Nineteenth-century Manuscript Research Articles

Handbook for Medicines by Iosif Țiucra, a Teacher. A Nineteenth-Century Manuscript in the History of Pharmacy Collection (MNIT)

"Among the numerous artifacts preserved in the History of Pharmacy Collection of the National Museum of Transylvanian History in Cluj‑Napoca (MNIT) there is an unpublished manuscript, a handbook with practical medical advice, dated 1876 and written in Romanian by Iosif Țiucra, a schoolteacher activating in Bârsa (Berza) village, Arad County. This research aims to present Iosif Țiucra, the content of his manuscript and to contextualize his handbook, considering the sanitary problems of the Romanian community in Arad County, in the middle of the nineteenth century."

The Benefits and Limitations of Digital Tools to Retrieve the Emotions of Nineteenth-Century Readers of Philosophy from Manuscript Letters

This article discusses the limitations and benefits of resorting to digital tools and research methodology to explore nineteenth-century manuscript letters, written by readers to the French philosopher Victor Cousin, and to increase our understanding of how ordinary readers responded to philosophy at the time. More broadly, it examines the potential assets of the annotation interface developed in the Reading Europe Advance Data Investigation Tool (READ-IT https://readit-project.eu/ 2018–2021), a collaborative research project focusing on regenerating lost connections about the cultural heritage of reading from large volumes of highly-diverse eighteenth- to twenty-first-century sources in multiple languages. The case study describes challenges raised by attempts to detect and classify differences between female and male philosophical reading experiences as well as emotional responses, something which is largely under-explored. Along the way it provides reflexive as well as epistemological insights into the promises of big data for research on cultural history and literary archives and the current state of knowledge on emotions.

Developing the Dead: Spirit Photography, Mormonism, and Noise

Developing the Dead: Spirit Photography, Mormonism, and Noise

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski

Reviewed by: Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski Adam L. Tate (bio) Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. By Gracjan Kraszewski. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2020. Pp. 216. Cloth, $45.00.) During the past fifteen years, scholars have rediscovered the history of Catholicism in the antebellum South and reexamined Catholic religious practice in the armies during the Civil War. For example, books by James Woods, Andrew Stern, Michael Pasquier, William Kurtz,1 and others have scrutinized Catholic engagement with mid-nineteenth-century culture. Interest in Civil War–era religion also drove the 2016 publication of the massive Civil War diary of Confederate chaplain James Sheeran and the 2019 edition of David Conyngham’s unfinished nineteenth-century manuscript, Soldiers of the Cross, which details the efforts of Catholic chaplains and religious sisters during the war.2 Recently, Benjamin Miller’s In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War (2019) incorporated the experiences of Catholic chaplains into a broader study of religion in Civil War armies. The new scholarship reveals that Catholicism, which by 1860 was the largest Christian denomination in the United States, needs broader incorporation into the general narratives of both southern religion and the Civil War. As part of this emerging literature, Gracjan Kraszewski’s Catholic Confederates demonstrates that southern Catholics strongly supported the Confederacy while considering themselves devoutly religious. Kraszewski, surprised by Catholic allegiance to the South, creates a term, “Confederatization,” to describe Catholics’ acceptance of their new nation. Confederatization, he notes, “propelled Southern Catholics toward prioritizing [End Page 127] a new national identity above older ethnic ones” (xviii–xix). Kraszewski uses letters, diaries, and newspaper sources to explain this process among a handful of Confederates. While the volume contributes to knowledge about religion during the Civil War and American Catholic history, his argument suffers at times from the inconsistent use of his model of Confederatization. Catholic bishops in the South, Kraszewski shows, varied in the enthusiasm they demonstrated toward the Confederacy, but all tried to separate their spiritual duties from their personal political beliefs. Patrick Lynch, the bishop of the Diocese of Charleston, was the “most Confederatized of bishops” (121). He publicly celebrated secession and the fall of Fort Sumter and, in 1864, served on a failed diplomatic mission to the Vatican to obtain formal recognition for the Confederacy from Pope Pius IX. Despite his political zeal, as Kraszewski notes, Lynch “encouraged Catholics to tend to their faith first, regardless of external pressures, for neither war nor circumstances of time could change the Church’s mission” (75). When the archbishop of Baltimore suddenly died in 1863, Lynch even recommended a northern bishop to fill the see, a sign of the episcopacy’s “cross-sectional spiritual unity,” Kraszewski contends (77). Kraszewski also discusses William Henry Elder, bishop of Natchez, Mississippi, who gained notoriety in June 1864 by refusing Union orders to read a prayer for President Abraham Lincoln during mass. At that time, Elder claimed that interfering with divine worship was not the business of the United States government. Refusing to bend, Elder suffered arrest and was imprisoned in Louisiana. Previous scholars have seen Elder’s actions as either genuine spiritual concern or “southern partisanship” (91). Kraszewski, however, depicts Elder’s stand as a perfect example of Confederatization. Elder could appear to be a good Catholic and good Confederate simultaneously with no cognitive dissonance. Elder had told his priests “not to make any pulpit statements about secession” so as not to “scandalize” Catholics who had already taken loyalty oaths to the occupying Union forces (87), but his arrest in 1864 brought him wide acclaim from Protestant southerners and made for newspaper fodder throughout the land. Unlike most of their bishops, however, Catholic Confederate chaplains and soldiers, Kraszewski asserts, “were highly politicized” (xvii). He relies on the diaries of three chaplains—James Sheeran, John Bannon, and Louis-Hippolyte Gache—and three Catholic soldiers—John Dooley, a Virginian, and two Louisiana men, Henri Garidel and Felix Pierre Poche. In particular, Kraszewski finds that the chaplains intensely focused on their spiritual mission to help the troops while frequently referencing their [End Page...

