrative form, as in the Bibliothèque orientale, and in this instance notably influenced or even inspired by the occidental and oriental historiographical traditions. Multiple examples given in this volume demonstrate the effects of variations in chapter divisions and other content arrangements between many translations, new editions and of course abridgements. It was not only the re-engraving of the heads in Rapin’s History, for example, that altered between editions and countries, but the changing placements within the text by generations of later engravers and publishers that introduced different qualities and interpretations. The example of Rapin’s History, however, also stands for every material text that appears in the chapters of this volume in that the differences between editions can be explored in a very large number of ways (even though many have often been taken for granted or not noticed). The variations include not just format, paper type, binding and typographical and illustrative choice and design (which might also vary in quality between individual copies and impressions) but the intricate and often miniscule but highly effective differences in decorations, headpieces and tailpieces, and critical apparatus including marginal guides, footnotes and indexes and much more besides. This extensive textual penumbra is indeed so capacious that – as this volume has resolved – it shades into the fuller definition and appreciation of the text itself. What, since the persuasive steer of Gérard Genette, has commonly been called and recognized as the ‘paratext’ is an inescapable and very wide-ranging part of the materially conveyed text.3 As all contributors have shown, that text cannot be conveyed legibly without the appurtenances of form, as modest and simple or sophisticated and intricate as they might be. The physical form of the text, its layout and paper also created meaning. Among numerous examples in preceding chapters, the 2 Sylvain Auroux, La révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Introduction à l’histoire des sciences du langage (Liège: Mardaga), 1994. 3 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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simultaneous production of finer copies of the same work printed on superior Dutch paper and aimed at superior and better-off clients is a striking feature of literary promotion whether in The Hague, Copenhagen, Milan or London. The paratextual elements also contributed to an understanding and reception of a text that is not always now apparent. Both the original legibility and what was anticipated as such by a text’s producers involved the appreciation of the layout of the pages, typographical and graphic design and, according to the type of publication, footnotes, page notes, marginal printed guidance and commentary, elaborate dedicatory and prefatory material and similar elements. As Genette and others have insisted, such paratext also functions as a tool to approach the relationship between materiality and textuality and aids our understanding of a book’s communication with its readers. What this volume has attempted is to expand the range of what we might think to be paratextual – and indeed to be peritextual (images and textual elements which surround, or are secondary to, the main body of a published work) and epitextual (textually derivative materials such as reviews and advertisements also shaping its reception). To this extent, the paratext becomes the fullest iteration of the text itself, moving through numerous instances of innovativeness and enticement to consider the consequences of what now often seems ponderous, repetitious and simply inexplicable. By the further consideration of translation and the reissue of text in a new linguistic and material form, sometimes with a transposer’s commentary upon that new form, the ‘paratextual’ elements are given even sharper relief – and sometimes a greater and more puzzling complexity. That complexity involves elements of the unanticipated and the accidental, whether it be in the multiple issues of Musei Petiveriani (and the compiler’s concern to cram in and use the full range of possible type from black letter to italic) or in the successive and somewhat haphazard dedicatory displays by Pontoppidan to Holstein and poetic salutations to the author himself. As modifications, reissues and eliminations imply, reactions varied to expressed gratitude to a patron or publisher or the avowal of the intellectual distinction of a work in expectation that such a dedication would command respect and encourage the purchase and circulation of the work. A particular contingency to what also might be deemed the paratextual is the relationship between print and script. The association is usually item- or copy-specific and – in ways which again contest any linear or teleological interpretation of the progress of print – suggests that script rather than print might ultimately confer the greater authority. Just as blank printed forms were redundant or invalid without the blanks penned

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in or the certification signed, so writers and scholars like Petiver combined manuscript with print in creating his collection, and on the finishing desks of printing houses the engraved charts of Playfair were given critical emphasis by hand colouration. Written words and markings within texts, but also separately penned commentaries and adjuncts, similarly illuminate the increasingly complex understanding of and commentary upon the advancing literary infrastructure and its transport and extended interactions. The penned booklist found in the Pickering papers is at once amply illustrative of these developments, but also prompts a recognition of what we cannot fully recover and the interpretational cautions to which we must adhere. It is a further reminder, alongside the sort of suspicion of print explored in the study by Graham Shaw (Chapter 13), of the continuing acuity of script – of the individual authority of the increasing volume of personal letters, for example, conferred within the developing public realm of printed exchange. It was not only in encounters outside of Europe and the Americas that in many sites and on many occasions manuscript (and indeed the spoken word) offered the more private space, one intimate and authoritative, and involving collecting, assessing, criticizing, satirizing and censoring information and knowledge. It is also the case that, as shown in all the studies, the paratextual intersects with the development of ‘genre’. In some respects, however, genre is a challenging referent. Crucial to the global interaction and efforts of publishers and promulgators were religious texts, and yet, most religious texts are problematically categorized as ‘genre’. The Christian Bible indeed is often subdivided into different genre classifications, and in many ways the great religious texts, serving different sacred functions, remain above ‘genre’. Moreover, the religious text, prominent and in some situations pre-eminent in publication outputs and reception, also extended the material form to imbue it with sacred meaning and ritual activity. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Bible, together with prayer books, psalters, liturgies and works of exegesis, dominated printing-house work in both Catholic and Protestant realms (and the previous two hundred years might be book-ended by the publication of the great black letter Gutenberg Bible in about 1455 and the great London Polyglot Bible in ten parallel texts in exquisitely crafted different language types in 1654). For the next two hundred years, and as explored centrally or in key supporting roles in all the chapters in this volume, Christian religious output self-evidently provided both spur and rein to Enlightenment thought and writing.4 But also at the very begin4 ‘Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty, commonly seek to exempt

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ning of our period, in 1647, André du Ryer’s ground-breaking L’Alcoran de Mahomet offered the first full translation of the Qur’an. Its publication encouraged collection and interest beyond the various partial or excerpted versions that had been circulating, but, as Alicia Montoya details (Chapter 12), prevailing cultures precluded collectors of Qur’ans from extending interests beyond theological contention and to greater engagement with Oriental cultures. Even so, questions of reliability and authenticity were to the fore in discussions of collecting and of textual comparisons.

Evaluations of Reliability and Trust That quest for the discovery of truth ranged demonstrably across genres. The capture of an emergent literary category to represent and critique a mysterious culture is epitomized in Trude Dijkstra’s study (Chapter 5) of interaction between the epistolary novel and fomenting interest in China and purported Chinese visions of different parts of the world. As a ‘perceived genre [that] fundamentally shapes how readers interact with a text’, its interpretation was filtered and manipulated by means of an array of material mediators and communicative actions in which the central questions were those of authenticity and authority. Many similar outcomes appear in the studies in this volume. Deliberations about the design of the engraved royal heads in Rapin’s History, for example, turned on intentions to impress and improve upon past representations by the delivery of an image in a new and commanding form (amid what Isabelle Baudino [Chapter 7] describes as ‘an illustrative frenzy’). The reliability of the statistical charts in Playfair or similar assessments of the worth and readability of news in the Caribbean were created and reinforced by the material form of the publication and its transposition and translation between different editions. Pontoppidan’s Kraken was offered exquisite authenticity by a combination of typographically imposing witness statements and finely engraved drawings. The images drew on familiar mythical imaginaries and were delivered alongside companion engravings of more attestable exemplars of natural history. The veracity of texts is discussed at various points in this collection in relation to one particular institution: that of slavery. Many of the regions associated with the labours of Petiver promoted a nascent trade in enslaved themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination’, Immanuel Kant, preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, cited in Bender, Ends of Enlightenment, p. 3.

