A Masterpiece of Maps Goes Digital At Cambridge

By Nancy Mattoon

Proof Sheet For The Map Of Lancashire,
Engraved For John Speed's 1611
Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine.
(Image Courtesy Of Cambridge University Library.)

Anglophiles who are planning to watch the Royal Wedding of HRH Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29, 2011, now have a new opportunity to gain insight into the history and geography of the kingdom over which the future monarch and his bride will reign. Cambridge University Library has digitized a set of proof sheets for the first comprehensive atlas of Great Britain, first published 400 years ago.

Detail From The Proof Sheet For A
Map of Britain at the time of the Saxon Heptarchy.
(Image Courtesy Of Cambridge University Library.)

John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine is one of the world’s finest cartographic treasures. Anne Taylor, head of the Map Department at Cambridge University Library, notes that, "Although the Library holds several copies of the published atlas – including a first edition – it is the hand-coloured set of proofs produced between 1603 and 1611 that is one of its greatest treasures."

Detail From The Title Page
For the Finished Atlas.
(Image Courtesy of Occidental College.)

There are only five known sets of the proof sheets in existence worldwide, and each of them differs greatly in composition. The proof sheets were purchased by the Cambridge Library in 1968, and are now considered priceless. They consist of a single sheet for each county of England and Wales, plus a map of Scotland and each of the four Irish provinces. The maps were engraved by the great Flemish artisan Jodocus Hondius, who worked for 10 years to complete the intricate copper plates used for printing the atlas.

A Sampling Of The Heraldry Included In Speed's Atlas.
(Image Courtesy of Occidental College.)

Born in Farndon, Cheshire, in 1551 or 1552, John Speed was a historian as well as a cartographer. He wrote a Historie of Great Britaine, which was also published in 1611, but is today remembered much more for his cartography than his writings. Speed did not do all of the surveying for his maps himself, but the maps which have a "scale of passes" in the completed atlas are those whose geography he observed first hand. He also relied to a degree on the works of earlier cartographers, especially the county maps of the great surveyor Christopher Saxton. As Speed himself wrote, "I have put my sickle into other mens corne."

Speed's Map of The Town Of Rochester.
(Image Courtesy of Occidental College.)

In the finished atlas, but not on the proof sheets, there are descriptions of each town which was mapped.These were often adapted from William Camden’s Britannia, a topographical and historical survey of Great Britain and Ireland, and are not always flattering. The entry for Cambridge states, "This province is not large, nor the aire greatly to be liked, having the Fenns so spread upon her North, that they infect the aire far into the rest." The entry for the city of Lincoln includes two major events in that city's history, "In the Citie of Lincolne two great conflicts have bene fought. The first by Ranulph Eearl of Chester and Robert Earle of Gloreshter against King Stephen in defence of Maude the Empress where King Stephen was taken and hence had to Bristow, and there layd in Irons. Anno 1140. The second was fought by King Henry 3 against his disloyall Barons, where Barons with the French were put to flight and therein dyed the Earle of Perch with 400 knights."

Detail Showing The Prehistoric
Monument Of Stonehenge.
(Image Courtesy of Occidental College.)

Anne Taylor points out a significant element omitted in the proofs by cartographer Speed: "You can see there aren't any roads on the maps. The bridges over rivers would have been a major transport route through the countryside back in those times. Roads would not have been properly constructed." She notes that these maps were not meant for the same purpose as road maps today. "People would not have used maps to get to places. They would have gone to a place and then asked for directions to the next place. These maps may have been sold individually but they would have been bound in a large volume that you wouldn't have been able to take out with you. They were more like a reference book. Queen Elizabeth’s advisers may have used the maps for strategic purposes." It is known that in the 1640's, Speed's atlas was used to create battle plans by both sides in the English Civil War.

Speed's Map Included Portraits Of
English Citizens Of Various Ranks.
(Image Courtesy of Occidental College.)

