Book into Manuscript
Bruce Whiteman, Clark Head Librarian
(no. 39, Spring 2002)

Two years ago the Clark Library acquired an interesting example of a seventeenth-century printed book that, by virtue of an early owner’s unusually voluminous annotations and manuscript additions, has been reinvented, as it were, as a manuscript. The book is Peter Heylyn’s A Help to English History (London: 1680, Wing h1720). It was first published in 1641 with the title Heroologia anglorum. Or, An Help to English History under the pseudonym of Robert Hall (Wing h1713). The book went through several editions, most of them posthumous, and was even issued as late as 1786. (The Clark has the editions of 1641, 1642, 1670, 1671, 1675, 1680, and 1709. Our copy of the 1709 edition belonged to the important late eighteenth-century collector Richard Farmer and has his notes.) Heylyn’s text was meant to aid the reader and historian in remembering the kings of England, the peerage, their places of origin, and so on. In other words the volume is a work concerning genealogy and heraldry, and clearly it had a popular appeal.

Peter Heylyn (1600–1662) was a well-known writer and religious controversialist whose works take up almost four full columns in Wing’s catalogue of English books published between 1641 and 1700; and although most of these are typified by such titles as The Historie of Episcopacie (1657) and The Stumbling-Block of Disobedience (1658), he also wrote on geography, history, and travel (more than one book on France was meant to demonstrate his lack of sympathy for the French). He was the anonymous compiler of Bibliotheca Regia, or The Royal Library (1659), a collection of the papers of Charles I, admiration for whose cause cost Heylyn dearly. Heylyn was a lifelong doctrinal squabbler whom Bishop John Hacket called “a bluster-master” and who was memorialized by Anthony à Wood as “very conceited and pragmatical.” A Help to English History, however, is not one of Heylyn’s polemical works.

The Clark copy—actually the second of two—bears the name “Cha: Morton” on the title-page, and the hand seems to be the same hand responsible for the substantial notes and drawings added throughout the text. There are two Charles Mortons in the Dictionary of National Biography, and it is possible that one of them was the owner of this book, though there is no solid evidence. (Both were antiquarians of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: one a minister who emigrated to America and played a role in the early history of Harvard, the other a trained doctor who became the principal librarian at the British Museum.) Morton has used his copy of the book to write at great length; sometimes every bit of marginal space, as well as the space between lines, is filled with writing, much of it describing coats of arms in the conventional language of heraldry, with explanations of various terms (“the cost is sometimes called a cotise, & also a batune, as Leigh noteth; but Bara maketh a cotise & the batune 2 distinct Things.”) Coats of arms have been added in ink throughout the book, and woodcut illustrations of the latter have been hand-colored. Perhaps most attractively of all, through all of the final two sections of the text, which list baronets created by Charles I and Charles II, there are dozens of drawings of animals and objects that could serve as charges on heraldic shields. Some of these are very accomplished amateur drawings, such as the wyvern (a dragonlike creature with wings and a serpent’s tail).

What librarians like to call copy-specific information (i.e. anything added to a printed book after printing) often turns a routine copy of a book into an object of polyvalent interest, and the comments, annotations, additions, and other forms of response of an individual reader to a text are potentially of great scholarly attraction. Few seventeenth-century examples can be as profusely annotated as this one, and further study may reveal, among other historically valuable facts, the exact identity of the owner.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 39).

Research Reports:
History, Theory, and the Subject of Rights, 1640–1848
(no. 39, Spring 2002)

[The following essays were contributed by the Ahmanson-Getty fellows who participated in the Center & Clark core program for 2001–02.]