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people. By the time of Pickering, the trade is sustained by advertisements for slave auctions and notices describing runaway slaves in which the format in the first Jamaican newspaper became the standard in all British and French Caribbean newspapers. As explored by Francesco Morriello (Chapter 9), the effectiveness of slave regulation increasingly depended on the speed of publication, the confidence in its regularity and also in its recognizable design, with increasing detail given of the sales and of the physical nature and behaviours of the escapees. As Cristina Soriano (Chapter 10) further explains, the conveyance of such information not only sustained the slave trade but spread panic in the time of insurrection and revolution in Europe, The reaction to newspaper publishing in the Spanish Caribbean and South America highlights tension between colonial officials who accused Spanish homeland printers and authorities of ignorance of the colonial context where political information (and notably of the French and Haitian Revolutions) was received very differently than it was in Madrid or other mainland Spanish cities. In the slave-based societies of colonial Venezuela, Cuba and New Granada, local agents had much greater awareness of the panic and general reaction to the spread of European news – a process that fundamentally also involved questions of speed, interpretation and the authority vested in an accepted type of printed newspaper. Again, the travel of tracts was given new meaning and interpretation, deliberate or (very often) unintentional, by reception in very different parts of the globe separated by great distances of space and time. The truth-claims promoted and authorized by different and differently packaged genres also depended on pre-publication resources and processes of information collection and assemblage. Those activities have been a central interest in this study of materialities and communicative modes. Much of the collaboration and the human networking involved in preparations for publication intersected with the processes that enabled the circulation and reception of texts. As a result of the research of Richard Coulton (Chapter 2), for example, we can appreciate the extraordinary range of Petiver’s correspondents and collectors drawn from a multiplicity of occupations, but in general terms such activity is often less obvious to us now as well as being concealed in final publications at the time. Appreciation was imperfect. It also invokes, and invoked then, consideration of what acknowledgement meant. How well known was any collaboration, what was expected in terms of intellectual or practical credit, and how well-organized could it all be? The complex network supporting the labours of Galeazzi in Milan and unravelled by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird (Chapter 3) is shown to be collaborative but also fragile and opportunistic. Planning, as so much of the above confirms, was often subject to accident or intervention.

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Disruption included technological limits, the intervention of censors, natural disaster, poor weather and climate, but also human failure and vexation. The attempts to overcome this highlight again the interpersonal nature of these communications, of friendship, trust, politeness and association supporting the mechanisms for the making and distribution of knowledge – a subject of growing historical interest and to which this volume and its parent series will contribute.5 In the creation of trustworthy personal and information networks supporting publication, religious affiliation has again been shown to play a fundamental role. Clerics and men of religion built up libraries (and led the way, for example, in collecting copies of the Qur’an) and accepted as well as sought patronage. Seminaries and clerical associations sustained learning, book buying and sharing and even printing and book-finishing establishments (as they still do6). Clerical learning included study of classical and modern languages and an interest in translation that extended to missionary proficiency in South and East Asian languages.7 In the publishing centres of Europe, clerics such as the abbé Morellet themselves became significant translators. Others contributed to the legions of translators, many also from scientific and learned academies, such as those working for Galeazii in Milan or Linde and Nourse in London or Barrois in Paris, but whose identities largely remain one of the lacunae of this area of research, Less anonymity (at least following the sort of research pursued in this volume) attends two other and very evident clerical contributions: travel and information gathering. Clerics like the Orientalist Pieter van der Vorm and scholars among the vast range of different missionaries in South Asia proved indomitable travellers who became adept in their specialisms and often accumulated significant libraries. The correspondence of clerics and missionaries assumed new importance in supporting collecting 5 See in particular Margaret O. Meredith, ‘Friendship and Knowledge: Correspondence and Communications in Northern Trans-Atlantic Natural History, 1780–1815’, in Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 Uppsala Studies in History of Science 35 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson Publishing International, 2009), pp. 151–91. 6 Notably, the Bindery at Benediktiner Abtei Metten, Bavaria; and the Trappist Abbey Bookbindery, Carlton, Oregon, https://www.bookbindery.org/home/. 7 Self-evidently, this also applies more widely and especially throughout Africa, where missionary groups laid the foundations for the literary rendering of indigenous languages, even if the guiding purpose was one of conversion; see Kwesi Kwaa Prah (ed.), The Role of Missionaries in the Development of African Languages (Cape Town: Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2009). The subject is to be addressed in a future volume in this series.

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information and advising about its significance and presentation. Many of these men were outstanding and persistent sleuths. Other clerical collectors and investigators who aided a Petiver or a Pontoppidan (or were corralled by them) were just sufficient in learning to complete their tasks but were otherwise unremarkable workhorses. Yet other ordained men combined pre-publication information gathering with far-flung missionary activities. The clergy courted by Petiver included Georg Kamel, a Jesuit missionary in Manila, John Smith, a traveller to the Cape Coast of Guinea in West Africa, and Hugh Jones of Christ Church in Calvert County, Maryland. Philippe Couplet and Claude Visdelou, the energetic Jesuit missionary sent to China by Louis XIV, travelled also to India, while Jesuits – central, as shown in several chapters above, to the shaping of perceptions of China – were also subject to intense contemporary debate about the credibility of their scholarship and practices. This ambiguity is well represented in the studies in this volume, not least by the account of educational and publishing opportunities released in Milan after the suppression of the Jesuits in 1775.

Funding the Material Other resourcing, including labour, required more direct financing. The gradual replacement of individual patronage by commercial markets to support publication in Europe and its colonies is a general truism of this period. Variation remained, however, in part by enduring sponsorship by wealthy individuals and institutions and in part by subscription schemes, brittle and unpredictable though they often were. Collaboration sustained many of the endeavours analysed in this volume, but for many undertakings specific – and sometimes very awkward – patronage was also required. Publication by subscription certainly proved liable to a failure of interest, as in the case of Neaulme’s 1776 edition of the Bibliothèque orientale, and by the end of this period such schemes remained a reserve and sometimes a vanity option – a material support to knowledge production that depended upon early-stage and often fickle interest in the subject. Difficulties in financing and working conditions further affected quality as much as quantity. Petiver’s publications were constrained by economic considerations, contributing to what Richard Coulton (Chapter 2) refers to as ‘relatively unprepossessing engravings’. The translated editions of Playfair suffered by the paucity of funds, as did the quality – and the perceived trustworthiness – of many other publications examined in this volume. The first Danish edition of Pontoppidan’s history was of rough and highly variable quality, with often confusing typographic design and poor printing. The original work, even though in the vernacular, was therefore apparently less

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reliable than the finely designed folio English-language London edition, admired, in its quality, for the delivery of its contents, Distance and under-resourcing of transport added to delays and an unreliability that extended to the degree of authority accorded to the knowledge and information conveyed. On many occasions, economic constraint coupled with distance resulted in inferior and unstable productions and undermined trust. Pontoppidan’s German translator, as he was keen to record, checked his text from a distance with too few resources to enable proper proofing. In the Caribbean, where, fascinatingly, news from mother countries was received differently by different reading groups and contrary to many home expectations, reactions were also filtered by variations in production quality and by the regularity and mode of conveyance, all grounded in resources. The Gaceta from Madrid suffered from poor support and its usually coarse and highly variable quality when circulating in the Spanish Caribbean compares poorly in retrospect with British and French Caribbean remote colonial printing. The latter enabled news through locally produced papers which also extracted news from European publications to become more detailed in content and thereby apparently more trustworthy. Despite the caveats, European market stability and the successful courting of new demand underpinned the transformation of publishing in the final decades of this period. Many printers and booksellers enjoyed long and highly respected careers, some members of long-established dynasties. A few noted printers, stationers and booksellers had established international reputations before 1650 but the next two hundred years is marked by many more international partnerships and associations, together with formidable operators like the Elzevirs and the Luchtmanns. These Dutch firms were joined in the middle of the eighteenth century by smaller but highly effective London operators like Nourse (with a fifty-year career), Millar, Strahan and the Longmans. With increased output and quality, this was also a period, at least in the major European centres, of greater distinction between operatives. A few key printing establishments separated more clearly from booksellers, fewer of whom printed their own publications but commissioned printers to do so, and among whom flourished a growing number of prominent and wealthy traders. These publishing booksellers, distinguished by their intellectual company, influenced a wide circle of authors and translators, and secured increasing public respect for their work and a confidence in the utility and conviction of the ideas and knowledge conveyed. In part, the dependence and trust between personal circles of scholarly collaborators so evident in the early years of this period was now transferred to a more professional and yet still sociably based

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community of book trade associates. Among them, by the early nineteenth century, although still in a great minority, were women.

