Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavour to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us.
The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust’, which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance.
Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.
Colin Davis is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research is mainly in the field of twentieth-century literature, film and theory.
The right of Colin Davis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-43978-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-43979-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-36971-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003369714
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to friends and colleagues who have helped, supported, encouraged and advised me during the preparation of this book. In particular, I would like to thank the following: Molly Andrews, Jens Brockmeier, Ruth Cruickshank, Oliver Davis, Robert Eaglestone, Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld, Mark Freeman, Ranjan Ghosh, Christina Howells, Jakob Lothe, Eneken Laanes, Hanna Meretoja, Ève Morisi, Esther Peeren, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Danielle Sands and Geir Uvsløkk. I am especially grateful to Nic Cooper, who generously gave permission to use their painting ‘An Absence of Precise Knowledge’ on the cover of this book. My greatest debt is to Jane Hiddleston and Natasha Davis, from both of whom I have learned more than I know how to express.
I wish to thank editors and publishers for permission to re-print material in Chapters 4, 6–9, which originally appeared in the following publications: ‘Overreading: Intentions, Mistakes and Lies’, in Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines, edited by Pepita Hesselberth, Janna Jouwen, Esther Peeren and Ruby de Vos (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi 2018), 35–50; ‘Reading Violence, Violent Reading: Levinas and Hermeneutics’, in Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics and Hermeutics, edited by Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja (London and New York: Routledge 2023), 154–66; ‘Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge’, in Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis (New York and London: Routledge 2018), 23–36; ‘Trauma, Poststructuralism and Ethics’, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja (London and New York: Routledge 2020), 36–44; ‘Ethics, Stories and Reading’, SubStance 42:2 (2013), 128–40.
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INTRODUCTION
Forays
A foray is a brief incursion into an unfamiliar territory. It is a raid not an invasion. It is linked to forage, an expedition looking for food, though with foraging there is no hint of aggression or hostility: you take only what you need, seeking out sustenance as it grows or roams in the environment. There may also be links to forest (the outside, the wild space, the space reserved for hunting), and to foreign. Foraying and foraging both entail going out into an alien world, one which may be either hostile or welcoming, withholding its bounty or freely offering it. In neither case is domination or ownership the primary aim, though either of these may ensue. The forayer and the forager head out into the unknown in order to find, or to find out, what they can, and to return home, better informed or better fed, sustained. Their actions may not be systematic but neither are they arbitrary. They are looking for something which may be given without resistance or sometimes only with more intrusive intervention. Foraying is a tentative journey into an unexplored space, not intended to possess or to conquer, but to get a glimpse of what might be found there, hidden or in plain sight.
Foraying is, I want to suggest, a useful metaphor for reading. The texts into which we venture are the outside, a forest, a foreign place, a site of otherness. We will never know them fully, but with cunning and hope, we may discover something in them which we did not know.
For and against interpretation
More specifically, this book is concerned with interpretation and the ethics of reading, and in particular with hermeneutics, this being understood as reflection on the theory and practice of interpretation. My most basic aims are to dispel some widespread misconceptions about hermeneutics, to defend its place as central to work in literary studies and the humanities more generally, and specifically to promote what I
describe as a ‘hermeneutics of trust’. The book is an exercise in foraying because it does not attempt to provide a history of hermeneutics, a comprehensive theory of interpretation or a systematic account of the relevance of hermeneutics to literary study. Fortunately, elements of these are available in a large number of admirable volumes.1 In the marketplace of competing critical methods, no single approach can expect to take precedence over all others. In this book, hermeneutics is understood as an endorsement of foraying rather than a candidate for a new (or old) master theory.
In 2015, Rita Felski wrote that ‘the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition in Anglo-American literary theory is little short of scandalous’ (Felski 2015, 33). In some respects, this is a surprising claim. The work of the great hermeneutic triumvirate of the last century – Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur – continues to be intensively studied and discussed; in 1991, the title of a widely read book announced the ‘interpretive turn’ in philosophy, science and culture (Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991), and in 2023 a further collection of essays promised to update the interpretive turn by offering, as its subtitle states, ‘new arguments in hermeneutics’ (Meijer 2023); an introduction to hermeneutics claims that it is both ‘a defining trait of our humanity’ and ‘foundational to every field of human knowledge’ (Zimmermann 2015, xiii); there are innumerable monographs and collections devoted to the history and development of hermeneutics; and some outstanding literary scholars have championed its continuing relevance (Iser 2000; Korthals Altes 2014; Meretoja 2018). So, hermeneutics is everywhere and all-embracing. Nevertheless, anecdotally, my own experience confirms Felski’s assertion. Colleagues who follow the latest theoretical debates are sometimes ignorant or dismissive of hermeneutics, perhaps regarding it as old-fashioned and retrograde; and undergraduate and graduate courses on critical theory are more likely to include sessions on ecocriticism and posthumanism than hermeneutics. As one defender of hermeneutics concedes, some regard the preoccupation with interpretation as being too closely allied to the relativism and unfettered scepticism of the ‘post-truth’ era; and even if it is not positively pernicious, it can appear to be ‘simply outdated’ (Meijer 2023, 3). Yet, hermeneutics poses questions which are fundamental to currently more fashionable branches of literary study: how do we make sense of a text as we read it, what role does our previous experience play in determining how we understand new experiences and how do we decide which possible interpretations are reasonable and legitimate?
The rejection of hermeneutics goes back a long way, as Liesbeth Korthals Altes has argued: ‘Structuralist, poststructuralist, or deconstructionist
approaches each had their own interest in obliterating any continuity with the hermeneutic tradition. This tradition was associated with everything that, on the side of Scylla, counted as the opposite of serious science or, on that of Charybdis, smacked of the authoritative imposition of meaning’ (2014, 47–48). So, it seems, hermeneutics is either not scientific enough or too authoritarian, and interpretation is either (or both) hopelessly subjective and crazily deluded in its aspiration to truth. Writing from a structuralist perspective in the 1960s, Tzvetan Todorov advocated the rigorous study of the general laws governing all texts rather than the unscientific interpretation of individual works (Todorov 1968, 18–20); and Jonathan Culler later concurred that ‘One thing we do not need is more interpretation of literary works’ (1981, 6). In the intervening years, the fortunes of interpretation have waxed and waned. Richard Rorty associated his approach with hermeneutics in his influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (2009, 315–56); Stanley Fish wrote that ‘like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town’ (1980, 355) and Culler would go on to assert that ‘Interpretation itself needs no defence’, even insisting that ‘interpretation is interesting only when it is extreme’ (1992, 110). The ‘symptomatic reading’ linked with figures such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar and Fredric Jameson, and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ associated with Paul Ricoeur (to which I will return in Chapter 2) are openly interpretive, as they look behind or underneath the work to find its hidden ideological underpinnings.
And yet, these defences of interpretation have done little or nothing to reverse the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition which Felski, as quoted above, describes as ‘scandalous’. Part of the problem, I suggest, is a widespread misunderstanding of what hermeneutics is and what it is not. Repeatedly in this book, I will refer to the misconception of hermeneutics as the belief in and the attempt to establish the single correct interpretation of a literary work. Jacques Derrida, whose work is discussed in Chapter 3, describes the hermeneutic project as ‘postulating the true sense of a text’ (1978, 86).2 As a close reader of Heidegger, an interlocutor of Gadamer and a colleague and friend of Ricoeur, Derrida ought to have known better. He reflects and helps spread a view which is demonstrably false. Originating in the exegesis of classical and sacred texts, hermeneutics developed out the need to regulate and limit the range of legitimate interpretations.3 However, its modern form is no longer defined by this regulatory function. A decisive reorientation can be observed in section 32 of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger has been discussing how interpretation is never free from presuppositions. The figure of the hermeneutic circle suggests that the parts (for example, of a sentence or a poem) can only be understood in relation to the whole,
whilst the whole can only be understood in relation to the parts. When he described this potentially vicious circle, the nineteenth-century hermeneutic philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher insisted that in practice it could be broken by a continual to-and-fro between the parts and the whole (see Mueller-Vollmer 1996, 84–86). Heidegger’s crucial intervention is to insist that the point is not to attempt to break or escape from the hermeneutic circle since any such endeavour entails misunderstanding the very act of understanding. Rather, as he goes on to argue, the point is to see that the circularity of understanding tells us something fundamental about the type of beings we are:
What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way. This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself. It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing.
(Heidegger 1962, 195; emphasis in original)
It is impossible to overstate the importance of this passage in the development of modern hermeneutic thought. The focus moves away from the regulation of interpretation towards a philosophical inquiry into the processes of interpretation and understanding themselves. Peter Szondi describes the consequential fundamental shift in the role of hermeneutics: ‘Hermeneutics was once exclusively a system of rules, while today it is exclusively a theory of understanding’ (1995, 2). As Szondi goes on to say, this does not mean that modern hermeneutics can or should forego the formulation of rules but understanding the activity of interpretation now takes precedence over providing means to secure the certainty of any particular interpretive act. Gadamer is the key figure in this postHeideggerian re-conception of hermeneutics, and in Truth and Method, he explicitly insists that there can never be a final resting point to the labour of interpretation: ‘the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art never comes to a conclusion; it is in fact an unending process’ (1986, 303). To the best of my knowledge, no one working in hermeneutics disputes this view. And this means that certainly, definitively and indisputably, hermeneutics DOES NOT endorse the notion of a single correct interpretation. I don’t know how often that needs to be repeated.
