Annotated Bibliography: Visual Arts and Print

At first, I found this assignment very frustrating. I must have spent 2 hours straight searching on the internet for any possible source on medicine and the printing press. There was literally nothing to be found.

Then I figured out that I need to broaden my search. I searched for sources on the printing press as a whole and I was surprised to find sources that related to my subject more frequently. That is when I located Eisenstein’s book (I promise I didn’t just copy paste from Pro. Gideon’s post, the version I found was older). What was interesting is that while I was looking for connections to medicine, I discovered a subject more fascinating to research: visual arts and print. So I switched gears and went to research a new subject than what I anticipated. It’s amazing how researching one thing can lead you on a path to something else entirely.

It turned out that the advent of medicine in the Renaissance was actually closely related to the visual arts. Discoveries concerning anatomy and depictions of the human body could be more easily published when print technology improved so much that art could be replicated as well.

The actual locating of the sources was also an enriching process. There’s something in a physical hunt for knowledge that increases the quality of one’s research. I literally started on the 5^th floor and eventually ended up on the second floor. I had to keep moving. Then once you actually locate the right source, you find a more personal and meaningful connection. I knew I could trust these sources. If they are hard to find, they must be worth reading.

Bibliography

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe . Cambridge University Press, 2005. Eisenstein provides a very comprehensive study on the effects of print culture in Early Europe. The section entitled “The Book of Nature Transformed” provided key insights pertaining to how visual arts affected growth of scientific knowledge. (HBLL Search Catalog)

McMurrich, J. Playfair. Leonardo Da Vinci The Anatomist. Carnegie Institution of Washington. 1930. This is a study of Leonardo Da Vinci’s contribution to the science of anatomy. His illustrations were printed and were revolutionary in changing the way people looked at the human body. (HBLL Search Catalog)

Ivins, William M. “What about the ‘Fabrica’ of Vesalius?”. Three Vesalian Essays. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1952. The essay covers the significance of Andreas Vesalius’ illustrations and how they contributed to science during the Renaissance. (This essay was cited the footnotes of Eisenstein’s book so I found the essay in the library)

Hsieh, Chia-Chuan. “Publishing the Raphael Cartoons and the Rise of Art-Historical Consciousness in England, 1707-1764.” The Historical Journal. Vol. 52 Iss. 4. Cambridge University Press, 2009. This article covers the effects of the ability to recreate famous art paintings through print beginning with the Raphael Cartoons. This new printing ability sparked a new wave of interest in the field of Art History. (HBLL Search Log, Periodical Section)

Robinson, Francis. “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print.” Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 27 Iss. 1. Cambridge University Press, 1993. The article addresses that one of the reasons Muslims avoided using print so long was because they valued calligraphy more so. Interesting how a love for visual art can keep one from accepting technology. (The catalog said they had it, but I was misled and ended up using a scanned version online instead)

Annotated Bibliography: The History of Print up until the 1700s.

First off, I would like to say that my Annotated Bibliography was quite the library adventure. Consisting of two trips, each hours long, aggravated allergies and runny noses, and getting way too familiar with the fifth floor, the topic of my bibliography is "The History of Print up to the 1700s". The first time I went to the library, I was there for two hours and only found one source. However, after meeting with Dr. Burton and getting some good advice, I was able to find an abundance of material the second time around. Out of all my sources, I spent the most time perusing the Fleuron Anthology. To anyone who is interested in the history of fonts and letter decorations, this is the book to take a gander at. I never realized how interesting printed "arabesques" could be until I looked over this book. All-in-all, I enjoyed my experience learning about the history of print (fonts, ink, paper, Gutenberg, and typography).


S. H. Steinberg. Five Hundred Years of Printing. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Harmondsworth, Middlesex : Penguin Books, 1966. Print.

Five Hundred Years of Printing covers all the different phases of printing through the centuries. It covers early typography (Roman Type, Gothic Type), Gutenberg, the spread of printing throughout Europe, publishing, book illustration, patrons, official and private presses, periodical presses, libraries, censorship, the Incunabula Period, and printing in the vernacular.


Sir, Francis Meynell. Fleuron Anthology. Ed. Herbert Simon. Boston: Boston : David R. Godine, 1979. Print.

