The Night Hag, a Halloween Romance

Title page for The Night HagIn honor of Halloween, we're posting an excerpt from one of the horror stories in the rare book collection, The Night Hag; or, St. Swithin's Chair: A Romance, which was published in the form of a small pamphlet by J. Bailey in the early nineteenth century (the pamphlet is undated).  There are only two three copies reported in WorldCat, and Special Collections has the only reported copy of this text in the United States (2014 update: there's another copy reported in the U.S. now, at the University of Pittsburgh).

He who dares sit on St. Swithin's chair…

The star of the romance is Fergus Campbell, "a captain in the Scotch service then stationed in Edinburgh, in the reign of James the Sixth."  Fergus' aunt is the wealthy Lady Margaret Mucklethrift, and Fergus is second in line after his cousin to inherit all of her money and property.  Thirsty for riches, Fergus decides to rob his aunt of her riches and depose his cousin as her heir. After a series of failed plots, Fergus decides to seek supernatural help.

"It was now Hallow mass E'en, and Fergus thought of the ancient spell of St. Swithin's applicable to that season, that then the Night Hag, delighting in scenes of blood and murderous deeds, has full power.

He who dares sit on St. Swithin's chair,
When the Night Hag rides the troubled air,
Questions three, if they speak the spell,
They may ask, and she must tell."
Fergus sits on St. Swithin's Chair, from The Night Hag

Fergus asks his three questions and finds that he will indeed gain his aunt's incredible riches, with the Night Hag's treacherous help.  After stabbing his aunt to death, with the household on the alert, Fergus hides in her iron-clad strong box.  Will he be discovered?

No spoilers here!  Of course, there's much more to the story: an innocent man framed for murder, a pair of star-crossed lovers, and a reformed criminal with a critical decision to make.  Read more about it in Special Collections!

The Scott Connection

The end of The Night HagThis pamphlet purports to be "a romance, on which is founded the popular drama now performing with unbounded applause at Astley's Amphitheatre."  Several plays were produced under this title in the early nineteenth century, featuring Fergus Campbell, his unfortunate aunt, and the rest of the characters in the romance.  Indeed, the first of these plays was performed at Astley's Amphitheatre and ran in September and October 1820.  The playbill for this production said "The Idea from which the Subject is arranged [is] taken from the Interesting Legend of St. Swithin's Chair, in Walter Scott's Popular Novel of Waverly."

The problem? The interesting legend of St. Swithin's Chair, as far as it pertains to Fergus Campbell, isn't in Waverley.  The novel includes a poem entitled "St. Swithin's Chair", based on an old Scottish legend, but that's all.  In his 1992 catalog of playbills and scripts based on Scott's works, H. Philip Bolton notes the difficulty in relating The Night Hag to Waverley, judging the play "doubly apocryphal."

How does this pamphlet relate to the Night Hag plays of the nineteenth century?  When was it published?  And, perhaps most importantly, who was its author?

At this point, we don't know.  If you're a researcher in this area, come finish the story, and help us find out.


Bolton, H. Philip.  Scott dramatized. London ; New York : Mansell, 1992.

Adopt-A-Book News

Thanks to the generous support of donors to the Friends of the MU Libraries Adopt-A-Book program, conservator Jim Downey has been able to treat and repair a number of books from Special Collections.  Below is a sampling of before and after pictures from the latest batch of adoptees; click over to the Adopt-A-Book web site for more.  A sincere thanks to donors George Justice, H. & D. Moore, B. Winfield, M. Nagar, W. Oshinsky, P. Collins, J. Schweitzer, R. Drake and M. Correale.

A flora of North America by William P. C. Barton. Philadelphia: M. Carey & Sons, 1821-23.Ellinor: or, The world as it is: a novel by Mary Anne Hanway. London: Printed for William Lane, 1798M.T.C. Epistolae familiares accuratius recognitae. Venetiis : Apud Aldum et Andream Socerum, 1512

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Index, Imprimatur, and Banned Books Week

Index, Imprimatur, and Banned Books Week

September 24 marked the beginning of Banned Books Week, a yearly celebration of the freedom to read.  Books in Special Collections are no stranger to banning and censorship – most were subject to some form of official approval, and many were banned at some point in their history.