The hostility towards interpretation is, of course, not restricted to the allegation that it fallaciously claims to exercise mastery over meaning.
Susan Sontag’s influential article ‘Against Interpretation’, originally published in 1964, extends the case against interpretation by arguing that it damages the experience of art. She states that interpreters claim to disclose the ‘true meaning’ of a text (2009, 6) but this claim is undermined by the diversity of interpretations. The work of Kafka, for example, has been read variously as social allegory (case studies in the insanity of modern bureaucracy), psychoanalytic allegory (Kafka’s fear of his father and castration anxiety) and religious allegory (humanity confronted with the mysterious justice of God) (2009, 5). Critics are ‘like leeches’ (2009, 5); and the modern style of criticism ‘excavates, and as it excavates, destroys’ (2009, 6). Interpretation, she says, might sometimes be a liberatory act but now it has become ‘reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling’ (2009, 7). It is ‘the revenge of the intellect upon art’ (2009, 7).
Sontag makes clear that she is not referring to all interpretation in all contexts. Indeed, she explicitly agrees with the Nietzschean axiom which states that, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ (2009, 5). According to this view, all knowledge and experience of the world are always already interpretive. Sontag specifies that she uses interpretation in a restricted sense: ‘By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation’ (2009, 5). So, her objection refers only to conscious, rule-bound interpretation. This, however, prompts criticism from a hermeneutic perspective. Hanna Meretoja suggests that Sontag’s focus on conscious interpretation excludes the major part of interpretive activity:
The starting point of the hermeneutic approach is that interpretation is something that we do all the time, whether we like it or not. We always orient ourselves to the world in a certain way, and in so doing we interpret and bestow meaning on it. According to this broad conception, interpretation is mostly not what Sontag described in the preceding as ‘a conscious act of the mind,’ but rather part of the automatized interpretative practices that largely escape our awareness. (2018, 44; emphasis in original)
This point underpins a further problem with Sontag’s argument when it is assessed from the perspective of hermeneutics. In the final sentence of her essay, Sontag rejects hermeneutics: ‘In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’ (2009, 14). Sexual vocabulary runs through Sontag’s indictment of interpretation. Earlier, she stated that the project of interpretation is ‘never-consummated’ (2009, 5): it never completes the (sexual) act which it promises and appears to initiate. The ‘erotics of
art’ which Sontag prefers presumably entails full-on contact and orgasm rather than the tease and deferment of interpretation. Sontag talks of ‘the naked power’ of art (2009, 8) and the need ‘[to] experience more immediately what we have’ (2009, 7). Interpretation, described as ‘the revenge of the intellect’ upon both art and the world (2009, 7), impairs our experience and makes it impossible for us to fully encounter the work. Rather than interpreting art, Sontag argues that we should expose ourselves again to ‘the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are’ (2009, 13).
Sontag’s argument depends upon a stark contrast between interpretation and experience. Interpretation domesticates and falsifies the work and distances us from it; uninterpreted experience allows us to know again the thing in itself, unspoiled by our over-intellectualised desire to create sense out of senselessness. This is more than a critique of some practices of interpretation. It is an uncompromising denial of the fundamental tenets of hermeneutics, at least in its most influential modern form. From a hermeneutic perspective, there is no thing in itself which can be experienced and known pre-interpretively. To quote Meretoja again: ‘A key insight of twentieth-century phenomenological hermeneutics is that all experience is interpretative. There is no such thing as raw or pure sense perception’ (2018, 44). Interpreting, giving meaning, making sense of our world: these are not activities which we might or might not undertake. We engage in them all the time, unavoidably and inevitably. The Heideggerian insight which inflects the modern direction of hermeneutics is that interpretation is what we do; like it or loath it, we are interpreting animals. To oppose interpretation is pointless because we cannot avoid it. The question is not whether or not we should interpret: the hermeneutic response to this is that, always and inescapably, we interpret our world, our relationships and our experiences. The question is rather: can we reflect effectively enough on our interpretive activity to make a difference to it, to avoid being fully determined by the baggage of beliefs and attitudes we take for granted, and in the process to make a positive, creative difference to our understanding and to ourselves?
The interest of Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ comes not so much from its argument, which is frankly weak, as from its continuing resonance with later strands of anti-hermeneutic criticism. A few years ago, so-called ‘surface reading’ acquired some impetus in US literature departments. The text that served as its manifesto, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’ by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, printed in a special edition of the journal Representations, does not explicitly take issue with hermeneutics as such but it nevertheless echoes Sontag’s critique of interpretation. In the account of Best and Marcus, the ‘symptomatic reading’
developed by Jameson and others and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ analysed by Ricoeur promote the notion that meaning is ‘hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter’ (2009, 1). This view of meaning makes of the interpreter a heroic figure who unmasks something which has been concealed. Best and Marcus advocate a model of reading which is more modest. Instead of looking for occluded, repressed or unconscious meanings, we should respect surfaces, where we find ‘what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding’ (2009, 9). So, the critic’s role is to attend to manifest meaning, to explain what is really present in a text and to endeavour ‘to describe texts accurately’ (2009, 16) rather than to coerce and distort them by imposing hidden meanings which they do not genuinely contain.
The very term ‘surface reading’ is problematic because it implies a clear distinction between what lies on the surface of a text, that is, what is identifiably present in the text, what it literally says and what is supplied by an interpreter.4 By contrast, hermeneutics allows of no definitive division between surface and depth, manifest and latent, literally present and belatedly added. To decide, for example, whether a text alludes to another work is often a matter for discernment, discussion and judgement rather than something which can be resolved simply by appealing to what the text explicitly says.5 Whether or not the text says it is precisely what is at issue. Nevertheless, the appeal of surface reading derives from its resolve to treat texts with respect. As Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood put it in their ‘Afterword’ to the edition of Representations devoted to surface reading, ‘the recalcitrant, mystified, out-of-control, and conflicted text of Marxist-psychoanalytic reading has been replaced by texts that are friendly, frank, generous, self-conscious, autocritiquing, and unguarded’ (2009, 139). They are friends to be cherished rather than slippery opponents with something to hide. And with this mindset, Apter and Freedgood continue, ‘we learn more from texts than we teach them; we expect to be surprised’ (2009, 139). On this point at least, hermeneutics and surface reading share common ground.
Surface reading is by no means alone in its implicit or explicit hostility to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is undoubtedly, undeniably and unapologetically concerned with meaning, but ‘meaning-mongers’ (Landy 2012, 8) are disparaged as either deluded or deleterious, or both: deluded because they believe in the ‘one true meaning’ of a work, and/ or deleterious because they estrange us from a better, more enriching, more direct experience of art. Casual dismissals are too common to cite. The straw man here is the belief in the unequivocal, fixed and
retrievable meaning of literary works, a belief which pretty much no one holds, and certainly no one who has any kind of commitment to or understanding of hermeneutics, or indeed of literature. In a lively and provocative account of the relevance of speculative realism for literary study, Grant Hamilton argues that ‘the search for meaning within or around a literary text can only be regarded as a fool’s errand’ (2016, 25); we must give up on our search for meaning because such a search is ‘a wild goose chase’, the reason for this is being that ‘the literary critic can never hope to know or recount the full meaning of a literary text’ (Hamilton 2016, 31). I do not know anyone who has ever suggested that we can hope to know or recount the full meaning of a literary text. But this does not entail that we should or can renounce interpretation. Moreover, if the search for meaning is a fool’s errand and a wild goose chase, I have to admit that – as this book will illustrate – I am a fool who enjoys chasing wild geese.
