Richardson and de Sade Acquisitions
(no. 37, Spring 2001)
Bruce Whiteman, Clark Head Librarian
On the surface, two items recently acquired by the Clark Library might
seem to have little to do with one another. A book by Samuel Richardson
(1689–1761) and a pair of manuscripts by the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814)
come from worlds so markedly different that, had the two writers ever met
(they could have in principle, since de Sade was twenty-one when Richardson
died), it is difficult to imagine what they would have had to converse
about.
In fact, however, de Sade (like Diderot) was a passionate admirer of
Clarissa, and his book Les crimes de l’amour (1800) contained
a preface in which he apostrophized both Fielding and Richardson: “It
is Richardson and Fielding who have taught us that only the profound
study of the heart of man . . . can inspire the novelist.”
He went on: “If after twelve or fifteen volumes [of Clarissa] the
immortal Richardson had virtuously ended by converting Lovelace and
having him peacefully marry Clarissa, would you . . . have
shed the delicious tears which it won from every feeling reader?” Doubtless
the author of Clarissa might not have been equally ebullient about Justine,
had he lived to read it; but de Sade’s enthusiasm was obviously genuine.
The Clark recently acquired a copy of one
of Richardson’s rarest works, Meditations Collected from the Sacred
Books (London, 1750), a compendium referred to by the eponymous
heroine of Clarissa in her will: she leaves to Mrs. Norton “my book
of Meditations, as I used to call it; being extracts from the best of
books . . . suited particularly to my own case.” Richardson
wrote in a letter to his friend Edward Young that his “little assembly
of female friends” had begged him to have the Meditations printed,
which he did. He went on to say: “I have printed but a small number.”
The fact that only seven copies are known (including the Clark’s) bears
out that statement. The Clark copy is one of only two, furthermore,
that have presentation inscriptions in the author’s hand, in our case
“To Mrs. Crane,” probably the wife of Dr. Stafford Crane, who attended
Richardson at his death.
Almost at the same time, t he
Clark had an opportunity to acquire two manuscripts by the Marquis de
Sade.* Manuscript material by de Sade is, not
surprisingly, extremely rare, and with the Clark’s increasing emphasis
on building a collection of European materials that complements its
existing strengths in British books, this opportunity was avidly taken.
The manuscripts are both of plays, and both were written by de Sade
during his final incarceration in the Charenton asylum, where he spent
the last eleven years of his life (1803–1814). Feeling that the drama
could actually be used as a form of psychotherapy, and that the opportunity
for the inmates to participate in producing and acting in plays would
be beneficial to their illnesses, de Sade became the maître de
théatre to a company of inmates, and the plays which they put
on attracted large audiences of doctors, village notables, and inmates.
Hippolyte de Colins, who edited an unpublished de Sade journal in 1970,
has written: “Both scientists and the ignorant wanted to attend the
spectacles given by the insane of Charenton. All of Paris flocked there
for several years; some out of curiosity, others to judge of the prodigious
effects of these admirable means of curing the insane.”
The plays put on by de Sade at Charenton are not characterized by the
ribald and obscene stories with which his name is so closely associated,
and which the recent film Quills portrays. The Clark manuscripts
are of two separate plays: La tour mystérieuse and Le
prévaricateur. Neither is dated, but the editor of the Pauvert
edition of de Sade’s Oeuvres (1991) has assigned them to ca.
1810 on the basis of the paper and the manner in which they are stitched.
Both plays are in a copyist’s hand. Roulhac de Maupas, the director
of Charenton, commented in a letter written to the French minister of
the interior on de Sade’s use of a copyist, and this letter is quoted
by Apollinaire in his 1909 preface to an edition of de Sade’s works:
“I have learned that he has hired one of them [the inmates], an honest
but simple man, to copy and have copies made by other inmates . . .
different theatrical pieces of his own composition.” De Sade has extensively
revised and corrected both plays in his own hand, however, and these
revisions are particularly numerous in Le prévaricateur, which
includes five full pages in the author’s autograph.
Both the Richardson book and the de Sade manuscripts were among the
materials displayed at the Clark’s “Afternoon of Acquisitions” event
in May.
