Two Hundred and Thirty-Three!!

The town of Saint-Omer in northern France (current population 15,700) is back on the map. Of course it was never really completely off the map. But to whom it belonged was the subject of a long series of struggles, and from the late 10th century it was passed back and forth between France and the Low Countries several times, and was besieged, plundered and looted over and over again. Internally, disputes also raged, in this case between two rival monasteries, Saint-Bertin and Notre Dame, for 900 years.

the abbey of St Bertin

A few events have left a lasting impression on the historical record. The Jesuit Robert Persons founded a College in Saint-Omer 1593, which had as its mission the education of refugee Catholics after the English penal laws were put into place. And it was from Saint-Omer that Henry VIII imported an expert swordsman to insure that the execution of Anne Boleyn would go smoothly.

But things have been relatively quiet in Saint-Omer for the past 200 years or so; that is, until last Saturday. Last Saturday, Eric Rasmussen was in Saint-Omer to verify that a book found in the town library (the Bibliothèque Municipale) was indeed one of the few original First Folio editions of the works of Shakespeare (Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, 1623).

Rasmussen’s qualifications for this task are impeccable: professor and chair of the department of English at the University of Nevada, author (with Anthony James West) of The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), developer of the Internet Shakespeare Project and editor of the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare series. No wonder it took him less than 5 minutes to determine the authenticity of the book!

The Saint-Omer First Folio was found by the Library staff during a hunt for volumes to be included in an upcoming exhibition of English-language books. It had been catalogued as an 18th century edition of Shakespeare works,”and it was just sitting on a shelf alongside other books by English authors,” the library’s Rare Books librarian Rémy Cordonnier said. The town library retains some of the books originally held by the Abbey of St Bertain, but this is likely from the library of the College of St Omer. The Bibliothèque Municipale also has one of the 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, although its copy is incomplete. (Were these deemed not worth moving when the College relocated to England in 1794?)

The newly-discovered Omer First Folio bears the name ‘Nevill,’ a Catholic family name with a rich pedigree in the highly-charged religio-polical world of the 16th and early-17th centuries. It was the Nevilles (along with the Percys) who had been at the center of the Revolt of the Northern Earls in 1569, which aimed to depose the Protestant Elizabeth and to replace her with the Catholic Mary. The revolt ended in disaster, and members of the Neville family fled into exile abroad. Like Shakespeare, the Nevilles had Warwickshire roots, and Warwickshire was known to be a hotbed of Catholic sedition. An Edmund Neville (1605-1647) is known to have been educated at the College. And members of the Scarisbrick family also adopted the alias 'Neville;' Edmund Scarisbrick (1639-1708) was also a student at Saint Omer.

One wonders what the network of spies in Elizabeth’s court, who were always looking for signs of religious treachery and who make the TSA look like rank amateurs, would have made of this First Folio in the collection of renegade Catholic institution? Would Will Shakespeare have had to answer some probing questions? 

"Jean-Christophe Mayer, a Shakespeare expert at the University of Montpellier III, France, cautioned against making too strong a connection, but noted that a library in the northern French town of Douai also owned some early transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays. 'It’s interesting that the plays were on the syllabuses at these colleges,' he said. The new folio, he added, “could be part of the puzzle of Shakespeare’s place in Catholic culture.'”  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/arts/shakespeare-folio-discovered-in-france-.html?_r=0

We await with interest the further insights of the serious Shakespeare scholars, but in the meantime we rejoice at this remarkable discovery. Check your attics, everyone!

The Eyes Have It!

I'm having warm thoughts about ophthalmology these days. My spouse has just had a cataract removed, and over the past several weeks we have seen (and been seen by) more different kinds of eye specialists than I imagined possible. The eye is a remarkable structure, and the science of the eye has a long and rich medical, bibliographical, literary history. But as a focus within the history of Islamic medicine, it has a particular status.

The earliest systematic treatise on the eye is attributed to the Islamic scholar and physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873), who spent much of his storied career translating Greek and Syriac manuscripts, and thus spreading classical influence throughout the Muslim world. His Ten Treatises on the Eye is not, however, one of these translations, but rather among his works of original medical research. It describes the anatomy of the eye in exquisite detail, and discusses treatments for, among other things, cataracts.

But for nearly a thousand years this treatise was lost, although secondary references to it gave scholars some sense of its contents. The great historian of medicine Julius Hirschberg (1843-1925) discovered a Latin manuscript of The Ten Treatises bound into a collection of works by Galen (c.129-200 or 216), and Orientalist Max Meyerhoff (1874-1945), the preeminent student of Arabic medical literature, discovered a (rather corrupt) Arabic version of the text in the Islamic library of Ahmed Taimur Pasha (1872-1940) in Cairo. It was Meyerhoff who managed to produce a full critical edition by comparing the Cairo text with another more complete manuscript in Leningrad.

Max Meyerhoff

Meyerhoff described the growth of the Muslim study of medicine, launched by those like Hunayn ibn Ishaq who began by translating classical manuscripts:

“At the end of the period of translation, the physicians and scientists of the Islamic world stood on a firm foundation of Greek science, increased by a large share of Persian and Indian thought and experience. Their work had been learned but was not very original. From this time on they begin to rely upon their own resources and develop from within. The sciences, particularly medicine, now pass rapidly from the hands of Christians and Sabians into the possession of Muslim scholars, mostly Persians. In medicine, in place of pandects compiled from antique sources, we find imposing encyclopedic works in which the knowledge of former generations is carefully classified and set against that of modern times.” (Meyerhof, Science and Medicine: The Legacy of Islam, 322)

It was clear to Meyerhoff and others that ophthalmology was a respected profession in medieval Islamic society, which was not the case in Galen's Rome, where the 'occulist' was deemed a second class medical professional. The crafting of precise specialized medical instruments for the study of the eye (described in the Ten Treatises) combined with theoretical experimental work, resulted in rapid innovation in the care of the eye. The treatment of cataracts described by Hunayn was aided by the development of instruments such as the 'injection syringe,' a hollow needle invented in the 11th century by Ammar ibn Ali of Mosul, which made possible the extraction by suction of soft cataracts.

