Lady Day (and the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents)

I just realized that today is Lady Day – that is, Annunciation. Once upon a time, this was New Year’s Day. It probably derives from the date being originally set on the Spring equinox, which makes a pretty sensible first day of the year if your concept of the world derives from observations of the sun. (Not that the autumn equinox nor the solstices would be any worse, but Spring = growth = life = youth and we all grow old and die, so I would argue Spring is the more likely candidate for ‘beginning of the year’ than the other seasons.)

At the moment I’m thinking about dates. Or to be exact, I am working on dating documents. One might think that dating was one of the easier tasks in creating an edition – the difficulties of determining dates of some documents notwithstanding. As I’m working on an edition of, mainly, letters, happily they almost always include a dateline.

If only it was this simple. I have found to my cost that there were three problems which I needed to solve.

1) New Style vs. Old Style

a. The Gregorian Calendar

In the early 1600s, two (main) calendars were used in Europe: the Julian calendar, dating back to Antiquity, and the Gregorian calendar, newly installed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. The Gregorian calendar was designed to deal with the problem of solar years being slightly longer than 364 days, which the Julian calendar failed to adequately compensate for, for which reason by 1600 festivities originally set by solar dates (namely the equinoxes and solstices) had drifted 10 days in the solar calendar. In addition to improving the correlation between the numerical and solar calendars, the Gregorian calendar shifted the entire year ten days forward in order to fix the present discrepancy, so that ten days were “skipped” or “lost”. (Or twelve days in the case of UK, which adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, by which time the discrepancy between calendars had increased to twelve days. This, by the by, is why the fiscal year in the UK starts on 6 April: the commercial sphere found it easier to stick to a 365-day period for calculating annual rents, taxes, etc, than to skip the 12 days and recalculate everything.)

Anyway, there were two obstacles for all of Europe to happily adopt the new calendar. First, the Gregorian calendar was established by the Pope – and this being the period of the Reformation, many Protestants states did not rush to embrace things of Catholic origin. Second, old habits are hard to kick, and it took time for innovations to spread and take root. Long story short, Catholic Europe adopted the new calendar immediately or very soon, and the Protestant north did not. England did not convert to the Gregorian calendar until 1752, so that for nearly two centuries the British Isles and most of continental Europe followed different calendars. (Interestingly, Tuscany hung on to the Julian calendar until 1750, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands adopted the new calendar in 1583, so this matter did not blindly follow the religious divide.)

The Gregorian and Julian calendars very quickly became to be referred to as “New Style” (NS) and “Old Style” (OS) (or some other variants thereof).

b. New Year’s Day

The other (to a modern eye, annoying) problem with pre-Gregorian dates is that the beginning of the year was calculated from 25 March (see top). [ETA: But see the bottom of this blog entry.] In other words, a full year ran from 25 March to 24 March. Thus, for dates between January 1 and March 24, the year is one less than in our modern reckoning. However (and here it gets interesting), starting with Venice in 1522, European states slowly started to adopt calculating the beginning of the year from January 1. Much of the Catholic block had already shifted to this reckoning years before the (creation and) adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

To sum up a bit, here is a comparison of dates, depending on where the writer (dater?) was located:

      England (OS):   15 January 1605    26 March 1606    24 December 1606
      Spain (NS):       25 January 1606    5 April 1606           3 January 1607

However, the above examples are drawn from a theoretical ‘official’ calendar. In practise, many in England, and many Englishmen on the continent, used New Style dates. The catch is that while some datelines do note that the date is “stilo antiqua” or “nova”, most dates are not accompanied by a mention of which calendar they are following. This is not a problem in many contexts where the style can be guessed, and especially between 26 March and 21 December, when at least the year will be the same. But as is evident from the above examples, a date in the problematic quarter could potentially be in either year.