Narrative hermeneutics
In this book, I discuss the possibility of a ‘hermeneutics of trust’ which, like surface reading, attempts to attend closely to texts rather than to look beneath or behind them. There are, however, important differences between this hermeneutics of trust and the literalism of surface reading which endeavours ‘to produce undistorted, complete descriptions of [texts]’ (Best and Marcus 2009, 18). Trust is problematic because it is not always deserved. In lending our trust, we expose ourselves to being deceived, cheated and hurt. I nevertheless want to suggest that the gains of trust outweigh the losses, at least where the interpretation of art is concerned. The point to which I constantly return is Heidegger’s claim in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ that the artwork speaks; moreover, it speaks of truth, it discloses something of immense importance about our world and our lives (see Heidegger 1971). It is therefore incumbent upon us as to listen with utmost attention to what the artwork has to say. But this does not mean that we cease to interpret. On the contrary, it requires an intense scrutiny of the ambivalences, ambiguities and semantic potential of the work. Trusting a text, in this light, does not entail attempting to reproduce its literal meaning; rather, it involves a willingness to push its power to suggest unforeseen meanings as far as the interpreter can. Trusting the text, listening to it in the Heideggerian sense, consequentially demands interpretation; indeed, it calls for and sanctions what some might regard as overinterpretation, if we are to have any prospect of adequately perceiving the profound things a work of art might say to us.6
My view of the continuing importance and relevance of hermeneutic thought has been reinforced by recent developments in narrative hermeneutics, as elaborated especially in the work of Hanna Meretoja, Jens Brockmeier and Mark Freeman.7 Narrative hermeneutics reiterates fundamental tenets of modern hermeneutics in general, namely the related claims that human understanding is mediated (Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014, 4) and experience is inherently interpretive (Meretoja 2018, 44). There is no radical separation between experience, storytelling and interpretation. Our experience is unavailable ‘as such’, in a raw, pre- or non-verbal form, and its meaning is never definitively settled. Moreover, narrative is part of our experience, not something that comes in retrospect to give order and make sense (see Meretoja 2018, 43–88). In Meretoja’s words, ‘narratives as cultural interpretative practices shape the way we experience things in the first place’ (2018, 57; emphasis in original).
This does not mean, however, that narrative hermeneutics embraces what Brockmeier describes as ‘the strong narrative thesis’, that is, the view that ‘there are autobiographical memories that only come into being because of narrative’ (2015, 99; emphasis in original). Read too rapidly, this strong thesis might appear to come perilously close to implying that everything is a story, there are only stories and all stories are ethically and politically equivalent; so, we can say anything we like; facts don’t matter because there are no facts. Nothing is true, so we can assert whatever best suits our interests or desires.
To counter this conclusion, a central issue for narrative hermeneutics is how to avoid the pitfalls of post-truth cynicism. The imbrication of experience, narrative and interpretation does not inevitably lead to the collapse of all distinctions between truth and falsehood, facts and lies. Rather, what is required is a complex, intellectually and emotionally demanding negotiation between an aspiration for truth and an awareness that truth is elusive. The kind of raw, naked experience to which Sontag aspires in ‘Against Interpretation’ may be an unattainable or unhelpful concept, so we are left with ambiguous narratives and unstable, unfinished interpretations; yet, we also feel morally and psychologically lost if there is no way of arbitrating between alternative ways of recounting and understanding our lives. Mark Freeman lucidly formulates the dilemma. He suggests that the stories we tell about ourselves may be ‘outright fictions’ but they nevertheless make us the people we are (Freeman 2015, 238). Moreover, crucially, this view resolutely does not mean that all stories are equally valid or equally false:
And yet, it is patently the case that there are both utterly false life stories and utterly deluded selves, that is, people whose very sense of
who and what they are flies in the face of what others know them to be. It is also the case that, occasionally, we selves seem to be able to move from a less truthful version of who and what we are to a more.
That is, our self-interpretations don’t merely change but somehow ‘progress’; there is insight, illumination, ‘development,’ perhaps even a movement in the direction of truth.
(Freeman 2015, 238–39)
In this passage, the quotation marks around progress and development reflect a necessary caution about embracing a too-hopeful prospect of achieving self-knowledge or truth. At the same time, that prospect is not abandoned. If truth is not available, Freeman nevertheless affirms the possibility of ‘a movement in the direction of truth’.
The merit of narrative hermeneutics is that it requires us to think again, seriously, about questions of truth and validation in the posttruth era. Stories may be everywhere, even in the deepest levels of our experience, but not all stories are as good or bad as others. This is why narrative is both useful – or more precisely: inescapable – and dangerous. If stories are ubiquitous, if they are part of the way we experience every moment of our lives, how can we tell the good ones from the bad, the ones which further our progress and the ones which impede it, the true ones from the false ones? This question is epistemological, ethical and political; and of course it ensures that the scope of narrative hermeneutics, whilst including literary study, also embraces work in other branches of the humanities and beyond.
My principal concern in this book is with issues of interpretation and ethics as raised in hermeneutic theory and in the practice of reading. Theoretical reflection sits alongside detailed discussions of texts and, in one chapter, films. The main chapters of the book are grouped in three parts. The first part, ‘Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trust’, sets out what I regard as some of the key issues in current literary studies. Chapter 1 examines recent reflections on why literature matters in the modern world, an issue that has been debated at least since Plato’s banishment of the poets from the ideal city in Book 10 of the Republic; and the chapter draws attention to what may be the emergence of what I call a ‘hermeneutics of trust’ in recent work on literature. Chapter 2 develops this by contrasting the hermeneutics of trust with the so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, with reference to the work of Ricoeur and Gadamer; and the chapter ends by discussing how these different hermeneutic approaches produce conflicting accounts of the work of Albert Camus. Chapter 3 continues the theoretical discussion of interpretation by examining the
apparent opposition between hermeneutics and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, following the work of John Caputo in suggesting that deconstruction can be regarded as a form of ‘radical hermeneutics’.
The three chapters in Part 2, entitled ‘Misreading/Overreading’, explore in detail questions of what is not legitimate in interpretation, whether we can usefully distinguish between plausible reading and misreading or overreading. Chapter 4 takes the example of Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci to show how brilliant interpretation can be entangled with demonstrable mistakes, and it discusses how far interpretation can viably be pushed with reference to two films, Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu and Louis Malle’s Milou en mai. Chapter 5 continues the discussion of the limits of interpretation first by examining the work of the theorist Umberto Eco, then by testing out some interpretive hypotheses regarding one of Camus’s short stories, ‘Jonas ou l’artiste au travail’. Chapter 6 considers the violence of reading in the Talmudic commentaries of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. These commentaries, I suggest, serve as exemplary displays of interpretive bravado, combining deep respect for traditional interpretations with a bold extension of a text’s possibilities of meaning.
Part 3, ‘Reading/Ethics’, turns explicitly to the ethical issues raised by literature and interpretation. As Liesbeth Korthals Altes argues, ‘There are no value-free interpretive exercises’ (2014, 252), and questions of interpretation lead inevitably to ethics. Chapter 7 provides an overview of ethical discussions of literature, from Plato’s proposal to banish the poets to more recent discussions in poststructuralism and trauma studies. Chapter 8 looks in more detail at the ethical claims of trauma studies. Chapter 9 discusses the ethical stakes of stories with reference to Kant, Bernard Williams and Camus’s short story ‘L’Hôte’. Chapter 10 brings together the interpretive and ethical concerns of the book through a metacritical reading of Camus’s novel La Chute. Critics have read the novel in widely divergent ways, attempting to tie their interpretations to ethical stances which they might either endorse or condemn. The chapter suggests that Camus’s novel permits, even encourages different interpretations, whilst also maintaining ironic distance from any interpretive certainty but this does not entail a complete repudiation of any kind of ethical value. Finally, the Conclusion summarises the argument of the book, and suggests that the ‘hermeneutics of trust’ might be better understood as the ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust’.
I should perhaps explain why I discuss the work of Albert Camus in several of the chapters of this book. At a basic level, this is due to personal preference and interest: I continue to find myself drawn to and
intrigued by Camus’s writing even though it has not always been fashionable. Moreover, to some readers, it may seem over-familiar and (as one anonymous reader put it) perhaps a little retro. Camus’s canonical status at least has the advantage that more readers will have some acquaintance with his key works than if I had chosen to discuss a less widely known selection of texts. And the fact that a large body of critical work has accrued around his fiction has allowed me to talk at a metacritical level about the formation and propagation of particular interpretive positions. But the bottom line remains that I chose Camus because I like his fiction and enjoy writing about it. There is in this choice a quiet appeal (following Felski 2020) for critics to nurture and attend to the texts we care about.
The chapters in this book are conceived as forays because they are more like limited incursions into foreign territory than actions in anticipation of a complete invasion. As Toril Moi puts it, reading has the potential to become ‘an adventure, an exploration of the unknown’ (2017, 6). This entails neither domination nor ownership, and it certainly does not promise a new and systematic theory of literature or interpretation. Indeed, as things currently stand, it seems to me neither interesting nor possible to propose a systematic theory which would have much chance of being taken seriously. Whilst remaining aware of the risks and pitfalls of interpretation, the book promotes our interpretive endeavours (and failures) as inherently, splendidly human. As such, it expresses a deep enjoyment of interpretation and even of overinterpretation, of finding more in the texts we appreciate than they may reasonably be thought to contain. This view inevitably brings with it the risk of going too far, a risk which some readers might scrupulously wish to avoid. Best and Marcus describe the purpose of criticism which attends to the surface of texts as ‘a relatively modest one’ (2009, 11), in contrast to the heroic delusions of the critic-as-demystifier. I wonder, however, whether this is really a time for modesty in the humanities, as funding diminishes and departments contract. Perhaps, on the contrary, now is a time when we should be intelligently immodest, insisting on the validity of our voice in debates about truth, justice, responsibility and the generation of values. This might involve proclaiming as loudly as we can that the texts we care about, supplemented by our sometimes anxious, overwrought readings of them, can support us as individuals who live and love and flounder and hope, and as citizens who vote and strive for what is right. If we sometimes go over the top, that may be a better way to fail than fatally undervaluing the contribution we are able to make.