Censorship and the License to Print

 

Imprimatur in Il maritaggio delle mvse: poema drammatico by Giovanni Giacomo Ricci (Venice, 1633).
Imprimatur in Il maritaggio delle mvse: poema drammatico by Giovanni Giacomo Ricci (Venice, 1633).
The printing press presented a new set of challenges to authorities who wanted to control the spread of ideas.  In 1485, in the birthplace of printing, the archbishop of Mainz issued a censorship decree that imposed a licensing requirement on the printing of all vernacular texts.  In 1515, Pope Leo X extended that decree to all translations to and from Latin, placing such texts subject to licensing and clerical review in order to keep the faithful from falling into error.[1]

By the seventeenth century, book publication in most European countries was regulated by a licensing board made up of Church or state officials.  Fail to get a license to print, an imprimatur, and your book was effectively banned.  Legitimately printed books featured the imprimatur prominently, often on the verso of the title page.

Title page from Nucleus historiæ ecclesiasticæ by Christopher Sandius (Amsterdam, 1676), with a false imprint.
Title page from Nucleus historiæ ecclesiasticæ by Christopher Sandius (Amsterdam, 1676), with a false imprint.

 

Of course, books were still printed without a license – and these often included a false imprint, to make it look like they had been printed somewhere else.  Printers used this bit of subterfuge to publish texts seen as subversive, heretical, or immoral.[2]

The book on the right is a work by Christopher Sandius promoting Arian and Socinian beliefs.  It was published in Amsterdam by Christoph Petzold.   However, Petzold issued it with a false imprint identifying a publisher in Köln.  The false imprint protected Petzold, and to some extent Sandius as well, and it enabled the publication of beliefs condemned by Protestant and Catholic authorities.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Underground publications like that of Sandius presented a challenge to religious and state officials: censorship wasn’t enough to keep dangerous ideas out of public circulation.  Authorities responded with outright bans of books already in print.

 

Title page of Philip II's edict concerning prohibted books (Antwerp, 1570)
Title page of Philip II's edict concerning prohibted books (Antwerp, 1570)
Throughout the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, and countries ruled by Catholic monarchs, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) provided a definitive guide for what was legal reading material, and what wasn’t.  The Index was first endorsed by Pope Pius IV in 1564 during the Council of Trent (it’s sometimes called the Tridentine Index because of this).  In 1569, with the Pope’s sanction, the Duke of Alba issued a supplement to the Index, adding more titles to the list.

Special Collections has a version of the Index accompanied by an edict issued by Philip II of Spain.  This version of the Index was released in 1570 in response to an uprising in the Netherlands, a territory Spain had recently acquired.  Issued in French, Dutch, and Latin, Philip’s Index was meant to eradicate political protest and Protestantism in the Netherlands, a goal he never achieved.  It's interesting to note that this Index was printed by the renowned Christopher Plantin.  Modern scholars have discovered that Plantin himself was involved in surreptitious printing of heretical and scientific texts.

First edition of Galileo's Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Florence, 1632)
First edition of Galileo's Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Florence, 1632)

 

The Index was updated and re-issued periodically, and authors were added or removed as opinion changed.  Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric, for example, was condemned as heretical and banned shortly after its publication in 1632; by 1758, however, works dealing with heliocentrism were removed from the Index.  Pope Paul VI abolished the Index in 1966.

Book Banning Continues

Book banning was certainly not limited to the Index, and it has been practiced in the United States for hundreds of years.  In 1650, only twelve years after the first printing in North America, Puritans in Boston held the continent’s first book burning.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, United States Customs and the U.S. Post Office regularly confiscated shipments of books under the auspices of anti-obscenity legislation, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Voltaire’s Candide, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In schools and public libraries, attempts to ban books continue.  Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned periodically in American schools since its publication, as have childhood favorites such as James and the Giant Peach and A Wrinkle in Time.  This summer, a high school in Republic, Missouri, drew national attention for banning Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  For more information about current attempts to ban books, see Mapping Censorship from the Banned Books Week website.

