• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Ransom Center Magazine

  • Articles
  • Sections
    • Art
    • Books + Manuscripts
    • Conservation
    • Exhibitions + Events
    • Film
    • Literature
    • Photography
    • Research + Teaching
    • Theatre + Performing Arts
  • Print Edition

Learning how to read again

October 14, 2020 - Aaron T. Pratt

Learning how to read again

This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. 

Part of what is so compelling about doing research with old books is that the learning curve never ends—there’s always some new challenge, another thing to explain, something else to get to the bottom of.

Reading old books is hard. Even if a book isn’t that old, content regularly poses challenges: who is that historical figure, what on earth is this political debate about, is this supposed to be a joke? And if the book is from more than a century or so ago, determining the meaning of basic nouns, verbs, and idioms can be tough, too. If you’re reading a manuscript or early printed edition in a place like the Ransom Center or working with a digital facsimile of one from your couch, you’re also likely to face different typographical conventions, alien styles of handwriting, and unfamiliar abbreviations.

The images below are from three English books in the Center’s medieval and early modern collections, but while they are all from roughly the same place and two are from the same decade, each requires its own set of literacies. And these literacies, of course, take time to develop.

Selection from a scribal manuscript of the Vita et gesta Alexandri Magni, England, 13th century, fol. 8r. Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Collection, HRC 33. The Latin text, written in the gothic book hand of a trained scribe, is heavily abbreviated.
Selection from a scribal manuscript of the Vita et gesta Alexandri Magni, England, 13th century, fol. 8r. Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Collection, HRC 33. The Latin text, written in the gothic book hand of a trained scribe, is heavily abbreviated.
Selection from a scribal(?) manuscript of Respublica, England, ca. 1553, fol. 1v. Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, MS 3244, Box 3, Folder 12. This cursive style, common in 16th- and 17th-century English manuscripts, is known as secretary hand. Letterforms in this script that often challenge modern readers include c, h, and r.
Selection from a scribal(?) manuscript of Respublica, England, ca. 1553, fol. 1v. Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, MS 3244, Box 3, Folder 12. This cursive style, common in 16th- and 17th-century English manuscripts, is known as secretary hand. Letterforms in this script that often challenge modern readers include c, h, and r.
Selection from William Baldwin, A myrroure for magistrates (London: Thomas Marshe, 1559), sig. A2r. Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Pforz 730 PFZ. The black-letter font used to print this book includes some unfamiliar letterforms: the long-s (ſ) and round-r, as in "prince". Also, a v-form serves as u at the beginning of "upon," and y regularly works in 16th-century spelling where i does today.
Selection from William Baldwin, A myrroure for magistrates (London: Thomas Marshe, 1559), sig. A2r. Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Pforz 730 PFZ. The black-letter font used to print this book includes some unfamiliar letterforms: the long-s (ſ) and round-r, as in “prince”. Also, a v-form serves as u at the beginning of “upon,” and y regularly appears in 16th-century spelling where i does today.

For card-carrying historians and those in other disciplines who approach the study of culture historically, analyzing old books requires yet another skill on top of those needed for comprehension, one that’s perhaps more subtle but is arguably just as important: learning how to read like earlier readers did. It’s one thing to decipher a particularly difficult bit of handwriting and—after much wailing and gnashing of teeth—to comprehend the theological background of a complex satirical poem, but it’s another thing to reconstruct how different types of readers from the past would likely have interpreted the same passage or work themselves.

Any researcher who thinks they can table all of their modern assumptions and be fully objective is fooling themselves. Nevertheless, these efforts in reconstruction are necessary if we want to understand the complex array of motivations, actions, and responses that created the world and defined the horizons of possibility for those who came before us.
—AARON T. PRATT

When I encounter the illustrations in the Center’s manuscript of the Täˀammərä Maryam (Miracles of Mary), for example, I am struck by many things about them; but as someone without expertise in early modern Ethiopian culture, I also know that any off-the-cuff analysis I could offer would be shaped in large part by my viewpoint as a white 21st-century American who researches Europe. It would be obvious pretty quickly that I lack the contextual knowledge needed to accurately approximate what Ethiopian Christians living in the 17th century would have seen in them. In many cases, though, it’s far less easy to catch ourselves when we’re interpreting a historical source or group of historical sources ahistorically. Even seasoned scholars can benefit from the reminder that knowing a lot about historical ingredients does not on its own guarantee that you’ll be able to make a historical recipe.

Two nonconsecutive pages from a scribal manuscript of Täˀammərä Maryam (Miracles of Mary), Ethiopia(?), 16th and 17th centuries. Eastern Manuscripts Collection, 8. Written in Gə'əz, an ancient Ethiopic language, this manuscript narrates—and illustrates—miracles believed to have been performed by the Virgin Mary.
Two nonconsecutive pages from a scribal manuscript of Täˀammərä Maryam (Miracles of Mary), Ethiopia(?), 16th and 17th centuries. Eastern Manuscripts Collection, 8. Written in Gə’əz, an ancient Ethiopic language, this manuscript narrates—and illustrates—miracles believed to have been performed by the Virgin Mary.