Notes
1 See, for example, Hoy (1982); Mueller-Vollmer (1986); Ormiston and Schrift (1990); Weinsheimer (1991); Szondi (1995); Grondin (1994) and Zimmermann (2015).
2 Throughout this book, translations from French are mine except where an English-language edition is cited.
3 For a useful short introduction to the origins and scope of hermeneutics, see Zimmermann (2015).
4 For criticism of the surface/depth distinction, see, for example, Moi (2017, 177–83); and for a spirited defence, see Landy (2020).
5 For discussion of this issue, see Chapter 5 of the current book.
6 On overinterpretation, see my Critical Excess (Davis 2010), and Chapter 4 of this book.
7 See, in particular, Brockmeier and Meretoja (2014); Brockmeier (2015); Freeman (2015); Meretoja (2018) and Meretoja and Freeman (2023). The current account of narrative hermeneutics is based on Davis (2023, 37–39).
Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’. Representations 108 (1): 1–21.
Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. ‘Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics’. Storyworlds 6 (2): 1–27.
Culler, Jonathan. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Culler, Jonathan. 1992. ‘In Defence of Overinterpretation’. In Interpretation and Overinterpretation, edited by Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose, 109–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Colin. 2010. Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Davis, Colin. 2023. ‘Testimony: Truth, Lies, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion’. In The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics, edited by Hanna Meretoja and Mark Freeman, 36–54. New York: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Paris: Flammarion.
Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Felski, Rita. 2020. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge (Mass.) and London: Harvard University Press.
Freeman, Mark. 2015. ‘Narrative Hermeneutics’. In The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, edited by Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman and Kathleen L. Slaney, 234–47. Malden (Mass.): Wiley Blackwell.
Grondin, Jean. 1994. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Hamilton, Grant. 2016. The World of Failing Machines: Speculative Realism and Literature. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 15–86. New York: HarperCollins.
Hiley, David, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds. 1991. The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hoy, David Couzens. 1982. The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Iser, Wolfgang. 2000. The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Landy, Joshua. 2012. How to Do Things with Fictions. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Landy, Joshua. 2020. ‘Praise of Depth; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hidden’. New Literary History 51 (1): 145–76.
Meijer, Michiel, ed. 2023. Updating the Interpretive Turn: New Arguments in Hermeneutics. New York and London: Routledge.
Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. New York: Oxford University Press.
Meretoja, Hanna, and Mark Freeman, eds. 2023. The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Moi, Toril. 2017. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, ed. 1986. The Hermeneutics Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ormiston, Gayle L., and Alan D. Schrift, eds. 1990. The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2009. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 2009. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin. Szondi, Peter. 1995. Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. Translated by Martha Woodmansee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1968. Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? 2. Poétique. Points ed. Paris: Seuil.
Weinsheimer, Joel. 1991. Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Zimmermann, Jens. 2015. Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PART I Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trust
1 DOES LITERATURE MATTER?
Anyone who reads this chapter is likely already to believe that literature matters. The fact that we nevertheless want repeatedly to ask and to attempt to answer the question of whether and why literature matters indicates a pressing sense of a need to defend literature, and by extension literary studies, in the face of indifference, scepticism or downright hostility from potential students, university authorities and national funding agencies. Perhaps those of us who have dedicated our professional lives to literary study also need to address our own self-doubts. There is of course nothing new about this situation, which dates back at least to Plato: the value of literature is not self-evident, and it needs to be justified. However, when student numbers were buoyant in the UK and US literature departments, there was a self-confidence about literary studies bordering on arrogance. It is no bad thing that we have been forced to think and talk more carefully about what we do and why. However, declining student numbers and, consequentially, reduced funding and staffing levels, indicate that we have failed. And so, the discussion of ‘why literature matters’ has become almost obsessive, as we justify ourselves valiantly but fail to reach the ears of the real decision makers.1
The fault is partly our own. As Joshua Landy has put it, ‘whether successfully or not, literary criticism has indeed made every effort to commit suicide’ (2007, 405). We speak to those of like mind without explaining to dissenters why what we do has value both to individuals and to society more broadly. The great American critic J. Hillis Miller explains that earlier generations of literary academics (he is talking about the 1950s to the 1970s) took for granted that teaching literature was important because it passed down truths and values to a receptive audience, even if in retrospect some of those truths and values now seem indefensible (2016, 16). So, what replaces the self-confidence of earlier generations? When Hillis Miller tackles this question head-on, in his paper ‘A Defense of Literature and Literary Study’ (Miller 2016, 54–65), his diagnosis of
the situation of literary studies in the age of digital technologies is exemplary but his solution offers no killer response. He calls upon Kafka, Mallarmé and Wallace Stevens, with reference to Derrida and Blanchot. I am utterly onside, but the reader whom we really need to persuade has probably already switched off. And this is the real problem here, as our defence of literature is heard only by those who are predisposed to listen. Like Hillis Miller, Martha Nussbaum has launched a well-informed, compelling defence of the humanities, for example, in her book Not for Profit. Literature, she argues, helps make us better individuals and better citizens, more capable of understanding the viewpoints of others and therefore more tolerant and less prone to violent prejudicial responses. The humanities are the cornerstone of democracy. I desperately want her to be right. However, the readers who are most likely to find her arguments persuasive are people like me, that is, people who do not need to be persuaded.
In an ever-more threatening context, the discussion continues. Many of us remain committed to literary study and the belief that literature is somehow good for us but we have patently failed to justify this to influential, sceptical audiences. As Magnus Persson puts it, a little sadly but perhaps also a little hopefully, ‘New arguments for reading literature are needed’ (2015, 202; emphasis in original). This chapter examines three recent attempts to show why literature and literary studies matter: Robert Eaglestone’s Literature: Why it Matters (2019), Terence Cave’s Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (2016) and Rita Felski’s Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020). Particularly fascinating here is the interplay of divergence and convergence as major scholars reflect and contend with the ongoing crisis of confidence in the humanities.
Literature: Why it Matters
Robert Eaglestone’s short book Literature: Why it Matters does not purport to be cutting-edge research. It is addressed to potential students of literature rather than established scholars. An outstanding academic with a distinguished research profile attempts to explain why his subject matters. This seems to me to be a brave and important endeavour. The book appears in a series in which, according to the publisher’s blurb, ‘world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students’. Other books in the series include defences of Philosophy, History, Anthropology and Classics. The series title Why it Matters is also the subtitle of each of the books. The aim is not to ask whether the subject matters; rather, it
is to seek to explain why it matters. This is a place for self-assertion not self-doubt. Moreover, the series blurb makes it explicit that the books are addressed to potential or actual students rather than to universitygoverning bodies or policy makers. The suggestion here may be that if we recruit and train enough students, there is no further need to justify ourselves in bottom-line financial terms. No university is going to pull a subject which has high recruitment levels and provides a correspondingly healthy income stream.
Eaglestone’s defence of literature begins on a deliberately unpromising note. On his first page, he reminds us that no one really knows what literature is: ‘as soon as we try to pin it down, to define it, literature seems to slip away’ (2019, 1). Later, it turns out to be equally difficult to explain why this elusive object might be thought to be important. The problem here is that there are too many answers: ‘Literature and works of literature matter in so many different ways that there is no single, easy-to-point-to answer to this question: just as literature can’t be defined, so how it matters can’t be pinned down’ (2019, 53). To some extent, Eaglestone is playing with his readers here: a book on why literature matters is inevitably going to frustrate us when it confesses that it cannot say either what literature is or why it matters. Eaglestone nevertheless has a serious point. There is no decisive answer to what literature is and why it matters, no knock-out punch which would leave the sceptics reeling and defeated. Instead, in his third chapter entitled, ‘Why Does Literature Matter?’ Eaglestone approaches the question from two separate, partial angles: firstly, by taking a concrete example where literature demonstrably mattered to real readers, and secondly, by refuting the argument of a book which insists that literature does not or should not matter.
Eaglestone’s concrete example is taken from the work of Jane Davis, an academic at the University of Liverpool. Seeking to extend the impact of literature outside the university, Davis set up a summer outreach project called ‘Get into reading’. She found a strong emotional response from some participants when a poem by Tennyson was read out loud. Davis went on to establish the Reader Project which, amongst other schemes, worked with mental health groups in South London. Reading and discussing poems together, group members again reported strong reactions, finding their lives reoriented and sometimes changed. The report on the project, entitled What Literature Can Do, concluded that literature can ‘(1) trigger access to felt experience at the human core and (2) offer a freer, deeper and more mobile way of thinking about it’ (quoted in Eaglestone 2019, 58). Here, we have irresistible evidence that literature really matters to real people.