Final Linkages The regularity, quality and volume of material production, coupled with stronger and more dependable modes of communication, created greater trust in the message. It was a trust that contrasted with the various failures and breakdowns which appear recurrently in the chapters in this volume and represent points at which materialities weakened, distorted or even frustrated knowledge creation and diffusion. At a distance, news of change was intermittent and problematic, materials were often fragile and modest, poorly printed and prone to damage and disintegration. Periodicity, however, so long as it was relatively regular, also cemented trust in what paradoxically was an acceptance of and even satisfaction with a certain incompleteness – the ongoingness of discovery associated, for example, with instalments in scientific and learned publications. The serial publication of journals and magazines ranging from The Philosophical Transactions to The Spectator, Il Caffé and Estatto, and the periodical reviews that escalated in number, size, specificity and quality from the mid-eighteenth century, developed a new literary infrastructure that reinforced attention to timing and to the ongoing. Supported by institutional development and most notably by learned societies and a plethora of different types of library, continuous publication in serials, part-issues and periodicals also contributed to contemporary discussion of knowledge exchange and a publication process that both objectified its readerships and sought closer and more immediate responses and feedback. Broad but interlinked questions of changing time and space, of distances and sites, are therefore a crucial element in understanding the developing relationship between materialities and ideas. As the chapters have shown, in considering time, we must not assume easy or uninterrupted production or conveyance. Authors and readers faced difficulties in publication processes and transport but they also anticipated interruptions in diffusion and interest. And fresh publications were not all. The antiquarian and second-hand market needs more investigation over the whole period. Equally important is the rediscovery and reprinting of a text, an undertaking sometimes nudged by its unavailability. This issue of knowledge re-encountered, given attention here for the Bibliothèque orientale and several other foundagain titles, is a subject worthy of much greater investigation. Mercantile and clerical travel brought exposure to an appreciation of the different times involved as well as the different practices associated with

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other types of literary production. Appreciation of scribal practices and printing by woodblock rather than moveable type did not always shake a stubborn and obstinate faith in the superiority of Western type and book design, but by the very end of this period global travel introduced greater discussion of what a book might be. The sort of contemporary descriptions – and tergiversations – fully quoted in the penultimate chapter, generated ideas about legibility, durability and mobility which are in fact surprisingly similar to modern musings about what a book now is in a world of new technological challenge.8 The difference here, however, was that for missionaries and other travellers the encounter with the ‘new’ was in fact with the very old, that ancient, enduring traditions of the oral, of script and of different methods of printing and of its reception demanded reconsideration of chronologies and sequencing. In this global study, the variations in the textual reproduction and impact of the same work also continued over generations as well as in often diverse parts of the world. A founding concern for this volume was that many studies of the creation and reception of texts minimize the significance of later editions and variants and especially those in translation, extract or unusually different material from across different media. As undertaken by several contributors here, the question might be approached by concentration on a single title, charting an individual work’s history from its genesis, publication, circulation and reception in different forms and in different places across generations of use and conservation. Isabel Hofmeyr’s influential study of Pilgrim’s Progress has already shown what can be done when a book is examined according to its multiple republication and translation in unexpected places.9 Paul Eggert followed Henry Lawson’s 1896 collection While the Billy Boils as he developed his writing career from short stories and sketches for newspapers.10 Fred Appel edited the ‘Lives of Great Religious Books’ series published by Princeton University Press in which ‘all great religious books are living things whose careers in the world can take the most unexpected turns’. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit is cited by Appel as declaring: ‘You know what I’d like to read? A biography of a great book – the story of its reception over time.’ Dozens of smaller initiatives have drawn inspiration from such ambition. In 2017, for example, Robin Naughton at the New York Academy of Medicine began 8 James Raven, What is the History of the Book (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), esp. pp. 10–12. 9 Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 10 Paul Eggert, Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Penn State University Press and Sydney University Press, 2013).

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his ‘Biography of a Book’ project, an interactive exhibition exploring the production and use of twelve books and manuscripts across time. At about the same time, Robert Thake published his study of the publishing and diffusion of de Vertot’s Histoire de Malte, an exacting pursuit of ‘un livre sans frontières’ which identifies its editions, translations and far-flung reception networks subverting attempts at prohibition.11 Not all modern scholars, however, have been comfortable with this concept of ‘book biography’. James Secord appeared to resist the concept in his seminal Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. In a view shared by others, he suggests that the ‘biography’ of a book fails adequately to address the interventions of a book’s multiple readings. Examples of those, he suggested (and he named Robert Darnton’s 1979 ‘publishing history’ of the Encyclopédie12), had ‘centered on production and authorship rather than reading’, and because ‘in any event, books do not have a “life” of their own independent from their use’.13 Leslie Howsam is unsurprised that ‘contemporary publishers are identifying this as an aspect of the “object biography” genre, but to my mind it doesn’t entirely work with the dual concepts of authorship, publishing and reading on the one hand and materiality on the other’.14 In Howsam’s own edited Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015), Sydney Shep stresses the mobility and mutability of the book in transnational perspective, proposing a model more dynamic than the communication circuit.15 A critical value therefore of the micro-studies carried by the preceding chapters is that they probe the materiality of textual meaning through time and by individual exemplars. The way forward, then, seems to be to extend both materially and social-historically the approach taken by those promoting ‘biography’ and ‘life cycle’ as concepts revealing the broadest historical influence of a literary work. Such an approach follows Philippe 11 Robert Thake, A Publishing History of a Prohibited Best-Seller: The Abbé de Vertot and his Histoire de Malte (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2016). 12 Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1979). 13 James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 297, note 2. 14 Leslie Howsam, contribution to online discussion, SHARP-L archives, 4 January 2020. 15 Sydney Shep, ‘Books in Global Perspectives’, in Leslie Howsam, Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 53–70.

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Lejeune’s theorizing about the autobiography as embodying a retrospective statement about its material as well as intellectual identity, one certainly including its material peritextual and non-narrative features.16 As Daniel Bellingradt, Daniel Nelles and Jeroen Salman argue in their introduction to Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe, book history can only benefit from still greater interest in concepts of materiality, sociality and spatiality.17 Further contributors to a volume edited by Bellingradt for Biographien des Buches18 attend to the ‘careers’ of a book or of its ‘object biography’, understanding this to be a history of a book’s combined material and communicative characteristics. Literary and book scholars, historians, philosophers, librarians and restorers all discuss the possibilities and limits of a biographical approach, underscoring the legacy of books, of their collection and conservation, and, for some works, of their successive neglect, rediscovery and reinterpretation. Ultimately, the test of these approaches remains in the quality of the bibliographical scholarship: of an intimate understanding of subtle changes between successive editions, in typography and format, in paratextual developments, in the nuances of different translations, in different accompanying illustrations and in the variations of emphasis in public reviews and individual readings.

16 Notably including Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre. L’autobiographie de la littérature aux médias (Paris: Editions de Seuil 1980); and La Pratique du journal personnel (Paris: Centre de sémiotique textuelle, Université de Paris X, 1990). 17 Daniel Bellingradt, Paul Nelles and Jeroen Salman (eds), Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe: Beyond Production, Circulation and Consumption (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 18 The first volume in a series ‘Cultures of Collecting. Actors, Objects, Media’ published by the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel https://www.wallstein-verlag. de/9783835331457-biographien-des-buches.html.

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Index Aarhus ​72 abridgements ​10, 51, 63, 141–2, 152, 156, 158, 264–5, 365, 368–9, 370 Accademia dei Pugni ​46, 50–1 Accademia della Crusca ​61–2, 67 accommodation policy ​114–15, 128, 129, 254–5, 323 Adams, John ​142, 147, 151 Addison, Joseph ​148, 360 Adolph Scheibe, Johann ​82–3, 85, 90, 92–3, 100 Adventurer, The ​148 Adventures of a Rake of Taste ​146, 149–50 Adventures or Memories of a Man of Pleasure ​ 146 version by H-F de la Salle, 149–51 Advocates Library, Edinburgh ​96 n.88, 103 Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers de l’Ile Guadeloupe ​214 Alfred the Great, of England ​160, 161 All Souls College, Oxford ​99–100 American War of Independence ​ 131, 134–6, 142, 144–7, 203, 207–8 Amoretti, Carlo ​50, 55, 56, 60 n.54, 61 Amory, Thomas ​98–9 Amsterdam ​122, 127, 269, 270, 272, 277, 281, 283, 286, 287–8 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities ​137, 141 Angiolini-Noverre quarrel ​68 À Kempis, Thomas ​275 Anglo-Chinese College ​324, 327, 329