On Void and the Plausibility of the Copernican Paradigm: an Indo-Persian Link in the Qajar Reception of Modern Astronomy

Abstract Historiography on the introduction of the Copernican astronomical paradigm in Iran has acknowledged the presence of Persian treatises from India in early-nineteenth century Qajar Iran for some time. In spite of this acknowledgment, the processes by which the modern paradigm was transmitted to Iran via the subcontinent have remained shrouded in mystery for the most part. MS Or. 462 at Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, represents a unique early nineteenth-century composite manuscript (majmūʿah), in which, alongside treatises belonging to the premodern Ptolemaic paradigm, appears an entry on the Copernican planetary system. The treatise in question, titled “The discovery of the novel opinions of the sages of Europe” (Istikshāf-i rāyhā-yi tāzah-ʾi ḥakīmān-i farang), outlines the expanding geographical knowledge of Europe as well as the cosmological revisions of Copernicus and Newton, among other unnamed European scholars. In this article, we first examine the treatise’s connection to its Indo-Persian source and present an overview of its content on the new Copernican cosmology. Furthermore, we examine an encounter between proponents and detractors of the new scientific paradigm as detailed at the end of the treatise. Finally, we draw a few conclusions about the introduction of modernity and modern science into nineteenth-century Qajar Iran, based on the information that can be retrieved from this treatise.

Nineteenth-century Islamic Manuscripts and Printed Books: Revisiting a survey of the Michael Abbott Collection, State Library Victoria

The Michael Abbott Collection of Islamic manuscripts and printed books was donated to State Library Victoria (SLV) in 2012 and comprises Qur’ans and religious texts. An initial collection survey in 2014 documented a variety of materials and techniques, but also highlighted challenges in describing Islamic bindings using existing bookbinding terminology. The Michael Abbott Collection is unique within the broader SLV collection, which is largely concentrated on the history of Western book production and trade, reflecting the primary cultural background and professional expertise of SLV specialist library and conservation staff. Subsequently, the author attended an Islamic Bookbinding Workshop at the Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia in July 2017, presented by Dr Karin Scheper, where participants deepened their understanding of binding structures, regional variations and conservation approaches. The workshop has provided a crucial frame of reference for the Michael Abbott Collection, and revealed some Indonesian manuscript traditions, from where the majority of manuscripts originated. Revisiting the survey in 2018 identified previously overlooked structural features that have been reconsidered within the context of the collection. This is a case study of ‘revisitation’ in conservation practice, responding to the challenges of preserving dissociated cultural collections and acquiring knowledge to give original observations greater depth and meaning.

Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales & Commentary by Wilt L. Idema

Reviewed by: Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales & Commentary by Wilt L. Idema Stephen Roddy (bio) Wilt L. Idema. Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales & Commentary. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. xv, 254 pp. Paperback, $30.00, isbn 978-0-295-74483-4. Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales & Commentary is an informative and delightfully entertaining survey of an exceptionally lively topic. Its ambitiously inclusive selection of cat-, mouse-, and (most prominently) cat-and-mouse-themed writings covers the entire span of Chinese history, from "Fat Rats" ("Shishu") in the Classic of Poetry (Shijing, ca. 600 b.c.e.) to Fang Hao's Empire of Cats (Mao diguo, 2010). The bulk of examples, however, are drawn from a narrower band of vernacular works of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. As the author notes in the introductory chapter, while Chinese "oral traditions of animal tales are as rich as any other tradition in the world," the classical tradition is considerably less voluminous, especially for "tales that feature talking animals" (p. 8). And therefore, only one of the book's five chapters (chapter 1) is devoted to the literati tradition of poetry and prose in the classical language. The other four chapters primarily discuss and present extended excerpts from vernacular sources ranging from late Ming colloquial fiction like Journey to the West (Xiyouji, ca. 1592) and One Hundred Court Cases (Baijia Gongan, ca. 1594) to late Qing baojuan (precious scrolls) and other oral storytelling scripts in various genres, some of them preserved only in manuscript form or as transcriptions of modern and contemporary performances. Thanks in part to this emphasis on non-elite literature, the reader is treated to sources that are not only relatively unknown outside or in some cases even within China but also not often found together within the same volume. And given the nearly universal human interest in this topic, especially in our post-anthropocentric cultural moment, the book is further enriched by the many comparisons it makes to South Asian, West Asian, and European literary traditions, which the author deploys both to identify foreign influences or sources and to highlight China's distinctive contributions to this diminutive but very animated niche of Weltliteratur. As noted, the bulk of the book comprises translations and descriptions of late imperial-era vernacular works, many of them—at least in their currently extant forms—from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The author makes the point that while these two animals are present in a variety of narrative genres, such as zhiguai (accounts of the supernatural) tales of seduction by animal spirits or other nonhumans disguised as sexually alluring women or boys, it was only in vernacular and performative texts of the mid- to late Qing that cats and mice began to appear primarily in their normative animal forms and not dissembling as human beings. While some of these later works are well known, many are not, and some exist only in fragments or as unpublished, hard-to-find [End Page 82] manuscripts. Among these latter, the longest and arguably most interesting piece translated by the author is a prosimetric tale of a war between mice and cats known as Wuying zhuan (here titled A Tale without Shape or Shadow, pp. 131-153), based on a nineteenth-century manuscript held in the Harvard-Yenching Library. This last work comes at the end of three chapters (2, 3, and 4) that trace the evolution of two dominant streams of cat-and-mouse tales: court cases (gongan) that situate their conflict—or at least its "resolution"—under the auspices of the famously incorruptible judge Bao Zheng, or of Yama, the judge of the underworld; and the folkloric "wedding of the mice" (or mice marrying cats) that was a popular subject of calendar prints and papercuts and may have derived—at least in one of its variants—from the Indian work Panchatantra (p. 86). These two strands are treated separately but also together, since in "traditional popular literature, detailed accounts of the marriage of the mouse are most commonly found in extended versions of the story of the court case, in which it serves as an explanation...