I. Jason Frank, "Who are the best keepers of the people's liberty?"
II. Kinch Hoekstra, Hobbes and the Politics of Prophesy
III. Sarah Ellenzweig, A Brush with Spinoza
IV. Theresa Smith, Female Authors in Enlightenment Spain

Research Reports I —

"Who are the best keepers of the people's liberty?"
Jason Frank, Franklin Institute, Duke University
(no. 39, Spring 2002)

Competing visions of the nature of the rights won in the War of Independence were at stake in the political struggles between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in the early years of the American Republic. In April of 1793 the German Republican Society of Philadelphia sent the editor of the National Gazette, Philip Freneau, a letter that outlined and defended the “republican purposes” undergirding their fledgling political organization. The members of this first of the American Jacobin clubs asked Freneau to publish an appeal to their “Friends and Fellow Citizens” reminding them of the political obligations that sustained their rights and liberties, and stressing in particular the duty of vigilantly governing the actions of their governors. Drawing on the complex Anglophone inheritance of popular constitutionalism, this letter, and many others from the period, called for the formation and mobilization of what could be called “counterpublics,” to secure the liberties and rights over which the War of Independence had been fought. This call highlights the fact that consensus over the proper dimensions of the public sphere, and also over the role of rights in creating, sustaining, and contesting this sphere, had yet to be reached. The Democratic-Republican Societies that flourished during the 1790s regularly articulated a fear that the rights of the Revolution (particularly the right to form extra-governmental groups that would make and enforce political claims) were under siege by the monarchical pretensions of the Federalist administrations of Presidents George Washington and John Adams. In a typical lament the popular Democratic-Republican pamphleteer George Logan wrote that Americans “have bartered their domestic rights, liberty and equality for the energy of government and the etiquette of a court.”

The members of these “self-created” societies (the term is a common Federalist denigration) feared that this corrupt transaction might bring about the loss of their Revolutionary birthright, their hard-won political subjectivity itself. In their letters, minutes, toasts, and public declarations, one finds frequent demands for what the contemporary political theorist Claude Lefort has called the “right to have rights”; that is, the right to be a political being, to make claims not by appeal to a pre-existing juridical authority, but through the popular enactment and enforcement of rights themselves. By highlighting the interrelationship between collective agency and rights discourse, these associations emphasized the political dimension of rights-claiming practice, which is usually ignored in the austere legalism of our present-day talk about juridical rights. “The spirit of liberty,” their proclamations insisted, “is to be only kept alive by constant action.”

My research this year at the Clark has explored this intersection between the ubiquity of rights talk in the period and what Charles Tilly has called the “repertoire of gestures” associated with that discourse—the conventions, assemblies, associations, and mob actions that enacted and enforced rights claims in late eighteenth-century Anglo-American contexts. Writing as a political theorist, I combine textual analysis with a study of the period’s different modalities of political action—the latter often situated outside of established political institutions—in order, not only to pursue new avenues of historical investigation, but also to complicate contemporary theoretical debates over the promises and limitations attending the political language of rights.

The often conflicting grounds underlying the invocation of rights in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary American political controversies—appeals were regularly based on such disparate authorities as common law, natural law, and divine sanction—frequently lead students of eighteenth-century American political thought to wonder at the philosophical inconsistencies of this discourse. Writers of the period, however, were often less concerned with why rights might be considered legitimate, and more with how rights were to be most reliably kept, claimed, and defended. (“Who are the best keepers of the people’s liberty?” James Madison asked in a 1791 essay appearing in Freneau’s Gazette, “the people themselves.”) By tethering rights to particular practices of claiming and enforcement, republican writing from the period suggests that rights claimed should not be understood in conceptual isolation from these practices. The conflicting grounds used by these writers to justify rights claims are disabling inconsistencies only if one assesses them according to the normative philosophical standards governing so much of current academic and legal discussion.

These contemporary discussions generally assume an intimate connection between the claims made through the language of rights and the inviolable, unitary image of the self associated with modern liberalism; they take the juridical subject of rights as a given. As such they tend to obscure the collective dimension of rights-claiming activity that is so prevalent in post-Revolutionary literature. The aforementioned letter from the German Republican Society of Philadelphia, for example, invokes a resolutely collective subject. It states that only contentious groups and associations can generate the “attention and exertion so necessary for the preservation of civil liberty,” stressing that “individual exertion seldom produces a general effect.” The neglect of this collective dimension in contemporary theoretical debate further skews our understanding by obscuring the importance of power as a player in conflicts over rights. The associations of the 1790s openly asserted the relationship between successful rights-claiming and power. And in couching their exhortations in the language of power, they revealed that their solution to the need to protect rights was not moral, philosophical, or legal, as our discussions are today, but deeply political.