Eaglestone’s second line of approach is through the case of psychologist Paul Dolan. In his book Happiness by Design, Dolan describes a pathway to happiness that certainly does not involve literature. He proudly proclaims that he has ‘never read a novel in [his] life’, having better things to do than ‘reading made-up stories’ (Dolan 2014, 81, quoted in Eaglestone 2019, 67). Eaglestone finds in Dolan a prime example of hostility to literature based on its apparent lack of instrumental value. And yet, through close attention to Dolan’s text, Eaglestone nevertheless argues that literature is implicitly valued even as it is explicitly denigrated. Dolan’s book has narrative drive as it recounts the story of its author’s pleasure-purpose principle; in fact, it is full of stories which are used to help the author make his points; and it uses jokes, poetic moments, metaphors and other literary devices. In short, it is a tribute to the value and usefulness of literature as it endeavours to convey its message: ‘So while his book tells us that literature is useless, it actually shows us that literature is useful, more useful than anything else’ (2019, 73; emphasis in original).
Eaglestone’s two approaches to the question of why literature matters make a number of strong points, whilst also leaving some questions open. To show empirically that literature has mattered to some readers does not in itself prove that literature in general matters or should matter, or that it must matter in a dystopic future. And whilst Eaglestone is undoubtedly correct in his sharp reading of literary elements in Dolan’s book, Dolan himself might easily shrug them off. If a text inadvertently adopts literary and narrative devices, all that proves is that you do not have to read novels in order to acquire, understand and use them. Perhaps Eaglestone is himself inadvertently demonstrating that there is no need to study literature in order to exploit its devices, just as there is no need to study respiration in order to breathe. In effect, even if the two approaches succeed in showing that literature matters, they do not yet give grounds for thinking that literary study is a worthwhile discipline. Eaglestone turns to this in his final chapter, ‘What Does Literature Teach?’.
The final chapter of Literature: Why it Matters makes the case for the university study of literature. Prospective students and their parents understandably wonder what the point of studying literature might be. Where will it lead, is it worth the investment of time and money? Most people who study literature do not go on to a professional career as literary critics or academics. Eaglestone’s response is robust. He quotes from the work of Cathy Davidson, who herself draws on a study undertaken by Google to determine what qualities are most likely to lead to promotion and a successful career. Google’s study showed that the best ideas
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
Bodleian originally forming the lining of the binding of a bible is an inscription stating that the book was bought from Ingelbert the Hereford bookseller in 1510 about the day of the Lichfield fair. The Hereford Breviary is a very rare book. The Bodleian has the Pars Estivalis which came from the Colbert sale. A copy was in Richard Smith’s sale in 1682, when it was sold for three shillings and eightpence. This may be the copy given at the end of the seventeenth century to Worcester Cathedral Library by Dr George Benson, prebendary of Worcester and dean of Hereford. The third copy known is in private hands. It would seem that Ingelbert and his patroness Margaret quarrelled over the production of this book, for in the plea-rolls of 1505, the year in which it was issued, he is cited as defendant in a suit brought by Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the King’s mother, to recover the sum of one hundred shillings. He is there called stationer and bookseller of London, so that he may have had a shop in both places. Unfortunately we have only the mere mention of the case without any reference to its purpose, but the coincidence of the date and the known connexion of the Lady Margaret with the issue of the Breviary make it probable that it formed the subject of the dispute.
The only other Hereford book known is an edition of the Ortus Vocabulorum, of which the only known copy, once in the magnificent collection of Richard Vaughan of Hengwrt, is now in the Rylands Library, Manchester. The colophon states that it was printed in 1517 at Rouen by Eustace Hardy at the costs of Jean Caillard, a stationer in business at Rouen, and John Gachet living at Hereford The copy is quite perfect and in good condition, and has the further interest of being in its original stamped binding. After this single venture we hear no more of Gachet at Hereford, or of anything being published there.
LECTURE III.
OXFORD SECOND PRESS AND CAMBRIDGE.
A an interval of about thirty years the Oxford press restarted on a brief career, this time apparently with the official sanction of the University. The first book issued was a commentary by W. Burley Super libros posteriorum Aristotelis. It is a small tract of ten leaves, and was finished on December 4, 1517. The printer, John Scolar, lived in St John’s Street, near Merton College. Nothing is known of him before he appears at Oxford as a printer, and nothing of his career in the University. Mr Madan remarks, “Although Scolar uses the arms of the University (their earliest occurrence in print), yet the registers of the University almost ignore the fact that for the second time the greatest literary invention since speech and writing were known was silently at work in its midst.” The expression “almost ignore” is rather disingenuous. Whether the registers did or did not ignore John Scolar we shall never know, since the volume covering the years from 1515 to 1526 is lost.
The text and notes of this volume are printed in two sizes of blackletter type, apparently identical with that used by Wynkyn de Worde. Some of the initials and the woodcut at the end are certainly his, and it would appear as though Scolar had obtained from him the type which had been used for printing the work of Sirectus, published a year or two earlier at Oxford by Jacobi.
The next book, finished on May 15, 1518, is Dedicus’ Questiones super libros Ethicorum Aristotelis. A very interesting fact about it is the statement on the last leaf that the printer had a privilege for it for seven years granted by the Chancellor. No one was to print it in the University or sell copies printed elsewhere under pain of confiscation of the books and a fine of five pounds sterling. The notice ends with the expressive Latin adage, “Cornicum oculos configere noli.”
This is the first privilege which I have found in an English printed book, the next, six months later, having been granted by the King for Cuthbert Tonstall’s Oratio in laudem matrimonii Mariæ et Francisci. This privilege prevented anyone either reprinting it in England or selling foreign printed copies for the space of two years. This may seem a short time, but the subject was only of passing interest. The rise, growth, and scope of these privileges, which are the foundations of copyright, form a subject which has hitherto received little or no attention even from writers on copyright, though I think it would go far to prove that the perpetual copyright, which later on was claimed by the stationers, was never legally recognised, but that the power granted them by the charter enabled them to impose and uphold arbitrary restrictions which were not legally binding.
On the title-page of this and the preceding work is John Scolar’s device, the shield of the University surmounted by a cap and supported by two angels. On the shield are the arms, the book with seven seals between the three crowns, but the motto on the book in place of the present “Dominus illuminatio mea” is “Veritas liberabit, bonitas regnavit.” Another woodcut containing the Royal arms and supporters is used in these books, which had been used previously by W. de Worde.
In June 1518 three books were printed: Questiones de luce et lumine, a tract of eight leaves, Burley’s Principia, also of eight leaves, and a Grammar of Whitinton. A new Oxford book from Scolar’s press was discovered recently in a volume of tracts in the British Museum. It is an edition of the Opus insolubilium, a text-book for the schools. It consisted originally of four leaves, but the last is unfortunately missing. On the first leaf is the woodcut of the University arms in fresh condition. This tract may perhaps be the first production of Scolar’s press.
The Questiones de luce et lumine has on the title-page a small rough woodcut depicting the visit of the Magi, belonging to a series made to illustrate a Book of Hours; and on the title of Burley’s Principia is a small neat woodcut, rather Italian in style, of a master seated before a desk with a pupil standing before him. At the end is a woodcut of the arms of England supported by the greyhound and dragon. Below
are two portcullises, and above two angels hold ribbons bearing the motto
“Hec rosa virtutis de celo missa sereno Eternum florens regia sceptra feret.”
This woodcut was part of the material obtained by the Oxford printer from W. de Worde, and which after the cessation of the press was returned to him. We find him using it in some of his later books, by which time it had become slightly damaged by wormholes.
We hear no more of Scolar in Oxford after 1518, when he probably left the city; but his place was taken by Charles Kyrfoth, who issued in February 1519 a Compotus manualis ad usum Oxoniensium, a little treatise of arithmetic illustrated by wood engravings of the open hand with values attached to each part. It is a small tract of eight leaves, and we learn from Dorne’s accounts that its price was one penny. In the colophon Kyrfoth gives his address, as did Scolar, as St John’s Street, and as he used the same device of the University Arms, we may conclude he had taken on Scolar’s business. On the title-page is a large and curious woodcut divided horizontally into three portions. In the upper is a row of seven books. In the centre a master in an embroidered robe and crowned with laurel is seated at a desk, while on either side of him are scholars taking notes. In the lower part are five men in gowns holding books. In the text are four diagrams of hands. The only copy known of this book is in the University Library. Beyond the occurrence of his name in this colophon we know nothing further of Kyrfoth. He probably left Oxford soon after the issue of this book, for his name is not found in the list of inhabitants in the Subsidy Rolls of 1524.
Scolar, as we said above, left Oxford in 1518, but we meet with him again ten years later; for in 1528 he printed a Breviary for the use of the Benedictine Monastery at Abingdon, which will be noticed hereafter.