A Manuscript Description in Kraków of the ‘Trivulzio Museum’ in Milan

An early nineteenth-century manuscript is preserved in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. This document in Italian, entitled ‘Breve Descrizione del Museo Trivulzio’, describes the contents of a collection of an aristocratic family in Milan, as seen shortly after the death of its builder – Don Carlo Trivulzio (1715-1789). The author compares it to a published text in French by Aubin-Louis Millin, and publishes up-to-date descriptions of the engraved gems evoked in the manuscript. Thanks to various sources, five of those seven cameos and intaglios can also be illustrated together for the first time.

Amateur Hours: The Visual Interpretation of Tennyson’s Poetry in Two Manuscript Albums

This article seeks to gauge Victorian readers’ responses by looking not at how readers wrote about their experience of texts, but at how they responded to their reading visually. To this end, the article presents a case study of two Victorian manuscript albums from the Tennyson Research Collection in Lincoln, in which Tennyson’s poetry has been transcribed alongside amateur illustrations. While these items improve our understanding of nineteenth-century manuscript culture in a similar way to commonplace books or scrapbooks, their sustained attention to individual texts is distinctive. The private nature of amateur illustration, and the fact that the amateur illustrator’s interpretations remain implicit, can encode responses to texts that are less articulable in other media. The first album, which contains Tennyson’s ‘The Day-Dream’, sheds new light on the problems of signification posed by the poem’s multiple endings; the album shows a reader who uses amateur illustration to create the ‘meaning suited to his mind’ that is mentioned and then dismissed by Tennyson’s narrator. In the second album, a talented group of sisters, including the amateur artist Ella Taylor, illustrated the 1859 Idylls of the King. The sisters’ pairings of word and image interpret the original four-poem Idylls in significant ways, for example, mitigating Guinevere’s guilt through the editing of extracts, and tacitly revelling in Vivien’s triumph over Merlin via an arresting illustration of Vivien in motion. As such, the album intervenes in Victorian debates surrounding female character, as the Taylor sisters sympathize even with the villainesses of the Idylls.

Perspective: Digitizing the Diary – Experiments in Queer Encoding (A Retrospective and a Prospective)

AbstractThis essay reflects on the process I am leading within the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium ( ) to create a scholarly edition of the diary of ‘Michael Field’ (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Situated in relation to a broader context of nineteenth-century manuscript digitization, it reflects both on the possibilities the digital environment offers for the study of manuscript life-writing, and on the timely and significant questions Bradley and Cooper’s diary raises for the field of manuscript digitization. By revisiting my earlier analysis of Bradley and Cooper’s collaborative life-writing, I probe the nature of their joint diary, asking what type of document it is and how it sits in relation to both nineteenth-century and contemporary understandings of life-writing. I then consider the new kinds of analysis and investigation the digitized diary will make possible, and the kind of new knowledge (historical and otherwise) we might seek from it. The journals ...

Accounting for Time in Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Diaries and Photographs

Diaries and photos are technologies that solicit and generate content, and they are places to archive and to keep. The content elicited by a diary is enmeshed with a physical format that emphasises daily or hourly rhythms of life; the content and format co-exist in tension with fleeting temporality and certain mortality. Likewise, the photograph records an impression of a single moment in order to preserve that moment for an unknowable future. This paper shows how the content of diaries and photographs is shaped by a moral obligation to account for time and a temporal orientation to the future. Nineteenth century diaries and photographs are deterministic technologies orienting their users’ actions within the historical context of the industrial revolution. They both promise reparation in anticipation of future losses (adjudged on a numberless balance sheet of life) and demand an active account of personal productivity; in these discursive operations, the diary and photograph may aggravate rather than answer anxieties about time.