Speed's country maps were among the first to attempt to show the territorial divisions created by local governments. But his town plans are considered his greatest contribution to British cartography. The atlas was the first printed collection of British city plans, and at least 50 of the 73 locales included in the atlas had never previously been mapped. The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine was an immediate success: the first print run of around 500 copies sold quickly, and many later editions followed. It remained the source of all folio maps of Britain well into the 18th century. If the proof sheets whet your appetite for more, there are several web sites which have digitized editions of the finished atlas. One of the most comprehensive was created by Professor Maryanne Cline Horowitz of Los Angeles's Occidental College, the source of many of the images in this post.
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Science Spars With The Supernatural At Cambridge

By Nancy Mattoon

Raphael. A manual of astrology, or the, book of the stars:
being the art of foretelling future events,
by the influences of the heavenly bodies,
in a manner unattempted by any former author
and divested of the superstitions of the Dark Ages, 1828.
(All Images Courtesy of Whipple Library.)

When Sir Isaac Newton wrote his third law of motion, translated from the Latin as, "To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction," he was talking physics, not philosophy. But his law often seems to govern the world of thought and belief, as much as the world of physical objects. In just one example, when we celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species in 2009, calls for teaching "Intelligent Design" in U.S. schools continued to mount. A new online exhibit from the University of Cambridge's Whipple Library illustrates the same action-reaction phenomena as it unfolded in the 19th century.

Raphael. A manual of astrology, or the, book of the stars:
being the art of foretelling future events,
by the influences of the heavenly bodies,
in a manner unattempted by any former author
and divested of the superstitions of the Dark Ages, 1828.

This library display shows a number of books from the Whipple's collection which illustrate that, in what was known as the "Age of Science," interest in the spirit world and the supernatural was at an all-time high. The Whipple Library was created in 1944, to house a gift of rare books from Robert Stewart Whipple. It is the largest library specializing in the history and philosophy of science and medicine in the UK. The collection includes books documenting everything from "the ancient use of astrology to the current curiosity in new age magic and ghost hunting." The exhibit Adventures in the Unknown: Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and the Supernatural, examines the strange attraction of many eminent 19th century men of science to the world of mediums, spirit guides, ghosts, and communication from "the other side."

Raphael. A manual of astrology, or the, book of the stars:
being the art of foretelling future events,
by the influences of the heavenly bodies,
in a manner unattempted by any former author
and divested of the superstitions of the Dark Ages, 1828.

Robert C. Smith, known as "Raphael," edited a magazine prophetically entitled The Struggling Astrologer beginning in 1824. It was a financial disaster, and was discontinued after only a handful of issues. Smith collected his articles from the periodical in this book, which he dedicated to Sir Walter Scott. It refers to astrology as a science and mentions "...that every problem is calculated merely by an arithmetical process, devoid of any thing resembling divination." It gives the reader instruction on how to make horoscope charts and contains handwritten perpetual tables of the celestial houses.

Frontispiece From:
Transcendental physics:
an account of experimental investigations
from the scientific treatises of
Johann Carl Friedrich Zollner,1882.

Johann Zollner (1834–1882), was a German Professor of Astrophysics at Leipzig, who specialized in optics. The frontispiece of this book depicts the study where he began his investigations of spiritualism and the fourth dimension, along with the notorious American medium, Henry Slade. Slade had been convicted of fraud by British authorities, and was on the lam in Europe when he first met Professor Zollner. Slade convinced Zollner and his fellow séance participants (all respected German scientists) of his skills through the appearance of "spirit writing" on slates, and through the mysterious movement of objects by unseen hands.

A Plate From Transcendental Physics
Depicting The Seance Table Before A Spirit Visitation.

And The Seance Table As Altered By The Spirits.

