If you haven’t already done so, get your blog post nominations in for Carnivalesque 48, the early modern edition! If you’ve come across–or if you’ve written–a great blog post that concerns the period 1500 to 1800, please let me know about it by emailing me or by using the nomination form. I’ll be posting my edition this weekend, so get your suggestions in now! I assume most of you recognize the image I’ve used to illustrate my theme of time’s a tickin’–it’s Abraham Lincoln’s watch, recently opened up by the Smithsonian to reveal messages inscribed on the underside of the watch movement. It seemed appropriate for this post not simpy because it demonstrates the passage of time, nor because it lets me demonstrate my fondness for things pertaining to Lincoln, although it does do both of those things wonderfully. But it also gestures toward something that I am not usually…
Author: Sarah Werner
pointing to Carnivalesque submissions
A quick but important announcement first: I am hosting the next early modern edition of Carnivalesque. Please nominate your favorite early modern blog posts by using the Carnivalesque nomination form, commenting here, or by emailing me directly (you can find my email address through my profile). The no-holds-barred Carnival fun and wisdom is scheduled for publication on March 21st, so get me pointed in the right direction now! And that last bit is my not very subtle transition to the lovely pictures below. I promised my last commenter that I would follow up that great pointing forefinger (or Fonz’s thumb, depending on your tastes) with some more examples. So here’s another great set of pointing fingers, this time complete with fancy ruffles. This is from a 1475 commentary on Aristotle–again, more commentary on commentary, as we saw with the Boethius. Some genres of writing would seem to invite more…
looking at Boethius
I failed to include any pretty pictures in my last post, so now I give you this: It’s a page opening from Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, printed in 1498 in Venice. Actually, that’s a completely inadequate description of what we’re looking at. And that’s one of the reasons I like this image–there is a lot to see when you look at this book. For starters, there is the text in the large font, printed in several blocks over the two pages. That text is Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, written around AD 524 while Boethius is imprisoned and awaiting trial for treason, for which he was to be executed. It was a highly influential piece in the medieval and early modern worlds, one that was studied and passed on in manuscripts and, eventually, printed texts. (You can find an online edition and an English translation at the University of Virginia Library’s…
accessing and looking at books
My last couple of posts on “navigating the information landscape” and “democratizing early english books” have gotten a number of links and comments–it’s great to have such thoughtful feedback, and I wanted to use this post to clarify some of my thoughts. This series of posts has been prompted by Robert Darnton’s latest essay in the New York Review of Books on “Google and the Future of Books.” Darnton’s call for the need to create a Digital Republic of Learning led me to wonder what it would mean to democratize access to early modern books. Does access to those books equal understanding those books? Perhaps. But not necessarily. As I argue in my last post, early modern books look different from modern books in ways that alienate us from the books and from their texts. There is a lot going on in Darnton’s piece that I don’t address in my…
democratizing early english books
So after my last post, I’ve been thinking about what it means to make digital early modern books available in the sort of democratic access that Darnton hopes for in an Digital Republic of Learning. My final point, in that post, was that when my students are first confronted with early English books, they don’t know how to make sense of them. Here’s one example of the sort of book that might perplex them: Just looking at the page opening brings up some of the details that estrange us from early books: the catchwords at the bottom of the page, the signature marks, the fists and marginal comments. None of those are details that we are used to seeing in how today’s books are laid out. And then there’s the text: This is a pretty straightforward and easy-to-read example. But even so, there are the long s’s that look like…