Hunays writes about performing surgery for a cataract:

"Then I operated on him with the hollow needle and extracted the cataract; and he saw immediately and did not need to lie, but slept as he liked. Only I bandaged his eye for seven days. With this needle nobody preceded me. I have done many operations with it in Egypt."

Throughout the Middle Ages, Islamic physicians advanced the knowledge and treatment of eye diseases, and treatises by Averroes, Ali ibn Isa al-Kahhal’, Jibrail Bukhtishu and Ibn al-Nafis provided solid ground for the field of ophthalmology. A splendid account by Cyril Elgood details this period of medical science: http://www.amazon.com/Medical-History-Persia-Eastern-Caliphate/dp/1108015883

A Medical History of Persia

But sadly, most of this Islamic scholarship in the field of ophthalmology (from the Greek ὀφθαλμός = eye) was lost to Western physicians, and as a distinct medical specialty in the West, ophthalmology dates its origins only  from the appointment by St Bartholomew's Hospital of the first eye surgeon in 1727, from the founding of the ophthalmological hospital i London (later Moorfields Eye Hospital ) in 1805, and from the founding of the American Ophthalmological Society in 1864. Ten years earlier, in 1854, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) had (re)invented the ophthalmoscope making direct observation of the interior of the eye again possible..

Moorfields Eye Hospital

The  continuing quest for the treatment of diseases of the eye and the reduction of blindness is a noble and often-overlooked aspect of Islamic history. And our experience over the past several days of a return to eye heath after a routine outpatient operation is a thing for which we are enormously grateful, grateful to the giants of both Muslim and Western medical practice. But we wonder if the ophthalmological science of the Muslim world had not been ignored (and, in most cases, despised) by the West, if the quality of life of generations of our forebears with eye disease would have been vastly improved.

In his 1995 novel  Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (= Essay on Blindness), Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago (1922-2010) describes an epidemic of blindness that seizes an unnamed city. We follow the characters as their social fabric unravels and as they attempt to create new forms of community. Sight and sightlessness become an extended metaphors for the ability to form human connections, and we observe the anxiety, apathy, violence, and despair that attends the loss of sight. Many of the characters are named by their disability: the boy with the squint, the girl with dark glasses, the man with the eye patch.

And throughout the novel we are called to appreciate, as we ourselves do this week after cataract surgery, the various deep meanings of the phrase "I see."

All Six Every Year . . .

Someone once asked philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) if he ever read novels. "Yes, certainly," he replied. "I read all six every year."

The 'six' to which he referred were, of course, the six novels of Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817 posthumously), and Northanger Abbey (1817 posthumously). Although they received relatively few reviews in her lifetime, they soon became fashionable reading for the taste-makers of the day, and by the time of her death had been translated into French, German, and Swedish. Although it was not until the mid-20th century that the academic world acknowledged her as one of the great English novelists, the memoir written by James Edward Austen Leigh published in 1870 gave readers a sense of the personality behind the novels, leading to the burgeoning of cultivated readership which has lasted until the present day.

 James Edward Austen-Leigh

There is also reason to think about Austen on this the 100th anniversary year of the outbreak of the 1914-1918 War. It was Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who coined the term 'Janeites' for Austen's admirers. In one of his Great War stories entitled "The Janeites," a secret-society of Austen-lovers recall having taken her books with them into the trenches. And in Kipling's evocative dialect prose, they banter about Austen's stories and characters. This from a soldier named Humberstall, recalling his reading of Emma: "And—oh yes—there was a Miss Bates; just an old maid runnin’ about like a hen with ’er ’ead cut off, an’ her tongue loose at both ends. I’ve got an aunt like ’er. Good as gold—but, you know.’

Kipling also penned a bit of doggerel in her memory:

Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade!

Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!

And while the stones of Winchester, 

      or Milsom Street, remain,

Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane!

(You can read "The Janeites" on the website of the Jane Austen Society of North America: http://www.jasna.org/membership/janeites.html )

Since then, Austen in every generation has continued to find new audiences all around the world. A great number of sequels and prequels to the "six novels" have found their way into print, and the most recent crop of Austen films  (graced by such stars as Kiera Knightley, Emma Thompson, Donald Sutherland and Colin Firth) and have increased popular interest in Austen and her work. Even Bollywood has gotten in on the act!

Just a few days ago at Sotheby's London sale-room, a 1st edition of Pride and Prejudice sold for a record price of  £139,250 (that is, $218,898.22). That was 150K times more than its original cost of 90pence in today's money.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325055/Early-edition-Jane-Austens-Pride-Prejudice-auctioned-140-000.html 

And in case you really want a first edition for yourself (as originally published in in three volumes), you can have one: Jonker's Rare Books in Henley-on-Thames near Oxford has one currently for sale at just $93,392.64: https://www.jonkers.co.uk/authors/detail/authorid/2599

But, for me, I'm happy with my tatty old set of Penguin Classics of Austen, each one read every year for more than a decade. And now that winter is beginning to close in, I'll begin my reading of "all six" for this year with Emma.