I absolutely fell in love with this book. The Fleuron Anthology covers the history of typography. Its pages are filled with beautiful pictures of some of the earliest prints of different kinds of font, printers' flowers and arabesques, initial letters, and title pages. It also included several chapters on notable printers of the time.

McKenzie (Donald Francis), D. F. A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade, 1641-1700. Ed. Maureen Bell. Oxford ; New York: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

This book is basically a chronological almanac or journal consisting of papers, documents, and records concerning the London book trade between the years of 1641-1700. It was a huge, old, dusty book that aggravated my allergies. The cramped, printed paragraphs made my eyes blurry. Needless to say, this wasn't my favorite book. However, it was a helpful source guide when searching for references to the topic.

Edward, Pickard Hall. Printing : Its Parentage, Progress, and Practice, with some Account of the 'Authorised Version of the Bible' and of the Clarendon Press, Oxford. Oxford: Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1876. Print.

Besides being a mouthful to pronounce, Printing is composed of four parts: The Progress of Printing, The Practice of Printing, The Newspaper Press, and the Bible. The Progress of Printing consisted of an in-depth history of typography, having extensive information about different styles of fonts. The Practice of Printing takes it even further, with information about kinds of paper used, printing companies, and different types of ink. It was also filled with examples of ornate printed pages from centuries ago.

Lewis, John Noel Claude. Anatomy of Printing : The Influences of Art and History on its Design. New York: New York : Watson-Guptill Publications, 1970. Print.

Anatomy of Printing covers the background and beginning of printing, the reformation of the printing press, printing in the Renaissance, the waning of printing, printing in eighteenth century England, the Baroque and the Rococo, printing and the Neo-Classical movement, the Industrial Revolution, Art Nouveau, and modern printing (Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Constructivism, modern typesetting).

Crawford, Douglas C. McMurtrie, Douglas. The Invention of Printing : A Bibliography. Ed. John Adamson. New York: New York : Burt Franklin, 1942. Print.

Crawford covers printing in the Orient and in Europe, going over textile printing, playing cards, metal engravings and woodcuts, block books and binders stamps. He then covers the history of printing inventions, 16th century to the modern day. He has several chapters devoted to Gutenberg and the technique of the School of Gutenberg. He also goes over the technique of the School of the Dutch.

Crandall Historic Printing Museum: A Diamond in the Rough

Walking through the wooden doorway felt like travelling back in time. The hardwood floors and colonial feel made it seem like I was touring historic monuments in Philadelphia. I had to keep reminding myself that I was in downtown Provo. The man behind the desk was very gracious and let me explore the rooms while also giving me a tour. There were four rooms with different replica presses in each: the Gutenberg press, Ben Franklin’s printing press, Palmyra’s Grandin press, and the original Desert News print shop.

More about the King James Bible

Visiting the KJV exhibit at the library (you can read about my experience here)really sparked my interest in the history and background of the printed bible. I had seen articles about a documentary about the coming forth of the King James Version Bible in the Daily Universe that would be on BYU TV, so I thought I would watch it. The second part of the three part series deals a lot with how vital printing was to the spread of the Bible to the masses, especially as it was translated into the vernaculars. There was some really interesting things I learned that I never knew or had even thought of before...

Delving into the Depths of the Library: Fort Worth Edition (An annotated bibliography on the history and influence of the printed book)

Rachel recently posted about her experience "delving into the depths of the library", and I had a similar experience at some different libraries. Since I'm home for the Thanksgiving break, I didn't have access to everyone's favorite library, the HBLL. Instead, I got to explore two of the Fort Worth Public Libraries.

The Rise of the Author: Delving into the Depths of the Library

I decided to look into the Rise of the Author before the 1700's because of what we've talked about in class concerning who really authored oral epics.  It was an interesting idea to me that an individual author hasn't always been the writer of a book, like a group of people who will write a autobiography for someone famous, or come up as a group with the idea for a book.  I thought it was interesting that those people to whom we attribute great epics might not have been the sole writers; it might have been a conglomeration of ideas, a hodge-podge of stories through generations.  And we don't even know who wrote Beowulf!

