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!

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

An Annotated Postcard

Last December, when I carried out phase I of my preliminary survey in the tremendous special collections of the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences my dreams of a marginalia fetishist came true once again. It turned out that my hopes of finding Central European scholars annotating works on calendars and chronology and polemicizing with Scaliger, Clavius, Petavius, Calvisius et consortes by means of annotations left on the pages of their books won’t be limited to the (rich enough) set of glosses left by Joannes Broscius and a bundle of anonymous libri annotati found here and there but will be expanded by at least one more reader who can be identified and whose annotations can be linked with his own works. This is the case of Peter Crüger (1580-1639), professor of astronomy and poetics in the Gymnasium Academicum in Gdańsk, one of the three famous Lutheran educational centers in the broadly understood Pomerania region.

Gdańsk Library is well-known as a treasure trove of various unique primary sources to the intellectual history of the region and its institutions and it seems that even after many years of scholarly efforts there are materials that have never been studied closely or have been studied for wrong reasons. This is the case of Crüger, whose annotations, mostly those left in the 3rd edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (now preserved in the Copernicus Museum in Frombork) attracted attention of scholars not due to the fact that he was an scholar in his own right, but mostly because he was a teacher of a much greater mind, i.e. Johannes Hevelius. This attitude can be best observed in a 3-pages long article published ca. 70 years ago by Tadeusz Przypkowski. In it, Przypkowski presented Crüger’s annotations in his copy of the 3rd edition of De revolutionibus but the conclusion he drew is somewhat surprising as he postulated creation of a monograph of Hevelius! It seems that only Owen Gingerich, in his Census of the first and second edition of Copernicus’s groundbreaking work did Crüger justice, presenting him as an actual reader and giving a very concise yet instructive report on the contents of his marginalia in one of the Moscow copies of De revolutionibus.

Title page of Astronomia instaurata (so-called 3rd edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus), owned in turn by Peter Crüger and Johannes Hevelius; Nicolaus Copernicus Museum, Frombork, Poland

 

Apart from these two volumes, notes in Crüger’s hand seem to be a virgin land and I am going to explore it a little bit, starting from the calendrical and chronological corner yet I guess there may be also some other areas that turn out worth exploring.

My December visit to Gdańsk proved to be only a beginning of a longer journey. After studying few books annotated by Crüger it turned out that one of them is preserved in quite a surprising location:

My March trip to the 2015 Annual Meeting in Berlin, where I organized a series of panels on chronology in the early modern period, seemed to be an excellent occasion to have a look at this volume. On Wednesday before the official proceedings of the RSA began, I spent a lovely morning at the Library of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam-Babelsberg where a copy of Kepler’s Astronomia nova, owned in turn by Crüger and Hevelius, is preserved. It is a fine volume which was carefully restored in 1950’s and all the annotations except for few minor ones have survived until today in highly legible form. I am really happy for two reasons: this brief, technical visit allowed me to pick up a single yet quite substantial piece of a puzzle which can be somehow linked to the astronomical workshop of Crüger and at the same time, like all good marginalia (should) do, opens up new paths for further queries.

Two days after my visit to Postdam and just seconds after the chronological panels, a bucket of cold water was poured on my head. I went to the roundtable session celebrating the 25th anniversary of Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s seminal essay on Gabriel Harvey’s reading of Livy. One of the most important things I learned during this fabulous meeting is that Grafton and Jardine, calling themselves “granpa and grandma of marginalia studies”, are not satisfied with the way their article was applied and imitated in further studies on early modern readers and that they ment something different than establishing a simple generative model for writing an endless series of papers on ‘X reading Y‘. While I believe every case is different and it always depends on the skills and approach of particular historian what s/he will eventually do with such kind of primary sources as marginalia, I must admit that Grafton and Jardine diagnosed an important illness (or a sin) of letting oneself believe that finding a reader and his annotations is a sufficient condition to write yet another study following the rules established by their 1990 paper. I have spent few past years with annotations, either doing research for my PhD, then moving on to other fields, and it was last December when the symptoms of this illness (or inclination towards this sin) struck me for the first time. It was then when I saw Crüger’s annotations for the first time during my visit to Gdansk: they simply triggered a feeling of finding something familiar yet new, something that you dealt with earlier and you know how to proceed with this kind of sources (or at least you believe you know) and at the same time something idiomatic and unique, which will force you to find new way of writing on this kind of sources even if you feel OK with the way you wrote your earlier studies. This feeling of familiarity can be misleading and cannot end well and it always takes great effort to overcome one’s mental and scholarly habits in order to find new approach and I think the apparent ease with which the “Studied for Action” paper can be emulated is the main fault for the entire confusion about the method and purpose of studying marginalia.

Certainly, there are some aspects of early modern annotations that can be treated as basis for data-mining and large scale analysis based on a large corpora of libri annotati – this is mostly the purpose of a new exciting project on the “Archaeology of Reading” with Grafton and Jardine as principal co-investigators. I really look forward to the development of this enterprise and I can only imagine what kind of tools and results the project will bring over the years to come. Yet, being also an admirer of micro-narratives, I do not want to let early modern readers dissolve in the pool of hundreds and thousands of annotations. I am not sure if the authors of the paper celebrated in Berlin would agree with me that what makes the set of marginalia writing about is the fact that they allow one to go beyond the closed cycle of references between a series of books and look at the relationship between these annotations and some other kinds of evidence. It is really difficult to find such a link in some cases, sometimes it is not necessary – it depends on the kind of history you would like to write and how far your sources and your imagination can take you. And I believe that this fact gives me at least partial absolution: “my” readers were involved in public activity, both as teachers and polemicists, and even if large chunks of their annotations have a technical or theoretical character and create a coherent system of internal references between piles of books, some of them still extant, some of them perished, they can be linked to their involvement in the public sphere where they translated their professional knowledge into the more popular kind of discourse and tried to shape views of citizens without professional training in calendrical astronomy or training of any other kind.

Having said this, I must confess that my sin drove me again to Gdańsk where I arrived yesterday and will stay until Friday, carrying out phase II of my survey. Here I am, an irredeemable sinner, willing to study marginalia in hope that there is some kind of order that can be derived out of them and that they can create pieces of narrative that can be written on Crüger – not as an isolated scholarly reader but as a scholar who by means of reading and linking various texts laid foundation for education of next generations of citizens of Gdansk/Danzig and whose knowledge of astronomy and the way it can be applied to chronology allowed him to get involved into public debate on Gregorian calendar and use chronology as a vehicle for other kinds of knowledge. Having transcribed a large portion of Crüger’s notes today and awaiting to see some other of his volumes over the next four days, I am still thinking about differences and similarities between him and other readers I have studied or read about. When you are sitting in a reading room, trying to decipher Crüger’s tiny hand, focusing on direct relations between the note left in the margin and printed text, trying to figure out the real meaning of all these references to Josephus, Bucholzer, Tremellius, Scaliger, Casaubon, Kepler and Petavius – it is easy to forget about the reality outside the library. Bu the world behind the library’s walls does exist, just as it did in Crüger’s times – and this is probably one of the arguments which gives some value added to the study of annotations and makes this kind of scholarship useful not only for book historians and manuscript fetishists but also for people interested in social interactions and the history of shaping of public sphere through of education, scholarship, and debate.