History of the Book 2024

Dickinson Blog for ENGL 222

Author: terrellf

AUDIENCES & READERSHIP

January 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

As I established in my last blog post, the physical construction of The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beasts and The Historie of Serpents shows clear signs of frequent use—and occasional abuse—by past readers. A rebinding and damage ranging from scratched-out illustrations to ripped-out pages, abundant marginalia, and scribbling suggests that, while the book was well-consulted, as Topsell hoped, it was not always well-treated (Figures 1, 2, & 3).

Figure 2

Figure 1

There is abundant evidence of a readership for Beastes, but I can deduce little else; uncovering who these folks might have been has proven to be a difficult calculus. It was my initial hope that by working my way backward from the most recent owner of this book, I could perhaps find one of its first. Beastes once belonged to Edwin E. Willoughby, Dickinson alumnus, former Chief Bibliographer of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and scholar of early printed Shakespeare works and the King James Bible. After his death in 1959, his sister and executor, Col. Frances Willoughby, coordinated with the College archivist and librarian Charles Sellers to donate Beastes along with Edwin’s dizzying collection of over four hundred rare books; it was his wish that future students—like myself—could learn about bibliography through these books. And what a gift. I only wish Beastes and the Willoughby files accompanied accession documents, bills of sale, receipts, anything, as without them, I cannot trace ownership past the Willoughbys—alas, a dead end. (I have reached out to the Folger Shakespeare Library to see if, by chance, they possess any pertinent documentation which is unlikely. I have not yet heard back. Hopefully, they do. I can use whatever they find to establish this book’s ‘afterlife’ in my next and final blog post).

Figure 3

In working on the previous blog post, I did discover a reader who inscribed his name in ink in the front matter: a “Johnathan Yates,” signed 1660 (Figure 5). If he is the same as the one found in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘John Yates’ (c. 1586–1660) was an Anglican clergyman, theologian, and physician (“John Yates,” 2004)(Sprunger, 697-698). He was admitted as a sizar to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1604, matriculating the same year, and earned his B.A. in 1607/08, M.A. in 1611, and B.D. in 1618, and was a fellow of the college from 1611 to 1616. Yates was ordained deacon and priest in September 1614 and later served as a preacher at St. Andrew’s, Norwich, from 1616 to 1622. In 1622, he became rector of Stiffkey, Norfolk, where he remained until his death in 1660. I cannot determine definitively that the present John Yates is the same who inscribed his name in Beastes, as the accompanying date—1660—is the year he died, and ‘John,’ though an abbreviated form of ‘Johnathan,’ is not necessarily the same name. Notwithstanding my inability to corroborate his relationship to this book, John Yates might yet serve as a point of departure from which to hypothesize the likely reader of Beastes.

Yates was by all accounts a learned and notable controversialist: as an author, he wrote many theological works; he also had a license to practice medicine in 1629, presumably issued by the Royal College of Physicians—I cannot, however, determine the capacity in which he exercised this license for we know so little about his local ministry (“John Yates,” 2004). If this Yates is indeed the same individual, his position as a clergyman and scholar would suggest that he was part of the audience Topsell hoped to reach with Beastes: the “learned men” of England. As an educated man no doubt with interests in intellectual stimulation and spiritual edification, Yates would have been drawn to Topsell’s bestiary, especially given its theological overtones. More generally, Yates’ interests in “practical theology” would have aligned well with Topsell’s conception of natural philosophy, which often connected the study of animals to both spiritual and medical concerns (Springer, 702, 704-706). 

 Yates likely would have been interested in the systematic approach that Topsell and Gesner both advocated. However, contrasting the ‘notes to readers’ in Beastes with the ‘note to readers’ in Serpents provides more clues about the intended audience and their relationship with the author. Topsell’s objective with the publication of Beastes, as he states in “To The Learned Readers,” was not only to gather all that had been written of beasts into one “Dictionary” for the consultation of “learned men” in their vulgar tongue but also to show to his “countrymen” the moral instruction God provides in all animals. To achieve this goal, Topsell, somewhere between tribute and theft, lifted his text and woodcuts almost wholesale from Conrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium, including a famous broadside of “The Rhinoceros”––a woodcut which Gesner himself ‘borrowed’ from Albrecht Dürer (Kusukawa, 311) (Figure 4). Topsell was indeed an assiduous compiler but a profoundly unoriginal man.

