Brooke Palmieri: ‘A Little World of Strangeness’
Duration: 15 mins 5 secs
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| Description: | Discussion of Thomas Leeds's Temple of Wisdom, reflecting on the treasuring mentality and the role of the 'impartial reader' (recording missed the first five minutes, for which Brooke Palmieri very helpfully provided a transcript, to be found under the 'transcript' tab). |
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| Created: | 2016-04-09 00:34 |
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| Collection: | Treasuries of Knowledge |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | Brooke Palmieri |
| Language: | eng (English) |
| Distribution: |
World
(downloadable)
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| Keywords: | reading; archive; early modern; quaker; |
| Categories: |
iTunes - History |
| Explicit content: | No |
| Abstract: | Here are some excerpts from the first printed book in Philadelphia, The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World: “The Masculine and Feminine property might be quite changed into one Image again, as Adam was before his Eve, when he was neither Man nor Woman, but a Masculine Virgin. Therefore Christ took his Soul from a Woman”; “I am no Italian lover,…But thy Beauty I discover,/ English-like, without a vail”; “Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.” They are taken from the mystic Jakob Böhme, the Anglican George Wither, and the philosopher Francis Bacon. “In this promiscuous Generation of men, this little Book might appear as a promiscuous Composition of Authors” wrote Daniel Leeds, who published the book in 1688. As a treasury of a colonial almanack-maker’s reading, and a financial risk in its own right, The Temple sheds light on the social make-up of Philadelphia at the time, its mix of English and Continental influences. Böhme had influenced the earliest Quakers of the 1650s but also German mystics who had settled in the colony; Wither tolerated Quakers exactly as they hoped Anglicans would; and Bacon featured on the enlightened reading list promoted by the founder of the colony, William Penn, among others. But Leeds’ “promiscuous composition” is equally misleading: Böhme had been censored out of Quaker writings for two decades, friction between Quakers and Anglicans only worsened in Philadelphia, and William Penn’s proprietorship was unpopular. After the book’s publication, Leeds was either ejected from the Quaker community, or left it in a rage. Throughout the 1690s he published attacks against them, and their attempts at censoring the publication of books, a common fate for many Quakers.
The purpose of this presentation is twofold, for as McKenzie Wark writes in Excommunication, a “text may be read backward into its mediatic status, just as it may be read forward into its hermeneutic status. Each approach may find gold in the cracks between the letters.” Looking backward, within the esoteric tradition, or indeed within the tradition of compiling libraries, and keeping commonplace books, The Temple of Wisdom is a very late mimic of a particular ethos of knowledge gathering made strange by a wilderness that had only imported books until that point. Reading forward, the strangest book in Philadelphia is also one which sheds insight into how extent networks of authors, publishers, and readers exacted their influence in the fledgling book market of the Middle Colonies. And finally, the work reads as a printed abridgement of its author’s own promiscuous tastes, combining a long-standing humanist tradition with a nonconformist style that could hardly keep itself from causing trouble. |
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Transcript
Transcript:
The first five minutes which are missing from the recording:
This is a very crude and fresh presentation that complements my work on non-conformist, particularly Quaker, reading and publication habits in the second half of the 17th century. But I’ve never presented on it before, and it probably won't make it into my dissertation, although hopefully it provides a useful example of a strange book I found in the course of my reading that also happens to show how the printed book might be seen as an archive, an archive of treasured knowledge.
Here are some excerpts from the first printed book in Philadelphia, called The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World, printed in 1688.
Quote 1: “The Masculine and Feminine property might be quite changed into one Image again, as Adam was before his Eve, when he was neither Man nor Woman, but a Masculine Virgin. Therefore Christ took his Soul from a Woman”;
Quote 2, a poem: “I am no Italian lover/ That will mew thee in a Goal/But thy Beauty I discover,/ English-like, without a vail”;
Quote 3, a proverb: “Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.”
The first reads like, and indeed inspired a century later, William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the second is full of poetry I don’t respect, and the third is still an important part of English Literature syllabi. The first comes from the mystic Jakob Böhme, the second the Anglican poet George Wither, and the final from an essay by Francis Bacon. They are printed together in this book as a matter of the compiler Daniel Leeds’ tastes.
“In this promiscuous Generation of men, this little book might appear as a promiscuous Composition of Authors,” Leeds wrote. “It is therefore distinguished in two parts.” The two parts are “The Philosophically Divine”, the bulk of the book, drawn from Böhme’s, the second part of “Morally divine” works by English authors: poems by George Wither, Francis Quarles, and Essays of Francis Bacon: “Collected, Published and intended for a general Good, by D.L.”