Between 1527 and 1557 nothing was printed at or for Oxford. The books printed for John Dorne, described in an earlier lecture, were the last enterprise of an Oxford publisher. Nor apparently was there
any wish to continue printing, for while Cambridge was careful during the changes brought about by various acts to preserve her liberties, and when the act of 1534 against foreign stationers was passed to obtain a special exemption enabling the University to employ foreign stationers or printers, Oxford was content to let matters take their course. The roll of stationers continued unbroken, and here and there an interesting man, such as Garbrand Harkes, stands out, but there is little of interest to chronicle before the revival of the press at the end of the sixteenth century.
While Oxford was credited by many early bibliographers with a book printed in 1468, which was not really printed until 1478, so many of the same authorities credited Cambridge with a book printed in 1478 which was not printed at Cambridge at all. The mistakes and confusions about this book, only finally cleared up by Bradshaw in 1861, form a curious comedy of errors.
Among the documents used by Strype when writing his life of Archbishop Parker was a catalogue of the books bequeathed to Corpus Christi College by the archbishop, in which was an entry: “Rhetorica nova, impressa Cantab, fo. 1478.” This entry was communicated by Strype to Bagford, then collecting materials for a history of printing, and Bagford in his turn wrote about it to Tanner. Tanner’s brother passed on the information to Ames, who inserted it at the head of his account of Cambridge printing, and from him it was copied by other writers, including Herbert.
In the meanwhile Conyers Middleton in his Dissertation concerning the origin of Printing in England, had turned the error into a new groove. Describing the edition printed at St Alban’s in octavo in 1480, he remarks: “The same book is mentioned by Mr Strype among those given by Archbishop Parker to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge; but the words, ‘Compilata in Universitate Cantabrigiæ,’ have drawn this learned antiquary into the mistake of imagining that it was printed also in that year at our University, and of doing us the honour of remarking upon it; so ancient was printing in Cambridge!”
If the University Librarian, as Middleton then was, in place of being facetious, had stepped down the street and examined the book for himself, much subsequent confusion would have been avoided. He must have had a poor opinion of Strype if he supposed that that learned antiquary would describe as a folio printed at Cambridge in 1478 an octavo with a printed colophon, “impressa apud Villam Sancti Albani. 1480.”
But Middleton’s plausible suggestion seems to have gained ground, and the Corpus volume was passed over as a copy of the St Alban’s book until 1861, when Bradshaw, at work on the manuscripts in the library accidentally met with it, and saw at once that it was not the St Alban’s book, but an unknown Caxton edition. It has no colophon, so that the concluding words “Compilata in Universitate Cantabrigiæ,” and the date 1478, might well deceive a casual observer into thinking it was printed at Cambridge in that year.
Printing was introduced into Cambridge at the beginning of the year 1521 by John Lair of Siberch or Siegburg, a town a few miles southwest of Cologne. Like most of the foreign printers settled in England, he made but little use of his proper surname, but used the place name instead and called himself John Siberch.
Nothing is known as to the date of his settling in Cambridge, but it was probably in 1519 or early in 1520, for in May of the latter year an edition of Richard Croke’s Introductiones in rudimenta Græca was printed for him by Eucharius Cervicornus at Cologne.
Croke was at this time Professor of Greek at Cambridge, but he was compelled to have his work printed abroad, since no English printer of the time possessed a fount of Greek type. Had he acted on his own initiative, he would probably have employed a printer of Paris where he had studied, or Leipzig where he had recently been a professor, both of which towns had excellent Greek presses. But if Siberch, a man presumably with practical knowledge, was already settled in Cambridge, what could be more natural than for the professor to hand over the arrangements of the printing to him, while he in his turn would no doubt entrust the work to a printer of the town from which he himself came, and not improbably to the master with
whom he had himself worked. This, of course, is conjecture, but some curious evidence of Siberch’s having been in Cambridge when Croke’s book was published, came to light accidentally in 1889. In that year a volume was found in the library of Westminster Abbey printed at Paris in 1519, which had evidently been bound in Siberch’s workshop. In the binding were several manuscript and printed fragments. The printed fragments consisted of leaves of the Papyrius Geminus printed by Siberch in 1522 and two leaves of a hitherto unknown edition of Lily’s Grammar; amongst the manuscript fragments was a letter to Siberch, to be referred to later, and a piece of the manuscript of Croke’s Rudimenta Græca, bearing upon it the rough pencil mark indicating the commencement of a new sheet and a fresh page, both agreeing with the printed book. The copy then had been returned from abroad, not to the author Croke, but to the man who had commissioned the book, Siberch. Had Siberch been abroad when the book was printed, he would either have corrected the proofs with the copy at Cologne, and in that case would hardly have troubled to bring over the then useless copy with him to England, or else proofs with the copy would have been sent to Croke, in which case we should not have expected to find it as waste in Siberch’s shop.
What Siberch’s exact position was in relation to the University is not quite clear. Dr Caius speaks of him as the University printer, but no direct evidence of this has been forthcoming. Mr Gray has, however, pointed out to me an entry in one of the Grace books recently printed, and which he was unaware of when writing his life of Siberch for the Bibliographical Society. This was one of the graces passed in congregation during the year from the feast of St Michael the Archangel [September 29], 1520 to the corresponding date of the following year. It runs: “Obligatur doctor Manfeld loco et vice magistri Norres pro summa pecunie quam recepit Johannes bibliopola ab universitate.” This debt is entered regularly in the proctors’ accounts, printed in another recently-printed Grace book, from 1520-21 up to 1524-25, and the sum mentioned is twenty pounds. We have therefore the clearest evidence that some time between September 1520 and September 1521 the University had advanced
to Siberch the sum of twenty pounds, and I think we are quite justified in concluding that this was to assist him in his business as a printer. The sum of twenty pounds is considerably more than a University stationer’s fee, and must have been granted for a special purpose. If the exact date of the grace in the year could be ascertained, it would probably throw some light on the question. If early enough, it might be the cost of material to enable him to set up his press.
It is not until October 1521 that he uses the words, “Cum gratia et privilegio.” Bradshaw, in a bibliographical note on the book in which they first appear, writes: “In his dedication to Bishop Fisher he [that is, Siberch] styles himself ‘Io. Siberch Cantabrigiensis typographus,’ and it must have been on this occasion and through Bishop Fisher’s influence that he obtained leave to place ‘Cum gratia et privilegio’ on his title-pages.” This privilege was not I think the King’s privilege, such as London printers had just begun to obtain, but more probably one granted by the Chancellor similar to that given to Scolar the Oxford printer by the Oxford Chancellor, and this would further point to Siberch’s official connexion with the University.
The house where he lived and printed was described by Dr Caius as situated between the Gate of Humility and the Gate of Virtue, forming part of some property bought by Caius in 1563 from Trinity College. It bore the sign of the King’s arms, which accounts for the use by Siberch in his books of two woodcuts containing the Royal arms. In the same house Erasmus lived when he was lecturing at Cambridge, and we know from his letters that he was on intimate terms with Siberch and the contemporary Cambridge stationers to whom he sends greetings by name at the conclusion of one of his letters.
Having obtained some type Siberch started to work for himself, and his first production was a speech of Dr Henry Bullock delivered before Wolsey when the Cardinal visited the University in the autumn of 1520. This is a small pamphlet of eight leaves, devoid of all ornament, and it was published between February 13, the date of the dedication and the end of the month, in 1521. The type used appears to be new, but where it was obtained is not settled. It bears
a very strong resemblance to some of Pynson’s, but is not quite identical. At present we do not know much about the early business of type-cutting, but it seems clear that, soon after the commencement of the sixteenth century, different printers went to a common source for their type, and that type-cutting was not a part of the printer’s business, as it was when printing was first invented, but a special trade. New types would thus tend to conform more to a common model. Of this first Cambridge book four copies are known, but unfortunately there is no copy in Cambridge, the four copies being in the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Lambeth Library, and Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin. The Bodleian copy had belonged to Richard Burton, the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, the Lambeth one to Archbishop Bancroft, so that at any rate for a few years, between 1646 and 1662, this latter copy was with the rest of the Archbishop’s books upon the shelves of the University Library.
About April, in 1521, according to Bradshaw’s calculation, Siberch’s second book appeared, the sermon of Augustine, De miseria ac brevitate vitæ, a book of twelve leaves. The printer had added a little to his stock of type, for there is a Greek motto on the title-page which is also enclosed between two border-pieces.
This type is interesting as the first genuine moveable Greek type used in England. A year or two earlier W. de Worde had introduced a few words of Greek into an edition of one of Whitinton’s Grammars, but the words were roughly cut on wood. Pynson did not begin to use Greek until 1524 in a work by Linacre, and in the preface he offers a curious apology for its imperfections, praying the reader to pardon missing breathings or accents, since he had but recently cast the Greek types and had not prepared a supply sufficient to finish the work completely.
The amount of Greek printing in all Siberch’s books put together is very small, hardly enough to call for the cutting of a special fount, for it must be borne in mind that a Greek fount is infinitely larger and more complex than a Roman. One specially complicated fount used at Venice in 1486 contained about 1350 sorts. It seems probable therefore that we must look to some foreign source for this type, and
its identification might throw some further light on Siberch’s business career.
