̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Jason Scott-Warren

John Milton's notes identified in an influential book he once owned

ta385 — Wed, 15 May 2024 15:00:00 +0000

John Milton’s handwritten annotations have been identified in a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles, a vital source of inspiration for the Paradise Lost poet. ̽��ֱ��discovery, made by a team including Cambridge's Prof. Jason Scott-Warren, includes a rare example of prudish censorship.

Annotating history: thoughts of an Elizabethan scholar revealed

sjr81 — Sat, 21 Sep 2019 11:21:47 +0000

Previously unrecorded book from Gabriel Harvey’s collection extends our knowledge of one of the most conspicuous and fascinating early modern annotators

Shakespeare’s mystery annotator identified as John Milton

ta385 — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 13:33:51 +0000

It is well known that Shakespeare was a huge influence on Milton. From learning how to write nature poetry to creating charismatic villains, Milton’s debt to his forebear continues to fascinate experts. ̽��ֱ��younger poet once praised the 'wonder and astonishment' that this 'great heir of fame' conjured up in his readers.

But now, Jason Scott-Warren from Cambridge’s English Faculty believes he has identified even more tangible evidence of this connection. ̽��ֱ��realisation began when Scott-Warren read an article by Professor Claire Bourne about an anonymous annotator of a Shakespeare First Folio housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department.

Bourne dated the annotator to the mid-17th century and shared images of the handwritten notes. These include suggested corrections, cross-references to other works and the addition of material such as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Studying these, Scott-Warren was struck by how closely they resembled known examples of Milton’s handwriting and after identifying numerous compelling similarities, he decided to share his theory in a blog post for Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts, of which he is Director.

Milton is known to have made similarly intelligent and assiduous annotations in other books that survive from his library, but the evidence that Scott-Warren presents is strictly palaeographical. It includes the observation that in both the First Folio and in Milton’s handwriting, the right foot of an ‘h’ misses the ground before it heads up into an ‘e’.

Even more convincingly, Scott-Warren points out that “Milton has an enlarged italic hand, sometimes rather scratchy, sometimes quite elegant, that he uses for headings and suchlike.” ̽��ֱ��researcher compares, for example, the ‘R’ in the speech-heading for ‘Romeo’ in the Folio to a remarkably similar and distinctive ‘R’ from Milton’s ‘commonplace book’, a handwritten compilation of quotes and notes from the books that he was reading between the 1630s and 1660s.

Scott-Warren offered up his theory tentatively, admitting that further work would be needed to prove it beyond doubt. But several Milton experts from around the world have already expressed their enthusiastic support and offered further evidence.

Dr William Poole from New College Oxford says: “Not only does this hand look like Milton’s, but it behaves like Milton’s writing elsewhere does, doing exactly the things Milton does when he annotates books, and using exactly the same marks.”

"I was gathering evidence with my heart in my mouth,” Scott-Warren says. “Now, every day someone is suggesting a new similarity. I feel 100% sure, but there are still people out there who remain to be convinced.”

As well as displaying many textual annotations, the folio contains line markings which record the annotator’s lively engagement with plays including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, ̽��ֱ��Tempest and King Lear. Scott-Warren says: “You don’t know why he’s singled out a passage for attention, but it forces you to think your way into Milton’s head and it chimes with a lot of what goes on in his poetry. You can really see him constructing himself through Shakespeare.”

In ̽��ֱ��Tempest, the annotator highlighted the song: 'Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands: / Courtsied when you have and kiss’d / ̽��ֱ��wild waves whist.' ̽��ֱ��unusual rhyme, of 'kiss’d' and 'whist', is echoed in Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: ' ̽��ֱ��winds with wonder whist, / Smoothly the waters kist.'

Scott-Warren says: “To see him marking it in the text and responding to it gives you a sense of his sensitivity and alertness to Shakespeare.”

̽��ֱ��First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, was published in 1623, seven years after his death, when Milton himself was fifteen. Around 750 were printed but only 233 are known to survive. Scott-Warren is now intending to collaborate with Professor Bourne on a series of articles about the findings.

John Milton was admitted to Christ's College Cambridge in 1624, gaining his BA in 1628 and his MA in 1632.

A Cambridge literary scholar suggests that the handwriting on a Shakespeare First Folio in Philadelphia matches that of the Paradise Lost poet, John Milton.

It shows you the first-hand encounter between two great writers, which you don’t often get to see

Jason Scott-Warren

Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadephia

̽��ֱ��prologue to Romeo and Juliet, transcribed on the last page of Titus Andronicus because it was omitted from the First Folio. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadephia

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̽��ֱ��needle and the pen

amb206 — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:46:45 +0000

In August 1992, the writer WG Sebald set off on the walking tour of Suffolk that he later immortalised in ̽��ֱ��Rings of Saturn. His journey took him through innumerable scenes of decline and decay—fading seaside towns, silted-up rivers, abandoned pleasure palaces, whole towns lost beneath the waves—and in the book those scenes prompt a series of meditations on human failure and folly.