Leeds added in his preface:
“My intent is to say little, either of the Book it self, or by what impulse I took the pains to compile and publish it, but rather let nimble Time, that over-runs all things, manifest the Effects of both, even so also let it manifest my Opponents, which hath been the fate of publick Writers heretofore.”
My purpose, on the other hand, is to say a lot about this little book. I want to think about how the Temple of Wisdom allows us to see to what extent the treasury tradition had diffused, or diluted, depending on how you think of it: diffused across the ocean, because the contents of the book actually have a lot to say about those who inhabited the wilderness of colonial Philadelphia where it was printed; diffused across social status, because its compiler was a self-educated almanac-maker and nonconformist, its contents meant for public consumption; diffused across time, because it’s a fairly late example of a treasury, and diffused across media, because it is printed, a humble little octavo clocking in at 220 pages. Each of these features are interconnected.
As the theorist McKenzie Wark writes in Excommunications, a “text may be read backward into its mediatic status, just as it may be read forward into its hermeneutic status. Each approach may find gold in the cracks between the letters.” I’ll try to do both — and I completely agree with Wark that making meaning from old books is like the Japanese art of kintsugi, restoring pottery with gold as glue to highlight rather than obscure the history of its destruction, its fragmented nature. In using Leeds’ little book as an example, I will also want to talk about the real challenges of writing from fragments of texts, the art of kintsugi as it concerns those of us working with the embarrassment of riches found in these collected treasuries. How do we piece together fragments, and what formations do they take when we do?
This is a very crude and fresh presentation that complements my work on non-conformist, particularly Quaker, reading and publication habits in the second half of the 17th century. But I’ve never presented on it before, and it probably won't make it into my dissertation, although hopefully it provides a useful example of a strange book I found in the course of my reading that also happens to show how the printed book might be seen as an archive, an archive of treasured knowledge.
Here are some excerpts from the first printed book in Philadelphia, called The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World, printed in 1688.
Quote 1: “The Masculine and Feminine property might be quite changed into one Image again, as Adam was before his Eve, when he was neither Man nor Woman, but a Masculine Virgin. Therefore Christ took his Soul from a Woman”;
Quote 2, a poem: “I am no Italian lover/ That will mew thee in a Goal/But thy Beauty I discover,/ English-like, without a vail”;
Quote 3, a proverb: “Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.”
The first reads like, and indeed inspired a century later, William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the second is full of poetry I don’t respect, and the third is still an important part of English Literature syllabi. The first comes from the mystic Jakob Böhme, the second the Anglican poet George Wither, and the final from an essay by Francis Bacon. They are printed together in this book as a matter of the compiler Daniel Leeds’ tastes.
“In this promiscuous Generation of men, this little book might appear as a promiscuous Composition of Authors,” Leeds wrote. “It is therefore distinguished in two parts.” The two parts are “The Philosophically Divine”, the bulk of the book, drawn from Böhme’s, the second part of “Morally divine” works by English authors: poems by George Wither, Francis Quarles, and Essays of Francis Bacon: “Collected, Published and intended for a general Good, by D.L.”
Leeds added in his preface:
“My intent is to say little, either of the Book it self, or by what impulse I took the pains to compile and publish it, but rather let nimble Time, that over-runs all things, manifest the Effects of both, even so also let it manifest my Opponents, which hath been the fate of publick Writers heretofore.”
My purpose, on the other hand, is to say a lot about this little book. I want to think about how the Temple of Wisdom allows us to see to what extent the treasury tradition had diffused, or diluted, depending on how you think of it: diffused across the ocean, because the contents of the book actually have a lot to say about those who inhabited the wilderness of colonial Philadelphia where it was printed; diffused across social status, because its compiler was a self-educated almanac-maker and nonconformist, its contents meant for public consumption; diffused across time, because it’s a fairly late example of a treasury, and diffused across media, because it is printed, a humble little octavo clocking in at 220 pages. Each of these features are interconnected.
As the theorist McKenzie Wark writes in Excommunications, a “text may be read backward into its mediatic status, just as it may be read forward into its hermeneutic status. Each approach may find gold in the cracks between the letters.” I’ll try to do both — and I completely agree with Wark that making meaning from old books is like the Japanese art of kintsugi, restoring pottery with gold as glue to highlight rather than obscure the history of its destruction, its fragmented nature. In using Leeds’ little book as an example, I will also want to talk about the real challenges of writing from fragments of texts, the art of kintsugi as it concerns those of us working with the embarrassment of riches found in these collected treasuries. How do we piece together fragments, and what formations do they take when we do?