Encountering Political Texts at the NLS II

The exhibition poster. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

On 8th December 2023 the exhibition 'Encountering Political Texts 1640-1770' - the final event of the Experiencing Political Texts project - opened at the National Library of Scotland. I offered an appetiser for the exhibition in my last blogpost by discussing the various books bound by Thomas Hollis that were donated to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, some of which appear in the exhibition. This month I offer a taste of some of the other items on display - focusing on the themes of materiality, genre and the debating of issues in print.

Materiality

Opening graphics on the wall of the exhibition. Image by Rachel Hammersley

The Hollis editions are interesting because of their elaborate bindings and handwritten marginalia, which reflect Hollis's own reading of the texts. Other items on display in the exhibition also reflect the importance of texts as material objects. At the other end of the spectrum from the lavish Hollis volumes are the examples of unbound pamphlets. Reading 'original' pamphlets today generally involves going to a Special Collections reading room and identifying the pamphlet within a volume of such material that was bound together in book form at a later point in time. This experience of encountering early modern pamphlets is very different from that of their original readers. Pamphlets would have been sold on the streets by hawkers. They will have varied in size and quality, but many will have consisted of just a few pages of text printed on flimsy paper, their ephemerality reflecting the fact that they were often interventions in specific (and sometimes fleeting) events - a bit like a social media post today. They were not really intended to last - and it is important that we remember this when reading them.

Other material from the seventeenth century takes a more elaborate physical form. A prime example here are the three volumes of Eikon Basilike that appear in the exhibition. This important work was published in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Charles I in January 1649. Said to be based on Charles's own thoughts and writings during his imprisonment, this was a powerful work which sought to transform the failed king, who had been executed by some of his subjects, into a martyr worthy of veneration. The frontispiece image reflects this aim in its depiction of Charles discarding his earthly crown and seeking instead the heavenly crown of martyrdom. (A more detailed analysis of the image is available here). I have seen at least one version of this image that has been hand-coloured, with the King's robe light pink and his sleeves a deeper maroon. (In fact, the striking pink colour scheme of our project - which is reflected in the NLS exhibition - was inspired by this). While the version of the image in our exhibition is in black and white, the title page of the work, which is also on display, includes red ink, which was more costly to produce and so again an indicator of quality. The NLS also holds a small version of Eikon Basilike which has an embroidered cover. Whereas the red type was the work of the printer, this cover was probably produced by the owner of the work, reflecting its importance and significance to them.

Infographic produced by Nifty Fox reflecting the reading group discussion on ‘Books as Physical Objects’ as displayed in the Encountering Political Texts exhibition. Image by Rachel Hammersley

This beautiful little book reminded me of the Reading Group session we held earlier in 2023, to which each member brought a book that was special to them. One participant bought along a book with a handmade cover, like the copy of Eikon Basilike on display. Others had marginalia or material pasted or tipped in by the owner - and again we have an example of this in the exhibition. One of several pamphlets on display that engages with the debate over the union between England and Scotland in 1707, Parainesis Pacifica; or, A perswasive to the union of Britain has a letter tipped in at the back.

Genres

Another theme of our project that is reflected in the exhibition is the variety of genres used to convey political ideas. While pamphlets that engaged directly with contemporary debates, and presented the argument or viewpoint of the author, were common at this time, political ideas could also be conveyed through texts originally intended for oral delivery, such as proclamations and sermons (which would be preached from the pulpit and then printed). We have a number of these relating to the Union debate on display in the exhibition. Fictional forms such as utopias, invented travel narratives, and imagined dialogues were also popular ways of conveying political ideas in the early modern period. In addition, humour could be deployed to convey an argument in a more forceful way, as in the case of The comical history of the mariage betwixt Fergusia and Heptarchus - a humorous take on the union debate - which is included in the exhibition.

For many years newspapers were a key vehicle for transmitting up-to-date political news and information. At the present time when these are shifting online and are at risk of being overshadowed as a news source by social media, it is interesting to look back to their origins. While newspapers as we know them are generally seen as emerging in the eighteenth century, the mid-seventeenth-century crisis in the British Isles prompted the publication of newsbooks which served a similar purpose. Like modern newspapers they took different political stances (there were both royalist and parliamentarian newsbooks) and often included an editorial as a preface to the account of current affairs. At the NLS exhibition there are examples of several seventeenth-century newsbooks including Mercurius Politicus, Mercurius Britanicus, and The Publick Intelligencer.

Debates in Print.

Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, by Andrew Birrell, published by Robert Wilkinson, after William Aikman, line engraving, 1798. National Portrait Gallery NPG D30937. Produced under a Creative Commons Licence.

As well as conveying and spreading knowledge of recent events, print could also be the site for political debate. The Union debate in the early eighteenth century generated a huge amount of printed material. Various examples are on display in the exhibition (some of which have already been mentioned). Sometimes individual authors would produce multiple responses and counter-responses to each other in print. In the exhibition are pamphlets attributed to Andrew Fletcher and James Webster produced in 1706-7. The initial pamphlet attributed to Fletcher did not explicitly oppose the idea of union, but suggested that a more equal union would be secured if each nation retained its own Parliament. On the other side, Webster, a Presbyterian minister who had previously been imprisoned for his religious opinions, argued against union on any terms, largely because of the impact it would have on the Scottish Kirk. Reading all the pamphlets in the debate gives a sense of how it unfolded and the different views it generated. We have to be careful too about authorship. Recent scholarship, as reflected in the article on Fletcher in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, suggests that although the pamphlet State of the Controversy betwixt United and Separate Parliaments was attributed to Fletcher, it was probably not written by him (John Robertson, 'Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun (1653?-1716)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

While this exhibition is the final element of our Experiencing Political Texts project, this first blogpost of the year is an opportunity to look forward as well as backward. We are already planning to explore the themes of the exhibition with audiences in Edinburgh at two workshops linked to the exhibition that will be held on Tuesday 27 February and Tuesday 9 April 2024. It should be possible to sign up for these events via Eventbrite soon. In addition, we are already exploring how we can develop the ideas generated by the Experiencing Political Texts project in a new project focusing on Political Education. We are holding an initial exploratory workshop for this project in Newcastle on 17 January 2024. I hope to provide further updates as the year progresses.

Encountering Political Texts at the National Library of Scotland 1: An Appetiser

The National Library of Scotland. Image by Rachel Hammersley

Next week the exhibition 'Encountering Political Texts' opens at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). This is the second exhibition related to the 'Experiencing Political Texts' project (an account of the first, which was held at Newcastle University's Philip Robinson Library last summer, can be found here). It is also our final Experiencing Political Texts event. Though the general themes are similar to those in the Newcastle exhibition, the focus of each cabinet and the items on display are different. Next month's blog will offer a full account of the exhibition, this month I provide a quick taster, discussing what are perhaps my favourite items in the exhibition - the volumes produced by Thomas Hollis.

I have discussed Hollis in previous blogs, and so will not repeat those details here. Instead I will focus on the volumes in the NLS collection, some of which feature in our exhibition. These volumes originally formed part of the Advocates Library of Edinburgh. This was a law library that was officially opened in 1689. From 1710 it became a legal deposit library, meaning that it received a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom. Between 1752 and 1757 the Keeper of the Advocates Library was the philosopher and historian David Hume. In 1925 the National Library of Scotland was created by an Act of Parliament

Hollis made donations to the Advocates Library at various points during the 1760s and 1770s, at a time when he was also sending books to Oxbridge college libraries and to public and university libraries in Europe and North America. Many of the NLS Hollis volumes include a dedication, written in Hollis's hand. Though the messages vary slightly from copy to copy the basic formula is this:

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

An Englishman, a lover of liberty, citizen of the world, is desirous of having the

honor to present this to the Advocate's Library at Edinburgh.

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Reproduced here under a Creative Commons License with permission from the Library

Most of the Hollis volumes at the NLS are bound in red Morocco with symbols added to the cover in gold tooling and stamped in black ink on the inside pages. They were the work of John Matthewman, who was Hollis's main bookbinder until around 1769 when he absconded due to a debt.

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

Among the volumes sent to the Advocates Library were several works from the commonwealth tradition. These include Henry Neville's Plato Redivivus, which had first appeared in 1681 at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. It sought to apply the principles set out by Neville's friend James Harrington in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) to the very different political situation of the 1680s. The work was republished by Andrew Millar in 1763. Hollis seems to have been quick to call for a second edition since an entry in Hollis's diary for 15 November the following year records a conversation Hollis had with Millar in which he 'Engaged him to reprint, that master-work intitled "Plato Redivivus. Or a Dialogue concerning Government", written by Harry Neville the friend of James Harrington, and like him ingeneous.' (The Diary of Thomas Hollis V from 1759 to 1770 transcribed from the original manuscript in the Houghton Library Harvard University, ed. W. H. Bond. Cambridge, Mass., 1996. 15 November 1764). The dedication in the Neville volume is a little fuller than the basic version reproduced above, with Hollis declaring himself a lover not merely of liberty but also of 'the Principles of the Revolution & the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover'. The tools on the cover of this volume are a cockerel on the front and an owl on the back, with a Pilius (liberty cap) on the spine. The cockerel symbolises alertness or vigilance, the owl - wisdom, and the Pilius - liberty. Inside the volume is a stamp depicting Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom) and one of Britannia (NLS: [Ad].7/1.8).

Also in the collection, though not in an original Hollis binding and probably not donated by Hollis himself, is a copy of Algernon Sidney's, Discourses Concerning Government. First published in 1698 by John Toland, the volume was reprinted several times during the eighteenth century with additional material being added each time. The copy in the NLS is a 1772 reprint of the 1763 edition printed by Andrew Millar that was edited by Hollis and which marked the high point of the work in terms of size, incorporating a biography of Sidney, additional works by him, and letters taken from the Sidney papers. This version includes an Advertisement signed by J. Robertson and dated 21 October 1771, which explains that various corrections (not previously picked up) had been made regarding the names old English names and places. The volume also includes the famous engraving of Sidney that Hollis commissioned from Giovanni Cipriani in which Sidney is dressed in armour and enclosed within a laurel wreath. Below that image, and repeated on the title page and later in the work, is a small Pilius, highlighting Sidney's commitment to liberty.

