Beware the Rheticus’s prophecy!

Prophecies were ‘bestsellers’ not only in the Middle Ages but also in early modernity. More than year ago I started to work on a commentary to the edition of the manuscript copy of Jan Latosz’s Przestroga (A Warning), the only surviving witness to this astrological and chronological dissertation published in Cracow in 1595. At some point I had to postpone my work as I encountered a puzzling passage which required some time to solve it.

Tu na tym miejscu zdało mi się przypomnieć prognosticon zacnego onego Doktora Rhetykusa, które prawie in ore omniu[m] jest, bo wszytkim w Polszcze wiadome, które ponieważ ex parvis initiis i dosyć słabego gruntu swój początek wiedzie, gdyż ex simplici interrogatione, a to quaestione swe ma fundamenta takie i tak się iści sprawa, powodzenie jego, począwszy od króla Augusta, królów polskich aż do tego czasu. Cóż rozumieć możemy o tych, które ex causis necessariis naturalibus pochodzą? Prawdziwe być nie mają? Praktyka takowa Retykowa wypełniła się już na trzech królach polskich …

 

It happened to me here to remind about the prognostication of the good Doctor Rheticus, which is on everyone’s lips and is known to everyone in Poland. Although its origins and ground are modest and weak as it is a result of simple interrogation, it has some foundations and the fates of the kings of Poland starting from the king [Sigismundus] Augustus [predicted in it] happen to fulfil. What should we understand, then, about those which come from the necessary natural causes? Should they be considered true? The Rheticus’s practice has already came true for three Polish kings …

 

Latosz’s reference to Rheticus in a 17th-century manuscript copy of his Przestroga of 1595 (MS Warsaw, National Library, 6631 III, fol. 20v, fragment; source: Polona)

In the next sentence Latosz provided brief characteristics of the first three elective kings of Poland, Henri de Valois, Stephen Báthory and Sigismund III Vasa so it seemed that my astrologer was actually paraphrasing a text known back then as a work of Rheticus. The first book I turned to to check this was Ludwik Aleksander Birkenmajer’s monumental study on Nicolaus Copernicus which is a real treasure trove of Copernicus- and Rheticus-related archival bits and pieces. It turned out that indeed, there is something like Rheticus prognostication on the elective monarchs but the text edited by Birkenmajer and taken from a manuscript miscellany held at the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow seemed to be slightly different from the one Latosz referred to as the latter gave descriptions in different order. Birkenmajer mentioned that there are also some other copies of Rheticus text which are located, among others, in the Ossolineum Library (now divided between Wrocław and Lviv) and in Vatican so I decided to take this lead. Unfortunately, consulting the scans from these libraries made it even worse as these copies also seemed to be substantially different from the samples given by Latosz in 1590s and by Birkenmajer in 1900.

First, I thought it was just a mere accident but then I referred to Karl-Heinz Burmeister’s three-volume thorough account of Rheticus’s biography and works and it turned out that things were even more complicated than I initially thought. Not only these few manuscripts mentioned by Birkenmajer turned out to be merely a drop in the bucket of the corpus of witnesses to Rheticus text but, as it turned out, they had very little in common with the text Burmeister published as the prognostication on the kings of Poland. The piece published by Birkenmajer and those I found in Ossolineum in Wrocław and in Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv were rather laconic in comparison to the elaborate horoscope edited by Burmeister.

Soon I came to realize that all scholars who were referring to Rheticus’s prognostication over the past hundred years were playing a blind man’s buff. Every one of them, after seeing few manuscripts, took for granted that the other copies were pretty much alike so if someone examined a late seventeenth-century simplified copy consisting of schematic list of kings he or she simply assumed that other witnesses, known from catalogue descriptions, are exactly the same. I also suppose that even Burmeister himself did not bother to consult all the manuscripts he included on his list of witnesses as some of the copies from Gdansk were considered lost at the moment when he published his study. However, in one thing Burmeister was right, i.e. in giving the privileged position to the manuscript that is now located in the University Library in Wrocław and which provides the most plausible version of Rheticus’s text. Unlike many other manuscripts related to this prognostication, it contains elements of astrological apparatus, including the precise time for which the horoscope was erected as well as an astrological diagram showing the positions of planets at the moment of interrogation. All these elements together with the elaborate characteristics of kings make it look like a work of a genuine sixteenth-century astrologer. The only tiny problem related to this manuscript is the fact that it comes from the eighteenth, not the sixteenth century…

The most reliable witness to Rheticus’s horoscope – MS Wrocław, University Library, Akc. 1949/594, fol. 56v, fragment

As much as I wanted to believe that Burmeister made the right choice, there were still few question that required some answers. Why should we believe that the 18th-century manuscript should be treated as a key witness to the tradition of text dating back to the second half ot the 16th century? What happened to the Rheticus’s autograph? What are the origins of the prognostication as such? Is it possible to reconstruct the process of textual transmission from the Wrocław MS to the dwarfed copies I saw at the beginning of my investigation? Finally, what about other texts that appear to be somehow linked to Wrocław MS but their form does not resemble even the dwarfed, simplified copies?