Read More

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.  New York : Cambridge University Press, 1980, c1979.

Heresy and Error: The Ecclesiastical Censorship of Books, 1400-1800.  Digital exhibit, Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, 2010.

Hans J. Hillerbrand, “On Book Burnings and Book Burners: Reflections on the Power (and Powerlessness) of Ideas.”  J Am Acad Relig (September 2006) 74 (3): 593-614. doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfj117

Joan Stack, ed., The Art of the Book: Manuscripts and Early Printing, 1000-1650.  Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri, Board of Curators, c2003.


[1] Eisenstein, 347.

 

[2] Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, printers also used false imprints to pirate popular works and turn a quick profit – but that’s another story.

 

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives What’s the oldest item in Special Collections?

What’s the oldest item in Special Collections?

We get this question a lot – and we posed it as a multiple-choice trivia question this week on our Facebook page.  Now it’s time to reveal the answer.   Which is the oldest item in Special Collections?

And the winner is… The Mesopotamian Clay Tablet

tablet9-1_smAs far as we know, this cuneiform tablet dates to around 2500 B.C.E., making it the oldest item held in Special Collections (it predates the next oldest item, an Egyptian scarab seal, by about 500 years).

This tablet is one of eight held in the Special Collections department.  Although the other seven tablets have been translated, this one has never been deciphered.  If you read any of the ancient Near Eastern dialects, we’d love to hear from you!

For more information about the cuneiform tablets in Special Collections, see the online exhibit Cuneiform Tablets: Records of Ancient Mesopotamia see the list on our website [digital exhibit retired; link updated 11/10/2014].

 

What about the other options?

This was a tough question, because all of the items were the oldest in one way or another.  More information below.

The Hebrew Scroll

IMG_6313If you guessed that the scroll represents the oldest book form in Special Collections, you were right!  The scroll predated the codex (the form we usually associate with a book nowadays) by thousands of years.

In most of the Western world, the codex replaced the scroll gradually, from around 300 to 500 A.D.  However, among Jewish communities, the scroll retained its place as the primary form for storing and transmitting information.  Jewish congregations still use temple scrolls produced to strict specifications in their rituals of worship.

Although it’s old, this parchment scroll is far from ancient.  It dates from the 1600s, contains the Book of Ruth, and was probably not produced for temple reading.  It fits conveniently into the hand, the perfect size for personal study.

The Latin Manuscript Codex

IMG_6304This manuscript copy of De Constructione by Priscianus dates to around 1150 A.D.  Although Special Collections holds manuscript fragments that are older, this is the oldest complete book in the collection.  It is a work on grammar, written in Latin with passages in Greek.IMG_6302

The binding of this manuscript was done later than the text, but it is also interesting because it’s a good example of a fifteenth-century German binding in blind-tooled pigskin.  The back board still shows discoloration from the former site of a metal clasp.

The Egyptian Papyrus Fragment

IMG_6319Dating from approximately 1500-1100 B.C.E., this fragment from the Egyptian Book of the Dead isn’t the oldest item in Special Collections – but it is the oldest piece of writing on papyrus in Special Collections.

Papyrus is a plant that grows along the marshy banks of the Nile River, and the ancient Egyptians used it to make a paper-like substance for writing.  Papyrus became one of Egypt’s main exports and was used throughout the ancient world, in Greece, modern-day Turkey, and the Middle East.

 

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives “Simple in vocabulary while majestic in effect”: 400th anniversary of the King James Translation of the Bible

“Simple in vocabulary while majestic in effect”: 400th anniversary of the King James Translation of the Bible

The most published book in the world celebrates its 400th anniversary.

King James Bible 1611. Title page

Soon after March 24th 1603, when James VI, King of Scots, inherited the English crown, a crowd of Puritans approached him with their petition. They requested that all traces of Catholicism were removed from the Church of England service. Upon thorough consideration of their request the King rejected the whole document and even threatened to “harry the Puritans out of the land, or else do worse”.