Identification and Analytical Examination of Copper Alloy Pigments Applied as Golden Illuminations on Three Persian Manuscripts

AbstractGolden pigments are among the most common colourants used in Persian illuminated manuscripts. In this research, golden pigments were investigated in three eighteenth- to nineteenth-century manuscripts. Initially, scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive spectrometry analyses showed that different kinds of metallic pigments were present and some of them were ternary alloys made up of copper, zinc and tin, hence copper-based alloys were ascertained as cheap alternatives to gold. Discolouration of the pigment was observable through alteration of the metallic pigments to greenish residues in the manuscripts. Subsequently, the greenish products in the golden pigments were studied by Raman spectroscopy. Copper carboxylates were recognized as degradation products. We inferred that the alteration is a consequence of the interaction between copper alloy pigments and carboxylic acids in conditions of high humidity. Moreover, more progressive degradation has caused the discolouration, brittleness and gradually crumbling of the paper in the painted areas. Signs of damages in the paper were comparable with decomposition of the paper by green copper pigments such as verdigris in historical documents and miniatures.

Christian Patriot or Oromo Traitor? The Ethiopian State in the Memories of Ras Gobäna Dače

Abstract In this article, Yates explores the memories of a key Oromo figure, ras Gobäna Dače, to argue for their use in past and contemporary versions of the modern Ethiopian state. Yates uses theoretical frameworks on memory by Gary Alan Fine, Allesandro Portelli and John Lonsdale to situate various memories on Gobäna. The source base includes folklore, oral interviews and late nineteenth century manuscripts that center on Gobäna. Yates uses the memories of three key moments in this Oromo life: his birth, his conquests of Oromo lands, and his death, and argues that memories of these moments are inextricably linked to notions of the Ethiopian state. For many oppressed Oromo, Ethiopia is a state where the Oromo cannot, do not and will not have a role and cast Gobäna as a cautionary tale for all Oromo who desire to work for Ethiopia. For the ruling elites, Ethiopia is a place for solely civilized Christian state construction, and Gobäna remains a shadowy figure in this discourse and when he is mentioned it is his Christianity that is emphasized and not his ethnicity. Ras Gobäna, an Oromo state architect, cannot be used in either version of Ethiopia's history, which remain separate and in competition.

A Cookbook of Her Own

A Cookbook of Her Own

Christian Patriot or Oromo Traitor?: The Ethiopian State in the Memories of Ras Gobäna Dače

In this article, Yates explores the memories of a key Oromo figure, ras Gobäna Dače, to argue for their use in past and contemporary versions of the modern Ethiopian state. Yates uses theoretical frameworks on memory by Gary Alan Fine, Allesandro Portelli and John Lonsdale to situate various memories on Gobäna. The source base includes folklore, oral interviews and late nineteenth century manuscripts that center on Gobäna. Yates uses the memories of three key moments in this Oromo life: his birth, his conquests of Oromo lands, and his death, and argues that memories of these moments are inextricably linked to notions of the Ethiopian state. For many oppressed Oromo, Ethiopia is a state where the Oromo cannot, do not and will not have a role and cast Gobäna as a cautionary tale for all Oromo who desire to work for Ethiopia. For the ruling elites, Ethiopia is a place for solely civilized Christian state construction, and Gobäna remains a shadowy figure in this discourse and when he is mentioned it is his Christianity that is emphasized and not his ethnicity. Ras Gobäna, an Oromo state architect, cannot be used in either version of Ethiopia’s history, which remain separate and in competition.

