The copiousness of the Copious Text symposium last month has defeated me. It’s taken me so long to take my fifteen pages of notes and turn them into something readable partly because the papers presented there were so rich, and partly because I am not up to date, if I ever was, in early modern studies. When one speaker began describing the changing reactions to and criticisms of E M W Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture over the decades, it came as news to me that this book, which provided the background for my Shakespearean studies at A level so long ago, was not still considered the definitive work on Elizabethan cosmology. And I fear that, at a distance of a month, the meaning of some of my notes is obscure. If any of the speakers read this, I ask forgiveness from those whose contributions I have mangled and compressed.
Five speakers spoke about five texts, or, in the first case, an author: Professor Neil Rhodes from St Andrews on Shakespeare, Dr Angus Vine of Sussex on William Camden’s Britannia, Dr Kathryn Murphy on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Dr Kevin Killeen of York on Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Dr Kate Bennett, once more from Oxford, on Audrey’s Brief Lives.
The copious text is a text written in the abundant style described by Erasmus in De Copia and what attracted me, and another librarian, Katherine Schopflin, who is researching the early history of encyclopaedias at UCL, was their description as early encyclopaedic texts.
Neil Rhodes spoke of the encyclopaedic texts available to Shakespeare. One, Batman upon Bartholomew, was a modernised edition of Bartolomaeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum, originally translated into English 1398 and first printed by Wynkyn De Worde (? Caxton) in 1495. Organised hierarchically, it mingles fact with fiction. A more modern composition, Pierre de la Primaudaye's The French Academie was first translated in 1586 and went through several editions, expanding with each new version, until 1618. He also described some of the forerunners of the modern dictionary of quotations, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers and Erasmus's Adagia, which hark back to a pre-literate society, designed as a rhetorical support system, providing the speaker with quotations to make an argument for or against any given proposition. Professor Rhodes pointed to a contradiction in encyclopaedic texts: that they present knowledge both as fixed, and as fluid. The places and head used in a commonplace book are by no means arbitrary but represent forms and things. Turning to the Shakespearean theatre, he said that it too has an encyclopaedic character, betrayed for example by he name of the Globe. The structure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre building is microcosmic, a model in plaster and wood of medieval cosmology. Compare Hamlet's speech or the line in the Duchess of Malfi, 'look you, the stars shine still.'
Angus Vine showed how William Camden used collaborators to expand the Britannia from edition to edition, encouraging and acknowledging the contributions of readers and local antiquaries, so that he was sometimes more editor than author. Britannia went through six editions, in 1586, 1587, 1590, 1594, 1600 and 1607, starting as a dumpy quarto and ending as a folio, and translated into English in 1610. The work started as a collaboration, for Camden was recruited by a Dutchman, Abraham Oretelius, who was working on a dictionary of Roman place names; his two previous English correspondents had let him down. Dr Vine showed us correspondence between Camden and Nicholas Roscarrock about Cornish saints, and with a Robert Claxton in Northumbria, asking about the Picts' [that is to say, Hadrian's] Wall and Reginald Bainbrigg about standing stones at Salkeld. At Camden's death in 1623 he was buried in Westminster Abbey and Thomas Browne, of whom more anon, wrote a poem in his honour in a memorial volume, Camdeni insignia, published in 1624.
At lunchtime it was a great pleasure to be taken over to the Special Collections at the University Library, to admire some items chosen to reflect the concerns of the symposium.
Kathyrn Murphy spoke first in the afternoon, on Burton and polymathy and polypraxy, two variants of copiousness. Burton wrote an early anti-papist play in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Philosophaster, in which he contrasted the good polymath or polyhistor with the bad, Jesuitical, polypraxist or polypragmatist. The encyclopaedic can either be helpful, as in Aristotle, or a busy-body. Is the Anatomy of Melancholy encyclopaedic? The question is anachronistic, for the encyclopaedia for Burton was not a type of book but an abstract noun. There is always a danger that encyclopaedic knowledge can be but 'shallow smatterings'. Burton warns against this shallowness in scholarship.
Kevin Kileen discussed Theopaediae or Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Empidemica, of common and vulgar errors, a book that has fascinated me since, as a boy, I discovered a copy in the' attic of our house in Cambridge. Introducing this with the philosophers' puzzle of the Argo, whose planks were replaced one by one until it might, or might not, be a new vessel, This is an anti-encyclopaedia, in that it catalogues and exposes false ideas, rather than compile and collect correct ones. Dr Kileen discussed the different forms of organisation of such a work: alphabetical, hexameral or according to some systematisation of knowledge such as the Ramist one.
Finally, Kate Bennet, who is preparing an edition of Audrey's Brief Lives, took us through the challenges facing an editor of a copious author's texts, not least those of unravelling the erroneous editorial decisions taken by one's predecessors, and of striking a balance between presenting material as it is, and as it should be.
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