While I have no idea what happened to Rheticus’s autograph the answer to the question about the origin of the Wrocław MS and the prophecy as such seems to be quite plausible. The manuscript used by Burmeister is an 18th-century copy of papers of Andreas Dudithius, Catholic bishop, Antitrinitarian and diplomat in the service of Maximilian II. The original papers were lost at some point but before this happened some local historian aware of the importance of Dudith copied them and surrounded with some factual annotations. As to Dudith himself, his connections with Rheticus are quite well documented. Their paths have crossed in Cracow when the first served as imperial envoy and intelligencer and the latter pursued his career of physician and astrologer and got close to the local centres of power. During their stay in Cracow, Dudith has created a circle of erudites interested in astronomy and Rheticus was one of its members. It is quite possible, then, that Dudith was one of the first readers of the horoscope. Although, as Gábor Almási has shown, Dudith was not very much keen on astrology – in fact, he was rather sceptical about it – he was an experienced politician, so it is also possible that he was the actual originator of the whole astrological enterprise or that he quickly incorporated it into his own political and diplomatic agenda. Even if he wasn’t behind the creation of the horoscope and the prognostication was either made of pure curiosity or commissioned by the royal court, it is quite reasonable to assume that Dudith played a significant role in disseminating the text by means of correspondence and there are some fragments in letters to and from him that clearly show that he introduced some astrological pieces into the Central European information exchange network. Being a representative of the Habsburg emperor in the capital of a country which was about to experience a political change, Dudith must have fell back on all possible means to win favor of Polish nobility and secure the election of the Habsburg candidate to the Polish throne.

As my interest in the history behind the Rheticus’s prognostication grew bigger, I kept looking for some other witnesses to this text and started consulting them, either in person or by means of microfilms and digital copies. Soon it turned out that some of them generally confirm the contents of the Wrocław MS although none of them contained the astrological chart and their astrological layer was heavily corrupted. In the meantime, the pool of manuscripts started to reveal some other curious aspects. For instance, soon it turned out that the prognostication was translated not only into German, what has been noted by Burmeister, but also into Polish and while the German version, most likely linked to the city of Gdansk, was consistent in all copies, the Polish had few very distant variants.

The analysis of these texts did not allow me to reconstruct the precise devolution of the text, from the inextant archetype (substituted by the Wrocław MS) to the most corrupted versions – there were simply too many differences between them to decide which one should be superior to another, especially if they all come from the second half of the seventeenth century and from different locations. The process of collecting all witnesses allowed me instead to do other thing, i.e. to analyse the process of condensation of the original horoscope into the form of a popular prophecy which had very little to do with the text that was authored by the disciple of Copernicus. One of the aspects of this process was the simplification of the text: first, the astrological apparatus was abandoned, then some of the characteristics got abridged, and the latest versions of the prophecy, although their titles still echoed the original horoscope, consisted merely of a list of two- or three-word characteristics of future kings of Poland. Another aspect is the fading memory of Rheticus as the author of the horoscope or, as you like, the elective prophecy. Latosz was able to refer to the author of Relatio prima thanks to the fact he was well aware of the astrological traditions of Cracow and he did this in 1590s, only two decades after Rheticus’s death. But these details must have fell into oblivion or simply seemed irrelevant to the members of nobility who continued to copy this text into their miscellanies until early eighteenth century. When one takes a look at all versions of the title she will immediately notice a long parade of names that have very little to do with Rheticus and one of the late 17th-century copies of the heavily abridged Latin text of the prophecy names ‘some Greek’ as the author, while another copy mentions ‘Doctor Clitricius”. There is some wisdom in it as, up to a point, ‘Rhetici’ and ‘Graecii’ or ‘Clitricii’ sound alike, but this manuscript, like many others, shows that the general astrological provenance of the text and the aura of secret knowledge were much more important to the users of this text than the actual identity of its author.

Rheticus disguised as a Greek in MS Warsaw, National Library, 6647 II, fol. 267v, fragment; source: Polona

Rheticus as ‘Doctor Klitricius’ in the Polish version of the prophecy, MS Warsaw, National Library, 6634 III, fol. 207r, fragment; source: Polona

What is the reason, one might ask, why we should beware the Rheticus’s prophecy? Since the expiry date for this horoscope expired long ago there is nothing to worry about on the astrological level, yet on the scholarly one there is. It is a common problem for all scholars who are trying to stabilize the text to decide when to cease their pursuit of further copies, especially if there is no central manuscript. In result of my chase I managed to collate the Wrocław MS with other witnesses to the longest version of the horoscope, complicating thus basic edition created by Burmeister. I also edited some variants of this text that document other stages of its degeneration and language versions. And in general I feel that the results of my toils are legible and shed some critical light on the to date claims about the Rheticus’s text. Yet, even now, when my two articles on the topic – one discussing the origins of the horoscope and the Dudith’s involvement, the other focused on the manuscript tradition – have been sent to the press and will appear later this year, I keep thinking about other possible copies of the prophepcy that should have been included but I was not aware of their existence. So even if there is nothing baleful in the horoscope as such, studying it may lead to a kind of textual anxiety which may urge one to check compulsively manuscript catalogues in hope of tracing another witness to the text and to keep leafing through hundreds of pages of uncatalogued manuscript miscellanies in search of just one more copy of this incredibly popular text.

On card catalogues

The yesterday’s post at Folger Library’s Collation brought back some memories of all the card catalogues I have studied back and forth over the past years, starting from the catalogue rooms of the Jagiellonian Library and the Czartoryski Library in Kraków through many other collections. I completely agree with Abbie Weinberg’s diagnosis and I also believe that the traditional card catalogue can be a powerful research tool which in some cases may prove to be much more useful or inspiring than its brand new, completely digital, glimmering online version and there are probably many other researchers who can confirm this. In this post, I would like to illustrate Abbie’s remarks with two catalogue anecdotes related to my own research.