Jack Rakove has noted that the language of rights was the “mother tongue” of colonial Americans, and it has remained the lingua franca of American politics up to the present day. Critics of contemporary rights talk often emphasize that invocations of right actually fix and delimit political possibilities, that they cultivate a political culture of mistrust and egoism, and that they prevent us from thinking through the complexity and novelty of contemporary power relations and institutional arrangements in a global context. But history shows that political invocations of right have also been profoundly transformative of collective life; rights talk has animated American political culture on multiple levels of hegemony and dissent. Suggesting these protean aspects of rights discourse, Michel Foucault wrote that, if “one wants to struggle against disciplines and disciplinary power,” one cannot appeal to the juridical rights associated with the sovereignty of the modern state, but must redirect attention “towards the possibility of a new form of right.” Preparatory orientation for this still-needed theoretical work may be well served by a critical examination of alternative forms of rights-claiming activity during this formative stage of American political development. The now almost intuitive association of rights with the constitutional safeguards provided by the Founders to protect individuals and minorities from the tyranny of the majority tells only one small part of the story, and this historical association too conveniently corresponds with a contemporary understanding of rights as trumps. When we think of rights as trumps—as means for protecting individuals from the potential depredations of democratic politics, and not themselves open to political negotiation—we risk foreclosing investigation into the ways in which rights were crucial to the historical formation of democracy. We not only lose an accurate portrayal of Anglo-American history but also impoverish our contemporary discussions about the place of rights in a democratic polity. Rights, my project suggests, need not signal a suspension of democracy, so much as a catalyst of its continuation.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 39).

Research Reports II —

Hobbes and the Politics of Prophecy
Kinch Hoekstra, OxfordUniversity
(no. 39, Spring 2002)

The great philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote three full versions of his political theory, The Elements of Law (1640), De cive (1642), and the notorious Leviathan (1651). Leviathan differs from its predecessors most substantially by the addition of chapters on ecclesiastical matters, which take up the whole of the third and fourth parts of the work. John Pocock, in Politics, Language, and Time (1971), detected an imbalance in the relevant scholarship, which he blamed on philosophers’ preoccupation with the first two parts:

The two books in which Hobbes expounds Christian faith and its sacred history are almost exactly equal in length to books I and II; yet the attitude of far too many scholars towards them has traditionally been, first, that they aren’t really there, second, that Hobbes didn’t really mean them.

As Pocock argues, Hobbes reduces all of revealed religion to prophecy and eschatology. So why does Hobbes come to think of prophecy as requiring such extended scrutiny?

The answer is that, after the breakdown of censorship in England in 1641, there was an unprecedented explosion of prophetical publications, and these played an important role in furthering the wars of the 1640s. The salient types of prophecies were eschatological, astrological, and “enthusiastic” (that is, based on claims to divine inspiration). All threatened to compromise the rights of sovereignty.

James I had argued at length—for example, in A Premonition to All Most Mightie Monarches—that the pope was Antichrist. Although meant to serve as a patriotic call to rally behind the king with all the forces one would muster against the Beast of the Revelation, this position ended up undermining the rule of his son, Charles I. At its forceful simplest, the argument wielded by pro-Parliament writers is that the Laudian church under Charles is popish, that is, sympathetic to the Church of Rome. It follows, then, that the established Church of England, headed by Charles I, is itself anti-Christian. The duty owed by an Englishman to his sovereign is hereby undermined, and rebellion against the sovereign is made into a religious duty. It is little wonder that Richard Hayter, looking back during the reign of Charles II, remarked that “a great inlet to our late civil wars hath been the misinterpretation of the Revelation.”