*I am grateful to Tim Johns of James Cummins, Bookseller, for background
information about the de Sade manuscripts.
Research Reports: Culture and
Authority in the Baroque
(no. 37, Spring 2001)
[The following three essays were contributed
by Ahmanson-Getty fellows who participated in this year’s core program,
Culture and Authority in the Baroque.]
Research Reports I —
Serious Play: Bacchanalian "Mysteries of State"
in the Russian Baroque
Ernest A. Zitser, Columbia University
(no.
37, Spring 2001)
When I first heard the title “Together Apart: Community, Communion,
and Concealment” (the second session of the Center and Clark series
on the baroque), I immediately thought that it alluded to Johan Huizinga’s
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1939). In
this classic work of cultural history, Huizinga argued that “culture
arises and unfolds in and as play” and that play “promotes the formation
of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and
to stress their difference from the common world by disguise.” Although
he did not describe the conditions under which this “play-community”
becomes institutionalized, Huizinga suggested that “the feeling of being
‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important,
of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the
usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual
game.” Those inducted into such a play community must abide by the rules
of the game and cast out “spoil-sports” who threaten the illusion the
players are trying to construct. Just such an instance of serious play
(serio ludere) presents itself in the mock court of Peter the
Great of Russia (1672–1725). Indeed, as I hope to demonstrate in my
larger study of Peter and his court, the tsar’s personal retinue attempted,
through play, to consolidate and maintain nothing less than the monarch’s
absolute power.
Despite the fact that Peter was not the logical heir-apparent to the
throne of Muscovy, he was crowned in 1682, alongside his slightly-retarded,
elder stepbrother, Ivan. This unusual political expedient revealed the
degree to which the traditional Orthodox ceremonies that conferred the
gift of divine grace—charisma, in its original, religious sense—upon
Russian tsars had become a tool of Muscovite court clans. As one of
two legally-crowned Muscovite monarchs, Peter did not have an unambiguous,
divine mandate for his rule. In fact, it was precisely the necessity
for such a mandate that underlay Peter’s first tentative steps towards
elaborating a new style of rule. Central to this project was the organization
of a counter-court at Novo-Preobrazhenskoe (literally “New Transfiguration”),
the royal estate just outside Moscow. This mock court, in which Peter
and his companions staged elaborate games parodying the “Pharisaic”
authorities of the old capital, would evolve to assume a serious role
in Peter’s struggle to assert his own personal charisma and to wrest
the throne from his brother’s family.
The maintenance of this play-world—and the legitimation of the claims
that inspired its political role in the succession crisis—required strategies
for fostering belief in Peter’s unmediated access to the divine. The
particular strategies that I discuss in my work include, but are not
limited to, the staging of Bacchanalian sacred parodies (parodia
sacra) that fostered a sense of being “apart together,” as well
as the performance of exorcisms for casting out “spoil-sports” who threatened
the political vision of the group. I seek to unravel the tacit rules
of the game by which the tsar and his advisors mobilized belief in Peter’s
charisma. I do so by focusing on the allegorical language that informed
the carnivalesque, male-bonding rituals associated with what I have
dubbed the “Transfigured Kingdom” of Peter the Great. By means of this
conceit I intend to characterize a geographical and rhetorical “common
place” (topos), one that served as an important reference point
for every member of the tsar’s inner circle. Over the course of Peter’s
reign, this play realm—with its mock kings, knights, and clerics; its
extravagant ceremonies of solidarity; and its imaginary, ever-expanding
topography—delineated the boundaries between those courtiers who belonged
to Peter’s select group (kompaniia) and those who did not. Continuously
invoked, presented, and re-presented by the organizers of Petrine court
spectacles, both in public ceremonies and in private correspondence,
this Transfigured Kingdom marked off those who had come to believe in
Peter’s personal gift of grace from those who remained unconvinced or
hostile to the tsar’s leadership style and his vision of imperial reform.