Sebald’s melancholy East Anglian odyssey ends in Norwich, where he turns to consider the many silk-weaving workshops that once kept that city lit up until late into the night. Looking at the surviving 18th-century pattern books, lined with ‘marvellous strips of colour, the edges and gaps filled with mysterious figures and symbols’, he finds in them ‘an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty’. These pages , copies of which once travelled the trade-routes of Europe, ‘seem to be leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival’. In concluding his patchwork travelogue with this celebration of a silk sample-book, Sebald makes a connection that has deep roots in human cultures, between the textual and the textile.

Next week, an ambitious interdisciplinary conference in Cambridge will unravel the fascinating interplay between words and fabrics. Run by the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Material Texts, the two-day conference is the latest in a series on ‘the material text in material culture’; last year’s meeting considered the interplay between reading, writing and eating. “After ‘Eating Words’, there was a certain inevitability about “Texts and Textiles’,” says the Centre’s director, Jason Scott-Warren. “You simply can’t get to grips with literature as a material phenomenon without thinking about its relationship with the physical fabrics that surround us.”

̽��ֱ��connection between texts and textiles begins in shared etymology; both words find their origins in the Latin verb texere, ‘to weave’. And that analogy between words and fabric continues to proliferate in our own everyday speech. We all know what it means to spin a yarn, or to lose the thread of a story. Every good plot needs a dénouement, an untying or unknotting, and from Ariosto to ̽��ֱ��Archers, narratives have benefited from entrelacement, the interlacing of several strands which can be left hanging at moments of crisis.

̽��ֱ��textile metaphor has been picked up by literary theorists such as Roland Barthes, who in ̽��ֱ��Death of the Author insists that we should not attempt to decipher texts but should instead disentangle them: ‘the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath’.

̽��ֱ��textile arts not only allow us to think about how literature works; they are also involved in the very stuff from which books are fashioned—whether we think of the rags that make paper, the sewing together of pages, or the various materials employed in bookbinding. Textiles (and the women who have made them) are also the subject of many stories, whether we are talking about Homer’s Penelope, Ovid’s Philomela, or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

And of course, the threads also run the other way. Samplers are only one of the many forms of fabric that have carried verbal messages, many of them moralising or improving. ̽��ֱ��recent exhibition of Quilts 1700-2010 at the Victoria and Albert Museum was subtitled ‘Hidden Histories, Untold Stories’. As well as displaying numerous quilts that had textual sources for their visual designs, or that had messages embroidered onto them, the V&A’s show also exposed the printed and handwritten texts that had been cut up to serve as templates or backing in the making of the patchwork. ̽��ֱ��patches on one 19th-century coverlet, celebrating a marriage, were rumoured to have been ‘pieced-in’ with the couple’s love-letters.

Tracy Emin’s infamous tent, ‘Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995’, which bore appliquéd names of her bedfellows from birth, offers a less romantic demonstration of the power of the stitched word. Meanwhile, even wordless textiles have a tantalising relationship with verbal culture, tempting us to ponder the ‘grammar of ornament’ or to decode the language of their decorative schemes. Of all fabrics, those used in clothing are perhaps the most legible. ̽��ֱ��‘newspaper outfits’ used in the Olympics‘ closing ceremony may have been intended to celebrate the freedom of the British press but they also suggest the eloquence of what we wear, whether or not it boasts a designer label.

From artists’ books to knitting blogs, from ancient Greek lyric to the language of modern colorectal surgery, ‘Texts and Textiles’ will explore a huge range of perspectives on its theme, hearing not only from academics but also from practitioners who make their living from the warp and weft of words. ̽��ֱ��keynote speaker is the anthropologist Tim Ingold from the ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen, whose work has reflected in fascinating ways on writing, stitching, storytelling and journeying. Doubtless the conference will leave many loose ends, but it promises to be an enthralling tapestry.

Texts and Textiles, a conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts, will take place on 11 and 12 September 2012 at Jesus College, Cambridge. For further information, contact the organisers, Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) or Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk).

A conference at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� will explore the ways in which words and fabrics are stitched together in language and literature – and celebrate the means by which textiles carry hidden narratives in their warp and weft.

You simply can’t get to grips with literature as a material phenomenon without thinking about its relationship with the physical fabrics that surround us.

Jason Scott-Warren

Sara Impey

Quilt by Sara Impey titled Context, made in silk

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