John Milton, The Life of John Milton (London, 1761). National Library of Scotland, Dav.1.2.10. Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

As well as publishing the first version of Sidney's Discourses, Toland had also published the works of John Milton in 1698. To accompany this, he wrote and printed The Life of John Milton which was then reprinted by Millar in 1761. This was another of the works that Hollis sent to the Advocates Library in the 1760s. It is particularly interesting because it has not one but three gold tools on both the front and the back. On the front is Athena with a branch on one side of her and a feather on the other. On the back the cockerel, Britannia, and the owl. The proliferation of gold tooling perhaps reflects the particularly high esteem in which Hollis held Milton. Hollis referred to Milton as 'divine' and 'incomparable'. And as well as collecting and disseminating Milton's works, Hollis had a picture of him in his apartment and even managed, in 1760, to purchase 'a bed which once belonged to John Milton, and on which he died'. This he sent as a present to the poet Mark Akenside, suggesting that if 'having slept in that bed' Akenside should be prompted 'to write an ode to the memory of John Milton, and the assertors of British liberty' it would be sufficient recompense for Hollis's expense (Memoirs of Thomas Hollis. London, 1780, pp. 93, 104, 112).

Following J. G. A. Pocock, a sharp distinction has tended to be drawn between the commonwealth writers (including Milton, Sidney and Neville) and John Locke. Now much questioned, this distinction also does not appear to have existed for Hollis who felt quite able to celebrate Locke as well as Milton. Several copies of Locke's works appear among the Hollis volumes in the NLS. One of these (a copy of the 1764 edition of Two Treatises of Government produced by Millar) resembles the commonwealth works in depicting Athena on the front and the Pilius on the back (with stamps of a Harp and Britannia on the fly leaves). Another emphasises the association of Locke's works with liberty by repeatedly using the Pilius image (NLS: [Ac].4/1.7).

Finally, several of the volumes donated by Hollis to the Advocates Library focus on religious rather than political matters, including several by the clergyman and religious controversialist Francis Blackburne (1705-1787). Born, like Hollis himself, in Yorkshire, Blackburne lived most of his life in Richmond. Though he became a clergyman in the Church of England, Blackburne subsequently refused to subscribe again to the Thirty-nine Articles, the defining statement of the doctrines and practices of that Church. His best known work The Confessional (which Hollis had persuaded him to publish and to which he gave his commendation 'Ut Spargum' - that we may scatter them) engaged with the history of the Church of England and the controversies over subscription. It was a text that prompted a fierce pamphlet exchange, allegedly amounting to ten volumes worth of material (B. W. Young, 'Blackburne, Francis', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). The presentation copy of The Confessional that Hollis gave to the Advocates Library bears a stamp of Athena inside the front cover and one of an owl in the back. The front bears a gold tool of Caduceus or staff of Hermes, a symbol of peace and rebirth, and the back a gold-tooled branch with leaves (NLS: Nha.Misc.32).

Francis Blackburne, Considerations on the present state of the controversy between the Protestants and Papists of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1768). National Library of Scotland: Nha.Misc.31. Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

Hollis also presented a copy of Blackburne's Considerations on the present state of the controversy between the Protestants and Papists of Great Britain and Ireland (1768) which, like the Milton volume, bears more than one emblem on the front and back covers. In the centre of the front cover is a gold-tooled Britannia, with a cockerel placed in the bottom left corner. The back depicts Athena centrally with an owl bottom right. The spine features the Caduceus (Nha.Misc.31).

Though he remained within the Church of England, Blackburne had close family connections to Theophilus Lindsey and John Disney who were involved in the establishment of Unitarianism, suggesting a link to Hollis's own Dissenting position. Moreover, just as Hollis devoted his life to preserving the memory of great thinkers of the past and present, so Blackburne played a crucial role in preserving the memory of Hollis himself. Following his friend's death, Blackburne produced a two-volume account of Hollis's life, which has been described as a 'memorial to Hollis's radical tradition' (Young, 'Blackburne, Francis', ODNB).

A number of the Hollis volumes described in this blogpost will be on display at the 'Encountering Political Texts' exhibition at the National Library of Scotland between Friday 8th December 2023 and Saturday 20th April 2024.

Translating English Republicanism in the European Enlightenment

I feel lucky that we have so many excellent early modern intellectual and cultural historians based at Newcastle with whom I can talk and collaborate. One of these is my friend and colleague Gaby Mahlberg who currently holds a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship with us. In late June, Gaby organised a workshop as part of her fellowship which brought a number of excellent scholars who work on the translation of political texts to Newcastle. The workshop explored a number of themes, including: the purpose of translations; the roles of the individuals involved in producing them; the building of canons; and free speech.

As someone who has worked on translations since the very beginning of my research career, I have often reflected on their purposes. We tend to assume that the main aim of a translation is to disseminate the ideas contained within the text and that those involved in producing the translation identify the text as relevant to their own cultural and political context and audience. Yet, some of the examples discussed at the workshop suggested that this is not always the case.

Plaque commemorating Thomas Paine’s time in Lewes, East Sussex, which appears on the wall of the White Hart Inn. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Elias Buchetmann briefly discussed the partial translation of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, which appeared in Leipzig in 1791. Though it made available part of Paine's famous work to a German audience, the aim appears to have been less to disseminate Paine's ideas than to contain them, reinforcing instead the position of Paine's antagonist Edmund Burke. This is evident in the way in which the footnotes are used to contradict and correct Paine's views, so that the reader does not receive Paine's ideas in isolation but via a Burkean lens.

Ariel Hessayon's paper on the translation of Gerrard Winstanley's New Law of Righteousness raised a different question: whether a translation is always produced for circulation. We know about this German translation of Winstanley's text from the catalogue of the library of Petrus Serrarius, though no copy of the translation survives. The translator was probably Serrarius himself. We might assume that since he could read English he must have translated it to circulate among others who could not, but in the discussion we noted that this is not necessarily the case. Katie East reminded us that translation was a long-established pedagogical technique for those learning classical languages and that this could equally apply to the learning of European languages. It was also noted that translating a work could be used to develop a deeper understanding of it.

A title page from Cato’s Letters. Taken from the Internet Archive.

Several papers challenged the assumption that a translated political text is necessarily seen as relevant to the political context into which it is translated. The transmission of English republican ideas into France, which has been explored in detail by several of the workshop participants, certainly seems to fit this model. The Huguenots, who were particularly concerned with justifications for resistance, translated works by Algernon Sidney and Edmund Ludlow. Whereas Harrington's works, as Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq's paper reminded us, came into their own during the French constitutional debates of the 1790s. Several papers, however, made clear that the translation of English texts into German tells a rather different story. Both Felix Waldmann in his account of the German translations of John Locke's works and Gaby Mahlberg in her discussion of the German reception of Cato's Letters highlighted a sense among both translators and reviewers that those texts applied specifically to England, and that their insights and models could not easily be applied in a German context. Of course, this could be a rhetorical device to distance the translator, editor, or printer from potentially controversial ideas, but it is certainly true that the German states in the eighteenth century were very different from that of early modern England.

As well as thinking about the purpose of translations, several speakers touched on the role of the individuals involved in their production. Thomas Munck's paper drew attention to the fact that, despite being in France during the Revolution, Thomas Paine contributed very little to debates and events there. Though he was a member of the Convention, he hardly ever spoke, he did little while in France to promote his own works, and though he advocated certain proposals - such as a fairer tax system - he had little to say about the practical means of achieving them. In the discussion that followed we reflected on how we should classify Paine. Was he a political thinker, a politician, an activist, or more like a journalist or observer (at least during his time in France)? It was also noted that political thinkers and writers do not always make good politicians.

Similar questions were asked about Pierre Des Maizeaux who was the focus of Ann Thomson's paper. He was not an original thinker, nor was he much interested in political discussion - being more of an erudite scholar. Yet he was crucial to the dissemination of political ideas thanks to his role as an intermediary, editor and populariser.

These examples point towards a wider question of the connection between theory and practice. Today it often seems as though politicians engage very little with political thought, while academics engaged in political thinking have little influence on practical policy. Yet, it might be argued, both are necessary if improvements are to be made. Thinking about the channels that exist - or could be developed - between the two, and celebrating the intermediaries and popularisers who forge and sustain them, has potential value for us all.

Algernon Sidney by James Basire after Giovanni Battista Cipriani, 1763. National Portrait Gallery NPG D28941. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The role or identity of key thinkers was approached from a different perspective in Tom Ashby's paper on the reception of Algernon Sidney's ideas in eighteenth-century Italy. Tom's account of the figures Sidney was associated with by different Italian thinkers at different times prompted much discussion. Initially he was linked, as one might expect, to natural law thinkers such as Samuel Pufendorf and Locke. But the Italian Jacobin Matteo Galdi associated Sidney, instead, with a more eclectic list of thinkers including Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the baron de Montesquieu, Gaetano Filangieri and Giambattista Vico. Galdi presented these figures as advocates of what he called 'new politics' (presumably building on Vico's 'new science'). Similarly, Christopher Hamel reminded us that the marquis de Condorcet associated Sidney with René Descartes and Rousseau in his Esquisse, and Sidney was also regularly linked in the eighteenth century with his contemporary John Hampden as examples of patriotic martyrs. While some of these links appear bizarre, and while it can be difficult to understand the thinking behind them, they do offer another potential avenue by which we can explore the tricky question of reception.