Figure 5

Figure 4

Topsell recognizes that a compilation as ambitious as his must yield to a certain tentativeness; it is better, he believes, to publish an incomplete treatise than to let it languish unprinted in the potentiality of his untimely death. Therefore, he appeals to readers to contribute insights, add information, or correct mistakes. And his readers did just that: since Topsell published The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes in 1607 and The Historie of Serpents in 1608, one—or several—of the proprietors bound them to create a more complete reference book (when they did this, however, I cannot determine). Topsell responded in kind to his readers: in the “To The Reader” preface to Serpents, Topsell acknowledges the many protestations he received from the readers of Beastes because of the typographical mistakes therein; Serpents, he assures readers, features no such errors. 

This dynamic between Topsell and his readers reveals something about the intellectual context in which audiences received Beastes. Readers like Yates, whoever they may have been (scholars, clergymen, aspirant zoologists––we may never know definitively), were far from passive consumers of Beastes and Serpents: they actively engaged the text, provided feedback, pointed out errors, inscribed their names, marked passages for later use, and even altered its material form through rebinding. While we cannot identify the readers of Beastes, they were as instrumental in shaping it as Topsell himself. Indeed, this book was not a static receptacle for animal lore but a dynamic, material space where reader and author cooperated—at times, competed—to articulate and cultivate knowledge. 

 

WORKS CITED

Kusukawa, S. (2010, July). The sources of Gessner’s pictures for the Historia animalium. Annals of Science. 67 (3): 303–328. http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pdf_files/128/1286404337.pdf. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

Sprunger, Keith L. “John Yates of Norfolk: The Radical Puritan Preacher as Ramist Philosopher.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 37, no. 4, 1976, pp. 697–706.

“John Yates.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30193?rskey=Aup4DQ&result=1. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

 

WORKS CONSULTED

Carpo, Mario.  Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (2001 translation), p. 110.

Heltzel, Virgil B. “Some New Light on Edward Topsell.” Huntington Library Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1938): 199–202.

Isaac, S. (2018, March 16). The familiar and the fantastic: The Historie of Foure-Footed beastes by Edward Topsell, 1607. Royal College of Surgeons. https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/the-familiar-and-the-fantastic/. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

Lancaster, James A.T. “Natural Knowledge as a Propaedeutic to Self-Betterment: Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Natural History.” Early Science and Medicine 17, no. 1/2 (2012): 181–96.

Lewis, G. “Topsell, Edward (bap. 1572, d. 1625), Church of England clergyman and author.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 1 Nov. 2024.

Ong, Walter. “Writing Restructures Consciousness: The New World of Autonomous Discourse” in Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Ed. Milton Park OX: Routledge, 2014. 77–114.

University of Washington. University Libraries. “The Historie of Serpents.” Edward Topsell, 1608. https://www.lib.washington.edu/preservation/preservation-services/conservation/topsell. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

Westhrop, H. (2007, March). Edward Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, 1658. Special Collections featured item for March 2006 by Helen Westhrop, Rare Books Library Assistant. University of Reading. https://collections.reading.ac.uk/special-collections/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2020/01/Featured-Item_Topsell_compressed.pdf. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.

A Material Description of Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes and A Historie of Serpents

October 28, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Figure 1: title page with the “Gorgon” vingette. As my copy of Beastes is missing its original title page, this is a scanned copy.

 While I understand that history is not divided into inflexible periods, what struck me about Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes, printed by William Jaggard in 1607, is that it seemed so anachronistic; I did not expect a bestiary, an anecdotal treatise that is, in my mind, characteristically ‘Medieval,’ to have been created in the early seventeenth century. At once, this made me reconsider the text and its context.

Figure 2: Topsell’s entry on the “Rat.” Note the detailed crosshatching, skin folds, and hair in this accurate depiction of a rat.

Beastes seems caught in this awkward period between eras––Reformation and Enlightenment––when scientific inquiry began supplanting the old dogmas of scholasticism and divine revelation. Like Medieval bestiaries, this codex is a compendium of factual and fantastical creatures with not only physical description of each but accompanying Christian symbology that explains them. In contrast to earlier texts, Beastes displays a subtle hint of the systematism I associated with later periods of bookmaking: it includes a catalog of every author known to Topsell who has written about animals, an epilogue, and an index of Latin and English animal names––all of which were comparatively new to the codex at the turn of the seventeenth century. Moreover, like Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium, from which Topsell drew almost all of his material, Beastes displays an interest in classifying the natural world with precise description in an easily accessible form intended for broader audiences. In the prefatory materials, an epistle from the collected works of Conrad Gessner, two introductions by Gessner and Topsell, contains its stated purpose: to inform, amuse, and above all to enlighten, for animals themselves are instructive, pleasing, and divine.