Well, I wanted this exploration into the print resources of the library for our bibliography requirement to be authentic, so I spent over two and a half hours walking up and down flights of stairs, sitting at computers, and then walking up and down more flights of stairs and rows of bookshelves until it was done!

The magnificent HBLL

I decided to look up sources pertaining to the "Rise of the Author before 1700," first because it sounds cool, and second because my desire to write a book and be an author is helping me to feel particularly kinship-y with this class of people.

Annotated Bibliography: History of Typography, 1450-1700

Just a quick definition: what is typography?  "...it is not merely the shapes of letters and the manner of making them that requires study but also their size, the spacing between lines, the size and proportion of the printed page..."  (B.L. Ullman, The origin and development of humanistic script, 1960)

 Included is my bibliography with information on the author, publisher, and year. There is a short synopsis on each source and in brackets at the end of each annotation, I include how I found the source and what it was like to consult it in print.

Sanskrit, English, and Greek: Recreating a Rosetta Stone

And the process continues! I think when it comes to translating languages or even just basic communicating, the process is never really finished. Even though each group created a Rosetta Stone, a finished product of translation between 3 languages, there were still imperfections, places to improve, things to add in. And so this is our process went…

We received the talipot palm leaf from the ancient Indian group. Thankfully, it was very legible and not terribly difficult to inscribe. We originally knew that it was written in Sanskrit, so that was our starting point. We noticed that there was a line, almost continuous, running through the text, but we didn’t know whether it went on the top or the bottom. Like Dr. Burton said, when using new languages, we have to reorient ourselves, whether we read the language right to left, clockwise, or upside down. From there, we tried to look up the translation character for character or word for word, but there are thousands of characters for Sanskrit, each connoting a different sound which then creates a word. We scrapped that idea and tried to find a specific authentic phrase they might have used. I knew, because Rachel is in our blogging group, that the Vedas were a sacred scriptural text very prominent in ancient Aryan culture. We then looked up the Vedas and found that the inscription came from the last line of the Rig Veda Book One, Hymn One. The phrase looked like this…

(check out this website for more on the Vedas’ history, content, and translation)

Mayan+English+Ogham+Stone= Daunting Process

This post pertains to the second part of our Rosetta Stone project, the actual creation of the Rosetta Stone! (For a recap of part one check out my previous post). We had the fortune (or misfortune) of receiving the Mayan group's original phrase, which was written in Mayan hieroglyphs.

Here is what ensued:

Failing at Hieroglyphics?

I think it’s about time I commented on our civilizations ende

avor to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ideally, we planned on finding a book on Ancient Egyptian characters, matching up the characters

with English words and coming up with a coherent message about written knowledge.

However, that was not the case, and I don’t think that’s what happened in reality either when original languages needed to be translated back in the day. Unless you had a Rosetta Stone, deciphering a language into had to be a lot of guess work.

There weren’t always language experts who could help you, and there were no keys that would tell you exactly what pictures of birds and staffs meant.

Such was the case with our group. We must have looked through at least 10 books on Egyptian hieroglyphics and every single one had different interpretations of each character. And in our search for knowledge, we found several difficulties with deciphering Egyptian.

First, Egyptians did not use vowels. A lot of phonetic words in

hieroglyphics typically left out vowel characters main

ly because the Egyptians considered them unimportant. This greatly contrasts with written language today in which we heavily rely on vowel sounds.

Second, I predetermined that hieroglyphs were simply a list of symbols in which each one a distinct independent meaning. Wow, was I

wrong. Different characters form clusters of each other the same way different letters in our alphabet make up words. As you can see in one alphabet on the right, the letter E corresponds with the double dash in hieroglyphics. However, in several of the books I looked at in the library, the double dash actually indicates dualism. Such discrepancies between hieroglyphic alphabets are everywhere and its

almost impossible to find the pure source.

Thirdly, there is no standardized Egyptian hieroglyph chart of today. Each book we read had different interpretations of the characters, and in fact some of them didn’t even address the characters that were on our artifact. It was frustrating. In order to truly decipher the code we needed the exact source that the original artifact was written from. In other words, we needed the book that the group before used. Since we could not find the exact source, it was impossible to come up with a true translation.