Finally, some of the papers touched on issues of free speech and toleration. Christopher Hamel drew attention to the idea of 'disinterested historians' in his paper on the French reception of Thomas Gordon's Discourses on Tacitus. Reviewers praised Gordon's tactic of simply describing, for example, 'the flattery which reigns at the court of tyrants' without feeling the need explicitly to pass judgement. It was noted that the Royal Society had emphasised the idea of disinterested scientists who would develop conclusions purely on the basis of reason, observation, and experimentation. The suggestion was presumably that historians could do something similar.

Ann Thomson reflected in a similar way on the approach of Huguenots such as Des Maizeaux and Jean Le Clerc. Des Maizeaux has sometimes been seen as advocating irreligion on account of his willingness to circulate free thinking works, but Ann suggested that his aim was really the promotion of toleration. This was reflected in the fact that he invested a great deal of time and energy into producing an edition of the works of William Chillingworth, who was a latitudinarian Anglican. Similarly, in a review of John Rushworth's collection of documents from the civil wars, Des Maizeaux noted a republican bias in the selected texts and suggested that royalist texts should be published as a complement. Jean Le Clerc also seems to have been concerned with offering a balanced account of the mid-seventeenth-century conflict. When reviewing the Earl of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England in Bibliothèque choisie he noted that it was 'very zealous' for the King's party and suggested that Edmund Ludlow's Memoirs be read to provide a contrast or comparison.

These examples reminded me of Thomas Hollis. As I have discussed previously in this blog, Hollis published not just works that he favoured but also those expressing opposing views - on the grounds that readers needed to read both and judge for themselves. Moreover, Hollis also picked up specifically on Clarendon's History, though his suggestion was that it should be read alongside the works not of Ludlow, but of John Milton.

In short, the workshop provided much stimulation for thought about the role and importance of translations and translators in adding to our understanding of early modern political cultures, and the relationship between ideas and practical action. At the same time, it prompted thought about that relationship today. What means can be used to bring the rich political thinking of academics to bear on contemporary political issues? And what specific role might 'disinterested historians' play in this task?

Political Legacies

For personal reasons the commemoration of the dead, and the legacies they leave to those who remain, have been on my mind recently. Though inheritance is usually assumed to refer to money, I am much more interested in the ideas, practices, and values that the dead bequeath to the living. Thomas Hollis is a particularly interesting case when it comes to legacies of both kinds.

Thomas Hollis by Giovanni Battista Ciprani, etching 1767. National Portrait Gallery NPG D46108. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

In my last blogpost I referred to the donation of approximately 3,000 books that Hollis sent to Harvard College in Massachusetts. Partly in recognition of this, the catalogue of the current Harvard University Library is called HOLLIS - a reference to the donations provided by the family and a convenient acronym for Harvard Online Library Information System. Hollis was not the first of his family (nor even the first with his name) to make donations to Harvard. His great grandfather - also called Thomas Hollis - founded several posts at Harvard which still bear his name, and was commemorated in a hall on campus and a street in the area.

Like his great grandfather Hollis had no children. Yet instead of passing on his inheritance via different family lines, as previous generations had done, Hollis chose to leave his own substantial fortune to his friend Thomas Brand, who subsequently styled himself Thomas Brand Hollis in recognition of the legacy.

Thomas Brand was born in Essex around 1719 (Colin Bonwick, 'Hollis, Thomas Brand, c.1719-1804, radical.' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Being from a dissenting family he could not attend an English University and so studied at Glasgow where he was taught by the great Francis Hutcheson and became friends with Hollis's future collaborator Richard Baron. Brand and Hollis are said to have met at the inns of court in London in the 1740s. They travelled around Europe together in 1748-9.

Hollis had always been keen to support Scottish institutions. In addition to the bequest in his will of books for Scottish University libraries, he also made donations to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, including this copy of Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland ([AD]7/1.8). It is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Licence with permission from the Library.

When Thomas Hollis died in 1774 Thomas Brand, whom Hollis described as 'my dear friend and fellow traveller', was named sole executor of his will and inherited his lands and the residue of his personal estate (The National Archives: PROB 11/994/68 'The Will of Thomas Hollis of Lincoln's Inn'). Hollis insisted on a private and modest funeral and, as was conventional, left small donations to the poor in the parishes near to his Dorset estate and money to various servants, family members, and friends, as well as to book binders, engravers, and printers with whom he had worked during his life. Hollis also continued his family's philanthropic traditions as well as those he had established during his lifetime. He pledged £300 to rebuild the almshouses that had been constructed by his great grandfather in Sheffield and £100 to the Society for Promoting Arts and Commerce in London. He also left money to be spent on books 'relating to Government or to civil or natural history or to ... Mathematics' for the university libraries at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St Andrews and Dublin, as well as for the public library at Berne and the university library at Geneva, in addition to a larger donation for Harvard.

Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), A View of Walton Bridge, 1754, oil on canvas, 48.7 x 76.4 cm, DPG600. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. With thanks to curator Lucy West for her assistance. This painting was commissioned by Thomas Hollis. It depicts Hollis himself (in the yellow coat) and his friend Thomas Brand.

As well as enacting these bequests, Thomas Brand also advanced Hollis's legacy in other ways. The two men shared a dissenting background and a commitment to political radicalism and reform. Brand Hollis was a member of several reform societies including the Revolution Society established in 1788 and the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI). He was a founder member of the SCI attending its first meeting in April 1780, often chairing sessions, and being elected President in December of that year (The National Archives: TS 11/1133).

In its purpose and activities the SCI echoed and extended Hollis's campaign to disseminate political texts and share political information. Hollis had sent copies of a wide range of works to university and public libraries in many countries. As I noted in my last blogpost, he paid particular attention to North America where his donations were explicitly designed to influence how the colonists interpreted the actions of the British government against them. In short, Hollis appears to have been seeking to rouse the Harvard students to revolutionary action by providing them with specific reading material on the nature of their rights as Englishmen and the threats posed to those rights - and therefore to their liberty - by the actions of the British government towards them. The SCI also disseminated political texts for free, this time in England. Its aim in doing so was to promote and eventually bring about political reform. The terms in which this aim was expressed were very similar to those used by Hollis in relation to the American colonists:

As every Englishman has an equal inheritance in this Liberty; and in those Laws

and that Constitution which have been provided for its defence; it is therefore

necessary that every Englishman should know what the Constitution IS; when it is

SAFE; and when ENDANGERED (An address to the public, from the Society for

Constitutional Information. London, 1780, p. 1).

There was also a similarity in the particular texts thought worthy of dissemination. At a meeting on 12th May 1780, at which Brand Hollis was present, the Society resolved to task one of its members, Capel Lofft, to:

compile a Tract or Tracts, consisting of Extracts from the

Mirror of Justices, Fleta, Bracton, Fortesquieu, Selden, Bacon,

Sir Thomas Smith, Coke, Sidney, Milton, Harrington, Nevile,

Molesworth, Bolingbroke, Price, Priestly, Blackstone, Somers,

Davenant, the Essay on the English Constitution, and other Authors

as may clearly define, or describe in few Words the English

Constitution (The National Archives: TS 11/1133).

With just two exceptions (Sir Thomas Smith and Charles Davenant), works by all of these authors had been sent by Hollis to Harvard.

As well as disseminating the texts free of charge, both Hollis and the SCI used newspapers and periodicals to advertise them and their relevance to contemporary affairs. In April 1766 Hollis inserted the following advert into the London Chronicle to alert the Corsican rebels who were drawing up a new constitution for the island - and more especially their British supporters - of the potential a particular English republican text offered them in their endeavour.

TO THE PEOPLE OF CORSICA

      FELICITY

"The Oceana of James Harrington, for practicable-

ness, equality and completeness, is the most perfect

model of a Commonwealth, that ever was delineated

by antient or modern pen (The London Chronicle, 10 April 1766).

John Somers, Baron Somers by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt. c.1705. National Portrait Gallery NPG 490. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

In the same vein, from Spring 1782, members of the SCI began inserting extracts from key texts into the General Advertiser. These included extracts selected by Brand Hollis from a work by John Somers, first Baron Somers (1651-1716), a notable Whig and one time Lord Chancellor. The extracts, which appeared in the General Advertiser on Monday 18 March 1782, concerned the limits of the ruler's powers and the rights of the people. Somers argued that a sovereign who invades or subverts the fundamental laws of society gives up his legal right to govern and absolves his subjects of obedience. Citing the popular phrase asserting the rights of the people salus populi, he claimed that all law and government is aimed at the public good and therefore: 'A just Governor, for the benefit of the people, is more careful of the public good and welfare, than of his own private advantage.' 'He who makes himself above all law, is no Member of a Commonwealth, but a mere tyrant whenever he pleases' and under such a magistrate the people would be justified in exercising a right of resistance. Though probably originally written in the context of the Glorious Revolution, these sentiments were meaningful to those engaged in the reform campaign and perhaps designed as a warning to George III.

There is one final more frivolous way in which Brand Hollis continued his friend's legacy. Hollis had had a curious habit of naming fields and farms on his Dorset estate at Corscombe and Halstock after thinkers, works, and places he respected. In July 1773 Hollis noted in a letter that he had named a small farm on his estate after George Buchanan 'this oldest son of liberty' (Caroline Robbins, 'Thomas Hollis in His Dorsetshire Retirement' in Absolute Liberty, ed. Barbara Taft. 1982, p. 240). Another farm of 247 acres was named after James Harrington and on that farm was a field he called Oceana after Harrington's most famous work. To the west of Harrington Farm was another called Milton Farm after John Milton, which included a field named after John Toland - who had edited both Milton's and Harrington's works. Also in the vicinity were farms named for other leading English republicans: Algernon Sidney, Edmund Ludlow, and Henry Neville.