 Very
few of those who remained outside the magic
circle of Peter’s playworld left an account of their views, which is
why we are lucky that some of their opinions were recorded as part of
an extended travel account by Philip Johan Tabbert von Stralenberg—a
Swedish officer and amateur ethnographer who spent more than a decade
(1711–1723) in Peter’s Russia as a captured prisoner-of-war. In his
Das Nord- und Östliche Theil von Europa und Asia (Stockholm,
1730; the Clark holds a copy of the first English translation, London,
1738), the former prisoner compiled a list of “twelve Articles,” by
which those who condemned Peter’s administration “pretended to prove,
that Russia labour’d under many Hardships during his Reign, and rather
suffer’d than was better’d by him.”
Heading the list of accusations made against the tsar by disaffected
Russian courtiers was the fact that Peter organized what the Swedish
officer called “Bacchus’ Ecclesiastical State.” This 300-member “Assembly”—composed
of the tsar’s “Courtiers, Ministers of State, and Officers of the Army”—was
headed by the “Patriarch of Bacchus” (Peter’s former tutor) under whom
were appointed “12 Archi-Episcopal Bacchanalian Assistants, who had
their common Priests, Deacons, Clerks, &c. subservient to them.”
In the company of the tsar and his cudgel-wielding royal jesters, this
drunken “Assembly” would go caroling through the streets of the old
Muscovite capitol, “singing Hymns on the Birth of Christ,” and “congratulating
the House-Keepers on Occasion of the [Christmas] Festival.” But far
from being an innocent imitation of popular customs, these Yuletide
caroling processions had the clear political purpose of drawing a distinct
boundary between the in-group and all those who were excluded. Some
of the most exalted “Inhabitants of Muscow [were put] under such Apprehensions,”
Stralenberg writes, “that no body durst to speak publickly any Thing
against the Czar, or his Favourites,” who thus “reveng’d” themselves
against those disaffected courtiers whom they “could not punish openly.”
Indeed, by these seemingly innocuous means, the tsar turned carnival
license to the cause of royal absolutism.
Precisely because Stralenberg and his informants were not part of the
original play community that was responsible for organizing these carnivalesque
spectacles, they could not explain the real reason why the tsar chose
to preside over “Bacchus’ Ecclesiastical State”—namely, that by means
of such rites of power the founding members of Peter’s personal “church”
initiated select members of the royal entourage into the mystery of
the tsar’s charismatic authority. To the uninitiated, such as Stralenberg,
the ordination of mock priests may have appeared like a diabolical inversion
of the sacrament of Holy Orders—the sacrament that is supposed to bestow
grace upon the clerical successors of Peter the Apostle. To those of
Peter’s courtiers who were familiar with the trope of “sober drunkenness”
(sobria ebrietas), however, the Bacchanalian “mysteries of State”
staged at the royal estate of Novo-Preobrazhenskoe re-enacted the mystical
experience of the apostles during the feast of Pentecost. Substituting
the libations of Bacchus for the overflowing of the Holy Spirit, the
participants and eyewitnesses of what I call the “New Gospel according
to Peter” were supposed to be able to glimpse the Transfigured Kingdom
and to understand what they must do in order to realize the ideals that
inspired it. Like the apostles after their encounter with the divine,
the tsar’s new disciples would then feel compelled (sometimes quite
literally) to venture out into the world, in order to preach about their
own “anointed one” and his personal role in the realm’s imminent transfiguration.
Indeed, if the transformation of Muscovy into Imperial Russia was a
leap of faith, as much as a matter of bureaucratic restructuring, then
one is justified in concluding, in the manner of Huizinga, that the
culture of modern Russia “arose in and as” Baroque royal play.
Research Reports II
—
"How Am I to Blame?" Women and Authority in Spain
Lisa Vollendorf, Wayne State University
(no.
37, Spring 2001)
My current book project, "Women’s Self-Representation in Early
Modern Spain," claims that we cannot understand the cultural and
social tensions of early modern western Europe without listening to
the marginalized voices that have been left to us in legal and personal
documents, and in a large body of female-authored literature from Spain.
Women’s texts can help bring nuance to our conceptualization of religion,
sexuality, and both personal and political authority. Women’s descriptions
of their lives often contradict the portrayals of an honor-crazed, politically
anxious society that permeate the male-authored literature of the period.
