How to Read Early Modern Texts: Component Parts and Transcriptions
This Week's Big Questions
How do we decipher, transcribe, and make sense of Early Modern printed texts?
How has the digitization of primary source material changed the way historians work?
This Week's Big Challenge
This week we begin to practice some of the less celebrated, but ultimately very rewarding skills that historians possess. We are are learning to SLOW DOWN, explore the organizational structure of early modern texts, learn how to read them, and transcribe them. What does that mean?
To "transcribe" means to reproduce someone else's writing in modern form.
Learning Outcomes
- Be able to transcribea single page from an early modern text, so that you will feel confident reading other early modern books in the weeks to come.
- Learn how to pre-read an early modern text by examining the title page, and introductory sections
- Analyze the contents of an early modern text so that you practice the skills of close reading, contextualization, corroboration, and sourcing.
- Practice assessing the line between errors, omissions, and style in early modern texts.
- Explore questions surrounding digital access to primary sources, and the problem of digital privilege.
Background
We are all familiar with online influencers, TikTok celebrities, and infomercials, but how write something here about reading quickly...Our primary material this week involves a small section of a text by an early English explorer, Richard Whitborne . The title of the text that you will read is A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land (it is part of a larger book -- and that book is the subject of your first assignment). In these pages Whitborne writes about his observations in the newly acquired English colony of Newfoundland. It is important that you read the version text provided by links on this page and not others, because one of the most important learning outcomes for this week is that you should learn how to read early modern books in the format that they were printed in originally. As the course progresses, we will be providing you with lots of sources that are only available in this form, so if you do not learn the basic skills of reading these texts now, you will be at a real disadvantage later in the course!
Reading a Frontispiece or Title Page
What can we learn about a book by reading its title page?When reading Early Modern Texts, the frontispiece or title page provided readers with significant information about the book's content. Let's take a look at the Title page for John Stedman's Narrative of Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.
How do the visual elements at the beginning of this book catch the readers’ attention, shape their interpretation of the text, and perhaps make literary connections? Describe what you see on the title page. Are there hints in the title and subtitles that suggest the topics this book will outline? Are there any images on the title page? If so, do they provide any further useful information about the book's contents? Who is the publisher? When was it published? Does knowing the date and location of publication help you to establish historical context for the book? Does the title page contain any literary or biblical references? If so, how might that help us to understand author's point of view regarding the book's content? If we look at the table of contents, what does it suggest about the sequence of events, or topics discussed in the book?
You will notice that there is indeed a poem quoted on the title page. Who is the poet? What is the poem? Can you read it? Try typing the poem into Google Translate. Does that help you to understand its meaning? You will be encountering other texts and images in languages other than English. While we do not expect any of you to be proficient in multiple languages, experimenting with the online tools available to you in order to help you better understand documents is often very helpful!
But, wait, you may ask, what about transcribing the text, and does transcribing even matter??
In many cases, when you visit an archive, photography may not be permitted!! This is rapidly changing, but not universally. So, how do you remember what you read in the archives? You transcribe it. This ensures you have an accurate record for future use. One of my first archival adventures as an undergraduate led me to the private archives of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, where I was ushered into a tiny, unheated room in the basement, the muniment room, which was piled with documents and papers. My visit required arranging several weeks ahead of time, and I was granted access to the room for only a few hours. Cameras were not permitted in the room, but I needed to glean as much information from what I could read in as short a time as possible. Note-taking skills were definitely important then, but in order to have useful tidbits of information to bring my research alive, transcribing the letters I found was critical to advancing my research! While a strict adherence to the no camera rule is no longer thanks to the advent of digital photography, it does remain very prevalent. So, what do you with box full of historical treasures in the archives? You transcribe them, so that you can refer back to them when you write up your research!
But, this is not the only reason historians transcribe documents. Increasingly, historians are engaging with digital tools to help them approach documents in new ways. Many of these tools use OCR (optical character recognition) software to identify key words and phrases. This software was designed to read contemporary text, however, which means that many of the documents that historians encounter remain either illegible, or mistranslated by these tools.