Last August, I visited the City Library in Elbląg (Elbing) hoping to find some annotated volumes that could show some forms of reception of early modern chronological controversies. Over the years I have developed a long check list of names and subjects which I try to verify methodically in almost every library I visit. When I was preparing for my trip to Elbląg, I checked their online catalogue, noted down all the shelfmarks that I needed and sent them in advance to the library so that at least some portion of the books would be waiting for me on Monday morning. On the first day I saw a trolley filled with volumes that I ordered and I was getting ready to have a look at them when the librarian instructed me that they have also some other volumes by the authors I am interested in. It turned out that the online catalogue does not provide full information about their holdings as there is a number of titles that can be found only in the traditional card catalogue. The reason for this lies in the fact that in the process of cataloguing of the special collections somebody made a decision to include ONLY the items that were bound as the first positions of Sammelbände and to skip other titles. If one would base her research only on the online catalogue and would never get in touch with the librarians she would never know that one of the composite volumes contains a brochure on comets by Bartholomew Keckermann with an dedication in author’s hand (call no. Pol.7.II.2419–2426) or to discover the heavily annotated collection of early sixteenth-century astronomical prints by Johannes Sacrobosco, Johannes de Glogovia and Andreas Perlach, followed by a set of notes by some anonymous sixteenth-century student (call no. Pol.6.II.211–216). Imagine that you are interested in preparing a census of Keckermann’s works in European libraries or you are chasing annotated copies of Perlach’s textbook that are scattered around the world (as Darin Hayton did in his magnificent recent study of astrology at the court of Maximilian I) – without the (unofficial) knowledge of discrepancies between the card and online catalogues and consulting the card catalogue (or asking the librarians to do this on your behalf) you would probably overlook a number of titles hidden deep in the stacks. In this case the analogue card catalogue remains the basic reservoir of knowledge about the full contents of the Elbląg collections – consulting the online catalogue may bring you results as the following:

(The necessity of consulting the card catalogues, either on site, or in digitized form or mediated by some incredibly patient librarian leads obviously to another issue, that is the limits of this kind of research and the criterion for saying stop at some point, but this is a topic I would like to keep for another occasion.)

Another anecdote is related to my personal pursuit of books annotated and/or owned by Peter Crüger. As I explained in one of older posts, the biggest (and, historically speaking, natural) repository of Crüger’s books is the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences, although a number of his libri annotati can be found in few other locations. In order to make sure that there are no other titles in Gdansk that could contain Crüger’s marginalia, I travelled there a number of times and spent ca. 20 working days browsing the traditional card catalogue and leafing hundreds of volumes. Yet doing one’s research in the special collections of the Gdansk Library is not that simple. Its card catalogue is a kind of a historical monument which documents efforts made by generations of German and Polish librarians who worked at this institution over the past two centuries, organizing its vast and rich holdings into thematic clusters and creating tools for finding volumes. This multigenerational nature of the catalogue makes it a unique material object in its own right. The drawers are filled with cards made of various kinds of paper, some of them very thin and fragile, some quite thick. The handwriting on the cards (I don’t recall seeing a single typewritten card!) is sometimes really awful so if you recognize your author but do not remember or do not know the title of his work, it is nearly impossible to decipher it and write down on the order slip. Once you get the author, title, year of publication and the shelfmark, it is good to check the latter against the subject catalogue which has the form of a series of monumental handwritten volumes and contains annotations by postwar librarians who left information about possible war losses. Between the card catalogue room and the bookshelf filled with tomes of the subject catalogue begins the real adventure as one needs to learn the whole system and begin to work his or her way through the collection. Although a catalogue, with its alphabetical order, clear system of shelfmarks and well-organized rows of cards put in drawers may seem to be a simple tool it has also some mysteries and secrets. For a majority of volumes that I saw in Gdansk (and, as I said, I saw quite a lot of them) this worked quite smoothly. But with time the system started to reveal some discrepancies that can be understood or explained only by a librarian who has a lot of experience in tracking down the volumes between the stacks. This is actually a matter of transmission of expert hermetic knowledge which cannot be learned in the university classrooms where the future librarians are trained but can be gained only through practice. During my last visit to Gdańsk, in early December 2015, I decided to have a look at the copies of Heinrich Pantaleon’s works. At some point I received two titles I have ordered (Chronographia Ecclesiae Christi of 1568 bound with works by Clemens Schubert, shelfmark Lb 1131 2^o, and Martyrum historia of 1563 bound with the 1559 Basel edition of John Foxe’s Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum … pars prima, shelfmark Uph. fol. 116). Neither of them contained annotations in Crüger’s hand so I made some basic notes about the volumes and returned them quickly at the circulation desk. To my amazement, it turned out that there is a problem with another copy of Chronographia Ecclesiae Christianae (Basel: Nicolaus Brylinger, 1551) as the librarians cannot recognize the shelfmark (XX C fol. 25²). First, they suspected that I miscopied the shelfmark, so we went to the card catalogue room, I showed the card and for the next two hours I could observe a number of Gdańsk librarians of various generations walking between the two catalogues and the stock, discussing the possible explanations of this problem. It turned out that nobody has ever seen this kind of shelfmark and that I accidentally digged up some archaeological layer of the catalogue which was completely forgotten. The most plausible explanation would be to assume that in the process of recataloguing of the collection somebody must have forgotten to change the shelfmark on the card or to prepare the new one and that this singularity is a kind of fossil documenting earlier stages of the development and organization of this collection. This, however, did not explain the fact that the subject catalogue did not contain references to this particular copy of Pantaleon’s work and, again, it is possible that it was lost either long before the introduction of the current system of shelfmarks (which is actually a work of German librarians inherited and maintained by their Polish successors) and hence the book never received the new shelfmark.

