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.

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

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!

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.

 

Early modern polytheism?

One of the most amusing parts of reading through the vernacular sources related to the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is the possibility to get a closer look at the rhetorical invention of the authors involved in this debate or, as you like, a quarrel. I am hoping to create a catalogue of such arguments, enthymems, metaphors, images and analogies, in the future; some of them are quite funny, some are annoying and embarassing (especially those which are openly xenophobic, anti-Ruthenian or anti-Semitic), but each of them plays an important role in the disquisitions of particular authors. The list of such rhetorical and dialectical devices will appear here in due course, meanwhile l would like to draw the readers’ attention to one particular phrase which has been haunting me for some time.

In the previous post on Joannes Broscius’s vain search for citations of his works in Jan Dubowicz’s thesis on the true (i.e. Gregorian) calendar, I referred to Broscius’s two apologies of the reformed calendar. His contribution to the calendrical debate in Poland-Lithuania should not be limited, however, to these two small Polish prints. There is actually one more brochure, which was published right before the two Apologies came of the Kraków and Warsaw printing presses and for a change was written in Latin.

The brochure in question is Broscius’s Sermo, which is a transcript or rather an elaborated, longer mutation of a sermon that our Kraków astronomer gave at the provincial synod of the Roman Catholic dioecese of Lutsk in Volhynia.

Let’s put aside the rhetorical structure of the whole address and arguments employed by the author and focus on one particular passage. In it, on fol. B2r, the stream of Broscius’s fluent Latin ornated with citations from the Scripture, Galen, Hippocrates, Aurelius Augustinus, Cardinal Bellarmin, is interrupted by an alien object:

… Nunquam ego illos esse vere Unitos, credam, nisi quemadmodum unus est Deus, una fides, unum baptisma, unum quoque nobiscum Pascha confiteantur et celebrent; reliquis vero temporibus simul nobiscum laborent, simul a laboribus quiescentes Sanctorum festa et memoriam devote recolant: ac ne illud rudes e plebe Rutheni usurpent: “Mnoho se Bohow narodiło”. Simul nobiscum Christo Domino e Virgine Sanctissimae nato, aurum, thus et myrrham offerant …

The phrase in quotation marks is an attempt to transcribe a Ruthenian quote with use of Latin alphabet and it means literally “Many Gods were born”.

But what does this phrase actually mean? One could begin to wonder, whether perhaps it is some kind of theological or even, God forbid, cosmological thesis? Was Broscius a hidden follower of Giordano Bruno’s theory of the infinite number of worlds? Did he believe in the actual existence of numerous, parallel Earths with their own Jesuses, Bethlehems, Crucifixions and Resurrections. No matter how tempting this may seem and no matter how much one would like to see Broscius as a model for one of the protagonists of Umberto Eco’s fantasy on Baroque science, i.e. the 1994 novel The Island of the Day Before, or as an ancestor of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz or David K. Lewis, I must disappoint you – this is not the case. As far as I can tell, Broscius was neither of them. One should also rule out suppositions of some unknown kind of polytheism.

Nevertheless, the whole concept of the “plurality of Gods” adds some metaphysical spice to the Catholic-Uniate-Orthodox calendrical affair and takes the whole discussion to a new level, at least in the mind of an ontologically-sensitive reader. It is difficult to find either Broscius’s Sermo or in any other polemical writings some traces of reflection on what the actual liturgy and the liturgical year is. Yet, despite this lack of elaborated theory, there are bits and pieces of “folk theology” in which the liturgical year, with Christmas, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Ascension and Pentecost is a cyclical, repetitive reenactment of the life of Jesus, in which the symbolic, commemorative sphere of liturgy and the actual life of Jesus are so close, that one could say that the events described in the Gospels actually take place in an annual cycle. And everything would go well if not the discrepancies between the two calendars. The use of two systems of measuring of time caused various problems on the high, social, theological, scientific level, but it had also its own representation in the popular culture and popular discourse of the time. The image of “many Gods” who “were born” and, to follow up, were crucified and resurrected a respective number of times, reflects up to a point the popular understanding of the conflict between the two calendars. Hence the paradoxical situation in which one (Catholic) Jesus is born in Bethlehem, while the other (the Uniate and Orthodox one) is still in Mary’s womb, or a parallell image in which the Catholic Jesus has already resurrected, while the Uniate/Orthodox is just on his way to Jerusalem (at least in these years when the delay of the Orthodox Easter amounts to 7 days). Although this reasoning is based on the reading of the liturgical commemoration in realistic terms, hence it qualifies as a logical fallacy, it makes a highly stimulating image which can easily appeal to one’s imagination.

Finally, one should ask about the origin of the whole phrase in question. Since it comes from the popular or folk discourse, it is difficult, if not impossible, to indicate a source or give credits to one, particular author. In this case, however, we are lucky as Broscius left us a note. One can find it in a sammelband that belonged to Broscius’s library and which contains three works by Peter Crüger, a Gdańsk/Danzig astronomer, correspondent of Broscius and teacher of Hevelius. In the sammelband (Kraków, Jagiellonian Library, shelfmark Mag. St. Dr. 54955−54957 II P), on the upper endleaf, there is a note in Latin which reads as follows:

Cum esset innovatum Calendarium alioque iam de Nativitatis Christi a Latinis celebraretur quam a Graecis Ruthenis quidam [?] camino quasi [?] dixit: Mnoho se Bohow narodiło Id audivi ab illustrissimo Domino Nicolau Pac Episcopio Samogitiae Patavii.

As much as helpful this note may be, it still leaves us on the level of the learned Catholics, as the informant of Broscius was not a Ruthenian nobleman or cleric, not to mention a servant or a peasant. The “Dominus Nicolaus” in question is Mikołaj Pac, the bishop of Samogitia (Żmudź), who travelled to Italy in the early 1620’s, met Broscius in Padua, and died in this city in 1624 at the age of 54. And since at our disposal we have only a reference to the oral testimony of a Catholic bishop who ruled the multiconfessional dioecese (Pac “dixit” Broscius), it is difficult, or even impossible, to tell whether it would be ever possible to track down the original roots of this concept. The Ruthenian phrase scribbled down by Broscius and incorporated into the printed text of the Latin Sermo of 1641 make the only two know occurences of this concept and I am not even sure if I should even expect finding more of them as my research moves forward. Despite these uncertainties, the image of „many Gods” remains a powerful and even witty concept which epitomizes well the conflict of two calendars under one roof of the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian state.

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