Dorset History Centre, D1_MO_3 Plan of Harrington Farm from the Corscombe Estate Map. With thanks to the Dorset History Centre for assistance and permission.

We know that Brand Hollis was aware of Hollis's actions in this regard since a survey of the estate that Brand Hollis conducted in 1799, now held at Dorset History Centre, details the names of the various farms and fields.

Brand Hollis not only maintained and memorialised Hollis's nomenclature on his Dorset estate, he also engaged in the same practice himself - naming trees on his property at Hyde in Essex after George Washington and other heroes of the American Revolution (Bonwick, ODNB). To my mind, legacies of place names, book collections, and the values of kindness and generosity, are far more meaningful and enduring than any financial bequest - even from someone with as extensive a fortune as Thomas Hollis.

'Ut Spargam' and other Hollis Marginalia

An example of the smoke printed symbol of the pilius or liberty cap taken from Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). This copy, which was donated by Hollis to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, is now held at the National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). It is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License with permission from the Library.

In last month's blogpost I noted that social media platforms have now taken over as the dominant source of news and political information for younger citizens in the UK. One of the main concerns about this shift in news consumption habits is the notion that such platforms tend to generate echo chambers. This results in individuals rarely being confronted by - and therefore required to engage with - views that differ significantly from their own. It can produce a polarisation of positions and a tendency to demonise - rather than seeking to understand - alternative viewpoints. The political dissemination campaigns of the late eighteenth century that were the focus of my last blogpost could be seen as leading to a similar outcome, with campaigners voicing particular viewpoints (such as the benefits of political reform), and dismissing alternative views. Yet in the case of Thomas Hollis, the picture is more complex.

I have touched on Hollis and his campaign several times in previous blogposts, so will not go into great detail here. Suffice to say that he sent a huge number of books to university and public libraries in Britain, continental Europe, and North America. Harvard College in Massachusetts was the recipient of the largest collection of donations, with around 3,000 volumes being sent over several years. Part of Hollis's aim in sending works to university libraries was to influence the education of the rising generation.

An example of the embossed symbol of the wise owl again taken from the National Library of Scotland’s copy of Neville’s Plato Redivivus: ([Ad].7/1.8). Reproduced under a Creative Commons License with permission from the Library.

As well as sending the works free of charge, Hollis also manipulated the physical appearance of the volumes he sent in order to shape how they were read and understood. One technique he deployed was to add symbols or emblematic tools to the works (either smoke printed into the text or embossed onto the binding) which served as a shorthand for the content. A pilius or liberty bonnet indicated that the work advocated liberty, a sword was associated with the right to overthrow tyrants, the cock symbolised alertness or vigilance, and an owl showed that the work was wise (unless it appeared upside down in which case it had the opposite meaning). More details on the emblematic tools Hollis used are provided in William Bond's lecture, 'Thomas Hollis: His Bookbinders and Book binding', which can be accessed here.

Another method Hollis used was to add handwritten comments to the texts expressing his views on them or pointing readers towards related works in the collection. Most of these comments were specific to the text itself (and I discussed some of these in a previous blogpost) but there were at least three phrases that can be found repeatedly in works that form part of the Harvard collection.

An example of Hollis’s handwritten marginalia. This comes from an edition of John Milton’s Works, ed. Richard Baron (London, 1753). Reproduced with permission from the Harvard Library copy.

One of these is the phrase 'Ut Spargam', which translates roughly as 'that we may scatter them', 'spargo' being the Latin verb meaning to scatter, strew, or sprinkle. Hollis added this phrase by hand to more than twenty of the volumes he sent to Harvard College. For the most part these are works that set out and celebrate the rights and liberties of the people in politics and religion. They include: several works from the French monarchomach tradition, written by Huguenots in the late sixteenth century, opposing absolute monarchy and justifying tyrannicide; several collections of speeches, acts, or declarations by the English parliament of the 1640s during its confrontation with Charles I; English republican texts such as James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana and Catharine Macaulay's History of England; and several works that deal explicitly with the rights of the people, including Benjamin Hoadly's The common rights of subjects, defended, William Petyt's, The antient right of the Commons of England, and a 1658 work called simply The rights of the people. The point of the Latin phrase was presumably to indicate that these works should be disseminated so that people around the world would come to know their rights.

A box commemorating the repeal of the Stamp Act. From the National Museum of American History. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License.

There were, of course, particular reasons why this message was pertinent to the American colonists in the 1760s (when Hollis sent most of these works to Harvard). This was a period during which the conflict between the colonists and the British government was escalating. The imposition of the Sugar Act in April 1764 and of the Stamp Act in March 1765 had led the colonists to fear that the British were seeking to exploit and oppress them - imposing taxes without according them representation, thereby infringing their rights as British subjects. The second of these acts provoked the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 - an early example of co-ordinated action on the part of the colonists. Yet despite securing the repeal of the Stamp Act the following year, the exercise of British control continued. The repeal was deliberately accompanied by the Declaratory Act, which asserted Parliament's right to control the colonies. In June 1767 further customs duties were imposed, and the following year British troops moved into Massachusetts, which had been the focus of the colonial protests. It is not difficult to read off from Hollis's gifts to Harvard his attitude towards the crisis and the fact that he saw it as crucial in this context to remind young American citizens of their rights and the threats posed by overbearing power.

The second phrase Hollis adds to multiple volumes is 'Felicity is Freedom and Freedom is Magnanimity'. It appears in seven works, most of which are recognisably republican texts and two of which also bear the 'Ut Spargam' tag (Harrington's Oceana and Macaulay's History). Interestingly it also appears in A short narrative of the horrid massacre, which described the Boston Massacre of 1770 when British troops fired on protestors. A direct connection is, therefore, drawn between the events of mid-seventeenth-century England and recent colonial affairs. In fact there is a third strand to the parallel, since Hollis attributes the phrase 'Felicity is Freedom and Freedom is Magnanimity' to Thucydides. In Book 2 of The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides praises the bravery of the Athenians who died in that war, sacrificing themselves for their country, and he urges their successors to follow their example:

For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own,

where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a

record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart. These take as

your model and, judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of

valour, never decline the dangers of war.

(http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.2.second.html)

Like the ancient Athenians and the republicans of seventeenth-century England, the American colonists were displaying a spirit of patriotism that led them to put the good of their country ahead of their own personal interests. The 'Felicity is Freedom' tag endorsed their willingness to fight - even to the death - to defend their rights.

Yet Hollis's strategy was not simply to present his readers with one side of the story. One of the works to which he added the phrase 'Ut Spargam' was Henry Sacheverell's account of his trial. Sacheverell was an Anglican clergyman and popular preacher. In a sermon delivered in November 1709, which he subsequently printed illegally, he attacked Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the execution of Charles I. At his trial, which opened in February 1710 and was accompanied by rioting, Sacheverell was found guilty. As a strong advocate of the Dissenting cause, Hollis will not have shared Sacheverell's views and the parallel drawn between Catholics and Dissenters will have been an affront to Hollis's staunch anti-Catholicism. Yet he still believed that Sacheverell's own account of his trial should be widely disseminated.

Moreover, the plot thickens further if we draw into the discussion Hollis's third repeatedly used inscription: 'Floreat Libertas, Pereat Tyrannis'. The words themselves celebrate the triumph of liberty over tyranny. Yet the works to which Hollis added these words were produced not by advocates of liberty, but by their tyrannical opponents. They include: the collected works of Charles I and his account of his trial; the Letters and dispatches of Charles's close advisor the Earl of Strafford who was executed by Parliament in 1641; and The free-holders grand inquest by the divine right theorist Robert Filmer. It is no doubt significant that while he strongly opposed the arguments reflected in these works, Hollis did not hide them from the Harvard students, but deliberately sent them copies, alerting them by his handwritten inscription that these works contained the arguments of tyrants. Hollis's position seems to have been that it was not sufficient for the colonists to be educated on their rights, they also needed to have a clear picture of what tyranny looked like so that they could recognise it and act quickly when it was imposed against them.

Underlying these decisions by Hollis we can perhaps glimpse the hand of the man he described as 'the divine Milton' (Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., ed. Francis Blackburne. London, 1780, pp. 60 and 93). In Areopagitica (1644) John Milton argued against the censorship of books, drawing a contrast between the food of the body and that of the mind:

Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in

John Milton in the ‘Temple of British Worthies’ at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. Image by Rachel Hammersley

the healthiest concoction; but herein the

difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet

and judicious Reader serve in many respects to

discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate (John

Milton, Areopagitica. London, 1644, p. 11).

Hollis, following Milton, believed that the American colonists needed to engage with and understand tyranny in order to be able to defend their rights and liberties. The same argument holds today. We cannot understand, let alone defend, what is right, if we are not prepared to listen to, and engage with, alternative viewpoints - even those we might find distasteful.

Commonwealthmen and Women: The Legacy of English Republicanism in Britain and Europe

Caroline Robbins's important book The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, which first appeared in 1959, provided the impetus for a detailed investigation of the legacy of English republican ideas which has involved some of the best known names in intellectual history; including John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Bernard Bailyn and Justin Champion. That legacy was the focus of a workshop held at Newcastle University in September 2021, organised by Gaby Mahlberg as part of her Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship. The workshop offered an excellent line-up of speakers who raised a number of interesting new questions for investigation. As usual, what follows is my own personal take on the workshop and the ideas it generated.

The legacy of English republicanism is, of course, centred, on a canon of texts. But, as many of the papers demonstrated, intellectual historians now recognise the importance of private as well as published works, of intellectual networks, and of the role played by editors and printers in shaping the physical form of those texts. In her excellent paper 'John Milton in the United Provinces', which opened the workshop, Esther van Raamsdonk showed that Milton had incorporated into his Second Defence information that had appeared in private correspondence between two Dutch intellectuals Daniel Heinsius and Issak Vossius in which they had been reflecting on Milton's First Defence. There is no evidence of any direct communication between Milton and these Dutchmen. Rather, Milton's knowledge of their exchange probably came via bridging figures who knew both parties, such as Lieuwe van Aitzema or John Drury. Esther's wider point was that 'reception' need not simply be one way but that in this case there was a two-way communication from text to reception and then back from reception to text. Such complexities only become evident if we incorporate into our research manuscript as well as published texts, and the networks within which both authors and readers were situated.