Although my desire to see the volume was never fulfilled, I learned an important lesson on different level: even such a prima facie simple tool as card catalogue requires interpretation and expert knowledge. This knowledge remains tacit and inactive for most of the time, but on special occasions like this missing copy of Pantaleon, has to be activated and this is only possible thanks to the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another. And just like old books, catalogues sometimes also require an archaeological approach and toolbox.

Virtual Museums and Time

Few years ago I had the occasion to observe the heroic beginnings of the Virtual Museums of Lesser Poland (Wirtualne Muzea Małopolski, hereafter WMM) project which is aimed at the three-dimensional photographic documentation of selected historical exhibit items from the museums scattered throughout this historical region of Poland. Back then, apart from being a PhD student at the Jagiellonian University, I worked as editor at the Autoportret quarterly and thanks to the fact that both the magazine and the WMM project are based at the same institution allowed me to observe fragmentarily the selection of the equipment and listen to some of discussions about first test sessions.

Few years later, in the fall of 2014, I received a letter from Kinga Kołodziejska of the WMM. It turned out that apart from the traditional (albeit 3D) presentation of the items the team created a section dedicated to a more elaborate interpretations or essays based on the pieces presented in the online collection and written by scholars coming from various corners of academia. Kinga asked me to write a piece on broadly understood time and the offer was simply too tempting to turn it down. Unfortunately, time was not on our side and the final version of my essay had to wait up until the vernal equinox of 2016 to see the digital daylight. But here it is, in Polish and English, available for browsing and downloading and provided with awesome graphic interpretation designed by Anna Zabdyrska.

I wish to thank the WMM team for their invitation and patience and I kindly invite readers of CU to dive into the river of time.

Serendipity in provenance research: A postscript

It’s been quite a while since I presented here the Serendipity Trilogy about the unexpected discovery of two books annotated by Joannes Broscius that were purchased in the second half of the 20th century by the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library. The reality wrote a postscript to this story as my article providing an extended discussion of these two small volumes owned previously by Broscius has appeared in the recent volume of Folia Toruniensia, a yearbook dedicated to book history. Although this article is rather technical and contributory and will be anly a tiny element of the overall output of the project, I am really happy about this publication for two reasons: (1) the article appeared in a journal which is dedicated to presentation of research based of local special collections; (2) its publication allows me to spread further my web of commentaries to Broscius’s papers (and it will take some time before I settle the score with him!).

For those who are interested, the electronic version of the journal is available through the regional digital library and the local television even informed about the publication of the yearbook on its daily news show!

Christmas, brimstone and calendar

When one is writing about historical issues related to Christmas, it is quite natural to include something about the nature of the star of Bethlehem, chronology of  the life of Jesus or the development of the very feast of Nativity and ancient and modern controversies related to it. While I do believe all these issues are fascinating, it is sometimes good to find some other Christmas-related topic. One of them can be found in a sixteenth-century Polish text.

The polemical writings related to the introduction of Gregorian calendar took different rhetorical forms: some of them were written as satirical dialogues, some of them pretended learned treatises (although their authors were far from being learned), finally some of them hidden the polemical content under the costume of good old sermon. One of such works is a calendrical bestseller, Two sermons on the calendar reform (O poprawie kalendarza kazanie dwoje, 1587) by Stanislaw Grodzicki SJ, which was published three times within the period of two years and is actually one of the most sophisticated and elaborate texts that were produced during this interconfessional exchange. Grodzicki was a well-trained preacher and althought it is not quite sure whether his written ‘sermons’ reflect exactly the sermons he delivered in person (probably not), it is quite striking that he mastered a substantial number of rhetorical devices and knew very well how to tie them together in order to create a convincing rhetorical structure.

Today I will spare you the details of Grodzicki’s argumentation and will keep them for some other occasion but I thought that one exemplum introduced by the Polish Jesuit is worth mentioning on the first day of Christmas (although I must warn you it is quite horrifying!)

The other example is more recent and of such nature that I can hardly imagine something more relevant. It is related to events which took place a couple weeks ago at the Prague Castle during the Emperor’s stay. On the Day of Nativity a certain important man who was well-experienced in the fireworks craft took his servants or companions and launched his maroons and fireworks by the very walls of the cathedral church in order to celebrate the wedding of his Master, Lord Rosenberg, the highest senator of the Bohemian Crown. And since it was impossible to perform this show without any noise, the Catholics reprimanded him not to do this on such a solemn day and occasion in order not to incur Lord’s anger. But he did not care about these admonitions, made laugh of them and said that he did not care about the corrected calendar and he wanted to celebrate the feast according to the old one. By the mysterious act of mighty God few hours later the gunpowder caught fire, made a great noise and thunder, and burnt severely both the master and his servants. The neighbours have gathered immediately and saw figures looking more like devils than men, half-alive, taken straight from the fire, confessing their sins, talking about God’s miracle and asking for a confessor. The latter, when he finally arrived, had listened to the confessions of all three men who renounced their heresy and recognized one Roman Catholic Church. The priest absolved them from heresy and other sins and, following the Catholic tradition, gave them the sacrament of our Lord’s body. After two hours from accepting the Holy Sacrament two comrades rendered up their souls to God and so did their master few hours later at dawn. Thus our Lord Jesus Christ by means of, so to say, one sermon of brimstone fire converted three souls and at the same time confirmed his decision announced through the hands of his Vicar and showed his grace to Catholics by saving the Prague cathedral and castle from the danger of fire.