Efforts to reconstruct the interpretive lenses through which readers in the past themselves saw the books preserved today in special collections libraries are necessarily imperfect and partial: as now, most readers didn’t write down their interpretations and those who did could very well have been idiosyncratic in their approaches, making it difficult to generalize from the evidence of reading that does survive. And any researcher who thinks they can table all of their modern assumptions and be fully objective is fooling themselves. Nevertheless, these efforts in reconstruction are necessary if we want to understand the complex array of motivations, actions, and responses that created the world and defined the horizons of possibility for those who came before us.

Perhaps frustratingly, the work required for historically minded research can be slow-going, because you can’t immerse yourself only in the content you find most fascinating. You may need to sit down and peruse a group of bestselling sermons you’ve never heard of, learn enough Dutch to get into the political discourses that shaped both sides of a cross-cultural exchange, look at maps and globes that testify to new trade routes and emerging imperialism, or spend time with the kinds of archival documents that have the potential to reveal more diverse local populations and more racialized thinking than many now assume there were.

Selection from Fausto Rughesi, Asia (Rome: Fausto Rughesi, 1597). Kraus Map Collection 25.3. This selection depicts islands in Maritime Southeast Asia.
Selection from Fausto Rughesi, Asia (Rome: Fausto Rughesi, 1597). Kraus Map Collection 25.3. This selection depicts islands in Maritime Southeast Asia.

You might also benefit from thinking about books as complex artifacts that extend beyond text and image in an effort to embed yourself in a media ecosystem that differs from ours today. How were books made? How did people buy, sell, and otherwise interact with them, and what might these things tell us about how they approached the content you’re interested in? You may need, too, to understand a range of historical experiences that are best attested to by artifacts—tools, clothing, furniture, entire buildings—that have only left the faintest of impressions in the written record.

Selection from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: William Ponsonby, 1596). Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, uncataloged acquisition. Alongside the title-page imprint, to the right of "1596," is the manuscript cipher used by an early secondhand bookseller to record the price they paid its previous owner for the book.
Selection from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: William Ponsonby, 1596), sig. A1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, uncataloged acquisition. Alongside the title-page imprint, to the right of “1596,” is the manuscript cipher used by an early secondhand bookseller to record the amount they paid its previous owner.

Having the discipline to delay judgment and keep honing the lenses through which you read is hard, and it can be hard, too, to know when you can stop researching and start making claims. But this kind of discipline is what it takes to represent the agents of history ethically. I tend to think of it as a discipline of empathy, one that balances a commitment to telling the stories of the past with an eye toward justice in the future against a commitment to representing that past honestly by helping its voices speak as they would have. Even if those voices are troubling, not entirely representative of a population, or just not as interesting as we’d like, they’re nonetheless the voices of individuals and populations that lived, and we have an obligation to try to represent them faithfully.

When you read an old book, you are being asked to enter a different world that only becomes maximally legible when you do the work to engage with it on historically situated terms. Yes, critique is well within the remit of those of us interested in history, but responsible work proceeds first from understanding. And a desire to understand is what brings us to the study of the past in the first place, right?

Read the What is Research? series and join this slow conversation and follow #ransomresearch: What is Research to You?

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: RansomResearch, Research, What is Research?

About Aaron T. Pratt

Pratt oversees research, access, and interpretation of the Ransom Center’s pre-1700 books and manuscripts. His own research focuses on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bibliography, and the history of the book. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Yale University.

Primary Sidebar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze-D9_lmKuM

Recent Posts

  • Wonder, depth, understanding: Scholarship in process
  • Highlights from an unprecedented year
  • Inspiration and insight in the papers of author Julian Barnes
  • EXCERPT: Julian Barnes From the Margins: Exploring the Writer’s Archives
  • The camera as a weapon against racial injustice: Eli Reed’s Black In America

Tags

acquisition Alice's Adventures in Wonderland archive archives Art Books Cataloging Conservation Council on Library and Information Resources David Douglas Duncan David Foster Wallace David O. Selznick digitization exhibition Exhibitions Fellows Find Fellowships Film Frank Reaugh Frank Reaugh: Landscapes of Texas and the American West From the Outside In Gabriel Garcia Marquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez archive Gone with the Wind I have seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America Lewis Carroll literature Magnum Photos Manuscripts Meet the Staff Nobel Prize Norman Bel Geddes Norman Mailer Performing Arts Photography poetry preservation Publishing Research Robert De Niro Shakespeare theater The King James Bible: Its History and Influence The Making of Gone With The Wind Undergraduate

Archives

Before Footer

Sign up for eNews

Our monthly newsletter highlights news, exhibitions, and programs.

Connect With Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

About

Ransom Center Magazine is an online and print publication sharing stories and news about the Harry Ransom Center, its collections, and the creative community surrounding it.

Copyright © 2021 The Harry Ransom Center Magazine


The University of Texas at Austin · Web Privacy Policy · Web Accessibility Policy

Copyright © 2020 Harry Ransom Center

Web Accessibility · Web Privacy