A Practical (and Humorous) Introduction to Reading Early Modern Books
Take a look at this excerpt with the help of Devon Eastland's helpful introduction to reading older English books. (It's in your toolbox for this week). The title of Eastland's essay is "Why do old books use F's instead of S's?" Eastland's answer is that they don't. The confusion is a mistake on the inexperienced reader's part.If you’re not familiar with older fonts, you might wonder why everyone spoke with a "lifp". They didn’t. Some of the older versions of the letter "s" look more like what we would call an "f". Look closely. Can you see that that there is a horizontal bar that goes all the way through both sides of the "f", but if there's any horizontal bar on an old-fashioned "s" it's only to the left-hand side of the letter. In other words, the two letters are NOT the same. This (to us) strange version of "s" is called a "long s". It is NOT an "f".
So, why do we care? As historians increasingly employ digital tools to read texts, they have discovered that the "long s" is a BIG problem for OCR computer programs. You will be introduced to one of these programs in our later assignments, Voyant Tools. By contrast, our minds are pliable enough to learn these very subtle distinctions, largely because we can usually figure out what these words should be (our minds do a kind of auto-correction, anticipating what should come next, how the words should look). While there are new versions of OCR programs emerging -- some even that work with handwritten manuscripts (Transkribus) -- at this point it’s very difficult for a computer to read these old fonts as well as we can.
When the OCR program used by archive.org, the world’s largest online archival database, tried to "read" the Whitefield passage we include above, it rendered it as this: As you can see, the computer program added a significant number of mistakes -- so many that it's really not useful for us to use this text. It’s the information age, but the machines that read this older information can’t help us here.
You can do a much better job yourself. Your first step toward this goal is to recognize that we have all kinds of confusing letters and numbers that we do not confuse when we read. Look at these combinations:
- 1 vs l (the number vs the letter);
- 0 vs O (again, the number [zero] vs the letter [capital o]);
- rn vs m (two letters [r and n] vs one letter, a distinction that some OCR computer programs find difficult to make).
When you read early modern books in English (and in many other languages that use a Latin alphabet, too), the letters that readers often mix up (but you should not) are:
- f and s;
- u and v;
- i and j.
The biggest confusions come with f's and s's. Remember that fonts have histories. They have changed over the generations, sometimes significantly. Don't let these changes give you a "fhit sit!" These two non-words in quotation marks would be an incorrect way of reading and transcribing an imaginary text. We won't correct the mistake, but you should not make this kind of mistake in your reading of early modern texts! Don't panic! Read the words that are actually on the page. Don't let the older fonts confuse you. You should not change the spelling that the original writers used (even if that spelling is not correct by modern standards), but you should also not introduce mistakes that the original writers never meant to make!
Let's practice with that 1745 passage from George Whitefield. Read it slowly, word-by-word, and correct the mistakes that the computer made. The corrected version and proper transcription of the passage from 1745 is:
YOUR last sweet Letter was very savouryThis kind of work is a great exercise for the historian-in-training. It requires you to slow down and read carefully. Yes, this passage is strange, but making sense of this strangeness is the kind of challenge that historians try to grapple with. We know that confronting this challenge takes time and is not easy. We sympathize: Most of you have full schedules, with jobs, domestic responsibilities, and university courses. You’re always needing to be in a hurry, to read quickly -- you just need to get through as much of the material as possible. We professors do that, too; sometimes we even recommend "strategic reading" as an effective way to cut through the detail to get at the essentials. But in research we often need to slow down, to read carefully, to think about what we’re reading, to sometimes stop on a word or a phrase to ponder exactly what’s going on.
to my Taste. It brought God to my
Soul. I feel much Heart-Union with
you. I thank you for all the kind Expressions
of your increasing Love. May the Lord re-
ward you an Hundred-fold in this World, and in
that to come! Oh what a blessed Instrument of
much Good, has the Lord made you to my
poor Soul!
Learning to read slooooooowly, and carefully, and thoughtfully are what we are practising often in this course, and certainly this week, too.
Learning Activities
First Post and response (Monday or Tuesday):This lesson is VERY "hands on", so plan your time carefully, and start EARLY!!!
- Take a look at the following selection from Richard Whitborne's Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land.
- Read the title page carefully, and scan the headings of each section.