Detail of p. 25 of the 3rd edition of S. Grodzicki’s Two Sermons on Calendar Reform
(Vilnius 1589)

Grodzicki’s Sermons will become a part of the critical edition of polemical writings I have been working on for the past ten or fifteen months. The book will appear in Polish at some point but before I send the final manuscript to the publisher, I need to explain few stories as the one above. If you happen to know any late sixteenth-century texts that could serve the Polish priest as a source for his explosive exemplum, do let me know! (While the main protagonists like Rudolf II or William of Rosenberg are quite easy to identify, the main source of the anectode remains unknown – at least for me.) Also, if you know any other calendar reform-related miracula (both those confirming the rightness of Gregorian calendar, like the one above, or those showing its unquestionable fallaciousness), please let me know – it would be fascinating to know how many stories like these were spread throughout Europe in order to prevent people from falling into one of two main calendrical heresies.

Meanwhile, I wish you a happy festive season (regardless of calendar system you may use). Stay tuned for more news about the project – these should arrive in early January.

A Warning: An Interlude

While the Warning cycle, commenced at the beginning of January, is still awaiting its continuation and so does my work on the critical edition of Latosz’s manuscript, I recently had the occasion to talk about some of the issues related to this astrological and chronological work which had puzzled me for quite a while. This was possible thanks to the invitation from prof. Alina Nowicka-Jeżowa who has kindly asked me to give a talk at the December meeting of the Warsaw Old Polish Thursdays. The talk I gave yesterday gave me an excellent occasion to distance myself from my work and to see gaps in the whole structure which is still under construction and think through the things that are still ahead of me.

Right now I am somewhere in the middle of the road, which began with the ‘discovery’ of the manuscript and its voracious transcription, resulted so far with an initial article published last year in Terminus and, hopefully, will end up as a study and critical edition. I should be able to get back to the cycle in the next year with few more exciting details. In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to a podcast from the yesterday’s seminar, which is available at the website of the Committee on the Study of the Reformation.

 

Pervolvi totum librum…

It’s time for a quick recapitulation of my last week’s visit to Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences. I was going there in high spirits as I was hoping to find at least one or two more volumes annotated by Peter Crüger. What I found instead was a large pile of books that were never actually read (or, at least some of them, were read but not in a very active way). My chase for Crüger’s marginalia slowed down a bit and I felt like my protagonist, when he took his copy of Petavius’s De doctrina temporum and jotted down in his microscopic hand that “he paged through the entire book 1 of Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata a couple of times” (ibi horum plane nihil aliq[uo]ties p[er]volvi totum librum I) but he failed to find the original passage to which Petavius had made a reference to. I console myself that this kind of despair might be temporary and that there may be still some volumes that contain Crüger’s annotations. The output of the last week’s survey, however, is mostly negative.

I have compiled a list of authors and works to which Crüger’s annotations. Some of them are quite precise, like his reference to Simplicius’s commentary to Aristotle’s On heaven (Venice 1526 edition, in folio) so if the catalogue does not show any records of such edition I decided not to order any other copies, at least for now. But some of his references are less precise and thus call for massive orders and may lead one eventually to insanity. Sometimes he just compares his own copy with the edition cited by, let’s say Petavius or Scaliger, but provides only a note that the text in question is on a different page (“mihi pag. XYZ”), sometimes he just mentions a title. It is ok, if he quotes works that had two or three editions and two or three copies are actually in the library. But when it comes to such authors as Livy, published a number of times and in all possible formats – it can have devastating consequences for researcher’s psyche, physical condition of the librarian responsible for taking the books from the shelves, and can eventually lead to the significant deterioration of mutual relations of both sides of the reference desk. I have filled in an endless number of order slips and paged through a large number of volumes, just to find out in the end that only one of them bears annotations made by hand that resembles the one of Crüger but even in this case I cannot be sure. That’s the other side of the coin: finding out that some of the volumes were never read or if they were, they belonged not to the people we are interested in, at least at this particular moment.

As for me, I still think I could be perfectly happy with the rich corpus of Crüger’s annotations I have gathered in Gdańsk, Berlin and Frombork – they are consistent, thorough, some of them are pretty extensive and if I only manage to interpret them in a proper way, they can shed some light on his reading techniques (on the history-of-reading level) and the way he found his way into the middle of calendrical and chronological controversy (on the scholarly level). But despite this, I still nurture a kind of hope that some day I will dig up a volume annotated by Crüger that will not belong to the corpus of astronomical, historical and chronological texts and will help me, for instance, in answering such questions as how did he read literary works. Right now, the method based on massive orders and compiling a long check list of names failed. This makes me wonder whether it would make sense to get back to Gdańsk in order to check another pile of volumes based on Crüger’s remarks and whether this method is worth following at all. Perhaps some other marginalia lovers who happen to read this blog will help me in solving this methodological issue – at the moment I feel as if I had a box of tasty cookies (i.e. identified books with annotations) and I am not sure whether it is good to abandon them in search for the mythical “cake” (that is, a further reconstruction of the library). Any suggestions will be most welcome!