They also suggest, in many cases, that those living on the cultural
margins developed substantive (although not always successful) strategies
to deal with patriarchal authority.
The case of a Portuguese immigrant named Bernarda, who was accused of
Judaizing, illustrates the struggle for cultural authority during the
period. Arrested and tried by the Inquisition in 1650, Bernarda eventually
confessed to practicing the Jewish faith. She admitted to observing
Jewish fasts, to keeping the Sabbath, and she named other Judaizers.
In the end, like all penitents before the Inquisition, she recognized
Catholicism as the “one true faith and the only route to salvation.”
As a result, she received a relatively light sentence: the Inquisition
confiscated all of her worldly goods, forced her to abjure her heretical
activities, made her participate in an auto-da-fé, and
sentenced her to life in prison.
It is impossible to glean an accurate account of Bernarda’s religious
beliefs. Since many Jews had fled to Portugal in the sixteenth century
only to return after Spain annexed that country and intensified the
Inquisition’s activities there, Bernarda’s status as a Portuguese immigrant
signals possible Jewish roots. Moreover, her father worked as a cloth
merchant in Seville. These facts about Bernarda’s immigration, her father’s
work in a profession often associated with Jews, and her residence in
an area of Spain occupied by a diverse population that included Moors
and Jews make it likely that she belonged to a family of Jewish descent.
The story of Bernarda is a story about immigrants and Jews, but it gives
us a glimpse into more than just religious and ethnic intolerance. Like
all defendants before the Inquisition, Bernarda did not know the identity
of her accuser. The Holy Office kept such information secret. However,
it did permit defendants to argue that certain potential witnesses were
their mortal enemies and thus should not be allowed to testify. If such
arguments were won, the contested witnesses would be disallowed. During
their trials, most defendants gave only oral defenses, which were recorded
by scribes as part of the detailed records of the procesos, but
Bernarda provided a handwritten deposition. In a twelve-page autobiographical
statement (memorial), this mother of five small children crafted
a defense that rested on her impeccable record as a virtuous Christian
and depicted her husband as crazy and abusive. The remarkable evidence
of Bernarda’s memorial, which is housed in the Inquisition archives
in Spain, reveals the strategies of self-representation employed by
one woman as she sought to make her voice heard.
 Since
the Inquisition’s authority rested on the impression of infallibility,
it was unlikely that Bernarda’s case would be dismissed, whatever the
merits of her self-defense, but this did not dissuade her from trying.
In her statement, rather than emphasize her knowledge of Catholicism,
she devotes approximately 75% of the document to an argument aimed at
casting doubt upon her husband’s sanity. This choice of narrative shows
that she guessed her accuser to be her husband, Antonio, who had disappeared
earlier in the year. She depicts Antonio as an unstable, unfit husband
and father who had fits of paranoia and locuras (crazy spells).
We must assume that Bernarda felt that her role as a good Catholic deserved
mention, but that she had a better chance at redemption if she debunked
her husband’s credibility. That this defense failed to spare her from
a conviction offers a poignant example of how women’s tales of domestic
strife have been ignored in legal arenas throughout the centuries.
A thin line between attack and self-defense complicates the narrative.
Bernarda emphasizes her sense of isolation, her husband’s strange behavior,
and her Christian obligation to obey him. She also defends the religious
orthodoxy of their home to show that her family complied with all of
the duties of good Catholics. The memorial closes with a discussion
of her husband’s illness: she explains that his verbal attacks and threats
of abuse were caused by his palsy, a physical illness that she links
to his locuras.
Many questions arise with this closure. Why does Bernarda mention that
Antonio made the family live in an isolated spot outside of Seville?
Why does she depict herself as living a lonely life, lacking social
contacts and burdened by family duties? Why does she emphasize Antonio’s
paranoia, which included his suspicions that she was having an affair?
Why does she go into detail about Antonio’s beliefs that people wanted
to kill him and that she wanted to poison him? Why does she tell Inquisitors
that her husband locked his whole family in a room while he slept downstairs
with a dagger in his bed?