Anker, Peter ​100 Anville, Jean-Baptiste Bourgignon d’ ​256 Appel, Fred ​379 Arrivabene, Andrea ​290 Arthur, William ​297–8, 318–19 Atrak ​265; see also Turk Baldwin, Robert ​201 Bampton, William ​312 Bancker, Charles Nicoll ​100 Banks, Joseph ​100, 103 Baraguey d’Hilliers, Louis ​285 Barbados ​35, 199–211, 216 Literary Society ​209 Barbados Gazette ​205, 209–10 Barbados Mercury ​206–8, 209–11 Barbier, Antoine Alexandre ​265–6 Barentin, Charles de Paule de ​182 Barrois, Louis François ​182, 375 Basel ​270, 289 Batavia (Jakarta) ​284, 292 Batz, Jean-Pierre de ​180, 190 Beccaria, Cesare ​44–7, 50, 52, 54, 56, 64, 67, 68 Beckmann, Johann ​57 Bellingradt, Daniel ​381 Benedict XIV, Pope ​256 Bentinck, Hans Willem, Baron Bentinck of Diepenheim and Schoonheten ​155–6 Bergen ​71, 76, 80, 83, 90, 92 coastline ​98 diocese ​74 fire of ​78 harbour image ​96 Berling, Ernst Heinrich ​80, 87 n.63

Index

Bermuda Gazette ​203 Berthelson, Andreas ​85, 93, 102, 368 Bertrand, Élie ​57 Betsy Thoughtless (by Eliza Haywood) ​ 140, 148 Bevilacqua, Alexander ​281 bibles ​12, 73, 245, 247, 274–5, 280–1, 296, 306, 309–10, 316, 317, 325, 327–8, 343, 359–6, 372; translation 283, 303 Bibliander, Theodor ​270, 277 n.17, 287, 288, 289 bibliographers ​265–6, 268 bibliography ​11, 18, 25, 27, 50, 60, 61, 264, 366 European view of Chinese ​363 Chinese divisions of ​333 ethnographical ​346, 360, 364 Bibliothèque du Roi ​362 Bibliothèque orientale ​159, 244–68, 279, 322, 368, 370, 376, 378 Bīdpāy (Pilpay) ​292 Bie, Alexander de ​269–71, 277 n.17, 292 Bignon, Jean-Paul ​291, 362 n.107 bindings ​2, 4, 11, 80, 85, 91–2, 366, 370 and binders ​85, 92, 95 blocks ​ see wood-blocks Bodleian Library, Oxford ​110, 361 Bogue, David ​325 Bombay, American Marathi Mission of ​297, 316 Bonaparte, Napoleon ​201, 204, 210–11, 215, 265, 285, 292; see also Napoleonic Wars Bonnet, Charles ​57 book biography ​71, 379–80 book history ​6, 7–8, 11–13, 108, 118, 278; see also bibliography book-collecting ​4, 5, 10, 27–8, 70, 101, 110, 142–3, 152, 170, 227, 246–8, 251, 270–2, 321–64, 366, 368–9, 372–6, 381

395

bookplates ​100 books ​ book trade and bookselling ​20, 35, 42–3, 44–5, 84–5, 88–91, 99, 136–7, 140–3, 156–9, 182, 258, 275, 287–8 different forms of ​1, 12, 72 format differences ​12, 56, 63, 72, 86–92, 109, 121, 123, 141, 150, 173, 184, 188, 206, 207, 212, 223, 231, 250–1, 263–4, 270, 366–9, 381 importation to North America ​ 136–7, 140–1, 152 lists and catalogues ​50–2, 131–6, 138, 145, 148–52 see also bibles, bindings, bookcollecting, book history bookshops ​46, 85, 88–90 in China ​338 n.57, 339, 341 Boston, Massachusetts ​134, 145, 147, 208, 274 Port Bill ​147 Tea Party ​147 Boulainvilliers, Henri de ​285, 291 Boulton, Matthew ​180, 192 Bourbon dynasty ​223 reforms ​221, 223, 232 Boyd, Fenwick ​289 Breteuil, Louis le Tonnelier de ​180, 161, 182, 187, 190–3 Bright, Henry Arthur ​100, British Museum ​19, 100, 361 Brown, William Revd ​306 Browne, William George ​290 Buchan, William ​58–9 Buddhism ​114, 297, 335, 341–2, 347–50 Chan ​341–2, 347 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de ​43, 44, 62–8, 101, 158, 367, 368, 369 Burke, Edmund ​140 Burke, Peter ​9, 43

396

Index

Burlemaqui Collection of Voyages ​147–8 Principles of Natural Law ​147 Burma see Myanmar Burrows, Simon ​5 business news ​198, 201, 205, 212, 214 businessmen ​135 cabinets of curiosity ​19, 21, 24 Cabinet du Roi 63 Cadet de Gassicourt, Louis Claude ​ 195  Cadet de Vaux, Antoine ​195  Cai (Tsae) brothers ​328 Calvo Maturana, Antonio ​222–3, 233–4 Cambridge ​91, 321 University Library ​361 Campomanes y Pérez, Pedro Rodríguez de ​47 Cantonese ​327 literati ​341, 358 Canute, King ​160, 163, 165 Carey, William ​305, 307 Cassandra a Romance ​146 Castell, Edmund ​279, 280, 284 n.37 Castrodardo, Giovanni Battista ​290 catalogues ​21, 23–9, 40, 41, 90, 110, 131, 134–5, 146, 148, 151, 157, 199, 269–81, 285–91, 302, 303, 334 of auctions ​89, 94, 270, 283, 284 Catholics ​127, 246, 273, 281, 282–3 n.34, 290, 302, 319, 324, 326, 329 n.20 Cator, John, MP ​100 censorship ​43–5, 51, 54–6, 62, 65, 66, 181–2, 223, 225, 232, 245, 286 n.16, 372 Ceylon see Sri Lanka Chamberlain, John ​308 Chan see Buddhism characters ​365 Chinese ​110, 328 n.20, 332 n.20, 342–4

incorrectly chosen ​307 South Asian printed ​306–8 Charles Careless Esq. His Amours ​ 146 Charles III, of Spain ​223 Charles IV, of Spain ​222, 225 Charles VI, of France ​170 China, Amherst Embassy, 326, 338 n.53 China ​4, 16, 29, 106–19, 255–9, 321–64, 273, 376 official publishing (guanke) 336 representations of ​120–30, 256, 259, 365 see also examination system Chinese annals ​255 Chinese Rites Controversy ​109 n.13, 115, 125, 129, 254–5, 257–8 Christian VI, of Denmark ​73 Christianity ​54, 65, 114 doctrine 115 Edict of Toleration of 254 in China 6, 114–15 in India and South Asia 293–6 and tract societies 293–8, 302–15, 320 see also missionaries Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (by Charles Johnstone) ​ 146 Church Missionary Society ​296 Cicero ​53, 275 Citizen of the World (by Oliver Goldsmith) ​119 Clarissa (by Samuel Richardson) ​ 131, 136, 141, 142, 143, 146, 150, 151, 152 Clavière, Étienne ​180 Cohen, David Isaac ​287 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste ​247 Colebrooke, George ​284 Collège de France chair in Chinese at ​363 Professor of Arabic at ​276

Index

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de ​63–4, 65, 68 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de ​ 181, 182, 191, 192–5 Confucius ​106, 108, 111, 113–16, 124, 127–9, 322, 332, 333, 367 Confucianism in Europe 114–19 perception of 121, 124 consumer revolution ​134, 138, 146, 367–8 Copenhagen ​70, 73, 80, 82–4, 88, 89, 98 dialect ​76 University of ​74, 95 see also vajsenhuset copperplates see engraving Costard, George ​52, 280, 286 Coulomb, Charles-Augustin ​181 Couplet, Philippe ​110, 376 Cousin, Jacques Antoine ​193 crowd-sourcing ​18–20, 22–3, 28–31, 40–1 acknowledgements of 29–32, 38–9 Cuba ​218, 228, 235, 237–8, 374 Custos, Domenicus ​170

397

Der goldne Spiegel oder die Könige von Scheschian ​112 Description géographique, historique chronologique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine ​115–16 Desessarts, Nicolas Toussaint Lemoyne ​265–6 Det forste Forsog paa Norges ​70, 75, 78–9, 81–2 advertisement of ​88–9 annotations in ​103 images in ​88–9, 94–8, 159 printing of ​80, 87–8, 92 sales ​89–90 translation ​82–4 typographical complexity of ​93 dictionaries ​85, 158, 194–5, 206, 210, 227, 247 n.9, 262, 268, 325–7, 332, 369–70 Dictionary of the Chinese Language ​ 326–9, 344 and Chinese-English dictionaries 325 Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes ​ 266 Dictionnaire encyclopédique ​260 Diderot, Denis ​158 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond ​158 Doelen, Johannes van ​288 Danske Post-Tidender ​87 Dominica ​202–3 Daoism ​335, 340–2, 347–8, 350, 361 Dominica Gazette see Freeport Darnton, Robert ​380 Gazette or the Dominica Darton, William ​174 Advertiser/Chronicle Daubenton, Louis-Jean-Marie ​57, 63 Dominicans ​44, 115 Davis, Jefferson ​137 Dort, Leopold Immanuel Jacob van ​ Davis, John Francis ​363 288 Declaration of the Rights of Man ​ Douce, Francis ​100 235 Dryden, John ​148 Deguignes, Joseph ​266, Du Ryer, André ​271–2, 274, 276, Delahaye, Madame ​291–2 277, 281, 287–92 Delbourgo, James ​9 Almoran de Mahomet ​283–92 Dempster of Dunnichen, George ​ Duguet, Jacques Joseph ​291 187 Dutch East India Company ​30, Den danske Atlas (The Danish Atlas) ​ 287, 361 n.105 74 Dutch (Holland) paper ​88, 260, 371