This notion of the complexity of transmission was a broader theme in several of the papers. While Heinsius and Vossius discussed Milton's ideas, they firmly rejected his views. In her own paper Gaby told a similar story about the reviews of seventeenth-century English republican writings in the conservative German periodical Acta Eruditorum. The journal had an explicit policy of neutrality on political matters, but did still review some politically sensitive texts, such as the English republican writings, albeit with a degree of objective distance. It was suggested that there is a parallel here with the claim in social media that a re-tweet does not necessarily indicate endorsement. Of course even if the review is written from a position of neutrality, the ideas contained within the original work are still being transmitted to new audiences - not all of whom will share the attitude of the journal editors.

John Milton by William Faithorne, 1670. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 610. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

One aspect of the English republican writings that many Europeans appear to have been uncomfortable about was their endorsement of regicide. Esther van Raamsdonk noted that, despite living under republican rule, Dutch commentators were highly critical of the execution of Charles I. In his consideration of Baruch Spinoza's knowledge of English republicanism, Thomas Munck reinforced this point. He noted that the Dutch saw themselves as having taken a more authentic route to republicanism than the English, and that they condemned the overthrow of Charles I as dangerous and insincere. While Spinoza was sympathetic to republican rule, he was deeply critical of the English abolition of monarchical government, no doubt partly because the process by which it came about was at odds with both his pacifism and his commitment to genuine popular sovereignty. This problem not only affected the Dutch. When responding to questions following his paper on Richard Price, Christopher Hamel, acknowledged that it was difficult for Price to cite Milton directly because of his link to the regicide. Similarly, Gaby believes that part of the reason why less work has been done on the legacy of English republicanism in Germany than in Britain, France and America is because of the more conservative path that Germany took in the eighteenth century, which has led historians to assume that works justifying regicide will not have found an audience there.

Another element of English republican thought that has often been seen as becoming less relevant or even distasteful as the eighteenth-century progressed is the agrarianism of James Harrington, which was increasingly at odds with the growing commercial society. In my own paper I showed that, in fact, Harrington's theory about the relationship between land and power remained a consistent theme for at least some republicans in Britain right through to the nineteenth century.

Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge) by Robert Edge Pine, c. 1775. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 5856. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

A further complication to our understanding of the legacy of English republican works was introduced via the papers and discussions of the second panel, where it was argued that there was a Saxon tradition of republicanism that emerged and developed alongside the more conventional ancient tradition. In his excellent paper on 'John Tutchin and Commonwealth Poetics', Joe Hone made a persuasive case for Tutchin as a commonwealth writer and the author of a number of commonwealth poems, including Aesop at Amsterdam and The Foreigners. He went on to demonstrate that there was a distinct vein of Saxon republicanism in these writings. For Tutchin freedom was a right that the English had inherited from their Saxon ancestors and these birth rights and native freedoms were given greater emphasis than the civic virtue central to ancient republicanism. Ashley Walsh has already published an excellent article on Saxon republicanism, and so it is not surprising that his paper on the standing army debate complemented Joe's paper in this regard. Ashley emphasised the fact that the standing army debate of the 1690s encouraged the revival of ancient constitutionalism, with advocates of the militia often looking to the Saxon past rather than to classical precedents. This remained a key strand of militia debates right through the eighteenth century. Moreover in later papers by Christopher Hamel and Max Skjönsberg it was clear that Saxon republicanism - and particularly ideas of natural rights and patriotism - remained important to later eighteenth-century commonwealthmen and women, including Price and Catharine Macaulay. Saxon republicanism is, however, complex. In discussions we noted its ambiguous nature as, on the one hand, an insular doctrine with elements of ethnic or racial exclusivity and, on the other hand, transnational features. Not only did the Saxons come to Britain from Germany, but there were also parallels in other countries (such as the Batavian tradition in the Dutch context). The group felt that there is more work to be done in this area.

Finally, given my current preoccupations, I noted when participants touched on issues of genre or materiality. The legacy of Milton's works has been interesting in this regard. His seventeenth-century reception in the Dutch Republic, as Esther van Raamsdonk noted, was focused on his prose writings. But, as Tom Corns reminded us, there was a 'cleaning up' of Milton's reputation in Britain from the late 1680s through a shift towards his poetic works and the crafting of his reputation as the English Protestant Virgil. Also of interest in relation to Milton was the fact that he was often praised for the style while being condemned for the content of his writing - as in the idea that he defended a bad case well. Joe Hone began his paper with the bigger question of why the commonwealth tradition is primarily a prose tradition, given that a wealth of commonwealth poetry was produced during the 1680s and 90s when the two were more or less on an equal footing. Moreover, it is clear from Joe's works that John Darby printed both poetry and prose and saw the connection between them. One possibility is that it was the preferences of the influential figures who shaped and transmitted the commonwealth tradition - including John Toland and Thomas Hollis - that were crucial.

Thomas Hollis’s edition of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government. Houghton Library, Harvard University. HOU F *EC75.H7267.Zz751s Lobby IV.4.14. I am grateful to the Houghton Library for permission to reproduce this and to Dr Mark Somos for his assistance.

The mention of Hollis brings us to the final paper of the workshop, by Allan Reddick, and to the question of books as material objects. Allan noted that Hollis sometimes sent English-language books to places where few would have been able to read them, raising the question of what his purpose in doing so was. In part it was probably about ensuring the preservation of these texts and the ideas contained within them, but Allan suggested that he also thinks that Hollis saw the books as having an almost talismanic quality - an idea that is reflected in the complex iconography that he incorporated into his editions and bindings. Hollis was no doubt influenced by his hero Milton's notion (expressed in Areopagitica) of books carrying a potency and agency and constituting an abstraction of the living intellect that bred them. The commonwealth works Hollis republished might be viewed, then, as warriors for liberty and, in this regard, our investigation of the commonwealth tradition concerns their still on-going battles.

Experiencing Political Texts 7: Intertextuality

It is now several months since I have written a post under the 'Experiencing Political Texts' heading. For that reason alone I wanted to return to it this month, but there is a further incentive for doing so. We learnt in May that our application for an AHRC Networking Grant on this topic has been successful. So, from January 2022 we will be organising a series of workshops exploring the themes: 'Genre and Form in Early Modern Political Texts', 'The Materiality of Early Modern Political Texts', and 'Experiencing Early Modern Political Texts in a Digital Age'. We will also be running a monthly reading group at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society and working with colleagues at the Robinson Library, Newcastle University and at the National Library of Scotland to put on exhibitions exploring the relative merits of print versus digital editions and the forms in which political arguments were articulated in the past and the present.

Screenshot from the Early Modern Ballot resource designed in conjunction with Animating Texts at Newcastle University (ATNU) as a pilot for the ‘Experiencing Political Texts’ project. It provides an animated version of James Harrington’s broadsheet The Manner and Life of the Ballot following the instructions set out in that publication.

In previous posts in this series I have written about the important role played by genre in early modern political texts and about the significance of the material dimensions of those texts. In this post I want to extend the discussion to think about how works were connected with each other: the issue of intertextuality. I should acknowledge here that my thinking on this was greatly influenced by supervising Thomas Whitfield's PhD thesis and, in particular, his work on the 'multi-media strategy' adopted by the radical printer and bookseller Thomas Spence. For those who are interested, you can find out more about Tom's work here.

Joseph Wilton, ‘Thomas Hollis’, marble bust, c.1762. National Portrait Gallery NPG 6946. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Thomas Hollis, who has featured previously in this blog, edited and financed the publication of a number of works on politics and government in the mid-eighteenth century, especially works of the republican canon, producing lavish copies with special bindings, illustrations and coded stamps. Hollis disseminated large numbers of works to city and university libraries across Britain, Europe, and North America. The most extensive collection of these books was sent to Harvard University. This donation, which was added to over many years, was so vast that the electronic library catalogue used at Harvard today is named after Hollis (and his forebears who also made donations to the College). Sending a huge collection of books allowed Hollis to seek to influence how readers read not just a single volume but the collection as a whole.

Hollis added handwritten annotations into a considerable number of the books he sent to Harvard that were designed to direct the reader to other works in the collection. In some cases the aim was to provide more detail on the author. On the flyleaf of Anthony Ascham's Of the confusions and revolutions of governments, for example, he directed readers wanting to know more about Ascham to Antony Wood's Athenae Oxoniensis, volume 2, p. 385, which he had also donated (William H. Bond, “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”: Thomas Hollis’s Gifts to the Harvard College Library. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press for the Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, 2010, p. 39). Elsewhere, however, annotation was intended to provide further reading on the same topic. In William Atwood's Jani anglorum facies nova he directs the reader to 'See "Plato Redivivus", by the ingenuous Harry Neville" (Bond, Thomas Hollis’s Gifts, p. 40). Similarly, on the flyleaf of John Bridges's work, A brief account of many of the prosecutions of the people call'd Quakers, Hollis added the following annotation: 'In "The Pillars of Priestcraft" shaken is preserved a master tract in behalf of the Quakers & of Liberty; which was written by the late Lord Hervey, in answer to an artful tract of the late Dr Sherlock's, then B. of Salisbury, intitled "The Country Parson's Plea'" (Bond, Thomas Hollis’s Gifts, p. 55). Two copies of The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, which was by Hollis's close friend Richard Baron, were also among the works sent to Harvard.