So was the project a complete failure? No it wasn’t. Our group got to experience first-hand that not all translations are always correct. In fact, some of them may be utterly wrong and fictional. It makes me wonder how much we can actually trust in modern translations of ancient written sources. It only takes one person to alter a sentence’s meaning for generations to come.

King James Bible

The Bible is the single most influential book in the history of mankind, and no where is this more true than with the King James Bible and the English language. I had a chance to go see an original King James Version (KJV) Bible at the exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library, an experience I won't soon forget. When I first came to BYU and heard about the exhibit, I kind of took it for granted. I didn't really realize what an opportunity this was, having a 400 year old and older sacred texts within a 5 minute walk, until I took the time to go to the exhibit and look at everything. Here's what I found:

Gutenburg, Reformation, Revolution

*Since I missed last week's post, this week's will be a two-part blog post about why the Protestant Reformation, Printing Revolution, and Scientific Revolution might not have been possible without the discoveries made by Johann Gutenberg, and the Gutenberg Bible itself.

Gutenberg, Reformation, Revolution

As both Americans and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, freedom of speech and freedom of religion are both very important to us. We seek to bring the gospel to all people, no matter what their gender, race, or income. With the church education fund, we work to make education available to all, and enable each willing citizen to take part in the issues of their community and provide for their families. We believe that God is "no respecter of persons", and so it is important to us to allow everyone an equal opportunity at life. The United States of America was founded on the principles of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.

In 15th century Europe, only the few elect were able to own and read Bibles. Every book produced in Europe had to be copied by hand. The Catholic Church held a monopoly on religion throughout greater Europe. Priests were believed to be the bridge between God and the people, which made the people dependent upon them and separated the masses from God. "Indulgences", pardons for their sins, could be bought from the priests for a price. The church took it upon itself to forgive the sinners instead of leaving sacred matters between God and His people. The Bible was written and church services were conducted in Latin, keeping the people even further from establishing their own opinion of religion and their own testimony. It was the age-old battle between the oligarchy and the serfs, the elite and the masses.

In the time and place in which we live, I don't think we can fully comprehend what that would be like. Too bad if you had an insatiable desire to know the truth or decide for yourself; the Pope and the priests held the keys to the gospel... keys they refused to give out to just anyone.

In approximately 1455, Johann Gutenberg produced the first printed Bible. With Gutenberg's new technological discovery, books (printed knowledge) now became more available to the masses, lowering the price of books and written material (since they could now be produced in greater quantities), opening up issues of interest, religion, politics, and new ideas to the general public. Besides wealth, the main divide between the oligarchs and the serfs was education. After all... knowledge is power. However, the oligarchs weren't so happy about these new developments. Did they want the power to be shared and spread out equally? Of course not. So, in an attempt to at least filter the knowledge that was now being distributed at greater quantities and speeds, they conspired to censor the material that was being printed.

Today, the issue of "the rich vs. the poor", or the "oligarchy vs. the serfs" is still hot and prevalent. Occupy Wall Street, anyone? Though the protest is over money, rather than freedom of religion, Occupy Wall Street is a "leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders, and political persuasions. The one thing that we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."

The Catholic church's decision to keep the teachings of the Bible inaccessible to the common public was not only an infringement on freedom of religion, but also freedom of the press. By withholding information that would give the public the power over themselves and give them a direct connection to God, they made themselves a needed commodity as middle-men.

Johann Gutenberg was the first man to print a book on a printing press he crafted. The 42-lined Bible he printed symbolized something very special-- higher education and information made ready for the public. No longer would knowledge remain elusive to educated, the wealthy, the priests, the oligarchs... soon, everyone would be given the chance to read, know, and decide for themselves. From a single printing press in Mainz, Germany, sprung the Printing Revolution. Starting with only a single machine, by 1500, over twenty-million copies of the Bible had been printed throughout Europe. The explosion of knowledge that resulted from the Printing Revolution also helped give rise to the Scientific Revolution, and also greatly factored into the democratization of knowledge.



http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/basics.html

http://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-religion/protestant-reformation.htm

http://occupywallst.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_Revolution#The_Printing_Revolution