398

Index

Dutch West India Company ​284 Duvillard de Durand, Emmanuel Etienne ​190, 193 Dziembowski, Edmond ​5 East India Company ​30, 35, 284, 307, 322–3 press in Macao ​344 École des jeunes de langues ​245 Edward I, of England ​160, 163, 166, 167–8 Edward II, of England ​160, 167, 168, 173 Edward III, of England ​159, 160, 163 Edward, of Woodstock (the Black Prince) ​163 Edward the Confessor ​165 Egbert, of England ​160, 163, 165, 166 Eggert, Paul ​379 Egypt ​285 Eleanor of Aquitaine ​172 Eleanor of Castile ​166 Elmacin, George (Jirjis al-Makīn) ​ 279 Elmarsafy, Ziad ​285, 288 Elstrack, Renold ​168–9, 171–2 encyclopaedias ​51, 158, 190, 255, 260–2, 266, 367 Encyclopédie ​51, 158, 380 encyclopédists ​ 54 engravers ​42, 96–7, 159–74, 288 tradecard 85 engravings ​3, 11–12, 21, 24, 28, 70, 76–7, 78–80, 86–9, 94–8, 157–74, 183–5, 288, 365–6, 370–4, 376 Enlightenment ​1–2, 6, 10, 29, 43, 67–8, 88, 108, 113, 183, 196–7, 221–2, 244, 261, 266–8, 271–2, 278, 290–2, 322–4, 347, 372 and natural philosophy ​22 as oplysning ​75 exchanges ​176

Milanese ​43–69 networks ​271 Scottish ​53, 53, 54, 175, 322–3 Spanish ​219–25 Radical ​281–3 see also MEDIATE Erpenius, Thomas ​270, 279, 286 Espagne, Michel ​5 Essex County Militia, Massachusetts ​ 146–7 Estratto della Letteratura Europea ​ 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 ethnography ​324, 329, 345–50, 360–4 evangelical revival ​297, 307, 312–16, 322–3 Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle ​311 n.39, 348 examination system, Chinese ​ 337–9, 345–7, 349, 353 Eyre, E. ​277 Faipoult de Maisoncelles, GuillaumeCharles ​180 Fanny Hill (by John Cleland) ​144, 145, 148, 149 Farquhar, George ​148 Febvre, Lucien ​365 Felice, Fortunato de ​44, 51 Fénelon, Gabriel-Jacques de Salignac, marquis de la Motte- ​257 Ferdinand Count Fathom (by Tobias Smollett) ​146 Ferguson, Adam ​55, 56 Ferrer, Ada ​228, 235 Ferry, Captain Lorentz de ​79, 94, 102, 104 financial journalism ​198–200, 232 Firmian, Count ​56 Five Classics ​126, 332, 359 Flowered Note Paper, The (Huajian ji) ​362 Fordyce, David ​55

Index

format see books Fort Dansborg ​73; see also Tranquebar Fortunate Union, The (Haoqiu zhuan) ​359, 363–4 Foshan ​337–8, 339 Fouquet, Nicolas ​245 Four Books, The ​331, 332, 346, 359 Francesco Soave ​50, 55 François Boissier de la Croix de Sauvage ​61 Frank, Johann Peter ​50, 59 Franklin, Benjamin ​57, 99–100, 181–2, 202 Frederick V, of Denmark ​74, 87 Freeport Gazette or the Dominica Advertiser/Chronicle ​ 203 French Revolutionary Wars ​204, 209, 211–12, 214, 285 Friend, Revd Charles ​296 Frisi, Paolo ​46, 50 Fromond, Giovanni Francesco ​50 Fumagalli, Galeazzo ​60 Gaceta de Madrid: content ​230 distribution in Spanish America ​ 231 editors ​234 French Revolution ​234–5 frequency and price ​231 Gage, General Thomas ​147 Galeazzi, Giuseppe ​43, 46, 47, 51, 55–60, 62–6, 368–9 Galland, Antoine ​246, 249, 253, 291 Gazette de la Guadeloupe ​213 Gazette de la Martinique ​212–14 Gazette nationale et politique ​213 Gazzetta letteraria ​56 Ge Maohe (Ko Mow-Ho) ​328, 346 Gelre, Pieter van ​288 Gendt, Wilhelm Godart Johan van ​ 288 Genette, Gerard ​370, 371 George I, of England ​162

399

George III, of England ​85 Gerard, Alexander ​140 An Essay on Taste 140 Gherardini, Michele ​59, 60 Ghewiet, Georges de ​289 Gibbon, Edward ​100 Gil Novales, Alberto ​234 Glazemaker, Jan Hendriksz ​274, 284, 287, 288 Glossarium Norvagicum ​74–5, 92 Godiche, Andreas Hartvig ​89, 90, 94 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von ​364 Goldsmith, Oliver ​119, 129, 148 Golius, Jacob ​270 Gordon, William James ​309 Gough, Richard ​100 Goujet, Claude-Pierre ​250, 251 Gralath, Daniel ​100 grammatization ​247, 264, 299, 369 Gravelot, Hubert-François Bourguignon, known as ​174 Gravesande, Guillaume-Jacob ​257, 258 Gregory, John ​55, 179 Grenada ​200 Grenville, Thomas, MP ​100 Guadeloupe ​199–201, 212–16, 218, 235 Guangzhou (Canton) ​323, 325–7, 329–30, 333–43 Gueullette, Thomas-Simon ​291 Gunnerus, Johan Ernst ​77 Gussen, Johann Nicodemus ​85 Haberkorn, Johann Christoph ​85 Habsburg administration ​43, 45, 47, 50, 57, 58, 61, 69 Hadji Khalfa (Katib Celebi) ​247, 249 Hague, The ​112, 156, 185, 230, 244, 250–1, 257, 287–8, 368, 391 Haichuang Temple (Haichuang si; Hoi Tong Zi) ​341–2, 344–7

400

Index

Haitian Revolution ​218, 235–6, 374 Halde, Jean-Baptiste du ​115–16, 120, 256 Haller, Albrecht von ​63 Hamilton, Alastair ​287, 290–1 Hancock, John ​134, 145 Haywood, Eliza ​140, 148 Hebraism ​278–9 Helvétius, Claude Adrien ​51, 55 Henderson, John ​286 Henry I, of England ​160, 163, 165, 169 Henry II, of England ​160, 172–3 Henry III, of England ​160, 165–6 Henry IV, of England ​160, 183, 170 Henry V, of England ​161 Herbelot, Barthélemy d’ ​244–68 Herrenschwand, Johann Friedrich ​ 59 Hewlett, John ​174 Hezarfenn Hüsseyn ​249 Higginson, John ​146 Hinckelmann, Abraham ​283 Hindu festivals ​313–18 Hinduism ​297, 299, 302, 320 sacred texts ​312–13, 316 schools ​310 Histoire de la Tartarie ​253, 255, 265 Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus ​ 98 History of the Amours of Miss Kitty, Jilt or Female Fortune Hunters ​ 146 Hocquart de Coubron, Jean Hyacinthe ​189 Hoffman, François-Benoît ​290 Hofman, Hans de ​74, 80, 81, 87 Hofmeyr, Isabel ​379 Holberg, Ludvig ​78, 97 Holland, Henry ​168 Holstein, Count Johan Ludvig ​74, 80, 81, 86, 87, 371 Holstein-Jessen questionnaire  75 Homann, Johann Baptist ​95