The principal question I have been asking is, “Why did Bernarda choose
the strategy of focusing on domestic rather than religious matters in
her memorial?” In a way, she answers the question for us. Near
the end of the document, she calls attention to her husband’s paranoia
and mentions that she finally told him, “where there is no smoke, there
is no fire.” Then, claiming that she fasted in accordance with Christian
and not Jewish tradition and that she wore dirty clothes on Saturdays
(and not clean clothes like a Jew), she speaks directly to the Inquisitors:
"Now I say to you, sir, that if his heart told him that the dirty
clothes I wore on Saturdays were clean and . . . the
real fasts were false and all that was good his imagination told him
was bad, how am I to blame?"
With this rhetorical flourish, Bernarda asks the Inquisitors to sympathize
with her powerlessness. She asks them to dismiss the accusation of Judaizing
and to focus on her identity as a victim of domestic violence. How
am I to blame? Today, this question rings with ambiguity. Is Bernarda
asking what guilt an abused wife shares with her abuser; what a mother
of five is to do when her husband becomes mentally unstable? Or does
she want the Inquisitors to tell her what blame there is in practicing
a faith that, like their own, promises salvation?
These are the questions that I have found compelling in reading women’s
words from the seventeenth century. Even if we cannot find all of the
answers, stories like Bernarda’s need to be retold if we are to gain
a fuller understanding of the cultural politics of authority, gender,
and religion in the early modern period.
Research Reports III
—
Depicting Demons: Counter-Reformation Restraints and Baroque Representations
Hilaire Kallendorf, Texas A&M University
(no.
37, Spring 2001)
At the last session of the Council of Trent on 3 December 1562, the
councilors passed a decree on images, which included a provision that any
new or unusual image had to be approved by a bishop before it was displayed
in a church: "This holy synod has decreed that it should be faithfully
observed that no one, even anyone given a special exemption by the Church,
may in any location place any new image, or arrange for the placing of
such an image, without the approval of his bishop."*
The synodal constitutions of various archbishoprics repeated this decree
and sometimes elaborated upon it. Thus we find the 1566 constitution issued
by the archbishop of Toledo stating that “it is prohibited to paint histories
of saints or retablos without their being examined by the vicars, and those
which are painted, being apocryphal or badly-painted, should be removed
and replaced with others that are more appropriate.”
The Counter-Reformation church relied on a combination of counsel and
coercion to enforce the new decree. To guide painters in the way of
orthodoxy, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti published in 1582 his Discorso
intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, a treatise which would be
widely imitated by art theoreticians during this period. When guidance
proved insufficient, the Inquisition, whose censors regularly visited
cities and towns looking for conceptual violations in art, could step
in. The charge to Francisco Pacheco, who became a censor in 1618, directs
him to “take particular care to look at and visit the paintings of sacred
things that might be in shops and public places; and, if he found ought
amiss, to carry the paintings to the Inquisitors so that they could
be amended.” The threat to artistic freedom was a real one, as the well-known
experience of Veronese with his painting The Festival in the House
of Levi reveals. Veronese was accused by the Venetian Inquisition
of introducing elements from his imagination not mentioned in the biblical
account of his subject matter. These elements lacked verisimilitude,
the accusers claimed, because they deviated from the official version
of the story.
But how could the Counter Reformation’s insistence on rigorous standards
for iconic verisimilitude be applied to depictions of the devil? No
one actually knew what a demon looked like, and, consequently, no standard
of verisimilitude, biblical or otherwise, could be articulated. The
depiction of daemonophanies—manifestations of demons—was thus
a liminal space of artistic freedom in which the artist could paint
whatever he pleased.
The writers of sanctioned treatises on art during this period dealt
with this problem in some interesting ways. The aforementioned Pacheco,
who capped his career as an Inquisitorial censor by publishing the treatise
Arte de la pintura in 1649, includes a section on the painting
of demons in which he insists that demons “do not demand a determinate
form and costume.” The only criterion that must be followed in their
portrayal is a clear indication “of their being and actions, alien to
sanctity and full of malice, terror, and fright.” He then describes
some common choices made by artists in paintings of demons; for example,
their representation as cruel and bloody beasts, dragons, basilisks,
and particularly serpents. But he also allows that demons could be depicted
as naked, ugly men with horns, long ears, claws, and tails.