Finally, the reason for this failure may lie not in the fact that these books did not survive. They could simply survive somewhere else. Collections were dispersed, scattered, moved, sold out, stolen and the fact that, for instance, Hevelius used some of Crüger’s books and bought them on the second hand market after his own library and observatory got burned down proves to the fact that not all Crügeriana found their way to the library of the Senate of Gdańsk. One of Crüger’s volumes, the 2^nd edition of Copernicus, is held in Moscow; one of his volumes was also identified at the Library of the Observatoire de Paris, the next two are in Potsdam and Frombork. So, perhaps, it is high time to follow the example set by Kees-Jan Schilt in his own quest for Newton’s libri annotati: if you are a special collections librarian or a student of early modern annotations, especially those left in astronomical works, and you think that you might have seen a book annotated by Crüger, do let me know at michal.choptiany[at]al.uw.edu.pl! Although books owned and/or used by Crüger do not have such easily identifiable features as those owned and/or used by Newton, I will be happy to share a set of samples of his handwriting and give more precise information about the way his hand can be identified.

Title page of Crüger’s copy of Copernicus’s Astronomia Instaurata; Frombork, Nicolaus Copernicus Museum, shelfmark MF/SD/321

A Moment of Wonder: Overlapping Networks

Last Friday, I gave a paper at the 106th Annual Meeting of the Polish Philological Society. A couple months ago, I was very happy to learn that this year’s session’s major theme would be the history of Latin and Greek letter as I have been hoarding a considerable pile of materials for quite a long time and I needed a decent stimulus to get back and start to try making sense out of them. The reason why these notes, transcriptions and scans were so neglected on my hard drive was the fact that they have actually very little to do with the calendrical debates I have been dealing with for the past two years. I gathered these materials back in January 2013 when I was in a kind of doctoral limbo, between the moment of submitting my dissertation for review and the ritual of public defense. I went for a couple of days to Zurich since I wanted to consult in person a particular copy of Nicolaus Hussovianus’s Carmen de bisonte, one of very few that survived and, luckily for me, annotated by Conrad Gessner. I had this tempting idea that by studying one book, or treating it as a kind of lense, or center of possible network of connections I will be able to work my way through at least some part of rich corpus of Gessneriana. The idea of having a look at an early modern polymath and naturalist dealing with information about an exotic, Eastern European animal excerpted from a poetical work and trying to include it into his body of work seemed quite promising and my former faculty was kind enough to support my research for the last time. In Zurich, I examined this and few other volumes annotated by Gessner and had a look at his rich Nachlass – a large collection of loose manuscripts of various kinds, which, taken together, make one of the best physical proofs that the experience of information overload in the sixteenth century was a fact and not only a projection of our contemporary concerns onto the distant past.

An annotated page of Gesner’s working copy of his Icones animalium of 1560 (Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, shelfmark NNN 44 | F, source: e-rara.ch)

Two pieces of Gessner’s Nachlass puzzled me in a particular way. These were two clumsy drafts of letters, written by Gessner and, from what I could read, addressed to Johannes Boner, a descendant of German family, nobleman and courtier of king Sigismund I the Old. Boner’s role in the whole history is much bigger than the few remarks I am going to include below but since I am in the middle of reorganizing my Zurich material and still would like to publish a study about my findings, I will jump to the part I am actually sure of and which puzzled and amazed me for the past few months, every time I got back to the ‘Gessner & Hussovianus’ file.

I still have some doubts related to the reading of certain fragments and Gessner’s inclusions and additions do not make it easy to stabilize the texts of these letters (an these two pieces of papers are the only copies known to me – originals on the Polish end apparently did not survive and there is no clean copy of Gessner’s letters in his Zurich papers). Despite these technical difficulties, it is quite clear from the legible fragments that they were conceived as letters of recommendation. The reason why the Swiss polymath wrote these two letters to Boner are quite clear: since they both belonged to the same correspondence network established between Bullinger in Zurich and the followers of Calvinism in Lesser Poland (Polonia Minor), it was quite natural for them not only to exchange views but also to develop their network even further. And here enter two characters: Anton Schneeberger and Georg Joachim Rheticus. Both were disciples of Gessner’s at some point of their education and, quite surprisingly, both ended up in Cracow in the same period: Schneeberger settled there in 1543 and Rheticus arrived only a year later. In this context letters of Gessner, addressed to a prominent Cracow figure, can and should be read as an attempt to clear the way for his two disciples. Although Gessner’s recommendations may seem quite conventional (we encounter praises of learnedness formulated in superlative so many times that we become callous to them), it is important that they apparently brought desired effects: Schneeberger settled in Cracow for good, got married, prospered quite well as a city physician and occasional collector of books, authored a handbook of military medicine, and eventually died there in 1581.

In case of Rheticus, the story is a bit more complicated as Cracow was not his final stop. From the point of view of Gessner’s letters, however, it is extremely important that these two scholars found a safe harbour in Cracow and entered the local intellectual elite. A couple of years ago, at the 2011 “Cultures of Knowledge” conference I listened to a great talk by Tamson Pietsch about the process of establishing the networks of trust among the Australian and UK-based physicists. And while late 19^th– early 20^th-century exchange between two distant milieus might seemed too modern for an early modernist, Pietsch in her paper provided a highly important point of view and introduced a crucial category of trust as a foundation for collaboration between the centres she studied. Now, after these few years, I believe that the idea of trust was also at play in the epistolary exchange between Gessner and Boner and should be considered as one of the key factors in the process of its development.