Hooke, Robert ​158 Hoorn, Timotheus ten ​288 Horace ​275 Horae Sinicae ​360 Houbraken, Jacob ​174 Howsam, Leslie ​380 Huang Jialüe (Arcade Houange) ​ 362 Huguenots ​155, 251, 282–3, 288 Hume, David ​53, 54, 55, 322 Hunter, John ​57 Hyde, Thomas ​110 hymns ​314–17, 324–5 Il Caffè ​44, 46, 50–2, 56, 58, 63, 64, 378 inculturation strategy, in India ​ 319–20 India ​30, 32, 35, 72, 75, 100, 104, 255 Christian missionaries in ​294– 320, 366, 376 languages ​314–15 see also East India Company, West India Company Islam ​271, 282, 285, 289, 297, 369 anti-Islam views ​279–80, 281–2 see also Qur’an Israel, Jonathan ​108 Jaffna peninsula, Christian missionaries in ​296, 302, 304–5, 309 Jaffna Tract Society ​307, 314 Jakarta see Batavia Jamaica ​24, 199, 200, 201, 202, 235, 374 Jansen, Hendrik ​181–2, 369 Jefferson, Thomas ​138, 179 Jessen, Erich Johan ​74, 75 Jesuits ​110, 124, 128 missionaries 109, 111–16, 120, 125 see also Society of Jesus Jewish books ​274–5, 278 book collectors 286–7

Index

congregations, Portuguese in India ​281 texts in India ​306, 315 see also Judaism John, of England ​160 Joncourt, Elie de ​257 Jones, Anna Maria (née Shipley) ​ 279 Jones, Hugh ​35, 376 Jones, William ​279–80 Jormungandr ​ 101 Journal de Paris ​190, 195 Journal des Sçavans / Journal des Savants ​194, 257 Journal encylopédique ​190 Journal helvétique ​121 Journal historique de la République des lettres ​257 Journal littéraire ​257 Journal Officiel de la Guadeloupe et Dépendances ​215 journalism ​7, 198–9, 210, 232 journals ​44–6, 50–7, 106, 109, 122–4, 158, 200, 215, 220–3, 326–7, 257, 278, 283 Judaism, Enlightenment interest in ​ 278; see also Jewish books Judson, Adoniram ​293–4 Kanakkupillais see scribes Kandhapurana(m) ​312, 313 Kangxi emperor ​254, 362 Kangxi zidian (Kangxi Dictionary) ​ 332 Kashf al-Zunūn ​247, 249 Keimer, Samuel ​200, 205–7 Kincaid, Eugene ​308 King, Giles ​159, 160, 166 King’s Library, British Library, London ​91 Kiobenhavnske Nye Post-Tidender ​ 88 Kisel, Gottmann Friderich ​81, 88, 89

401

Knapton, John and James ​156, 157, 159, 161, 168, 170, 174 Kochi (India) ​287 Koran see Qur’an kraken ​72, 79, 94, 100–4; see also sea monsters Krinke Kesmes ​121 L’Abbé de la Ville ​257 L’Apparition du Livre (The Coming of the Book) ​365 L’esploratore turco ​111 L’esprit des journaux ​186 Levi, Jacob Ben Israel ​287 L’Orphelin de la Maison de Tchao (Zhaoshi gu’er da baochou) ​ 363 La Cave, François Morellon de ​157, 170 La Harpe, Jean-François ​194, 195 Lacey, Charles ​306, 318 Lacroix, Alphonse François ​320 Lansdowne, William Petty FitzMaurice, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, 1st Marquess of ​ 186–7 Lansman, Andreas ​283 Laplace, Pierre-Simon ​193 Larriba, Lisabel ​218 n.3, 231 La Salle de l’Étang, Simon Philibert de ​52 Latour, Bruno ​81 Laurentian Library ​247 Lavoisier, Antoine ​193 Lawrence, John Jay ​308 Le Grand, Louis ​158 Lee, Samuel ​274 Leiden ​35, 36, 257 booksellers ​275, 287–8 University professors ​279, 271 Leipzig ​94 trade fair ​85 Lejeune, Philippe ​380–1 Leslie, Colonel Alexander ​147

402

Index

Letters Written by a Turkish Spy ​121 Lettres chinoises ​106–30, 322 Lettres juives ​112, 121, 129–30 Lettres persanes ​111, 119 Lexell, Anders-Johan ​192 Lexington and Concord, Battle of ​ 134, 147 Li Chating (Lee Tsak-Ting) ​327, 331, 346 Li Jufan ​355 libraries ​2, 7, 11, 99–100, 101, 103, 226–7, 247, 250, 262, 269–92, 367, 375, 378 at Tranquebar ​302 circulating ​143 in China ​341, 354, 365 private ​226 see also Salem Social Library Life of John Buncle ​98 Lillie, Ludolph Henrik ​80, 84, 87–8, 91 Linde, Andreas ​84–5, 90–1 Linnaeus, Carl ​24, 63, 66, 68 taxonomy ​63, 64, 68 listening, communal ​308–10 literacy ​61, 309, 346, 350, 360 Livingstone, John ​354–5 Locke, John ​138, 139 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ​139 Lode, Odvardt Helmoldt de (von) ​ 95 London and engraving presses ​157, 161 book and printing trade ​136–7, 156, 199 foreign communities in ​84–5 libraries sold in ​273, 277, 286 reprinted news from ​208, 227, 230, 235 scholarly conventions of ​18 London Missionary Society ​309, 319, 320, 321, 325, 327 Lorry, Anne Charles ​59

Louis XIV, of France ​110, 245, 254 Louis XV, of France ​257, 259, 276 Louis XVI, of France ​190, 234 Luther, Martin ​73, 289, 319 Lutterell, Edward ​162–3, 168, 169 Luxdorph, Bolle Willum ​101 Luyken, Caspar ​288 Ma Duanlin ​255 Maastricht ​250, 261 Mabillon, Jean ​246 Macao ​326–7, 344 Madras ​310 Christian missionaries at ​312–13 Religious Tract Society of ​314–15 Magnus, Albertus ​98 Magnus, Olaus ​98 Mahomet, Life of ​148 Maid of Orleans ​142 Malacca ​326 Malet, Jean-Roland ​256 Man of Feeling (by Henry Mackenzie) ​ 142, 143, 144 Mandarin ​328 Manfred, of Sicily ​170 Mansfield, Lord William, Judge ​134 Marana, Giovanni Paolo ​111 Marchand, Prosper ​257, 258 Margalit, Avishai ​379 Marracci, Lodovico ​279, 290, 368 Martin, Henri-Jean ​365 Martini, Martino ​113 Martinique ​201–15, 216, 235 Mary II, of England ​161 Massachusetts Bar Association ​146 Massachusetts Minutemen ​134 Maurist ​246 Mears, William ​161–2, 168 Mechell, James ​157–9, 161–3, 166, 168 MEDIATE database ​272–83, 287, 289–91 Meigs, Benjamin Clark ​309 Mein, John ​134

Index

Melanchthon, Philip ​289 Meldal, Augustin ​75, 77 Melville, Herman ​104 Memoirs of a Coquette ​146 Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure ​149 memorization ​309–12 Menoza ​ 74, 78 Mercure Danois ​84 Mercure de France ​194–5 Meredith, Roger ​286 Merian, Johann Bernard ​55 Milan ​42–69 book trade  44–5 Milanese Patriotic Society ​50, 57, 60, 64 Milne, William ​327, 343, 344, 359 missionaries ​4, 7, 9, 10, 35, 199, 279, 284, 294, 321, 323, 366, 375–6 in China ​108, 111–14, 128, 259, 323–9, 345, 347, 355 in India and South Asia ​294–329 missionary knowledge ​254–6 Missionskollegiets Trykkeri (printing house) ​73 Mitterpacher, Ludwig ​61 Moby Dick ​104 Moerbeek, Abraham van ​277 Moetjens, Adriaen (the elder) ​277, 288 Moller, Olaus Heinrich ​100 Moltke, Adam Gottlob ​87 Monserrat ​203 Monserrat Chronicle ​203 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat baron de ​111–12, 119, 129, 148, 285 Spirit of the Laws (L’Esprit des Lois) ​147 Montfaucon, Bernard de ​172–3 Monthly Review ​99, 100 Morellet, André ​159, 178–9, 181, 187, 188, 194, 196 Morgenbladat ​ 103 Morrison, Robert ​321–64