This official indecisiveness on the subject of painting demons was repeated
by Juan Interián de Ayala in his El pintor cristiano y erudito
(1730), a treatise, according to its descriptive subtitle, of the
errors frequently committed in the painting and sculpting of sacred
images. In a chapter titled “Of the Paintings and Images of Demons,
and What Is Reprehensible in Them for Containing Some Error or Strange
Novelty,” Ayala assumes the tone of both apologist and preceptor, defending
artists who have painted demons to look like monsters on the grounds
that they have appeared as such in the visions of saintly men and women
mystics. With its fascinating exercise in circular logic, invoking supernatural
phenomena to justify the depiction of supernatural phenomena, this treatise
is notable in that it extends the range of acceptable demonic iconography.
Likenesses of black Ethiopian men (Ayala recalls that St. Teresa had
a vision of the devil as a little black man) are now approved along
with copies of the idols encountered by the conquistadores in Asia and
the Americas (he justifies this idea by asserting that these barbaric
peoples’ gods are surely devils). The only hard and fast principle Ayala
can offer to the painter wishing for guidance on this question is that
demons must be differentiated in some way from both angels and human
beings. As long as there is no confusion on this point, anything goes.
How could the church authorities justify such an alarming lack of consensus?
One commonly cited argument was that, since the devil can transform
himself into many different shapes, it is permissible to use many different
shapes to depict him. Vicente Carducho goes much farther in his treatise
of 1633, Diálogos de la pintura, giving the artist permission
to use his imagination when painting sacred things as long as he does
not change the essential elements of the holy mysteries:
"these circumstances may be altered in the painting, largely . . .
to move devotion, reverence, respect, and piety . . . and
thus in so far as the substantial deed is not altered, and does not cause
indecency, or indevotion, but instead it will increase and declare better
the mystery. . . . It will be laudable to arbitrate with
gravity and prudence, and with more license, when such circumstances are
not found in anything the Scripture signals: and not only do I not take
it to be culpable, but, I praise it as a prudent act, to adorn and explicate
the substance of the story with the most proper and decent circumstances . . .
because . . . this serves intelligence and devotion."
It may be that the popularity of daemonophanic subjects in baroque painting
derives, at least in part, from the unusual freedom granted to Counter-Reformation
artists in this realm.
*All translations supplied in this essay are the author’s.
The Center, the Clark, the Community
Elizabeth Krown Spellman, Assistant Director
(no. 37,
Spring 2001)
In the past year, the Center and the Clark have intensified their effort to
make the rich resources of the Clark Library, and of UCLA as a whole,
available to the surrounding community, to its children in particular.
While our music and poetry programs have always been attractive to the
community, the thrust of our current endeavors has been in the area
of education.
In November, the Center arranged a visit to the UCLA campus for the
Wilcox Travel Club for Children, a group in the West Adams area whose
stated purpose is “to expose inner city children to stimulating dimensions
of learning through fun and informative local, national, and foreign
trips.” Guided by classics professor Bernard Frischer, who is using
evidence from archaeological sites to create a three-dimensional computer
model of ancient Rome, children ranging in age from six to fourteen
toured the university’s Cultural Virtual Reality Lab and its Visualization
Portal. Professor Frischer gave the children a presentation about ancient
Rome and then joined them for lunch at UCLA’s Ackerman Union.
In December, we met with community leaders to discuss ways in which
we could best benefit the community, especially in the areas of primary
and secondary education. We agreed that the Clark, with its rich resources,
should be used increasingly as a site for educational activities and
that we would promote its use for such purposes. Since then, we have
begun contacts with the Humanitas Program, which arranges training sessions
throughout the year for some five-hundred Los Angeles teachers, enabling
them to offer their students enriched programs in the humanities, and
with the closely connected Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a nonprofit
fund committed to the development of a high quality public education
system for the children of the city. The latter group held its first
meetings at the Clark this past spring. In June and August, the Clark
will host several Humanitas meetings and Humanitas Summer Academy seminars
for teachers.