In Leviathan, Hobbes provides a biblical exegesis to render politically harmless the accusation that the Laudian church and the monarch are anti-Christian. Hobbes limits the meaning of the term Antichrist in most scriptural references to those who both profess to be the Christ and deny that Jesus is the Christ. This argument not only eliminates the pope as a candidate (on both counts); it also eliminates almost any conceivable candidate: no Christian would deny that Jesus is the Christ and no non-Christian would claim to be the Christ. Hobbes accepts that a special Antichrist will appear in the last days, but points out that his advent is to be accompanied by such events as the darkening of the sun and moon and the falling of the stars; therefore the Antichrist “is not yet come.” Now is always a bad time for apocalypse. When the stars fall, then we can worry about combating the Antichrist.

Hobbes also tries to pluck the political sting from apocalyptic prophecy with a much broader argument, which hands the authority for all scriptural interpretation to the sovereign. The identification of Antichrist with the sovereign (or his party) is hereby preempted in another way. For according to Hobbes’s doctrine, it is up to the king himself to determine whether or not he is the Antichrist predicted in the Bible. And one can expect the stars to fall well before he would give an affirmative answer to this question.

One problem with deferring the apocalypse until the sun and the moon darken and the stars fall is that throughout the 1640s there were solar and lunar eclipses, comets, and shooting stars. Prophets were not far behind, educing partisan political interpretations from all of these celestial phenomena. The prince of these prophets was William Lilly (1602–81). Along with many others who supported the Parliament, including the anonymous author of the 1644 Prognosticall Prediction of Admirable Events, Lilly published secular prophecies proclaiming that Charles I would have to lay down his sword or die. Lilly’s forte was delivering such prophecies as if they were guaranteed by the heavens. So he interprets an eclipse of the sun by the moon as the blotting out of the monarch by the common people, concluding that “monarchy shall be eclipsed and darkened.” Astrological works were more popular than any others during the 1640s, and Lilly’s influence was tremendous. One contemporary remarked that the people “put more confidence in Lilly than . . . in God”; another said that for the king to get Lilly on his side would be like bringing over six regiments.

In order to ensure that the sovereign retained a firm grip on power, Hobbes had to disarm such prophets. His methods include criticizing the supposed scientific basis of the predictions, and calling into question the motives of the prognosticators. So he says of Lilly that he is “a pretender to a pretended art of judicial astrology; a mere cozener, to get maintenance from a multitude of ignorant people.” Hobbes puts the astrologer in a bind: insofar as the predictions of astrology are those of a science, he debunks them by reason. Insofar as they are inspired or revealed, he debunks them as enthusiastic.

Enthusiasts were those who claimed variously to be inspired by God, to have been sent an angel, to have converse with demons, or to have special powers to interpret Scripture. Hobbes writes that nothing could be more pernicious to peace than the pretended revelations of these fanatics. He aims to undermine their authority with his argument that the sovereign must be the sole interpreter of God’s word, and to isolate them by maintaining that revelation only obliges the individual to whom it is made. He also provides naturalistic reductions of each enthusiastic claim: he argues that angels are dreams, that demons are delusions, and that anyone who pretends to be divinely inspired is mad or lying. Someone who says that God spoke to him in a dream says only that he dreamed that God spoke to him. A vision is merely a dream that one does not recognize as such. One who claims to speak by supernatural stimulus is only admitting that he can find no natural reason to explain his strong desire to speak. And so on.

Prophecies of royalist defeat were often credited with bringing about such defeat. Hobbes agrees that prophets who pretend to predict the events of the war actually affect its outcome. Thus, in order to promote obedience and peace, he tries to undermine the superstitious belief in prophecy. In the half of Leviathan devoted to religious questions, Hobbes shows that the vast promised gardens of the spiritual realm are imaginary; on close scrutiny, there are only a few quite ordinary toads. Or, to put it in the terms of Pocock’s complaint, Hobbes did mean these parts of Leviathan, but when we understand what he meant by them, we can see that they aren’t really there.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 39).