403

book collection ​333–45 building his collection ​330–3 collection profile ​345– 7 early life ​324–9 and medicine ​350–5 and vernacular fiction ​355–60 Mortimer, Cromwell ​57 Moscati, Pietro ​64, 65 Moutard, editions ​266 moveable type see printing Moyne Lewis, John ​166 Mumme, Franz Christian ​82, 90, 91 Musei Petiveriani ​18, 21–7, 371 muslim see Islam, Myanmar, Christian missionaries in ​ 297, 308, 319 Napoleonic Wars ​201, 204, 210, 211, 215, 285; see also Bonaparte, Napoleon Natural History of Norway ​78–85, 105 financing 85–90 images and map in ​94–8 reception and legacy ​94–105 subscriptions ​84 translation of ​84–5 typography of ​93–4 see also Pontoppidan, Erik; Det forste Forsog paa Norges; and Versuch einer naturlichen Geschichte Norwegens Naughton, Robin ​379–80 Neaulme, Jean ​250–1, 257–60, 368, 376 Necker, Jacques ​190, 195 Nelles, Daniel ​381 Nestorian inscription (Nestorian Stele) ​256–7 Neumann, Karl Friedrich ​258 New Granada ​218, 238 Newhall, Alfred Augustus ​315 newspapers ​2, 3, 7, 12. 82, 87–9, 90, 103–4, 105, 106, 122–4, 367, 374

404

Index

in Lesser Antilles ​198–216 in Spanish Caribbean ​217–43 Nieuhof, Johan ​127, 128 Non-Importation Movement ​134, 146 Norges naturlige Historie ​70, 72 novels ​98, 104, 110, 112, 139, 141–6, 146–51, 267 epistolary ​119–22, 129 Chinese ​356–60, 364 Nuremberg ​95, 290

paper ​11, 251, 395, 307 high quality ​28, 70, 88, 90, 95, 381; see also Dutch/Holland paper in China ​337 scarcity in India ​298 varying quality ​86, 88, 89, 92, 366, 370–1 paratext ​17, 27, 42, 118, 365, 370–3 Paris ​62, 113, 121, 124, 149, 176–80, 191, 196–7, 199, 228, 245, 256, 281, 287, 290, 376 Odisha, Christian missionaries in ​ booksellers ​184, 258, 264 297, 306, 311, 312 Faculty of Theology ​65 ola see palm-leaves National Assembly ​225 Olearius, Adam ​98 newspapers from ​225–6 Oplysning ​ 75 Royal Library in ​245, 247, 248 Orderson, John ​207, 209 Parmentier, Antoine-Augustin ​50 family ​210 Parr, Nathaniel (or Richard) ​159, 162 Oriental collections ​247–9, 251 Payen, Joseph ​203–4 Oriental languages ​246, 264, 269, Payne, John, of Paternoster Row ​99 270 Pennant, Thomas ​77, 83 Oriental studies ​127, 243, 246–7, periodicals see journals 255–6, 271, 370 Percy, Thomas ​363–4 Orientalism ​119, 127, 244, 271, 272 Pétis de la Croix, Alexandre-Louisn.6, 285, 290–2 Marie ​276, 280, 290 Orientalists ​251–3, 259, 263, 266–7, Pétis de la Croix, François (the 271, 279–82, 283, 375 younger) ​61, 291, 292 and early Qur’an owners ​278–81 Petiver, James ​17–41, 107, 122, 158, Ottoman Empire ​247–9, 369 199, 367, 372, 373–4, 376 Oudemans, Anthonie Cornelis ​98 extent of network ​32–6 Ovid ​275 see also crowd sourcing; Musei Petiveriani Paddebrugge, Herman (or Armand) ​ Pickering, Timothy, Third U.S. 288 Secretary of State ​131, 134, palm-leaves, copying Christian texts 136, 140, 142, 146, 147, 148, 151 on ​294, 297–9, 300–1, 302–4, Pilgrim’s Progress ​379 308 Pilpay see Bīdpāy Pamela (by Samuel Richardson) ​ pirated editions ​45, 250, 250 n.16, 140, 143, 144, 152 368, table 11.1 Pamela Censured ​144, 145 Plato ​141 Panchaud, Isaac ​190 Playfair, John ​175 Panckoucke, Charles-Joseph 63, 65, Playfair, William ​175–97, 368, 372, 66, 194 393

Index

Plütschau, Heinrich ​299, 314 Poinçot, Claude ​243 politeness ​150, 375 Pondicherry ​9 Pietism ​74, 75 Pietists ​72–3 Pietist missionaries  100 Pontoppidan, Erik, Bishop of Bergen ​ 70–105, 367–9, 371, 376–7 as bishop ​74–5 early life ​72–3 financial support ​85–90 information networks ​74–8 letter-book ​76 writing and publishing the Natural History ​78–85 and natural history ​75–8 see also Natural History of Norway Pope, Alexander ​148, 179 Portland, Earl of ​155 Prémare, Joseph Henri Marie de ​363 Prevost, Pierre ​189  Price, Richard ​189–90 Priestley, Joseph ​57 printers ​46, 158, 200, 377 and influence ​127 and publishing strategies ​69, 80, 88–94, 260 devices ​46–7 status of  55 printing ​9, 10, 117, 141, 198–200, 205, 368 and colonial reprints ​141–2, 244 and crowd sourcing ​23 and origins in China ​343 n 64 by moveable type ​10, 327, 343, 344, 366, 379 by wooden moveable type ​336, 342, 343 forms of  20–1 impact of  11–12, 24, 108–9, 211, 215–16, 223–4, 294, 326, 351, 371–2

405

jobbing ​12 misprints ​83, 102, 274 techniques ​25, 80–1, 94–6, 184, 201, 336–7, 342–6 printing rights ​45 privileges ​73–4, 76 prohibitions ​236–7 private publishing (sike) ​335 Propaganda Fide ​256 Protestants ​282–3 missionaries 4, 73, 225, 299, 318–30 outlook ​54 readership ​127 Protestantism ​319, 323–4, 326 Psalmanazar, George ​110 public opinion ​137, 140, 189, 222, 238 publishing centres ​44–5 democratisation of ​62 practice ​21–2, 42, 45, 57, 69, 78, 88–91, 156, 159–60, 198–9, 290–2, 374 strategies 181–91, 223–7, 259–63, 367 in China 324 in Guangdong 333–43; see also books Pure Land (Buddhist text) ​342, 347 Qing dynasty ​254, 333, 336, 375 government 323, 324–6, 328, 337–8 Qur’an ​10, 148, 264, 317, 365, 368 early European owners ​278–83 in European libraries ​269–92 translation of ​271, 273–4, 277, 283–92, 369–9, 373 racial war ​236, 238 Raj, Kapil ​9 Rambler (by Samuel Johnson) ​146 Rapin de Thoyras, Paul de ​147, 155–8

406

Index

engravings for ​160–74 translations of ​ 159–60 Ravius, Christian ​270, 286 readers ​1, 5, 7, 11, 27, 50–52, 56, 58, 60–1, 75, 109, 116, 127, 142–3, 268, 292, 311–12, 322, 345, 369, 371, 373 American colonial ​136–7, 139–40, 142–4, 152 annotations by ​103 Asian colonial ​206–7, 227–9, 232, 234–7 Catholic ​290 Chinese ​362 Chinese ‘common’ ​346 differences between ​137, 268 printed letters by ​123, 216 marginal aids ​92 of the erotic ​144–5 of the Qur’an ​274, 276, 289, 317 text acquisition ​123, 160 reading revolution ​2, 276 n.15 Reeves, John ​86, 93 Reineccius, Christian ​290 Reiske, Johann Jacob ​251, 253 Reland, Adriaen ​284, 291 Religious Tract Society, grants to India ​316 Remonstrants ​277, 282 René I, of Anjou ​170 Republic of Letters ​2, 6, 24, 65, 122–3, 178, 181, 244, 247, 257–9 Huguenots within ​283 revolutions age of ​1, 142, 195, 201, 215–16, 225, 374 American ​134, 144, 146–8, 151, 155, 218, 232 Atlantic ​218, 232–9 French ​175, 190, 192, 196, 199, 201, 204, 212–13, 216–18, 220, 225, 234–5 Glorious ​187 Haitian ​218, 220, 225, 234

see also French Revolutionary Wars Reynolds, Joshua ​181  Ricci, Matteo ​115, 317 Richard I (the Lion-Heart), of England ​ 160, 163–5, 166–8, 171–3 Richard II, of England ​160, 169 Richard, Francis ​287, 290–1 Rieuwertsz, Jan ​288 Risi, Paolo ​50 Robert of Ketton ​274, 286, 287 Roberts, Henry ​159, 162 Roberts, Lissa ​9 Robertson, William ​181 Rochon, Alexis-Marie de ​182 Roderick Random (by Tobias Smollett) ​146 Roger II, of Sicily ​170 Roman Catholicism see Catholics Romance of the Three Kingdoms ​ 356, 359–60 Rome ​44, 115, 206, 239, 255, 256, 259, 290 Rong Sande (Yong Sam-Tak) ​327 Ross, Alexander, Hugh and Thomas ​ 288–9 Rouillé, Guillaume ​170 Royal Grenada Gazette ​202 Royal Library (Bibliothèque du roi) ​ 245, 247, 248 Royal Library, Windsor ​91 Royal Society ​17, 19, 20, 110, 159; printers to 25 Philosophical Transactions of ​ 123 Ruan Yuan ​338 Said, Edward ​247 n.10, 272 n.6, 285 Saint-Domingue ​199–201, 204, 211, 218, 235–6 Saint-Germain-des-Près, abbey of ​ 246 Sain-Non, Jean-Claude Richard, abbé de ​179–80