Our ultimate goal is threefold. First, we want to institute, at the
Clark with UCLA faculty advisors and instructors, regular training programs
for high school teachers, on the model of the summer N.E.H. programs
for college teachers. Over time, we hope to establish, with UCLA faculty
advisors and with teachers from the first program working in tandem
with selected teachers from the area, a summer program for high school
students focused on writing, reading, and critical thinking. Third,
we will be looking for ways to help elementary school students acquire
skills necessary for success in the schools.
At this point, the Clark is serving mainly as a venue for gatherings
of community-based groups. As awareness grows of what the Clark is and
what it has, we can expect an upturn in its use for educational events.
We are excited about making our Library better known to our neighboring
community and about helping to forge a closer connection between it
and the wider academic community of UCLA.
Eighth Graders Visit the Clark
Suzanne Tatian, Supervisor of Reader Services
(no. 37,
Spring 2001)
Toward the end of the year 2000, the Clark hosted a series of tours
for eighth-grade students from the nearby Los Angeles Center for Enriched
Studies, a secondary public school for highly motivated young people.
Designed to give students a glimpse into the several periods represented
by the Library’s collections, the tour began in the vestibule, with
an exhibit of materials by and associated with John Dryden. Books, manuscript
letters, and copperplate engravings, all helped to make tangible the
poet and his time. The eighth graders then moved through the bookrooms,
where items had been assembled especially for them, many selected on
the basis of their class readings. The latter included the first folio
of Shakespeare, an early edition of Sheridan’s School for Scandal,
pamphlets from the American Revolution, and Homer’s Odyssey with
illustrations by John Ogilby. Other highlights included Orbis Sensualium
Pictus, a seventeenth-century illustrated children’s book, with
woodcuts of daily life accompanied by labels in Latin and English by
Johann Comenius; a handwritten letter from Oscar Wilde on black-bordered
mourning stationery; and Granite and Cypress, an edition of poems
by Robinson Jeffers that offered a contemporary example of some traditional
elements of book design and book making.
The rich craftsmanship and baroque style of the library’s interiors served
to bring to life a past that young people could enter directly, as did
the rich displays of unusual objects—miniature books, terrestrial and celestial
globes from 1695, eighteenth-century pocket globes, and an English lute-harp
from 1812. Seated on period-style chairs in the drawing room, students
followed the story of Antony and Cleopatra, depicted in Allyn Cox’s murals,
and discovered the theatrical masks set amongst the carved garlands on
the coffered oak ceiling.
Downstairs, in the working area of the library, students learned about
reading room protocol: how to find material in specialized card catalogues,
how to page it, and then how to handle it correctly. In the rare book stacks,
where moveable shelving was a source of some excitement, students stood
amidst row upon row of old books as they listened to a capsule history
of English bookbinding.
Robert Griffin, a short-term fellow from Tel Aviv University, provided
a view into the work of a scholar. Engaging students with questions,
Dr. Griffin explained some of the complexities of determining the authorship
of eighteenth-century works. First editions of Robinson Crusoe and
Gulliver’s Travels, originally published anonymously, were the
starting point of a discussion that was followed by comparative readings
from variant editions of an eighteenth-century novel.
Tea and popcorn concluded the visit. Each student received
a Clark Library bookmark as a keepsake.
Return to the listing of contents
(no. 37).
Images reproduced in this on-line
issue:
When not otherwise identified, the images reproduced
here are from the Clark
Library Collection.
–Presentation
inscription in the author’s hand and the half title to Samuel Richardson’s
Meditations Collected from
the Sacred Books (London, 1750).
–Marquis de Sade, Le
Prévaricateur, manuscript, ca. 1810. Paste-over revisions in
the author’s hand.
–Cartouche from Philip
Johan von Stralenberg’s map of northern Eurasia and the Russian
empire. From the English edition, An Historico-Geographical Description
of the North and Eastern Part of Europe and Asia (London, 1738).
–“The Celebration
of an Act of Faith in Spain,” in Philippus van Limborch, The
History of the Inquisition (London, 1731).
–
Wilcox Travel Club at UCLA with Bernard Frischer.
Photo by SeElcy Caldwell.
–Group from Center for
Enriched Studies at the Clark with Robert Griffin.
Photographer unknown.
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