Zollner believed that these supernatural writings were caused by spirits working through Slade from the fourth dimension, and that the objects on his "seance table" were manipulated by ghosts. (In fact, Slade was extremely adept at writing with his feet, and was a better than average sleight of hand magician. And it didn't hurt that his seances were always conducted in the dark.) The publication of Transcendental Physics (1882) damaged Zollner's scientific reputation, and caused a major scandal in the world of modern German occultism. According to American historian of magic Henry Ripley Evans, by 1892, Slade was "an inmate of a workhouse in one of our Western towns, penniless, friendless and a lunatic."

Portrait of author Alfred Russel Wallace From:
The Wonderful Century, 1898.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist, was one of the great Victorian scientists. He is best known for proposing a theory of evolution due to natural selection independent of, and prior to, Charles Darwin. He publicly embraced spiritualism in 1866, and wrote a number of works on spiritualism including A Defence of Modern Spiritualism (1874). In The Wonderful Century, Wallace describes what he sees as successes and failures of the 19th century. In the failure section he includes a chapter entitled The Opposition to Hypnotism and Psychical Research in which he takes to task those who refuse to accept the validity of mesmerism and hypnotism, in spite of experiments involving men of learning which he believed had "produced convincing evidence." His very public advocacy of spiritualism caused him to lose standing in the scientific world, and even strained what was a previously close friendship with Darwin.

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Persia's Book Of Kings Gets The Royal Treatment At Cambridge

By Nancy Mattoon

A Hero Fights A Demon.
An Image From The Shahnameh,
Or Persian Book Of Kings.
(All Images Courtesy of The Fitzwilliam Museum.)

The Shahnameh, or " Persian Book of Kings," is the national epic of the Iranian people. The longest poem ever written by a single author, this chronicle of the reigns of fifty monarchs was completed exactly 1,000 years ago by the Persian poet Ferdowsi, who dedicated his life to crafting its 60,000 verses.

Ferdowsi’s importance in Persian language and literature has been compared to that of Goethe for the Germans, of Pushkin for the Russians, or of Shakespeare for the English-speaking world. A new exhibit at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge contains almost 100 illustrations from rare manuscript books spanning nearly eight centuries of this tale of myth, legend, and history.

A Hero Endures A Trial By Fire.

The exhibit, Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is the largest display of its kind ever shown in a British museum. Artworks inspired by this poem, which tells the story of Persia from the beginning of time through the Arab conquest in the 7th century, have been gathered together from the British Museum, the Bodleian Library and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

Timothy Potts, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, says: "It is impossible to overstate the significance of Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, which remains, a millennium after its completion, one of the most popular texts of secular poetry in Southwest Asia. In its ambition, scope and spectacular range of displays, this exhibition at the Fitzwilliam is truly a landmark and for many visitors will be a revelatory introduction to the Shahnameh and its world."

A Vanquished Demon
Is Bound By The Hero.

During the thousand years since its completion, illustrated manuscripts of The Shahnameh have spread Persian culture from Egypt and Anatolia to India and Central Asia. The enormous popularity of its stories and characters, and their depiction by a wide range of artists in various media, allow the illustrated editions of The Shahnameh to become a microcosm for all of Persian art from the 12th until the 19th century.

In early manuscripts the pictures are small and simple, fitting within the larger text. But over the years they increase in size and become much more elaborate, even including the use of decorative gold, lapis lazuli, and other precious pigments. The Shahnameh texts evolved into works similar to the heavily embellished illuminated manuscripts from the monasteries of Europe.

A Miniature Painting Inspired By The Shahnameh.

Wealthy patrons commissioned manuscripts of greater and greater magnificence, each hoping to possess the most lavish edition of the epic ever created. Splendid pictures often crowded out the text, and the artistic influence of China, India, and Central Asia could be seen in the the style of the illustrations. The earliest illustrations on show at the Fitzwilliam Museum are from the 1300's, and they continued to be produced until the mid-19th century.

The tradition of hand-illustrating books in this painstaking way survived in Persia for nearly another three centuries after it ended in Europe. The Shahnameh was also the inspiration for thousands of miniature paintings, produced separately from any manuscript. These paintings were created by Persian, Arab, Turkish, Mongol, Kurdish, and Indian artists commissioned to recreate favorite scenes from the epic for the royalty and nobility.