But he surprisingly agreed to commission a new translation of the English Bible — a last-minute added wish by one of the Puritans, known as Dr. John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. The 47 translators were selected based exclusively on their scholarly reputation without regard of religious convictions, thus about a quarter of them were Puritans.

Though it is officially called the Authorized Version, King James never technically authorized this new translation of the Bible into English. It is possible to assume that this version which is now firmly connected with the King’s name was called “authorized” in opposition to the two preceding attempts made by the early dissidents – Wycliffe and ill-fated Tyndale. This translation meant to play an important role in uniting all Protestant Englishmen despite their religious differences, the endeavor started by Elizabeth I with The Act of Uniformity in 1559.

Dedication to the King
Dedication to the King

 

As Leland Ryken puts it: “The King James style is a paradox: it is usually simple in vocabulary while majestic and elevating in effect. However imitated or parodied, the language is dignified, beautiful, sonorous and elegant.” *

These words capture well the impression King James Bible makes on all who love the English language.

Perhaps nothing influenced the English and eventually American literature and literary language more than KJB. Edmund Wilson thought that “other cultures have felt its impact, and none — in the West, at least – seems quite to accommodate to it. Yet we find we have been living with it all our lives”**

Small wonder: first [pilgrim] settlers in America were people of the Bible, and many early American towns carry Biblical names, such as Salem, Mass, 1626; Bethel, Conn, 1700; Shiloh, NJ, 1705; Ephrata, Penn, 1732; Nazareth, Penn., 1740;  Emmaus, Penn.,1740; Bethlehem, NH, 1774, etc. Seven towns named Galilee, fifteen named Trinity, fourteen – St. Joseph, including one in Missouri; as well as St. Mary, MO — one of the nineteen American towns with this name.

Everyday idiomatic usage is replete with hidden or obvious direct quotations from the KJB. Here are a few common examples:

At his wit’s end – Psalms, 107:27

God save the king – The First Book of Samuel, 10:24

My brother’s keeper – Genesis, 4:9

The land of the living – Job, 28:13

The root of the matter– Job 19:28

Fell flat on his face — Numbers 22:31

The salt of the earth– Matthew 5:13

Labor of love — Thessalonians 1:2, 1:3:

A two-edged sword—Proverbs 5:4

White as snow — Daniel 7:9:

A drop in the bucket — Isaiah 40:15

A wolf in sheep’s clothing — Matthew 7:15

Woe is me – Job 10:15

Beat swords into ploughshares — Isaiah II

In the twinkling of an eye1 Corinthians 15:52

Sign of the times — Matthew 16:3

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak Matthew 26:41

You reap what you sow — Galatians VI

Physician heal thyself — Luke 4:23

Man does not live by bread alone — Deuteronomy 8:3

A broken heart — Psalms 34:18

It’s better to give than to receive — Acts 20:35

Good Samaritan — Luke 10:30/33

Feet of clay — Daniel 2: 31-33

Don’t cast your pearls before swine — Matthew 7:6,

A voice crying in the wilderness– John 1:23

Awake and sing– – Isaiah 16:19

We also encounter these quotations in our everyday lives, as I did while at the ALA conference in Philadelphia last year where I took this picture.

Philadelphia Liberty Bell

“Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus 25:10) – The Liberty Bell in the Liberty Bell Center, Philadelphia.

Sources:

*Leland Ryken. How We Got the Best-Selling Book of All Time. WSJ, August 27, 2011

**Robert Alter. Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton U Press, 2010.

John Bartlett. Familiar Quotations: A Collection of passages, Phrases and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature. Boston, 1855.

Highway 70 from Columbia, MO to St. Louis.

 

Tuesday Trivia

question marksThis semester, get acquainted with Special Collections and Rare Books by playing Tuesday Trivia!  Each week, we’ll post a question on our Facebook page.  Be the first to leave a comment on Facebook with the correct answer, and we’ll send you a Special Collections bookmark.  At the end of each month, the person with the most correct answers will win a “grand prize” – including packs of Special Collections notecards, publications, and more.