It is not the trust, however, which has been making me wonder for the past months, ever since I submitted my abstract. These were the quite unexpected developments within my ongoing project, which made me realize with great force how closely linked are the early modern figures that I study, starting with the Cracow reception of Ramism, through my Gessnerian episode, and up to some chapters in my ongoing research on Central European chronological debates. It was another correspondent of Gessner, a Polish nobleman Jan Łasicki (Joannes Lasicius) who served Peter Ramus as an emissary to Cracow and brought to the university a copy of his Scholarum physicarum libri VIII in 1566 (now, in the collections of Jagiellonian Library there is also a copy of Ramus’s Proemium mathematicum which the author gave to Łasicki a year later). Łasicki was important for the Ramist network as he helped Ramus to establish contact with another highly prominent figure on the early modern intellectual arena, i.e. John Dee. Next, we have the Polish-Swiss network, consisting of numerous names on both sides, with the Gessner’s sub-network as an object of my own study, hopefully to be concluded within a couple of months – this is another network. But the process of unfolding does not end here. When one takes a look for instance at a figure such as Rheticus s/he will realize immediately in how many fascinating directions this may lead him or her, starting with the great figure of Andreas Dudithius, a Catholic bishop and diplomat and later on a Socinian intellectual, through some minor characters that can lead one to another, equally or even more fascinating, corners of respublica litteraria of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. And what is amazing here is the fact that one can make this transition in few jumps!

Although I was well aware of this fact for quite a while, it struck me with a great force when I started putting together pieces of puzzle I encountered while creating a commentary to Johannes’s Latosinus astrological Warning which I mentioned at the beginning of this year. This idea will be developed in another post which, I think, will be a good occasion to get back and continue ‘the Warning cycle’ (which right now consists of one post, was originally conceived as a diptych but will be developed soon into a trilogy). Right now, I would like to just pin point the fact that we live in truly magnificent times when we can jump from one correspondence network to another. And this would be impossible without the efforts of such excellent teams as those gathered around such projects as the “Cultures of Knowledge” project in Oxford, the Dutch ePistolarium or the “Mapping the Republic of Letters” at Stanford, just to name the few. These projects make visible things that could escape one’s attention without the tools they provide, i.e. the fact of overlapping of certain networks and the very basic yet crucial fact that the center of one epistolary network is an element or branch of another, and the center of the second web of correspondents may be (and surely was) an element of epistolary circle of the third, fourth, nth corresponding intellectual or public figure of other kind. This, indeed, gives us a powerful tool for the study of early modern intellectual history and for understanding it as a cluster of dynamic systems and subsystems of personal and intellectual relations.

At this point, my confessions about the importance of networks may sound banal and I am sure I am basically preaching to the already converted but if you want to find out how did this work in case of Rheticus, stay tuned as the continuation of ‘the Warning cycle’ is coming!

On the Road: In Royal Prussia

It’s been quite a while since the last time I posted anything to this blog. This does not mean, however, that I quit my research, abandoned the idea, or decided to change profession. The last few months, apart from a two-week summer break dedicated solely to charging my mental and physical batteries, were actually quite intense and productive. I won’t annoy the readers with details as most of this intensity and productivity means simply sitting, reading, discussing, writing, revising and copy-editing – an endless loop known pretty well to those who are trying to make some sense out of the material they have gathered, find some new sources and publish essays on their findings in a place that would guarantee some level of readership to their work. Hopefully, some of the results of these efforts will see soon the printing press and the future posts published here will reveal some behind-the-scenes details related to other currents of my research.

Right after the summer holidays, at the turn of August and September, I rushed to Ermland, a region in the far North of Poland and visited two libraries. One of them, the Cyprian Kamil Norwid City Library in Elbląg (Elbing), was once a library of the Lutheran gymnasium, member of the famous Protestant triad consisting of educational institutions established in the 16^th century in Elbląg, Toruń (Thorn) and Gdańsk (Danzig) and radiating on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea and beyond. For those of you who have visited this blog earlier, the reason for this visit will be quite predictable: I was chasing for marginalia. There are many reasons why one should expect finding some libri annotati in a library like the one in Elbląg: such historical institutions usually hold not some random old prints but volumes that were actually used in local school(s) or read by local intellectuals and then were bequeathed to or purchased by the library.

This picturesque sequence of buildings, starting with the 14th-century former Holy Spirit church, is the house of the Elbląg Library (although its special collections are located across the street, in a 19th-century building)

There is always a chance that looking through a pile of volumes will bring some new materials that will shed some light on the topics one is working on – that’s what I do in every collection I visit, apart from consulting some unique prints and manuscripts that can be consulted only in this particular place. This kind of research requires time. My list of names worth checking is constantly growing and sometimes I feel as if I was creating an alternative version of the library catalogues: the catalogues of the libraries I visit, both the ones available online and the old-fashioned card catalogues that can be consulted on-site are extremely laconic and they very rarely provide information on the ownership marks and absence/presence of annotations. The provenance catalogue is usually a mythical box hidden in the restricted area and provided only upon special request. Should I add that such thing as a catalogue dedicated explicitly of libri annotati is only an object of wishful thinking? This always end up in massive orders, semi-automatic filling of order slips, great confusion about the shelfmarks in the end (“Have I seen this volume?”). On the last day of such a weekly visit I am usually totally confused (and so are the librarians).