Research Reports III —

A Brush with Spinoza
Sarah Ellenzweig , Rice University
(no. 39, Spring 2002)

It is well known that Mary Astell (1666–1731) was a High-Church Anglican, an inveterate Tory, and a Platonist—a traditionalist in matters of theology, politics, and philosophy. Thus it may come as a surprise to discover that she found herself less than six degrees of separation away from the philosopher thought of as the most abominable heretic and republican of the seventeenth century, Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–77). The story of this unlikely proximity will appear in my planned book, “The Fringes of Enlightenment: English Literature and the Politics of Modernity, 1660–1740,” and has been the focus of my research in the Clark’s collections.

Astell entered the Spinozan fray through her interest in the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), whose distinctive mixture of Platonism and neo-Cartesianism was zealously being disseminated in England in the 1690s by the Anglican divine John Norris (1657–1711). Malebranche’s principal works, The Search after Truth (1674–75) and A Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), embroiled him in a lifelong storm of controversy in France. Most notorious to contemporaries was Malebranche’s promotion of a theocentric theory of causation called “occasionalism,” which attempted to reconcile theologically unpalatable elements of Cartesianism with orthodox Christian doctrine. The problem was this: if, as Descartes had argued, the created world operates according to universal mathematical-mechanical laws, then, critics pointed out, God is not needed to watch over its daily operations. Cartesianism thus seemed to be arguing for a godless universe, though this was never Descartes’s intention. Malebranche tried to return God to an active role in the daily operations of the natural world by arguing that the Cartesian laws of nature are not creations apart from God the Creator but rather direct manifestations of his will; the action of a law of nature (when a man’s arm moves, or a ball falls to the ground, for example) is really God’s action. God is thereby the immediate cause of everything that happens in nature (the laws of nature are simply occasions for God’s action, i.e., occasional causes; hence the term occasionalism); he is omnipresent and omnipotent even in a Cartesian universe.

Malebranche’s critics immediately recognized that the occasionalist argument was slipping towards a grave theological error: by equating the laws of nature with God’s will, Malebranche approached Spinoza’s heretical position that God and his universe are one substance rather than the two (i.e., Creator and creation; spirit and matter; or mind and body) of dualist Christian doctrine. Meanwhile, Astell, apparently unaware of these criticisms, began corresponding with Norris about Malebranche’s philosophy. For her (as for Malebranche and Norris) occasionalism’s view of God’s supreme power was the utmost expression of piety and humility. Norris was impressed with Astell’s grasp of Malebranchism and, in 1694, he persuaded her to overcome her diffidence and publish their communications. Shortly before the book, Letters Concerning the Love of God, went to press, however, Astell wrote an additional letter to Norris, in which she renounced occasionalism, protesting that “very many object against this Proposition.” This letter, along with Norris’s reply, was included in an appendix to the published text.

Astell’s apostasy has been of interest to critics concerned to situate her accurately in the context of seventeenth-century philosophical debate (see in particular E. Derek Taylor’s article on Astell and Locke in Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3), especially since she re-embraced Malebranchism in her 1705 “magnum opus,” The Christian Religion, as profess’d by a daughter of the Church of England. Why did Astell suddenly reject Malebranche in 1695, and why did she come back to his defense in 1705? Did these decisions, perhaps, have anything to do with the charges of Spinozism being aimed against Malebranche? Some clues to the answers to these questions are to be found in events preceding the publication of Letters.

As it turns out, 1694 was a big year for Malebranche in England. In July and August, two rival editions of The Search after Truth were published within weeks of one another. The first, a two-volume set, was translated by Richard Sault and printed by John Dunton and Samuel Manship, both of whom were close associates of Norris. Volume 1 was published in late July of 1694, volume 2 in 1695. The second translation, by Thomas Taylor, appeared in Oxford in mid-August of 1694. According to the Term Catalogues (November 1694), an abridgement of Malebranche’s controversy with Antoine Arnauld (in which the Spinozist error of one substance featured prominently) had been intended for the Taylor translation. Although it was eventually excluded because of its length (twenty years’ worth of correspondence) and the pressure to release the primary text, the editors promised that another volume was planned, which would include the documents of the conflict. Since Norris was involved in editing and revising the Sault translation and Dunton was engaged in a dispute with the London printer of the Taylor translation, it is very likely that Astell knew all the details of the plans for each edition. Upon hearing that the philosopher whose tenets she was extolling in her forthcoming Letters would soon be linked in the eyes of her countrymen with Spinoza, Astell may have recoiled, fearing the taint of an unholy association. In retrospect, she made a wise choice, for even though the expected Arnauld-Malebranche correspondence did not materialize, the English reception of Search largely followed that of the French: John Locke, James Lowde, Richard Burthogge, and John Sergeant all charged Malebranche with impiety and pointed to the similarities between his system and Spinoza’s.