Foragers on the Frontiers: the /Xam Bushmen of the Northern Cape, South Africa, in the Nineteenth Century

This thesis constructs an ethnography for the nineteenth century ǀXam Bushmen of the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, known primarily through a nineteenth century manuscript collection of oral narrative (the Bleek-Lloyd archive), which has, over the past twenty-five years, increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention, mined for insights about the cultural world of southern Bushman societies. It draws on the Bleek-Lloyd archive to produce a detailed ethnographic case study, focusing on the ideological and ontological concepts that underpinned the differentiation of ǀXam society. Firstly, the thesis situates the archive and ǀXam society within their particular environmental and historical contexts, providing valuable supplementary information that informs readings of the narratives. By producing a fully searchable transcription of the entirety of the archive, paying close attention to emic terminology, and examining the recurrence of thematic associations of this phraseology throughout the narratives, the analysis explores the constitution of ǀXam ‘personhood’ and examines the extent to which the ‘hunter-gatherer’ category forms a useful heuristic for understanding ǀXam society, with a particular focus on models of the ‘animic ontology’. The ǀXam deployed a series of positively and negatively evaluated traits in the creation of dimensions of authority, obligation, and social responsibility, embedded in particular social identities; central to these constructions and to the differentiation of these identities were the techniques and resources of ǀXam subsistence practices, salient in the production of admirable (socially-responsible hunters), reprehensible (antagonistic ‘beasts of prey’), and more ambiguous (ǃgi:tǝn ritual specialists) identities. Recognising this internal differentiation, the thesis outlines ǀXam ‘subsistence strategies’ and suggests they should be defined broadly to include their contacts and interactions with non-ǀXam groups, with domesticated animals, and with the novel material culture of the colonial period; these interactions were a consequence of their ‘hunter-gatherer’ strategies rather than a negation of them. Such strategies generated experiences that reinforced and reconstituted ǀXam ideological frameworks, incorporating the dynamics of the nineteenth century ‘frontier’ scenario and provided avenues for social change that ultimately led to the collapse of independent hunter-gatherer lifeways, and to the adoption of strategies that incorporated ǀXam individuals within rural and urban ‘Coloured’ populations of the Northern Cape; placing the ǀXam in a comparative colonial context, the thesis stresses the wider relevance of this particular ethnography for understanding hunter-gatherer engagements with food-producing, state-level societies.

A Unique Episode from the Kārnāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān in a Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Indian Manuscript of the Shāhnāmeh

The episode under discussion in this article comes from the Middle Persian text Kārnāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān. It does not appear in any published edition of the Shāhnāmeh, nor does it seem to be recorded in any manuscript consulted for these editions. The episode is versified and illustrated in a nineteenth-century manuscript preserved in the Government Museum in Alwar, India. If it is an early interpolation, why is it not found in major Shāhnāmeh manuscripts? And if it is a late interpolation, how did it find its way into an Indian manuscript at such a late date? The article proposes a provenance for the manuscript and draws attention to the possible role of the Zoroastrian community in India in the transmission of Ferdowsi's opus.

The discovery of Javanese writing in a Sri Lankan Malay manuscript

Beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered the Indonesian-Malay world, a small community known today as the Sri Lanka Malays continued to employ the Malay language in writing and speech long after its ancestors left the Indonesian archipelago and Malay peninsula for their new home. Although it is reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the Malays spoke a variety of languages, at least initially, no traces of writing in another Indonesian language have ever been found. Below I present the first evidence of such writing, in Javanese, encountered in an early nineteenth century manuscript from Colombo.

A Nineteenth-Century Colourman's Terminology

Interpretation of historical art-technical terminology is often problematic. All periods have lacked a standardized terminology. Both historically and recently the use of words has been inconsistent, varying between periods, regions or individual users. For nineteenth-century painters' materials this terminology problem was acute, and remains so. A new source of documented usage has recently become available: the unpublished nineteenth-century manuscripts of paint recipes of the English manufacturer and exporter of artists' materials, Winsor & Newton. These provide explicit definitions and contextual information which enables many art-technical terms to be interpreted. The methodology of interpreting such works is outlined. A glossary of interpreted terms is presented. While some conventional interpretations are confirmed, many unexpected alternative usages are documented in the Winsor & Newton Archive.

Making History Count: The Guadalajara Census Project (1791–1930)

Making History Count: The Guadalajara Census Project (1791–1930)