The two border side-pieces, each containing three small scenes in canopied compartments relating to the Last Judgment, evidently form part of a set for use in a Book of Hours. These identical borderpieces have not been found used elsewhere, but are evidently copied from, and resemble in every detail, two of a set used in a Book of Hours printed at Kirchheim. Very little, however, can be deduced from similarity of design, for printers copied designs which pleased them from any source, and often with such extraordinary accuracy as to require very careful scrutiny to distinguish the copy from the original.
This is the rarest of all Siberch’s books, for only one copy is known, now in the Bodleian. It formerly belonged to John Selden and went with the rest of his books to Oxford by bequest in 1659.
Of the next book four copies are known. It consists of a translation of Lucian’s πὲρι διψάδων by Henry Bullock, and a reissue of the latter’s Oration. On the title-page Siberch uses for the first time his ornamental border with the Royal arms at the base. A very curious statement, that this border is the first specimen of English copperplate engraving, has found its way into a number of books. Its earliest appearance seems to be in Herbert’s Typographical Antiquities, where a so-called facsimile is given. Now this facsimile itself is a very roughly-executed metal engraving, and from the text it is clear that Herbert made his description from this rough engraving and not from the book itself. The proof of this is clear. The engraver has added a rough facsimile of the two-lined colophon, immediately below the border, and Herbert, assuming it to be part of the titlepage, has so described it in his text. The most cursory glance would show this border to be a woodcut, but the old statement goes on being repeated.
The fourth book, Baldwin’s Sermo de altaris sacramento was issued in the summer, probably August, of 1521. In this is found for the first time the smaller device of the Royal arms. Eight copies of the book are known, two being in the University Library while another has
lately been discovered in the library of Magdalene College. One of those in the University Library, which it is suggested may be an early copy sent to Nicholas West, bishop of Ely, to whom the book is dedicated, shows some variations from the ordinary copies. It is clear that it is an early issue, since the border is without a small break noticeable in other copies, and the first word of the title-page, Reverendissimi, has been misprinted Reverndissimi, a mistake almost immediately noticed and corrected. In this book, for the first time, Siberch begins to use one of his ornamental capitals, a fine sixline S.
Siberch’s fifth book, Erasmus De conscribendis epistolis, was issued in October 1521. This is a more important book in point of size than any which preceded it, containing eighty leaves, whereas the largest of the others only ran to twenty. It also shows certain marks of advance. We find for the first time a frequent use of fine initial letters, and it is the first book for which the printer obtained a privilege, unfortunately not printed in full. Four copies of this book are known, two in the British Museum, and two in Cambridge College Libraries, St John’s and Corpus. The last copy has the additional interest of being bound by a contemporary Cambridge stationer, Nicholas Speryng, and bears his mark and initials on the binding. The Erasmus was followed by Galen De Temperamentis, translated from the Greek by Linacre. This is the commonest of Siberch’s books, at least twelve copies being known, but some of these show important variations. The first intention seems to have been to issue the De Temperamentis alone, and it was so printed off on sixty-six leaves, with the signatures A⁴, Q⁶. Later it was determined to add another small treatise De inequali intemperie, so the last two leaves of the first issue, containing the end of the De Temperamentis were cancelled, and two new sheets R⁴ and S⁶ added. Finally a preliminary quire of eight leaves was printed, making the complete book consist of seventy-four leaves. One copy of the first state is known, first noticed by Mr Bowes in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1894. On the verso of the penultimate leaf is a woodcut of the Adoration of the Shepherds and the colophon, on the verso of the last leaf the small block of the Royal arms and the date 1521. A
transitional copy, containing the first issue with the end uncancelled, but the additional sheets added, is in the library of the Royal College of Physicians. All the remaining copies are of the revised issue. In it the last two leaves are mainly occupied with a list of the errata which had been found in the De Temperamentis, and on the verso of the last leaf is the device of the Royal arms. The woodcut of the Shepherds found in the early copies has not as yet been traced to an earlier source. It is apparently Low Country work of the fifteenth century; Sir Martin Conway ascribes it to about the year 1485.
Two copies of the Galen were printed on vellum, both of which are now in Oxford, one in the library of All Souls College, the other in the Bodleian. This latter copy possesses a curious pedigree. It was presented to the Bodleian in 1634 by Thomas Clayton, Regius Professor of Medicine. In a long Latin note which he has written in the volume he states that it was given by Linacre to Henry VIII. who in his turn gave it to Cuthbert Tonstall, and after passing through various hands it had come into his possession, and he finally has deposited it in the Bodleian. It is an interesting copy, but whether it ever belonged to Henry is very doubtful. It is in the original binding, but this is simply an ordinary stationer’s binding impressed in blind with the two panels of the Royal arms and Tudor rose used by many of the London binders of the time. Again one sheet has been incorrectly printed. In printing the reverse side of a sheet in signature S, the workman has laid the sheet the wrong way round on the form and consequently the pages follow one another in the wrong order, a fruitful and common cause of waste sheets. Finally the ornamental initials in the early part of the book have not been printed in, and no attempt has been made to supply them by hand. It does not seem probable that so poor a copy would have been presented to the King. An early inscription shows that it belonged to Tonstall, who gave it to Richard Sparchford, archdeacon of Shropshire, who gave it to the church of Ludlow.
The seventh book is a translation into Latin by Richard Pace of the sermon preached by John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, in London, to an audience said to have numbered thirty thousand, on the occasion of the public burning of Luther’s works. In this book for the first time
Siberch made use of the device with his initials and mark within a chain work frame showing white on a black background, an uncommon style of device and one unlike any other used in England at the time. Of this book only four copies are known, two in the Bodleian, one in the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and one in the Rylands Library, Manchester.
The last dated of the early Cambridge books is the Hermathena of Papyrius Geminus, issued on December 8, 1522. No less than three different states of the title-page are known. The first is quite free from ornament, in the second an attempt seems to have been made to supply the want of the old border device, and the upper part of the title is enclosed in a frame made by two horizontal border-pieces joined at the sides by a plain fine. In the third state, a third borderpiece has been added at the bottom of the page and the black lines extended on either side to join all three. The book contains twentysix leaves, the last leaf containing on the recto the colophon and printer’s device, on the verso the small arma regia device. Six copies are known. With the title in the first state one copy remains, which formerly belonged to Bradshaw and is now in the University Library. Of the second state there are three copies, in Archbishop Marsh’s Library, in Lincoln Cathedral, and in St John’s College, Cambridge. Of the third state the two copies belong to the British Museum and the Duke of Devonshire. These last two copies are both printed on vellum, but the museum copy wants the last leaf containing the colophon and devices.
T - F ’ S , C J S 1522.
The publication of another Cambridge book, an edition of the Grammar of Lily and Erasmus, was proved by the discovery in 1889 of two leaves, found with some other most interesting fragments in the covers of a book in Westminster Abbey Library.
The Grammar is the De octo orationis partium constructione libellus written for the use of St Paul’s School. It was composed originally by William Lily, and Colet, the founder of the school, sent the work to Erasmus to emend. Erasmus so altered it that Lily would not permit it to be called his work, and as Erasmus for his part refused to put his name to Lily’s work, the book was published anonymously. It became very popular, and many editions were issued abroad for the English market, so that it is just such a book as a Cambridge printer might be expected to print rather than to import.
These nine books comprise the whole output of the early Cambridge press. Though Cambridge obtained a special privilege shortly afterwards giving the right to print, the right was never exercised, and nothing was produced in the town until the two Universities restarted their presses towards the end of the sixteenth century.
The bookbindings that can definitely be assigned to Siberch are at present few in number. He used one fine roll divided into four rectangular compartments, containing a pomegranate, a turretted gateway with portcullis, a Tudor rose, and three fleurs-de-lys, all surmounted by a royal crown and within canopied archways. Below the fleurs-de-lys are his initials. This is a purely English design, and the tool was no doubt made for him after his arrival in Cambridge. Immediately Siberch gave up work, about 1523-24, the tool passed to Speryng, who mutilated it, so that we know fairly well the period during which it was used when undamaged. Its use in conjunction with other tools enables more of Siberch’s material to be identified. In the University Library is a copy of the Epistolæ of Paulinus, bishop of Nola, printed at Paris in 1516, whose binding is impressed with two well-executed panel stamps separated from each other by this roll. On one is depicted St Roche tended by an angel for the plague and a dog bringing him food, on the other St John Baptist, standing on a mound and preaching to four persons seated below him. These two saints were popular subjects for binding panels, and a number of
varieties, mostly copied one from another, are known, but this particular pair are especially well designed and engraved, and were chosen by Dibdin to reproduce in his Bibliographical Decameron.
On a folio in the library of Clare College, Siberch’s signed roll is found used with another roll or band containing figures of seven peasants, one piping, the rest dancing with hands joined, a very favourite design with Netherlandish binders.