Figure 3: you might note that this print of “Rhinoceros” is stylistically different from the other prints, that is because this is actually a reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s print of the same name

This early-modern juxtaposition between natural philosophy and natural theology is intriguing. However, my primary reason for choosing this book is, perhaps, less academic; what sealed the deal was the title’s vignette, “The Gorgon”: a creature that appears to be a scaled bull with pig trotters, a cow’s nose, and a woman’s mop of hair (Figure 1). How absurd is that? I would say that’s not what a Gorgon looks like, snake-haired and all, but then I’ve never actually seen one for myself, have I?

Figure 4: the “Mantichora”

These woodblock prints are an incredible feature of this codex; it is replete with them––large and small, of animals, real and imagined, from the benign to the frightful: animals familiar to seventeenth-century England like rats or cats are represented with considerable accuracy (Figure 2 & 5); creatures less familiar to the Continent, like the rhinoceros, are armored in a literal sense, clad in what appears to be fluted plate mail and lamellar (Figure 3); others still, like the “Mantichora,” with its toothy grin that hangs from either ear, considers the reader with a hungry look (Figure 4). Doubtless, it would have been expensive to produce so many prints in a single book.

Figure 5: the “Cat”

Figure 6: manicules

It would seem that past students also enjoyed this book as much as I have. Beastes has the many signs of frequent use––and misuse. The buildup of residual hand oil, indicated by smooth and darkened areas at the foot corners, suggests frequent use. In parts of the book, the damage seems intentional: in the section enumerating the various virtues and vices of the “Cat,” a reader has scratched away the eyes of the accompanying print (Figure 5), perhaps wary of the beguiling gaze which Topsell suggests; other entries, like that on the dromedary, given the cleanness of the tear, seem to have been ripped out of the book entirely!––a souvenir, perhaps? Or did one reader have a particular dislike for humped, desert-going mammalians? There are other examples of readers’ engagement with the book. Marginalia and annotation abound: I have found manicules, underlining, and margin notes throughout the book, signs that the readers sought to highlight information in the text for its later use (Figure 6). In other places, humorously, I found the bored and uneven, graphite scribblings of an uncooperative pupil, perhaps a more contemporary one (Figures 7). Indeed, it seems readers consulted Beastes often; however, these same readers were not, perhaps to Topsell’s chagrin, all that precious about this book.

Figure 7: you can just make out the graphite scribblings on the back endpaper here. Note also that someone, perhaps a former proprietor of this book, signed this book. This will no doubt proove useful when I investigate this book’s afterlife in the following posts.

Figure 8: the spine and raised cords

At seven-hundred and ninety pages, twelve and a half inches long, eight inches wide, and two and a half inches deep, Topsell’s tome is a heavy and unyielding thing and in decidedly poor condition. The eight raised cords along the spine are nearly fully exposed, and only one remains attached to the front board (Figure 8). The somewhat flimsy pasteboards, covered in cracked caf’s skin, have all but separated from their hinges and joints (Figure 9). The endpapers have peeled away, revealing two equally spaced incisions along the outer edges of either board through which green ribbon appears to have been threaded (Figure 10). Perhaps because of the binding’s disrepair, the front matter is similarly damaged. The overall make of the book’s rag paper feels good––fine and smooth––but very thin, so much so that the printed ink bleeds through the pages, and many pages throughout are torn and crumpled.

Figure 9: the cover

I do not believe these were original features of this codex and am certain that it was rebound at least once. In The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes, the outer margins are one and three-quarter inches whereas the gutter margins are only one inch; in A Historie of Serpents, the outer margins are two inches, the gutter margins, one inch. This irregularity in formatting indicates that the pages were perhaps cropped to facilitate a rebinding. However, it is also possible the outer margins were deliberately made larger to accommodate the printed marginalia. Notwithstanding this, as discussed above, Topsell compiled and published Beastes and its front matter in 1607; he published Serpents the following year in 1608. Topsell’s introductory notes do not mention Serpents which indicates that, even if Beastes was not rebound to include the later text, if it were, say, taken to a binder only after the publication of the later text the following year, it was not Topsell’s initial intent to compile them. It is also possible that this book was one of those volumes produced in 1658; however, as there is no original front matter, this is something I cannot corroborate.

Figure 10: paste board

What is most striking about the binding is that it is not striking; even in its diminished state, it hosts no ornamentation, no embossing, no gold tooling, no marbling or mottled treatment––nothing. Why would such spartan binding enclose this no doubt expensive and decorative codex? Well, Topsell aimed not simply to impress but to inform and educate, and his audience, scholars, naturalists, aspirant zoologists, autodidacts, and students, likely valued content over aesthetics, facts over embellishment––decorative embellishments, that is, for as we probably know now, there is no such thing as a Gorgon.

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