- What can we learn about the text before we even start reading it?
- Consider the way the text is constructed.
- How does this help us to anticipate what the text may contain?
- What is an Epistle Dedicatory?
- Who does Whitborne mean by His Majesties Good Subjects?
- What can we learn from a Preface? or a Conclusion? Why the additional sections like Letters and Charges?
- After thinking through all these questions, you are ready to write explore one of these questions in your post describing what you think this book is about, and why, just from the title page, or how these other parts of the text relate to it as a whole. Understanding how early modern authors approach their audiences will help you to weed away much of the flowery language you will encounter this year!
Now it is time to actually read those sections, and transcribe a small section of the text.
- For your second forum post transcribe 1-2 pages of Richard Whitborne's A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land
- I have divided the selections by your name in the alphabet, so that we can explore more selections from the text, so pay attention to which section you are being asked to read.
- Read through the section, and choose a page that sounds interesting to you. Transcribe it!
- Once you have your transcription, briefly describe the passage ( include the page numbers, some information about what's going on in the text and how it relates to the topic of the chapter
- Avoid transcribing a page that other students have already transcribed. This means you will need to be checking the forums to see what others have already contributed before you begin!
- Then in your first response Connect or compare your passage with at least one other passage that others in your group have added to the forum discussion. Read the transcriptions that other students have posted to your forum discussion, and check several of them against the original text by Whitborne. If you find mistakes in the transcriptions that others have posted, suggest corrections, kindly.
- The purpose of this exercise is for you and your forum colleagues to help one another improve your reading ability, so please provide corrections in a positive and encouraging way, and ask questions of each other if you're not sure how to transcribe a passage.
- Finally, comment on one another's experiences. What worked? What did you struggle with? What might you like to explore given more time?
- Feel free to comment on posts that have transcribed different sections of the text. The point here, is to explore its various component parts, and how they work together!
- Finally, in a third post, reflect on Sharon Block's discussion of digital privilege. Consider your exercise this week as a virtual archival experience. This is not a text that you might readily find in your local library, and the copy you are reading comes from the special collections at Memorial University in St. John's, NFLD. Reflect on some of the ways that technology and computers facilitate what historians can do with their research. What do you see as some of the limits of digitization? Use your experience this week to describe yourself as a digital historian!
Toolbox
For an introduction to transcribing Early Modern Texts, visit:- Devon Eastland, "Why Do Old Books Use F's instead of S's?" Swann Auction Galleries (April 2020) (https://www.swanngalleries.com/news/early-printed-books/2020/04/why-do-old-books-use-fs-instead-of-ss/);
Primary Source
- Selections from:
- Richard Whitmore, A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land (1620)
- This is your selection if your last name begins with letters from A-F
- This is your selection if your last name begins with letters from G-Q
- This is your selection if your last name begins with letters from R-Z
- For an additional challenge, try this selection
Secondary Source
- Our secondary source this week explores the way that digitizing materials has changed the way historians do history.
- Sharon Block. “How to Research History Online” Doing History. Episode 8.
Supplemental Materials
Many of you may not have been introduced to cursive writing, so I am offering a supplementary section here that you can revisit and explore.
The Library from the University of Hull, UK provides samples of several styles of Early Modern handwriting, and most of what we will encounter in this course is likely a form of later italic with some remnants of secretary hand.
What happens if you encounter a source in cursive writing?
Here are some useful websites to help you read Early Modern handwriting. Use them to help you read through sources you encounter in cursive writing. There are a few in the course! They are not intended to be mini-courses for you, rather resources to help you when you get stuck. Choose the one that helps you the best, they are all good!
- Palaeography at The National Archives UK
- English Handwriting Online 1500-1700 at Cambridge University
- Quarantine Reading:Learning to Read Secretary Hand by Kathryn James at the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
This page references:
- George Whitefield, Letters on Spiritual Subjects (London, 1745)
- Transcribing Early Modern Sources Banner
- Transcription from Archive.org from a passage in Whitefield (1745).
- Italic Alphabet
- John Stedman, Narrative of a Five Year's Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796)
- Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (London, 1710), vol. 4, pp. 2750-1.