We’ve designed these questions to challenge you, but a hint: most of the answers can be found on the Special Collections website, in the MERLIN library catalog, or in the UM Digital Library.

Stay tuned for the first Tuesday Trivia question!

Welcome Back, Students!

Fall is in the air, and students are everywhere!  As we welcome members of this record-breaking freshman class, it may be interesting to see how their predecessors dealt with the first weeks of classes at MU twenty-five, fifty, and even 100 years ago.

100 Years AgoSavitar, 1911

The Savitar yearbook published a fictitious freshman's diary in 1911, which describes in humorous and exaggerated terms the experiences of a bumbling new student from rural Hemlock, Missouri.  He describes his first sight of the Quad, and the now-defunct tradition of freshman beanies:

The schoolhouses are all set around just like the town square at Hemlock except that there are six pillars covered with vines in the middle.  As soon as I came up on the walk on the square, some fellows grabbed me and made me shine shoes.  There are big signs pasted all over telling the freshmen to buy caps.  They tell me that I'll have to wear a red one but I won't do it because my hair is red. [see source online]

The university bulletin for 1911 records a total enrollment of 2,956 students in the Columbia campus.  One hundred years later, enrollment at MU is more than ten times that number.

50 Years Ago

Construction Nears End on Arts & Science BuildingThe current student newspaper, the Maneater, was in publication by 1955.  In the first week of classes in 1961, it reported that the new Arts and Science Building was nearing completion and would be in use later that semester. The new building would feature a language laboratory, increased classroom space, a public address and intercom system, and a special classroom equipped with closed-circuit television. And – perhaps most importantly – air conditioning.

The Arts and Science Building was home to the departments of English, History, German and Russian, and Romance Languages when it opened in 1961.  Classrooms and office space for these departments had previously been in Jesse Hall.

25 Years Agomaneater1986_lg

During the first week of classes in 1986, the Maneater documented registration delays.  Long lines of students snaked through the stairwells and corridors of Brady Commons, and the newspaper commented:

Director of Admissions Gary L. Smith said when the first online computers were used for registering students in April of 1985, approximately 40 to 50 students could be registered in five minutes.  But things were going a lot slower this week at Brady.

Student registrations were taxing the processing power of MU's relatively new computer network, causing the slowdown.  Over the past 25 years, various computerized registration systems have made waiting in line at Brady Commons obsolete – and Brady itself has become part of the new Student Center.

Want to Know More?

Records of of past student life, including documents, publications, photos, and memorabilia, are at the University ArchivesSpecial Collections also holds the student publications mentioned above, and over 100 years of the Savitar (1891-2000) are available in the University of Missouri Digital Library.

Instructor Resources

Don’t forget!  Special Collections is offering information sessions for instructors and new faculty in Ellis Library in the coming week.  Topics will include:

  • Specific materials and collections with potential for use in class visits or assignments
  • Instruction services offered by Special Collections – with opportunities for feedback and suggestions from workshop participants
  • Ideas for developing students’ research skills, visual literacy, and creativity, using Special Collections materials

Preview  the workshop and register online, or contact Kelli Hansen to schedule a session for specific departments, groups, or courses.

Leave a comment

Kelli Hansen

Kelli Hansen is head of the Special Collections and Rare Books department.

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Historical Remarks on the Castle of the Bastille

Historical Remarks on the Castle of the Bastille

The Bastille: “a place even the innocent must be afraid of.”[1] Parisians whispered of the prison’s rat-infested dungeons, torture machines, bread-and-water rations, and secret murder-rooms from which no prisoner ever emerged.

The Bastille embodied the French monarchy’s despotic rule, and as such, it was the first institutional casualty of the French Revolution. On today’s date in 1789, a mob of insurgents stormed the Bastille, liberated the few prisoners that remained, and massacred the guards, prison directors, and other staff.

Fear and Rumors

Illustration of the Bastille, from the 1789 English editionAlthough the Bastille could only hold around 50 prisoners, the rumors and mystery that surrounded it caused the prison to loom large in French culture. Rebellious subjects, religious dissenters, journalists, common criminals and those who simply incurred the king’s displeasure were all confined there. No one really knew what happened in the Bastille; prisoners were forced to take an oath of secrecy, promising never to divulge anything they saw or heard while inside the walls.