Now if I am correct that Astell’s abandonment of Malebranchism in 1694 stemmed from the dread of Spinozism, why would she re-embrace such tainted goods in 1705, in the most important work of her career? A few possible explanations emerge from an examination of the English response to Spinoza in the intervening years. Locke had written and circulated in manuscript censures of both Malebranche and Norris, in which he raised the problem of one substance in Malebranche’s system. Locke was also the presumed author of a 1696 attack on Astell’s Letters (Damaris Masham was the actual author), which accused Astell and Norris, and Malebranchism, of promoting irreligion and enthusiasm. Locke, of course, was a formidable adversary, but luckily for Astell, he suddenly found himself dodging accusations of Spinozism in his famous debate with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, on thinking matter (1696–98). Meanwhile, England’s most furious anti-Spinozist, one William Carroll, was just beginning to appear on the scene, and Locke was his prime mark. In a series of sermons and tracts published between 1705 and 1711, Carroll accused Locke and his followers of “establishing and spreading Spinoza’s Hypothesis in a Disguise.” Carroll praised both Norris and Malebranche for embracing Cartesianism (i.e., dualism) rather than Locke’s Spinozistic materialism. What can be inferred from this evidence? By the time Astell’s Christian Religion appeared in 1705, the charge of Spinozism seems to have changed targets. Indeed, taking his cue from Stillingfleet, Carroll appears almost single-handedly to have diverted attention away from Malebranche and his High-Church English disciples by turning the accusation of Spinozism (somewhat illogically and without great success) against several prominent Whig intellectuals. Such a climate, I would suggest, left Astell freer to support a doctrine which, to her, continued to represent the apotheosis of Christian piety.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 39).

Research Reports IV —

Female Authors in Enlightenment Spain
Theresa Smith, UCLA
(no. 39, Spring 2002)

In my current book manuscript, “The Emerging Female Citizen: Gender and the Spanish Enlightenment,” I examine the way that intellectual discourse and women’s participation in public life intertwined to redefine women’s roles, and thus the nature of citizenship rights, in the emerging liberal nation in eighteenth-century Spain. By mid-century, most of Spain’s Enlightenment elites accepted the idea that women were rational beings and thus equal to men. While acknowledgment as equal beings did not automatically translate into equal rights for women, their acceptance as both contributors to and facilitators of Spain’s burgeoning Republic of Letters, exemplified by their participation in nascent Enlightenment institutions such as Royal Academies and tertulias (similar to French salons), suggests that notions about the status of women in society were changing. Once female equality was established and women’s status began to change, a new debate over women’s proper role in society occupied intellectuals in the 1760s and 1770s. These thinkers focused on the obligations of female citizens, appealing to utilitarian arguments, rather than universal rights. How women responded to this increasingly circumscribed vision of citizenship has been the subject of my work at the Clark.

Much of my analysis has centered on petitions female authors submitted to royal censors, who served under the direction of the Council of Castile, in order to gain licenses for publication and on subsequent correspondence between these women and the censors who had denied their original petitions. These seldom-examined documents provide a valuable source for examining women’s varied strategies for getting into print and evidence the tenacity with which female authors sought publication. The vehemence with which women writers defended their own works reveals both the value they placed on publication and the confidence they had in their right to put forth their ideas. In case after case, female authors were quick to question the merits of censors’ arguments and to assert claims in defense of their works. What stands out in these petitions is the seemingly contradictory nature of the arguments women made in support of their rights. At times, they framed their cases in terms of the merits of their works and their right to be evaluated fairly and equally on the basis of established guidelines. At other times, they employed the then prominent notion that the status of Spain’s women was a vital measure of the nation’s progress on its path to modernization and Europeanization. While encouraging censors to consider the larger benefits of supporting women’s writings might appear to be a call for a double standard and therefore a contradiction of the appeal to the principle of equality, female authors did not see these two strategies as contradictory. Rather, they felt that both strategies served the common goal of carving out a space for women’s voices in public discourse.