Giovanni Battista Cipriani, ‘Thomas Hollis’, etching, 1767. National Portrait Gallery NPG D46107. Reproduced under a creative commons licence. This portrait of Hollis by Cipriani was produced to appear in his Memoirs. It includes several of the emblems or tools used in the works Hollis commissioned., including the owl and the pileus or liberty cap between two Roman short swords. That combination of symbols appeared on coins issued by Brutus to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar.

In both of these cases the works to which the reader was directed expressed similar sentiments to the one in which the annotation appeared, but this was not always the case. On the half-title page of the first volume of The history of the rebellion, Hollis added a rather unflattering description of the author: "Edward Hyde, at length Earl of Clarendon, in the opinion of the writer, so far as he can judge, a hack Lawyer ... of working, but not first-rate abilities; a wordy, partial Historian." He went on to recommend that readers of Clarendon's volume should also read the works of one of his contemporaries: 'See the Prose-works of his opposite, the man, who in no respect, would subscribe slave, the matchless John Milton. T-H aug. 7. 1767" (Bond, Thomas Hollis’s Gifts, p. 67).

The printer and radical bookseller Thomas Spence did not have the resources that were at Hollis's disposal, but he too saw value in encouraging readers to read one text in the light of another, and found a much more direct way of encouraging them to do so. His weekly periodical One Pennyworth of Pig's Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude comprised an eclectic mix of short extracts from works by authors as diverse as the Anglo-Irish cleric and satirist Jonathan Swift, the eighteenth-century reformer William Frend, the political theorist John Locke, and the French philosopher, writer and politician the comte de Volney. The extracts are carefully chosen and important in themselves, but additional messages are conveyed through their juxtaposition. For example, in an early issue Spence included two extracts from Frend's Peace and Union, one dealing with the recent regicide in France, drawing a parallel between it and the events of 1688, and another highlighting the negative impact of war on the poor. They are followed by Lord Chesterfield's letter to his son from April 1752 in which he predicts a decline in the power of kings and priests by the end of the century, on the basis of the 'symptoms of reason and good sense' breaking out in France, which he also links to 'Revolution principles' at home. Together these extracts are designed to encourage readers to view the French Revolution in a positive light and to oppose Britain's involvement in the war against France.

Token produced on Spence’s behalf to advertise his Pig’s Meat publication. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

One of Spence's particular aims in the work is to demonstrate that his arguments for equality, and in particular the fair division of land, are endorsed not just by many of the great political thinkers of the past, but also by the Bible. In another issue he includes two extracts taken respectively from Leviticus and Isaiah followed by a passage from Samuel Pufendorf's Whole Duty of Man. The labels Spence gives to these extracts hints at the connections between them. The Biblical passages are headed 'Lessons for the Monopolizers of Land', while the passage from Pufendorf is entitled 'On Equality'. The extract from Leviticus describes the idea of jubilee whereby every fifty years land that had been bought or sold in the intervening half century would be returned to its original owner. The passage from Isaiah also warned against the accumulation of land. The Pufendorf extract included the following claim: 'That no man, who has not a peculiar right, ought to arrogate more to himself than he is ready to allow to his fellows, but that he permit other men to enjoy equal privileges with himself.' (One Pennyworth of Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. London, 1793, p. 91).

In fact both Hollis and Spence also went beyond intertextuality, making connections not just between one text and another, but also between texts and objects, and between text and place. Both men commissioned the production of images and tokens depicting individuals and emblems that embodied the causes for which they stood. The portrait of Hollis by Giovanni Battista Cipriani and the Spence token advertising his Pig's Meat periodical, both of which are depicted above, are good examples of this. Hollis also became obsessed with John Milton's bed, while Spence experimented with speakeasies and even embarked on a graffiti campaign chalking the words 'The Rights of Man' around the streets of London. Historians of political ideas must, therefore, venture beyond the words on the pages of individual texts if they are to make sense of the politics of the past. I hope that through the 'Experiencing Political Texts' project we will be able to identify fruitful ways of doing this.

Experiencing Political Texts 6: Materiality

We currently find ourselves on a cusp with regard to the materiality of texts. Print copies are still common, but digital editions and open access publishing are on the rise. Yet, for now, the conventions of print tend to provide the framework for digital editions with an emphasis on recreating the look and experience of reading a printed book (for example with 'Turning the Pages' technology) rather than exploring the new possibilities that digital editions might offer.

Despite his experimental use of genre and the blending of fact and fiction, the physical format of Yanis Varoufakis's book Another Now, which I have discussed in previous blogposts in this series, is relatively conventional. It is available in hardback, paperback, as an audio download, and in e-book form with the last of these merely comprising a digital version of the print copy. However, Varoufakis does acknowledge potential innovations in future in his description of what happens when the narrator Yango Varo first opens Iris's diary:

Two red arrows filled my vision as my hybrid-reality contact lenses detected audio-visual content in the diary and kicked in. Instinctively I gestured to switch off my haptic interface and slammed the book shut. Costa had explicitly instructed me to set up the dampening field device before opening the diary. Chastened by my failure to do so, I went to fetch it. Only once the device was on the desk, humming away reassuringly, was I able to delve into Iris's memories in that rarest of conditions - privacy. (Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. London: Bodley Head, 2019, p. 5).

Title page of Toland and Darby’s edition of The Oceana of James Harrington. Reproduced from the copy at the Robinson Library Newcastle University, BRAD 321 07-TP. I am grateful to the Library staff for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

I have already touched on the materiality of early modern texts in previous blogposts (January 2021, September 2020), but there is more to explore. One area of interest is the way in which the material or physical form of a text was deliberately designed to engage a specific audience. During the eighteenth century the English republican works first published during the mid-seventeenth century were directed, in successive waves, at different audiences and the physical format of those editions varied accordingly. 

Many of the original English republican texts published during the mid to late seventeenth century had been relatively small, cheap editions. When John Toland and John Darby decided to reprint these works at the turn of the eighteenth century, they deliberately reproduced them as lavish folio editions. We know from personal correspondence that they took care to use high quality paper and the title pages often include words in red type, which was more expensive. The size and quality of these volumes makes clear that they were aimed at a high-status audience - particularly members of the political elite. They were destined for their own private libraries or those used by them. While in one sense this was exclusionary - putting these works (and the ideas contained within them) beyond the means of ordinary citizens - there was a positive reason for doing so. Toland and Darby were keen to make clear that, although these texts had been published in the midst of the chaos of the civil war and interregnum, they remained of interest - and of relevance to those in government - even after the restoration of 1660. These works were not mere ephemera, but were of lasting significance and continued relevance in the eighteenth century even though England was no longer ruled as a republic.

Binding of Thomas Hollis’s edition of Harrington’s works. From Houghton Library, Harvard University. HOU GEN *EC65.H2381 656c (B) Lobby IV.2.18. I am grateful to the Houghton Library for giving me permission to reproduce this and to Dr Mark Somos for his assistance.

Thomas Hollis was aware of Toland's publishing campaign and built his own on its foundations. He republished many of the same texts, and again did so in the form of lavish folio volumes with expensive bindings. Hollis commissioned the Italian engraver Giovanni Cipriani to produce portraits of the authors to preface the volumes and to design little emblems that could be embossed onto the front as a key to the nature of the work inside. However, Hollis's dissemination strategy was aimed less at the private libraries of the elite and instead at institutional libraries - public libraries such as those established in cities like Leiden in the United Provinces and Bern in Switzerland, but also the libraries of educational establishments such as Christ's College Cambridge and, most famously, Harvard in the United States. This suggests that Hollis's target audience was less the current political elite than that of the future. His aim was to educate the next generation - especially in America where, from the 1760s, a crisis was brewing.

The American Revolution, when it came, had a significant impact on both sides of the Atlantic. The slogan 'no taxation without representation' flagged up political inequalities in Britain and provided fuel for the incipient reform movement. To further the cause of reform, the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) was established in 1774. Its main mode of operation was to print cheap copies of political texts which were disseminated freely. In particular, members of the SCI believed it necessary to educate the people on the nature of the British constitution. As the Address to the Public, published in 1780, explained

John Jebb, one of the founder members of the Society for Constitutional Information. Portrait by Charles Knight, 1782. National Portrait Gallery NPG D10782. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

As every Englishman has an equal inheritance in this Liberty; and in those Laws and that Constitution which have been provided for its defence; it is therefore necessary that every Englishman should know what the Constitution IS; when it is SAFE; and when ENDANGERED (An Address to the public, from the Society for Constitutional Information. London, 1780, p. 1).

The Society focused on printing works that contributed towards this mission, stating that:

To diffuse this knowledge universally throughout the realm, to circulate it through every village and hamlet, and even to introduce it into the humble dwelling of the cottager, is the wish and hope of this Society.

Consequently, the SCI disseminated works such as Obidiah Hulme's Historical Essay on the English Constitution, but also extracts from older works that spoke to these issues. Yet, as the statement of intent makes clear, the Society aimed to disseminate political works not simply among an elite, as their predecessors had done, but throughout the population. This, it was believed, was the best means of awakening people to their rights and thereby furthering the case for the reform of Parliament.

The SCI continued to function into the 1790s and was, therefore, well placed to capitalise on further calls for reform sparked by the outbreak of the Revolution in France in 1789. In this febrile atmosphere, others took up the cause of educating the ordinary people about their rights by making available to them important political texts from past and present.

Spence token advertising Pig’s Meat. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

In 1793 the Newcastle-born radical Thomas Spence published the first issue of a weekly publication entitled Pig's Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, which printed extracts from political texts including from works that had been republished by Toland and Darby or Hollis. The title was a reference to Edmund Burke's derisory comment in Reflections on the Revolution in France which referred to the ordinary people as swine. Spence's publication cost just 1 penny, making it affordable even for those who were relatively poor, and as he explained on the title page, his aim was 'To promote among the Labouring Part of Mankind proper Ideas of their Situation, of their Importance, and of their Rights. AND TO CONVINCE THEM That their Forlorn Condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten, nor their just Cause unpleased, neither by their Maker nor by the best and most enlightened of Men in all Ages.' Alongside his Pig's Meat publications, Spence engaged in other means of spreading political ideas including writing works of his own and producing and disseminating tokens.