In 1715, Constantin de Renneville, a spy who was imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven years, was the first to break the oath. Writing from the safety of England, Renneville published a dramaticized chronicle of his sufferings entitled L'inquisition Françoise, ou, l'histoire de la Bastille.

Following Renneville’s example, former Bastille inmates published tell-all pamphlets at sporadic intervals throughout the eighteenth century. These tales fueled the fear and speculation surrounding the prison. Were the pamphlets simply the sensationalized stories of a few unfortunates? Or did they tell of typical experiences at the Bastille? No one knew.

Bringing the Bastille to Light

Title page for the 1780 English editionIn 1774, a different type of pamphlet was published: Remarques historiques et anecdotes sur le château de la Bastille. The anonymous author described the Bastille in “seemingly objective terms, systematically and with exact figures (including a ground plan), and presenting individual cases only in an appendix.”[2]

Like earlier anti-Bastille pamphlets, Remarques historiques was soon translated, becoming Historical Remarks on the Castle of the Bastille in English. For the first time, Europe saw, in relatively matter-of-fact terms, the treatment to which state prisoners were subject.

All the towers are closed below by strong double doors, with large bolts let into enormous locks. The dungeons under the towers are filled with a mud which exhales the most offensive scent. They are the resort of toads, newts, rats, and spiders. In a corner of each is a camp bed, formed of iron bars, soldered into the wall, with some planks laid upon them. In these are put prisoners whom they wish to intimidate, and a little straw is given them for their bed. Two doors, each seven inches thick, one over the other, close these dark deGround plan of the Bastille, from the 1780 English editionns: each has two great bolts, and as many locks. … There are five ranks of chambers. The most dreadful next to the dungeons, are those in which are iron cages or dungeons. Of these there are three. These cages are formed of beams lined with strong iron plates. They are six feet by eight.[3]

Torture chambers and murder rooms fail to appear in this description of the prison, and the author notes that “It sometimes happens that prisoners die in the Bastille by secret means; but the instances are rare.”[4] Historical Remarks also includes precise descriptions of the prisoners’ furnishings, provisions, health care, and communication with the outside world.

Revolution

Remarques historiques was quickly banned in France, but not before it had an effect. The precise details in the pamphlet injected a dose of reason into sensationalist anti-Bastille journalism and galvanized the underground press into a more radical and intense criticism of the government.

Title page for the 1789 English editionIn the rest of Europe, the pamphlet gained acceptance as a true and accurate depiction of the Bastille. English editions of the pamphlet came out in 1780 and 1784, and a new translation was issued after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The English criminologist and reformer John Howard endorsed it as “the best account of this celebrated structure ever published” and included content from the pamphlet in his survey of European penitentiaries.[5]

The revolutionaries that conquered the Bastille in 1789 paraded through the streets of Paris with keys, weapons, and the heads of prison guards and officials on pikes. Demolition of the hated structure began that very night, and within six months, the prison had disappeared. Today, only the foundations remain.

 

 

Read More

Historical Remarks on the Castle of the Bastille. London: Printed for T. Cadell and N. Conant.
1780 Edition | 1784 Edition | 1789 Edition

Hans-Jürgen Lüsenbrink and Rolf Reichardt. The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom. (Durham, NC, 1997). DC167.5 .L8713 1997

Christopher Prendergast. The Fourteenth of July. (London, 2008). DC167 .P74 2008


[1] Extract from a letter, 15 July 1789, quoted in Lüsenbrink and Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (Durham, NC, 1997), 13.
[2] Lüsenbrink and Reichardt, 18.
[3] Historical Remarks (1780), 5-6.
[4] Historical Remarks (1789), 55.
[5] Historical Remarks (1789), title page.