Teresa González represents a case in point. While she had received permission to publish an almanac in 1773, her petition for a similar project, Estado del Cielo para el año de 1777 (“State of the Heavens for the Year 1777”), was denied because of a December 1776 letter by the censor Benito Bails, who had criticized her for making frivolous predictions about the future. González apparently overlooked this rejection, but when Bails offered a similar criticism of her proposed almanac for 1778, she took action. Her protest pointed to the inconsistencies in the treatment of her almanacs by the Council of Castile and directly challenged Bails’s arguments. In a rather curt letter to the council, González claimed that,

after the great degree of evidence, . . . the work of the supplicant, as she herself will demonstrate, does not contain anything prophetic. . . . on the contrary, it is all strictly limited to . . . that which councils, Popes, Doctors of the Church, sound Philosophers and knowledgeable Critics, permit, and authorize, because they comprehend the reason and experience on which these types of predictions rest, and the usefulness they can serve for Agriculture, Medicine, and Navigation.*

With this powerful assertion, González undercut Bails’s critique that her predictions were based on “superstition” and “whim,” and instead emphasized the logic of her own method. She proceeded to quote a number of authorities, from the Council of Trent’s Index of Prohibited Books to the Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana, to support her contention that this type of writing was both acceptable and useful. González thus requested that her almanac be considered for publication by a less biased censor:

She humbly asks . . . that you find it worthy to grant what you deem appropriate, in order to vindicate the offense that has been done to the author by her contemptible labeling as soothsayer; and mandate that the work be reviewed anew by a dispassionate and impartial censor, just as Saint Augustine wanted for his writings.

With this not-so-humble plea for reconsideration, González ventured a harsh critique of the previous censor: her request for a “dispassionate and impartial censor” implicitly labeled Bails a subjective and biased reader. By suggesting that Bails’s conclusions, including his “contemptible labeling as soothsayer,” were the product of emotion, and not reason, González also underscored her own rational approach in both her appeal and her original work’s predictions. At the same time, her reference to Saint Augustine linked her with a great writer and thinker of the past. As a result of these forceful arguments, she received, on November 14, 1777, a license to print her 1778 book.

González claimed her place in print by defending the merits of her work and implicitly arguing for her right to be judged equally and fairly by the council. However, this was not always the tack that women writers took. María Rosa de Gálvez’s defense of her 1801 comedy Un loco hace ciento shows how female authors often used their gender to their advantage:

With the peculiarity of this production being the work of a Spanish lady, whose individual circumstances the exponent believes make her worthy of some favor, much more since she has already presented and had completely approved an original tragedy, . . . she hopes to continue her work, and that of her sex[;] she will not fail to contribute to the luster of the Spanish theater. In this case, then, she asks . . . that . . . said comedy . . . be viewed and examined by other individuals who will give it a scrupulous, but impartial, censure.

Gálvez appealed to the censor to recognize her unique position as a woman writer while also drawing on her credentials as an already established playwright. By simultaneously invoking her work as advancing the cause of women and of Spanish theater, Gálvez plays into a strongly held belief among Spain’s reformers: that the status of Spain’s women was directly related to the status of the nation. The work received a license for publication.

Female authors constituted a surprisingly active part of Spain’s growing Republic of Letters. Their appeals in pursuit of publication provide a glimpse into just one area where women sought a place in the changing political and social landscape of eighteenth-century Spain.

*All translations in this essay are the author's.

Return to the listing of contents (no. 39).

Reaching Out to the Community
Elizabeth Krown Spellman, Assistant Director
(no. 39, Spring 2002)

The Clark Library’s participation in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, in late April, and an interactive concert by the Ying Quartet for high-school students, in early May, were this year’s highlights of our continuing effort to bring awareness of the Clark to the greater Los Angeles community.