What is the relevance of all this? First, it reminds us that it is not just the content of political works that matters, but also the form in which they are printed, and the way they are disseminated and read. Literary critics like George Bornstein, inspired by Jean Genet and Jerome McGann, have been making this point for some time. But it has yet to fully penetrate the historical investigation of political texts. Secondly, the attempt by authors, editors and reformers to reach ever wider sections of the population during the course of the eighteenth century is striking. It reveals the importance of politics to eighteenth-century British society and the firm belief (at least on the part of some) that political education could and would bring political reform. Is there, I wonder, the same appetite for political knowledge today? What kind of publications would best attract twenty-first century audiences? And what kinds of reform might they propose?

Myths Concerning Republicanism 6: The Material Culture of Republican Rule or the Problem of the King's Head

The Seal of the Commonwealth. This is the version from 1651, the earlier 1649 version wore out.

The prospect of executing Charles I raised a problem for the English Parliament that, on the face of it, may look trivial but which was in fact very important: what was to be done about the royal seal? The seal was used to indicate royal approval on official documents and was therefore a crucial mark of legitimacy. Yet the royal seal (which depicted the King's head on one side and his coat of arms on the other) could not be used by a regicidal regime. Monarchies had a ready-made symbol in the image of the monarch, republics had to be more creative to find effective ways of representing the regime in material form. Another myth of republican government might then be that it is difficult to create a powerfully symbolic material culture for a republican regime. Yet various creative and innovative attempts have been made to do so.

The English regicides were certainly not deterred by the problem. Before Charles I had even been condemned to death plans were in train to produce a replacement seal. Four weeks before the regicide a new 'republican' seal had been designed and four days before Charles's death Thomas Simon was paid to produce it. As a result, the seal of the commonwealth was ready for use just a week after Charles had been executed. In place of the King's arms it depicted a map of England, Wales and Ireland (Scotland was not yet under the control of the English republic). In place of the King's head was an image of Parliament in session, reinforcing the point that that body (rather than a single individual) was now the sovereign.

Bust of a boy wearing a phrygian cap. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

One obvious source of inspiration for later republicans was the Roman Republic where inscriptions, images, material objects, architecture and rituals were all developed to reflect and reinforce the power of the state. The acronym SPQR (senatus populusque romanus, 'the senate and people of Rome') served as a reminder of where power lay in the Roman system and was used as an emblem of Rome's republican government, being emblazoned not just on official documents, but also on coins and buildings. The Roman legacy also furnished a number of motifs that were picked up by later republican states. One of these was the phrygian cap or liberty bonnet. Its origins lay in the practice of shaving the heads of slaves in ancient Rome. Freed slaves would, therefore, be given a hat to hide their shaved head while their hair grew back. On this basis the phrygian cap became a symbol of liberty.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ‘The Allegory of Good Government’ from the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The frescoes that the artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti produced for the Sale dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena between 1337 and 1339 constitute a particularly lavish example of the way in which republican ideology can be reflected in visual form. The cycle of six paintings present good and bad government and the effects of each in the city and in the countryside. Like written texts, the frescoes have been subject to conflicting interpretations. Quentin Skinner has challenged the traditional Aristotelian or Thomist reading, arguing instead that the frescoes reflect the ideology of pre-humanist texts and, more especially, the particular account set out in Bruno Latini's Li Livres dou trésor (Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume II: Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 39-116). On this basis Skinner argues that the placing of the figure of peace in the middle section of the middle painting of the cycle reflects the pre-humanist view that the goal of good government is the preservation of peace and concord. He also claims that the regal figure, which had been seen as a symbolic representation of the Thomist doctrine of the common good, is in fact supposed to indicate the kind of magistrates the city should elect in order to secure the common good. Moreover, by simultaneously depicting this figure as representing the city of Siena and a supreme judge, Lorenzetti was emphasising Latini's point that the supreme ruler or judge of Siena must be the Sienese themselves. However we interpret these images, they constitute a powerful representation in visual form of republican political ideas.

Republican material culture could be used not simply to reinforce and disseminate the values of the ruling powers, but also as a tool of opposition. In eighteenth-century Britain Thomas Hollis and Thomas Spence both deployed images and artefacts alongside texts to mount extra-parliamentary republican campaigns.

The cover of the Hollis edition of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, F *EC75.H7267.Zz751s Lobby IV.4.14, Houghton Library, Harvard University. I am grateful to the Houghton Library for giving me permission to include this here and to Dr Mark Somos for his assistance.

At the heart of Hollis's campaign were the texts of earlier republican authors that he republished. These included Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government, James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana, Edmund Ludlow's Memoirs, Marchamont Nedham's The Excellencie of a Free State and works by John Milton. But it was not merely the words of these volumes that mattered to Hollis, their physicality or material form was also crucial to the messages that he wanted to convey. The volumes that Hollis republished, and then sent to furnish public and university libraries across Europe and North America, were lavishly produced and deliberately associated with each other by their appearance. They were bound in red leather and embossed with symbols - including a small liberty bonnet. Each volume also bore a portrait of the author designed by the Italian-born painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Cipriani. The portraits were enclosed within a wreath made by two laurel branches (alluding to the victory laurels of ancient Rome) underneath which the liberty cap was repeated. Copies of the portraits were also printed separately, perhaps as advertisements for the volume or to be displayed on a wall. Hollis also commissioned Cipriani to design medals to commemorate key victories, including one which depicted Britannia wearing a liberty cap that was designed to celebrate the victory of the British over the French at Louisbourg in 1758.

Thomas Spence's political programme was grounded in the 'Land Plan' that he first presented in a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society in November 1775. Though the lecture caused controversy and resulted in Spence being expelled from the society, he continued to promote his plan in a variety of publications. These included, not just conventional political pamphlets, but also utopian, semi-fictional works such as Crusonia and Spensonia, and his cheap periodical Pig's Meat. Like Hollis, Spence also experimented with visual representations. In particular he produced tokens depicting images that reflected or served as short-hand reminders of his land plan. He also used the images, as Hollis did, to reflect his broader political views, though he was less reverential. Rather than celebrating military victories he tended to use his tokens to complain about present day injustices. Spence's tokens were subversive in their function as well as their appearance. They were produced in response to the shortage of low denomination coins in the eighteenth century. Spence's tokens could be used by the public as small change and then exchanged for legal tender at his shop. By this means his tokens could be seen as replacing or subverting government authority and royal power. This was particularly the case with those on which the head of the monarch was replaced by an image of a radical activist such as John Horne Tooke or John Thelwall. Spence also counter-stamped official regal coinage with his slogans.

Royal iconography has always been dominated by the image of the monarch. Finding an equivalent symbol to represent republican authority has been a matter of debate and experimentation for republican regimes and opposition republicans alike. Their endeavours have produced a rich repertoire of republican imagery which draws heavily on the Roman legacy, but also reflects different national and temporal contexts.

The concern of those involved in the redesign of the seal in 1649 was to ensure that it reflected the reality of the new situation. By contrast, the official iconography of the United Kingdom today misrepresents the form of government that now prevails. The state is officially a monarchy, as reflected in the fact that the Queen's head is depicted on the royal seal, coins and postage stamps. Yet sovereign power now lies not with the monarch, but in the Houses of Parliament. Perhaps it is time to return to the iconography of 1649? Contrary to the myth, there is plenty of scope for doing so.

Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government: The Journey of a Text from Manuscript to Translation

Covid-19 has disrupted everything, including academic conferences, workshops and seminars. In the light of the necessary postponement of this year’s Translating Cultures workshop in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, I have chosen to suspend my series on Myths Concerning Republican Government for one month more in order to offer a brief account of the paper I would have given at that workshop, which reflects the new project that I am currently in the process of developing.

Scholarship on translation inevitably focuses on words. How are specific terms translated? How accurately does a translation convey the meaning and sentiment of a work? But what about the form in which those words are presented: what role does the genre that is used or the physical appearance of a text play in conveying meaning, indicating audience, and determining purpose; and what happens when a translation appears in a different form from the original? These are questions I had begun to ponder during previous Wolfenbüttel workshops.

Algernon Sidney, after Justus van Egmont, based on a work of 1663. National Portrait Gallery NPG 568. Reproduced thanks to a Creative Commons license.

For my contribution to our postponed third workshop I plan to explore these issues using Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government as a case study. Though an important seventeenth-century work with a long afterlife in England and abroad, the original 'text' was simply a collection of manuscript sheets found on Sidney's desk when he was arrested, in May 1683, for his alleged involvement in the Rye House Plot. In its journey from Sidney's desk to the French Revolution, where it generated particular interest, Discourses Concerning Government was transformed multiple times through the interventions of various collaborators.

The first stage of this was its publication as a physical book in 1698 by the editor John Toland and printer John Darby. In 1762, Thomas Hollis published a new edition in his 'Library of Liberty' and, a further thirty years on, Daniel Eaton followed suit with his own edition. Over the same period The Discourses established a French presence. Toland's edition was reviewed in the Huguenot periodical Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in 1699. Soon after, a French translation was produced by a Huguenot refugee Pierre-August Samson. It too was reviewed in Huguenot periodicals as well as being reprinted in 1755 and 1794. In 1789 Sidney's ideas were drawn to the attention of a wider French audience via Lettre de félicitation de milord Sidney aux Parisiens et à la nation françoise. Exploring the different stages of this text's journey, and changes in its form that occurred in the process, reveals interesting evidence about the relationship between the form and content of texts and translations.