A Court Scene From The Poem,
Highlighting Music And Dance.

Aside from artistic value, one reason The Shahnameh remains so central to Iranian literature is because it was written in Persian rather than Arabic. Ferdowsi is widely regarded as the preserver of the Persian language and of pre-Islamic Iranian culture. Of all the peoples conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century, the Persians are the only ones who can boast a major literature in the indigenous language that they were using before the conquest, according to the Cambridge exhibit.

Unlike the English language of a work such as Beowulf, the Persian of Ferdowsi's poem changed very little over the centuries. The Persian reader needs no "translation" into modern language to fully understand the poem just as its original audience did. Ferdowsi went to great lengths to avoid using any words of Arabic origin. Children in Iran still study The Shahnameh in school, and many memorize portions of it in the same way that English speakers learn to recite passages from Shakespeare.

A Dragon Devours An Unlucky Would-Be Slayer.

Charles Melville, professor of Persian history at Cambridge, tells us that Ferdowsi was a wealthy landowner who spent at least 30 years writing his epic poem. It is a huge text, twice as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. It explores not only the royal history of Persia, but also goes back to the days of mythic kings, who were slayers of dragons and demons. The work contains battle scenes and other heroics, but also romance and light-hearted games of polo.

The exhibition curator, Barbara Brend, explains that there are three distinct sections of the work, "There's a legendary, mythical bit at the beginning then a middle section covering Alexander the Great. The last section deals with a real dynasty, the Sasanians." Each of the illustrations of The Shahnameh at the Fitzwilliam shows an event in the epic, whether a battle scene, the combat between a warrior and a fantastical creature, or a King courting his ladylove.

An Illustration Of A Scene From The Epic
Featuring Alexander The Great. (At Left.)

By the time Ferdowsi finally got close to finishing his work, he was beginning to run short of money. He presented his still unfinished epic to his patron, Mahmud of Ghazni, in hopes that the sultan would be pleased enough to advance him some cash. Sadly, things had changed since the work was begun: the pre-Islamic era was past, and a poem in Persian was viewed with suspicion.

Professor Melville remarks, "He wasn't a court poet, a flatterer. And it's possible that he was suspected of Zoroastrian sympathies, the pre-Islamic religion. So he wasn't accepted by the religious authorities either." Ferdowsi died in 1020, fearing his poem was a failure. Fitzwilliam Museum director Timothy Potts says Ferdowsi’s words were initially greeted with hostility, "His poem was to be a paean to a Persian past that struggled to maintain itself against Arab, Turkish and other peoples and ways of life."

A Battle Scene Between Rival Factions.

The Shahnameh went virtually underground for nearly 200 years after its completion, with only a few brief quotations and references to the work in existence. By the 13th century the epic had begun to return to favor, although copies of the text made 200 years after Ferdowsi's death undoubtedly contain both errors and "improvements." According to the Cambridge Museum, only three manuscripts are known to have survived from before the end of the 13th century: an incomplete copy of 1217, a full text of 1276 and a third, undated copy from this period. None of these is illustrated.

A Magicial Scene
Near The End Of The Persian Epic.

But the universal themes of The Shahnameh allowed it to survive through the centuries. Its tales of power and glory, ambition and failure, wisdom and folly all resonate across generations and even cultures. (The poem was translated into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish early on, and eventually into many of the world's modern languages.)

"Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh has been the wellspring of Persian culture for the past thousand years," says Timothy Potts. "Other cultures have their literary icons – Homer for the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare for the English, Dante for the Italians. But none of these exercised quite the defining influence on so many levels of culture and identity up to the present day as The Shahnameh did for the Persians."

Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge will be on display through January of 2011. Highlights of the show are also available in an excellent virtual exhibit on the museum's website.
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