The two panel stamps and this second roll are all foreign in appearance, and were no doubt brought by Siberch from abroad. After he gave up work they remained in England. I have a work of Erasmus, printed in 1532, certainly bound in this country, which has the two panels on the binding, while the roll with dancing figures occurs on a binding in St Paul’s Cathedral Library, lined with waste leaves of an Almanac for 1544. It is not improbable that Siberch had other panels, for we find, soon after he ceased to bind, stamps which were certainly his used in conjunction with others exactly similar in style. I saw lately a work of Erasmus, dated 1524, on which this St Roche panel was used, and with it was a panel with St Michael, and these two occur together elsewhere. One point, however, must certainly be noticed. The one panel binding that we can with certainty attribute to Siberch has three bands on the back, as was usual in the case of English bindings. Every other binding with his stamps which I have seen has four bands, and a binder would be most unlikely to change his habits on such a point.
The letter of Peter Kaetz to Siberch, referred to earlier, is of the greatest interest. It is written on one side of an oblong piece of paper, with the address on the other side. Unfortunately parts of the ends of some of the lines are missing, making parts of certain sentences vague, especially at the beginning, but generally the meaning is fairly clear It has been translated by Mr Hessels as follows: “Know, Jan Siborch, that I have received your letter as [well as specimens] of your type, and it is very good; if you can otherwise ... and conduct yourself well then you will get enough to print. So I remain still in London because my master comes; I expect him from day to day, therefore I cannot even know when I cross, but so soon as I cross I shall do the best that is in my power. Item, I have told
Peter Rinck three or four times of the Pater noster, but he tells me that he cannot find it; and Gibkerken has not yet given Jacob Pastor the ring, but he carries it every day on his hand and he will not give it to Jacob Pastor. Item, I send you 25 prognostications and 3 New Testaments small. The prognostications cost one shilling sterling the 25, and the 3 New Testaments cost 2 shillings and 6 pence sterling, so there is still due to you, which I remain in your debt. I have no more New Testaments, otherwise I should have sent you more. I have nothing else to write except [to ask you to] deliver the accompanying parcel to Niclas, and greet Baetzken for me with your whole family, and do not forget yourself. Petrus Kaetz.”
Among the fragments found with it was part of the manuscript copy of Croke’s book printed in May 1520, a sheet of the Papyrius Geminus printed in 1522, and two leaves of the Lily’s Grammar. The book in which they were found must have been bound after December 1522, but the tools on the binding are not those known to have been used by Siberch, and the book may have been bound after Siberch ceased work by someone occupying his old workshop or who had obtained his waste material. From internal evidence the letter would appear to have been written in 1521 just after Siberch had started printing, the reference to the excellence of the type, of which proofs had apparently been sent, and the remark by Kaetz that if Siberch conducted himself well he would get enough to print, both pointing to this conclusion. One small point may be noticed here in passing. The tone of the letter is that of an older to a younger man, or at any rate, of a man to one of his own age Now in the colophons of books printed for Kaetz between 1523 and 1525 he is spoken of as “juvenis” and this may be taken as a slight argument for believing that in 1521 Siberch was a young man also.
The master to whom Kaetz referred was very possibly Christopher Endoviensis or Van Ruremond, who, when Kaetz set up in business on his own account, printed books for him. Van Ruremond we know printed English prognostications, single folio broadsides such as would be sold at a penny a piece, which as we know from Dorne’s day-book was the usual price of a single sheet, so that he may have been the printer of these supplied to Siberch at twenty-five for a
shilling. The New Testaments were probably of a Latin version since they are called Nova Testamenta in the letter. Nicholas, to whom a packet was sent, was, we may suppose, Speryng.
After 1522 Siberch seems to have relinquished his business as a printer and stationer. We have no reference to him in accounts, and as his name does not occur in the Subsidy Rolls of 1523-24 it may be considered as fairly certain that he was not then in Cambridge. That he had definitely given up work is clearly shown by the dispersal of his material. The smaller neatly-executed cut of the Royal arms went to his friend Peter Kaetz, who, taking it with him on his return to Antwerp, used it in the edition of the Dutch Bible printed for him there in 1525 by Hans Van Ruremonde. Apparently the same block appears in an edition of Erasmus and Lily’s Grammar published at Antwerp by Godfried van der Haeghen in 1527 for sale in St Paul’s Churchyard. The fine border of the Galen also went to Antwerp and is found eventually on the title-page of a Dutch Prognostication of 1536 printed by Hendrick Pietersen van Middleburch. From a comparison of a recently-issued facsimile of the Dutch book with the original Cambridge book, it is clear the border is identical in both. What has now to be done is to trace it between 1522 and 1536. Lastly, the fine binding roll which he possessed passed into the hands of Nicholas Speryng who attempted to obliterate the initial I upon it and substitute an N. The latest binding on which it is found in an unmutilated state is on a book printed at Venice and finished on November 10, 1522, so that the binding cannot be earlier than 1523. The mutilated tool is found used with others belonging to Speryng on the binding of a book printed in 1524.
For a considerable time after 1522 we have no information. The debt of twenty pounds continued to be entered in the proctor’s accounts up to the year 1524-25, after which it dropped out. In 1538-39 the debt is re-entered in a most interesting memorandum which may be translated thus: “Note; that twenty pounds sterling are owing to the university by ‘Dominus’ John Lair, an alien priest, and Doctors Rydley, Bullock, Wakefelde, and Maundefelde, and it has their bond signed by all their hands, and sealed with their seals.” After several
entries of a similar tenor we come to the final one in the Audit book under the year 1553. “John Syberche owes out of the money advanced to him [xx. li.], as is evidenced by his bond contained in the common chest, and his guarantors are Doctors Rydley, Bullocke, and Manfyld, together with Mr Wakfyld.” It would thus appear that like many another, Siberch was so influenced by the religious movements of the time, that he forsook his business in order to serve the Church, and it is therefore in this sphere that we should seek for further information about him. He seems also to have made use of his proper name Lair, sometimes corrupted into Law, rather than the name Siberch he had used as a printer.
Perhaps further search in this new direction may result in fresh discoveries.
The stationers of Cambridge, like the stationers of Oxford, were of two classes, those officially appointed by the University and those who traded independently. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there are frequent references to the rights of the University over the stationers. They had certain official duties, such as the valuation of books and the supply of the necessary school books at fixed rates, and the stationers chosen by the University received a small fee or salary for such work. After the middle of the fifteenth century the stationers can be traced in an unbroken series, but though we know their names and find entries of their business in accounts, there, at present, our information ceases. Five names are given in Mr Gray’s account of the early Cambridge stationers for the second half of the fifteenth century, Gerard Wake, John Ward, Fydyon, perhaps Fitzjohn, William Squire, and Walter Hatley. Of these, two, Wake and Hatley, were bookbinders, and perhaps some of their work may yet be identified, and if one single volume could be ascribed to either with certainty and the stamps they used definitely ascertained, then much of their work could be traced. William Squire is only known from receiving a settled fee of thirteen shillings and fourpence between the years 1482-6. He may perhaps, since we find the names Squire and Lesquier often used indiscriminately, be identical with the stationer William Lesquier whose goods were administered
at Oxford in February 1501-2. Peter Breynans, another bookbinder, is mentioned in 1502, and a Lawrence Topfeller in 1506.
In May 1503 the award of Margaret, Countess of Richmond, and three other arbitrators was agreed to and signed. This covenant between the town and University contained special references to stationers, and enacted that only those stationers and binders who had always practised their trade should be considered under the jurisdiction of the University, a certain number, then in business, being exempted.
Our knowledge of early Cambridge bookbinding is curiously different from what we know of Oxford. There our knowledge of fifteenthcentury work is full, and of early sixteenth almost a blank. For Cambridge there is a splendid series of early sixteenth-century work, while fifteenth-century specimens are almost unknown or at any rate unidentified. Mr G. J. Gray’s excellent monograph, lately published by the Bibliographical Society, has fully put on record what is known about Cambridge binding, and has the advantage of being well illustrated. The earliest examples facsimiled in his work are ornamented by means of the roll-tool, but there is a series of bindings ornamented with dies in the earlier manner produced probably about 1500, which may with considerable probability be ascribed to a Cambridge binder. These bindings are very distinctive in appearance and may easily be distinguished from others of the same period. One peculiarity enables us to identify this binder’s work even when on the shelves. He always ruled two perpendicular lines down the back. The leather used is nearly always the red-tinted variety which seems peculiar to Cambridge. The scheme of decoration of the sides consisted of a large centre panel divided by diagonal lines into a kind of diamond-shaped lattice work, and in each division thus formed a die was stamped. These dies, mostly square or diamond-shaped, contained conventional flowers or strange animals and birds. The best two, which are very finely engraved, have two cocks fighting and a pelican feeding her young. This binder also made frequent use of a small tool of a spray of foliage, plain and not enclosed in a frame, and this he used to build