This was the second time that the Library participated in the two-day book festival, an annual event held on the UCLA campus. Our booth was arranged with the aim of attracting attention to the Clark and its collections. Even casual passersby could not fail to notice our display of photographs of the Clark and a banner featuring Oscar Wilde. To those who stopped to inquire, staff members described the Library, its history, collections, and programs. Issues of our newsletter and brochures about our conferences and concerts led many to sign up to be on the mailing list. Offered for purchase were a selection of our scholarly publications and some new postcards: reproductions from the Library’s rare materials, and a view of the muraled ceiling and marbled walls of the Clark vestibule.

For several hours, Richard Wagener, a wood engraver, displayed examples of his work and discussed the craft of wood engraving with those who stopped by. A very big draw, for a large number of visitors, were free book evaluations conducted by rare bookdealers from the Southern California Chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.* People signed up, and lined up, to find out if their old books had value. While only a very few discovered that they possessed special treasures, most were pleased to learn something new about their books. We were glad to provide them with this opportunity, to encourage new visitors, and to welcome back old ones, all in the hope that the Clark will become better known as the real treasure that it is.

On 6 May, we welcomed to the Clark students from the Hamilton High School Academy of Music, a Los Angeles Unified School District magnet school specializing in the performing arts. The occasion was an interactive program, specially planned for this group by the Ying Quartet, who, just a day before, had performed in celebration of the Clark’s seventy-fifth anniversary. For the Hamilton students, the Yings selected single movements from different quartets, which they performed and then discussed with the students in order to illustrate various musical concepts. Students responded to questions from the quartet and asked their own questions, about topics ranging from bows and instruments to the peculiarities and difficulties of a professional musician’s lifestyle. The student musicians were particularly interested in the Yings themselves and in their life as a musical family. Not only were the quartet members open in their responses, but they also joined the students for lively conversation at the reception after the program. Jaw-Xin Wang, a Hamilton cellist, got to try out David Ying’s instrument, a 1695 G. B. Rogeri; and Jessie Rodgers, a student percussionist, enjoyed the chance to play William Andrews Clark Jr.’s own Steinway, vintage 1925.

It was a wonderful treat for us to observe the interaction between the Yings and these young musicians and to see how much the students appreciated our Library as a whole—one even lobbied for eventual employment there. Many plan to return for a tour, or to attend a concert, or to show their parents that such a remarkable place exists. And we hope to arrange many more occasions that will expose both students and the general public to all that the Clark has to offer.

*Our thanks to Gordon Hollis of Golden Legend, Inc.; Lou Weinstein of Heritage Book Shop, Inc.; Ken Karmiole of Kenneth Karmiole Bookseller, Inc.; Franklin V. Spellman of Krown & Spellman, Booksellers; and Carol Sandberg and Michael Thompson of Michael R. Thompson Bookseller.

When not otherwise identified, the images reproduced here are from the Clark Library Collection.

—Peter Heylyn, A Help to English History (London, 1680), facing pages with dense annotation.

—Peter Heylyn, A Help to English History (London, 1680), marginal sketch of a wyvern.

—Encyclopédie, ou Díctionaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Recueil de planches (Paris, 1762–72): vol. 2, “L'art d'écrire,” plate detail.

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), title page image, detail; and A Prognosticall Prediction (1644), title page image.

—Portion of a page from William Lilly, The Starry Messenger (London, 1645).

—John Norris [and Mary Astell], Letters Concerning the Love of God (London, 1695), title page and the first two pages of the appendix.

—Encyclopédie, ou Díctionaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Recueil de planches (Paris, 1762–72): vol. 2, “L'art d'écrire,” plate detail.

—Bruce Whiteman with visitors to the Clark Library’s booth at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books ). Photo by Marina Romani.

—David Ying and Hamilton student Jaw-Xin Wang. Photo by Candis Snoddy.

—Simon Varey at the Clark in January 2001. Photo by Suzanne Tatian.

—Simon at the Clark, July 4 1988.

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