Index

Sale, George ​289 Salignac de la Motte-Fénelon, François de ​257 Salman, Jeroen ​381 Salmon, Thomas ​162 Salonika ​287 Sammelband ​277, 283, 292 Sandhed til Gudfrygtighed ​73, 78 Santo Domingo ​218, 227, 231 Sanyuan Palace (Sanyuan gong) ​ 339, 348 Savary, Claude ​285 Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue ​44, 50, 55, 56, 57, 64 Schaffer, Simon ​9 Schools ​245 Brera ​50 Buddhist ​342, 347, 349 Hindu ​310 in China ​352 in India ​302–3, 304, 312 medical, in China ​353 prefectural ​337, 339 Tamil ​304 Schultens, Henri-Albert ​251 Schulz, Johann Christoph Friedrich ​ 263 Schweigger, Salomon ​290 Scots Magazine ​101 Scott, John, of Paternoster Row ​99 Scott, Sir Walter ​98 Scottish Enlightenment see Enlightenment sea monsters ​72, 78–9, 81, 94, 96–105; see also kraken Sea-of-Learning Academy (Xuehai tang) ​337–8 Secord, James ​380 Sentimental Journey (by Laurence Sterne) ​140, 146 Serampore Baptist missionaries ​ 295, 297, 305, 310–12 Servetus, Michael ​281

407

Sève, Jaques de ​158 Shamela (by Henry Fielding) ​143, 144 Shen Fu-Tsung ​110 Shep, Sydney ​380 Sheppard, Robert ​159, 160, 162 Sidney Bidulph (by Frances Sheridan) ​ 140 Singanfou ​256–7 sinology, professionalization of ​325 Sir Charles Grandison (by Samuel Richardson) ​140, 148 Sloane, Hans ​19, 20, 24, 26, 35, 40, 199 Smeeks, Hendrik ​14 Smith, Adam ​52, 53, 139, 140, 322 Smith, James ​160, 162, 166, 168, 169 Smith, Sir James Edward ​192, 193 Smith, Robert ​52 Smith, Thomas ​202 Société Typographique de Neuchâtel ​ 45 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, grants to India ​ 298, 305 Society of Jesus ​113, 259; see also Jesuits Sommaville, Antoine de ​287, 291 Song dynasty ​255, 335 editions ​336 Sonnenfels, Joseph von ​43, 47, 50 Souchay, Jean-Baptiste ​281 Spaulding, Levi ​304 Staatsund Gelehrte Zeitung ​82 Steele, Sir Richard ​291 Stephen, of England ​160, 168, 170 Strom, Hans ​76, 77, 97 Suard, Jean-Baptiste ​181, 192–3, 195, 369 Sutras ​247–50 Swart, Hendrik ​284 Swinton, Samuel ​179 talipot see palm-leaves

408

Index

Tamil and Religious Tract Society ​300 Christian literature in ​299–303, 314 labels ​41 school ​304 Tartary, ‘History of ’ ​253, 257, 266 Thake, Robert ​380 The Fool of Quality (by Henry Brooke) ​146 Thibouville, Henri Lambert d’Herbigny de ​277 Thirteen Factories, China ​330, 341 Thomas, Isaiah ​202 Thoms, Peter Perring ​327 Thomson, Ann ​5 Thounens, J.B. ​213 Tindal, Nicholas, Revd ​156 Ting Qua (Teen Qua) ​326, 331, 346 Tissot, Samuel Auguste ​50 Tom Jones (by Henry Fielding) ​148 Tranquebar ​73 hymnal ​214 missionaries ​299, 302–4 translation ​2, 4–5, 10, 42–4, 45, 47, 50–62, 69, 81, 112, 121, 124, 136, 152, 156–7, 159–61, 174, 249, 257, 267, 270, 274–7, 282, 292, 366–7, 368–70, 373, 380–3 difficulties of ​61, 62 in China ​327–9, 332, 343, 349, 358–64 in India and South Asia ​300–6 of Buffon ​62–8 of de Boyer ​112, 129 of de Ryer ​283–92 of Playfair ​176–9, 181–3, 186–7, 191, 196 of Pontoppidan ​81–6, 90, 100, 102 translators ​9, 42–7, 50, 53–60, 82, 83, 90, 266, 279, 326, 332, 358, 375, 377 Trigault, Nicolas ​113

Tristram Shandy (by Laurence Sterne) ​150 Tscharner, Vincenz Bernhard ​51 Turk ​265–6, 291; see also Atrak Turkish grammar ​291 Turkish peoples ​266 Two Fair Cousins, The (Yujiao li) ​ 357, 362, 363 Typographic Society of Bern ​51, 54 typography ​4, 12, 25, 31, 32, 70–1, 80, 92–4, 102, 123, 265, 367, 370 ornaments and designs ​86, 92 Unitarianism ​281 United Provinces ​250, 257, 261, 263 United States of America Civil War ​137, 298 Declaration of Independence ​136 University College London ​321 University of Giessen ​263 Utrecht ​284, 288 vajsenhuset, Copenhagen ​73–4, 75, 89 Vanderbank, Peter ​162–3, 168–9 Vandermonde, Alexandre-Théophile ​ 191–2 Vattel, Emer de ​51, 147 Vatican Library ​247 Vaucanson, Jacques ​191 Venezuela ​217, 218, 226, 227, 228, 237, 238, 374 Venice ​44, 53, 54, 298 Venus Unmasked ​146 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, Earl of ​ 177–8, 180 Verri, Pietro ​44, 45, 46, 50, 51, 54–5, 62, 64, 67–8 Verryn, Paulus ​277 Versuch einer naturlichen Geschichte Norwegens ​ 70, 82, 83, 86 errata in ​102 style of ​90, 91, 93–4 typographical complexity of ​93

Index

Vertue, George ​159–74 Vicar of Wakefield (by Oliver Goldsmith) ​148 Virgil ​275 Visdelou, Claude ​253–9, 261, 265, 266 Vitalism ​64, 65 Voltaire, Jean Marie Arouet ​115, 182, 289 Vondel, Joost van den ​111 Vorm, Pieter van der ​284, 375 Walker, William ​207, 210 Walpole, Horace ​173 Walton, Brian ​276, 280, 283, 286, 289 Warsaw ​230 Watt, James ​179, 192 Wayland, William ​202 Weekly Courant ​202 Weekly Jamaica Courant ​201 Wendbeil, Johannes Wilhelmus ​288 Wengierski, Thomas Gaston Jean de ​291 Wenxian tongkao ​255 Werner, Michael ​5 West, Andrew ​333 While the Billy Boils ​379 Wieland, Christoph Martin ​111

409

Wildman, Daniel ​60 William I, of England ​160, 163, 165, 170, 172 William II, of England ​160, 165, 168 William III, of England ​155, 161 Willis, Thomas ​158 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim ​182 Winslow, Miron ​296 wood-blocks ​ cutters ​343–5, 359 cutting shop (kezi dian) ​339 n.58 printing with ​341–3, 379 see also xylography wooden fish ballads (muyu shu) ​358 Wren, Sir Christopher ​157 Wren, Stephen ​157 Wright, Benjamin  162 xylography ​342–6 Yn-Che-Chan ​112–13, 124–5, 128–9 Yorick’s Sermons (by Laurence Sterne) ​140 Yverdon Encylopédie ​51 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus ​299– 301, 304, 314 Zungchin ​111