 

 

 

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Descartes…L’Homme the Journey to Print

Descartes…L’Homme the Journey to Print

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French thinker of the empiricist thinker. Descartes was born in la Haye, in Touraine. He was the son of a provincial governor, Joachim Descartes, and his wife Jeanne Brochard.  After a short career of practicing law he went to fight under Maurice of Nassau, in the rebellion against the Spanish. In 1619, he had a series of visions that compelled him to devote his life to science. Shortly thereafter, he moved to the protestant Dutch republic where his teachings and experiments would be more accepted. While there he corresponded and tutored a number of pupils that followed and studied his Cartesian teachings and his traité des passions, the study of emotions.

 

L'Homme cover with acid specklingThe copy in the collection is bound in calf skin, a common binding of the 17th and 18th centuries. The speckling technique used on it was created by sprinkling acid over the leather and then wiping it clean after a period of time. This technique has created problems in some specimens in today’s world as the acid continues to erode the boards. The printer of this text, Jacques Le Gras, was the original publisher. Shortly afterward, the text was moved to a different printing house and released in a larger run from the printers Charles Angot and Théodore Girard.

The book itself is best described in the Heirs of Hippocrates (1974) text, “This first French edition is the original text as composed by Descartes and is edited by his good friend, Claude Clerselier (1614-1684). This edition also contains the first printing of his treatise ‘De la formation du foetus,’ completed just before his death. The fine woodcuts in this edition were partly based on Descartes’ drawings from the manuscript and partly prepared by the co-editors, Louis de la Forge (1632-1666?) and Gerard van Gutschoven (fl. 1660) … Descartes was prepared to publish this book in 1633 but decided to withhold it when he learned of Galileo’s condemnation by the Church. As a result, the first edition was not published until 1662 [in Latin], twelve years after Descartes’ death … It is sometimes called the first book on physiology, and that could be argued, but there is no doubt that the Cartesian philosophy exerted a tremendous effect on the evolution of medicine.”

Eye with muscle purportedly drawn by DescartesDescartes decision to withhold this text from the public may have spared him from the kind of persecution Galileo endured upon the publication of his Dialogs, 1632. However, Descartes did not escape allegations that his beliefs were atheistic and pelagianistic, which is the idea that people, can avoid sin without God’s grace. These accusations started in the 1640s when the rector at the university at Utrecht began making these charges. These denunciations regarding his atheistic thoughts become more heated as scholars from Leiden, a university town, became involved.  At one point in the summer of 1647, Descartes returned to France for the second time in that decade, where he contemplated staying to escape these charges. He did return to the Dutch republic, but by the end of the decade he had traveled to Stockholm to tutor Christina of Sweden. The arrangement for tutoring her was extremely strenuous, she required sessions before dawn in the brisk air of the Swedish winter. By February 1650, he had fallen ill and ultimately died from pneumonia.

Image from L'Homme drawn by an illustrator other than Descartes.The journey to publish L’homme was led by Claude Clerselier, a staunch Catholic, who came into the ownership of Descartes’ papers via his brother-in-law, the French ambassador to Sweden. Clerselier edited this text and considerable correspondence, which helped shape Descartes’ image in the following years. The quality of the 1664 French edition made Clerselier the understood guardian of Descartes’ body of manuscripts. The book itself is interesting because Descartes’ essay is the smallest portion of the over four hundred page text. The accompanying essays, forwards and remarks make up the majority of the pages. Clerselier’s remarks include, among other things, a reasoning of the illustrations included, of which many were provided by Florentius Shuyl and Clerselier himself. One image of particular interest was drawn by Descartes. Clerselier kept the original drawing, an eye held by muscle, to prove it was Descartes work. However, there is a notable difference in the artistic styles between the eye and some of the other pieces, particularly in their background detail.  The additional contributions to the text include Louis de La Forge’s remarks that expand on the Descartes text and attempt to clarify the conceptual leaps Descartes makes in L’Homme.

This exceptional text was purchased in the spring of 2010 by University of Missouri Ellis Library Special Collections and Rare Books, through a donation by Mr. Richard Toft.

 

Bibliographic Information:

L’homme

A Paris: Chez Iacques Le Gras, au Palais, à l’entrée de la Gallerie des Prisonniers, MDCLXIV, [1664]

QP29 .D44 1664