Yet, with this method comes also a risk, a risk that the volumes one is hoping to see – those filled with marginalia with ownership annotations that can be easily tracked back to particular scholars – are not always those one eventually gets. And my visit to Elbląg gave me a lesson: do not expect too much, even if the catalogue seems to be rich and promising. This is not to say that I found nothing, in fact I digged up a lot of new materials which I would like to refer to in my future studies (some of them related to chronological debates, and some of them representing the ‘Ramist’ branch of my studies), but it simply did not bring any sources that could play a leading role in a yet another chronology-and-calendars narrative. Again, the hope to find some revelatory materials right behind the corner, in every library one pays a visit to can be deceptive so one needs to nourish it carefully, just in order to avoid grave disappointment that can paralyse further work. My visit to Elbląg was one of these hunting trips the results of which are, so to say, less spectacular but at the same time have broadened my knowledge about the specificity of local collections in the region I am particularly interested in, so despite this lack of fireworks I must say that I already have some plans where to use material the material I have seen there and this could not have happened without the help of helpful, friendly and patient staff (they are also blogging!).

Working space for visitors to the Library’s Special Collections Department

In the middle of my visit to Elbląg I took a one-day trip to Frombork (Frauenburg), one of the key cities in the intellectual and public biography of Copernicus. For quite a while I knew that the Library of the Nicholaus Copernicus Museum has in its collection of old prints a copy of the 3^rd edition of De revolutionibus, the one published in Amsterdam in 1617 and known under the title of Astronomia instaurata, which belonged to Peter Crüger, whom I mentioned in my penultimate post. There is only one, three pages long article dedicated to Crüger’s annotations in this volume and it seemed to me so confusing that I decided to combine these two research trips into one in order to examine the Copernicus volume in person. I am still digesting marginalia I transcribed there thanks to the hospitality of the Museum staff, trying to link them with other annotations left by this Danzig-based astronomer in volumes preserved in other libraries and, what is most important, I finally have a feeling that I am quite close to writing a large study on Crüger’s astronomical library, reading and writing habits, the way he worked with particular books, how he digested them in relation to particular scholarly plan and about his views on technical chronology. I had the occasion to discuss the preliminary ideas of this article with an excellent group of historians concerned with medieval and early modern writing practices during the “Loca scribendi” conference organized in Warsaw this June and I think that I have found a way to write about Crüger’s annotations which will take me at least a little beyond what I wrote about the first annotator I have studied, Joannes Broscius. Writing about Crüger is really important for the internal logic of my project, as it allows me to link various levels of my research, but it is also of great importance on the, so to say, personal level as I am seeking a way that would help me to avoid becoming a one trick historian.

A really nice plaque on the door to the Museum Library, used also as a bookplate

Leaving the methodological concerns aside, at least for now, I cannot start writing this essay, which will be probably a long one, without having another look at the books preserved in Gdańsk. So I decided to take another trip there, in order to verify my transcriptions (some of them were made in haste, 10 minutes before the closing of the library and few hours before my departure back home so I simply do not trust my memory and intuition). But the careful analysis of Crüger’s notes gave me a bundle of hints and leads I would like to verify, again, in hope that I will find at least one or two volumes he might owned and annotated or just annotated while working at the city library (back in the 17^th century leaving one’s annotations in the book belonging to a public institution was not considered a crime or violation of the regulations). I have printed out a set of transcriptions I have made so far and updated a list of volumes that I would like to consult next week – I guess it’s not a bad starting point for the execution of the plan described above.

Statue of Copernicus sitting reflectively by the heliocentric fountain at the market square in Frombork

After my return from Gdańsk, I am will be attending the 106th Annual Meeting of the Polish Philological Society organized in Toruń. And once the session is ended, I will be rushing towards another point on my map and yet another set of (this time confirmed) annotations, left by a first-class superstar early modern astronomer. Stay tuned for more news!

A Ramist Postscript

As I mentioned some time ago, part of my scholarly soul still belongs to Ramism. Although I have moved into a slightly different field, I wouldn’t be here  without my research on the reception of Ramism in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – it was then when I started to study Broscius’s marginalia and realized that he was involved in the calendrical debates and these two facts made me to think about carrying out a larger project that could embrace not only Broscius but also a number of other fascinating early modern figuers who got involved into these debates. After I completed my PhD I had to take a kind of intellectual leave from all these logical distinctions, branching schemes, anti-Aristotelian polemics and rather dry textbooks and the Ramist virus remained dormant for a while. It was thanks to my faculty colleague, Simon Burton, that we started to think about organizing a seminar on broadly understood theories of knowledge and arts in late medieval and early modern, mostly Central, Europe which allowed us to join our forces.

The seminar, scheduled to take place in less than four weeks, on the 28th and 29th of May, was actually one of the reasons I visited Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences two weeks ago. I wish I had more time to study Peter Crüger’s microscopic, erudite and highly critical marginalia related to chronology (although, in the long run, this might lead to a serious deterioration of my sight), the agenda of my visit was twofold and I spent at least half of my time in Gdańsk consulting manuscripts and books that have very little to do with chronology but will help me to shape the first version of my argument on the reception of Ramism in early modern Gdańsk/Danzig. This does not necessarily mean that I have to abandon Crüger – as a disciple of Danzig omnivorous logician and encyclopaedic polymath, Bartholomaeus Keckermann, he remains on the horizon as one of the elements of the picture I would like to include in my May paper, yet this time not as an active reader, but as an author of texts. (As an annotator, he will reappear in mid-June, at another exciting conference organized by Warsaw historians and dedicated to the manucript and handwriting cultures.)

Having said this, I am happy to officially announce the schedule of the Tree of Knowledge seminar and I really look forward to meeting all fabulous speakers and listening to their fascinating papers in Warsaw in a couple of weeks.