The frontispiece to Toland and Darby’s 1698 edition of Sidney’s text. I am grateful to Gaby Mahlberg for providing me with this image.

First, the physical form of a text - its size, the quality of the paper, the sophistication of the frontispiece - offers indications as to its audience, purpose, and significance. Here there is a marked contrast between the different versions of The Discourses. The Toland and Hollis editions are large lavish volumes intended for the private libraries of the rich (Toland) or major university and public libraries (Hollis). Hollis went so far as to bind the works in his Library of Liberty in red leather and to emboss them with symbols of liberty such as the bonnet rouge. By contrast Daniel Eaton's edition was more modest, being part of a scheme by the London Corresponding Society to make available cheap versions of key political texts. In fact, Eaton not only published Sidney's text in full, but also included excerpts in his weekly periodical Politics for the People. The French translations too were generally smaller than Toland's original, perhaps reflecting the humble and transient lifestyle of Huguenots at the time.

Secondly, it is interesting to observe the connections these editors and translators saw between texts. Toland was largely responsible for the creation of a canon of English republican works and he deliberately associated Sidney's Discourses (written in the 1680s) with works produced during the English Revolution, emphasising their common themes. His 1704 reprint of the Discourses explicitly alerted readers to the fact that John Milton's, Edmund Ludlow's and James Harrington's works could also be found in Derby's shop. Similarly, Hollis's Library of Liberty set Sidney's text alongside works by Milton, Ludlow, Andrew Marvell and Marchamont Nedham; and the common binding used physical resemblance to reinforce the ideological connection. In sending collections of works to particular institutions Hollis was also able, as Mark Somos demonstrated to us last year, to use marginalia to create a trail of republican writings and to influence how they were read.

Pierre-August Samson’s 1702 French translation of Sidney’s Discourses. With thanks to Gaby Mahlberg for providing the image.

Thirdly there is the question of genre. Knowledge of Sidney in France came initially via the reviews in periodicals. Here, then, The Discourses was associated with Huguenot concerns - in particular Protestantism and resistance to absolute monarchy. How did this affect French readings of Sidney's text? And what about Lettre de félicitation de milord Sidney. This was not a translation, but a short work pretending that Sidney had returned from the dead to counsel the French. Presenting Sidney's ideas in the form of a letter addressed to the revolutionaries allowed those ideas to be targeted at their concerns. Content and form, then, are inextricably bound together. To fully understand the one - we must also pay close attention to the other.

Translating Cultures

The main square in Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

Last year I attended a 'Translating Cultures' workshop organised by Gaby Mahlberg and Thomas Munck. I found it so collegial and thought-provoking that I was delighted to be invited to attend the follow-up this October. The occasion did not disappoint. The location is one where early-modern historians instantly feel at home: the beautiful Lower Saxony town of Wolfenbüttel has a remarkably well preserved collection of 17th century houses, complete with mottos carved into the lintels. And the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB), which hosted our workshop, is a wonderful research library based around the collection put together by Duke August the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

The HAB and its director, Peter Burschel, and head of scientific programmes, Volker Bauer, were very hospitable hosts, but the positive and stimulating atmosphere also owed much to the excellent conference organisers, Gaby Mahlberg and Thomas Munck, and to the other participants, who without exception delivered thoughtful and engaging papers. Gaby has offered a summary of the workshop here, but I would like to take this opportunity to offer my own reflections on some of the themes that surfaced during the two days. In particular, the papers provided food for thought on three issues that I have been pondering myself recently: language, genre, and materiality.

Given our focus on translation, it is not surprising that several papers touched on the limitations of language and the difficulty sometimes of conveying a particular idea or concept in a foreign language. Lázló Kontler in his paper on the translation of Montesquieu into Hungarian, pointed out that 'parliament' is a difficult word to translate into Hungarian. It ended up being translated as 'word house' which while alluding to the etymology of the word, seemed rather quaint and provoked smiles around the room. Several papers developed this point to suggest that certain ideas or concepts might be easier to express in one language than in another. In his paper on the Book of Job, Asaph Ben-Tov noted that, while this was not (as some in the early-modern period had believed) a Hebrew translation from an Ancient Arabic source, there was nevertheless a sense in which the ideas it contained could be more easily understood in Arabic than in Hebrew. Nor is this just a question of the written word. Jaya Remond in discussing colonial botanical texts, raised the idea that images might themselves be viewed as a language made up of lines and dots, and that a picture might evoke an object much more effectively than could ever be achieved in words. Rachel Foxley went even further in exploring language, translated words, and the power they wield. She looked at the translation of terms from Latin and Greek as a way into thinking about how the language of innovation and revolution developed in seventeenth-century England. She showed that, while the Roman term 'novae res' evoked a sense of innovation that was linked to the restless crowd and to demagoguery, this was set against an Aristotelian understanding of the means by which more gradual change by the authorities might bring about revolution. In this way, ancient languages of innovation were deployed by both sides in the build up to the English Civil War.

Portrait of Aphra Behn by Robert White, after John Riley line engraving, published 1716. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D30183. Reproduced under a creative commons license.

Not only were specific terms or languages felt to be most appropriate for conveying particular concepts or ideas, but the choice of genre may also be important. In her paper on Aphra Behn's translations of French works, Amelia Mills made the fascinating observation that Behn's version of Paul Tallemant's Le Voyage de L'Isle d'Amour not only translated the language from French to English, but also transformed an original prose work interspersed with small sections of verse into a work that was entirely in poetic form. As a group we speculated about Behn's motivations in doing so. Perhaps she viewed poetry as higher form and was using the transformation to show off her skills, or perhaps she felt poetry to be a more appropriate mode of writing for a woman at that time.

Several papers noted the fact that in the early-modern period historical writing was often seen as a good vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. Helmer Helmers described the deliberate efforts of the Dutch government to produce histories of the Dutch Revolt for European dissemination. The state invested more than 40,000 guilders in histories of this key event that were translated into German, French, and Latin. Emanuel van Meteren's history of the Dutch Revolt proved particularly popular going through 111 editions and translations between 1596 and 1647 including no fewer than 74 German versions. Almost as popular were the Italian translations of the historical works of William Robertson, examined by Alessia Castagnino, with more than 50 translations appearing in the early-modern period. In her paper on the 1627 French translation of Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of Henry VII, Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq delved into the question of why that work should have been of interest to the French at that time, concluding that the reign of Henry VII offered a useful antidote to French absolutism. It held a revealing mirror to Louis XIII in presenting a King who sought to reconcile warring parties and to promote religious concord.

French translation of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government by P. A. Samson. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Several participants touched on another genre of writings which while not translations in themselves, are closely connected to them - reviews. For Thomas Munck these offer one valuable way of gaining an insight into the 'imagined community of readers' that can prove so elusive to those of us working on the early-modern period. Reviews were presented as particularly useful in this regard as they need not be purely national in focus, and therefore when dealing with translated works may provide insight into transnational communities of readers. Thomas - and Gaby Mahlberg in her paper on German reviews of Algernon Sidney's Discourses - noted that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reviews start making comments about the nature and quality of the translations themselves, suggesting an emerging understanding of what was considered a good translation. In my own paper on the reception of James Harrington's ideas in revolutionary France I pointed out that while reviews are not translations, a review in a different language from the original work can perform some of the same functions, not least in providing an account of the argument and key points of the work for a foreign audience and many early-modern reviews included lengthy quotations translated directly from the text, thereby constituting at least a partial translation. Both French and German reviews of Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government that appeared in the early eighteenth century are a good example in this regard. The idea that the basic content of a text could be disseminated without an actual translation appearing was also picked up by Lázló Kontler who noted that Montesquieu's ideas had already been much debated in Hungary long before the first full translation of The Spirit of the Laws appeared in 1833.

Finally, various papers touched on the materiality of texts, including translations, and what texts as physical objects and associated artefacts might reveal about the aims, audience, and reception of texts. William Robertson, Alessia Castagnino explained, deliberately laid out the original text of his history of Scotland so that it could appeal to two distinct groups of readers - on the one hand scholars and on the other a more general, casual public - placing the notes and other scholarly apparatus in such a way that they could be accessed, but did not interfere with the flow of the narrative. The Italian translators, however, eschewed this method, instead producing separate translations for different audiences. Crocchi's 1765 translation was deliberately aimed at government and administrative officials, men of letters and science, whereas Rossi's 1779-80 translation was directed at a wider audience. The absence of illustrations and other supplementary elements ensured that the volume was cheap, costing the same as just 24 eggs, prompting Alessia to joke that  Italians could choose between Robertson's history and a very large omelette.

The interior of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley

A number of the translations discussed at the workshop were also linked to or associated with other objects. For example, the Collection Magliabechi, put together by Raimondi on behalf of the Medici and discussed by Luisa Simonutti, involved the gathering and production not just of books but also of seeds for the Medici garden. Moreover, the collection includes not just the books themselves, but also some of the original plates that were used to produce the lavish images that adorned them. As far as I am aware, Thomas Hollis did not send seeds from England to Europe or America, but he sent more or less everything else. Moreover, as Mark Somos demonstrated in his paper, Hollis sought to link texts with other texts, and with objects and networks. This is evident from the extensive marginalia that he added to the copies of books he sent to libraries around the globe. As Mark argued, Hollis's aim was to guide his readers through the works, pointing them to related works (sometimes even giving page numbers) and creating a trail for them through republican writings. I was particularly fascinated by the observation that his technical comments on the works of John Milton (an author almost always featured in the donations he sent) often refer to Harrington, suggesting that Hollis wanted his audience to read Milton through the lens of The Commonwealth of Oceana.

It is a sign of a good workshop that it prompts one to ponder new projects and future work. It is testimony to just how good this one was that I left eager to pick up Hollis's trail for myself and to follow his texts across Europe and North America. For now, though, I think I will have to remain content with looking forward to next year's workshop.