The traditional way to counter this problem in historical studies is to use double-dating: each year is marked so that the year according to modern reckoning is clear. For instance, 1605/6 indicates 1606 in our reckoning. This double-dating is of course only used for dates falling in the problematic quarter. (Double-dating was also used by an increasing number of English writers before 1752.)

Having shown that establishing the correct date of a document is far from a trivial or simple matter, let us move on to the second problem.

2) Assigning dates to problematic or undated documents

This was partly covered in 1b. above, but keeping in mind the problem of establishing the dates of documents according to modern reckoning as outlined in part 1, this can be a daunting task. In practice, it boils down to comparison with other documents of (ostensibly) the same period, namely other letters, and the lists and abstracts mentioned under part 2. The clues include mentions of dates and contents of previous letters as repeated in other, clearly dated, letters, and in lists and abstracts. They also include comparing information in the problematic letters with known historical dates (such as the Gunpowder Plot). The editor may also have to resort to palaeographical analysis to determine the dating of letters – this is something I have done both for entire documents (where the handwriting was “too early” for the year attributed by the repository), and for specific instances (where others had previously read “1603” I established that the number was in fact “1605”).

Sometimes a document cannot be dated to a specific date. In these cases the editor has no choice but to also use span dates, and ante quem and post quem dates.

3) Deciding on a policy of dating

What is the date of a document, and what date(s) should the editor assign to documents?

For letters, these questions have a seemingly obvious answer: the date of writing. But what about letters started on day 1 and finished on day 3? What about letters with postscripts dated 5 days after the beginning of the letter? And do we need to consider the date of sending of the letter, instead of the date of writing? (Perhaps more relevant in more modern times, where postal markings reveal dates of conveyance.)

– The easy option is to use the last date in a letter, unless the editor feels that there is some justification in assigning a span date (“1-5” or “1×5 January 1605”).

But what about copies of letters (or other documents)? Does one assign them the date of the writing of the original document (see above), or is the date of composition of the copy the one to use?

– The text-based solution is the easiest, and perhaps makes the most sense. That is, to use the date of the original document, and mark the date of copying (or estimation thereof) in the notes. Using the date of the original document allows for the copy to function as a surrogate when the letters are viewed in chronological order, so that there are no leaps in the textual continuity.

Moving on, what about notes, memoranda and the like?

– Here a date of composition seems the obvious one to use.

But what about abstracts of letters (sent or received), or lists of correspondence (sent and/or received)? These often lack a date of composition, but do contain dates of letters they refer to.

– The only sensible approach would be to calculate a likely date of composition, based in part on the contents of the document (ie. on or, which is more usual, some time after the date of the last letter in the list or abstract).

Finally, a technical point: when creating a digital edition, the editor may be forced to assign specific dates when none are evident, in order to satisfy the requirements of the computing process. These should always be noted both in the notes for the document, and within the encoding.

—-

This blog ran much longer than I thought it would. I suppose it is evidence of how the matter is far from trivial, and requires proper editorial consideration and attention. Yesterday I spent a similar while thinking about the ordering of documents in editions, and what kind of numbering or IDs to assign to them. Maybe tomorrow I’ll tackle misplaced sheets and letters – the disparity between archival ordering and chronological ordering can pose tricky problems..

—-

ETA: regarding dating the New Year in Early Modern England

It had not crossed my mind to actually look at the evidence to see when people in Early Modern England referred to New Year. So I had a look in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence, searching for “new year”. And what did I find? In the CEEC, 27 hits for “new year”, almost all of them pointing to 1 January (in some cases the date could not be determined). In the CEEC Supplement, 1 hit for 1 January, and 1 for 25 March. (There may be more instances in the CEEC and CEECSU: this was a cursory search.)

The next step would be to try to determine from the CEEC or other corpora – or, since the CEEC corpora are compiled from editions (which often modernize dates), directly from manuscript sources, whether people changed the year in their datelines after 1 January or after 25 March. I mean people in England, and in particular people like those in CEEC who referred to 1 January as New Year’s Day. ..but maybe I need not do this now. I do need to remember to eschew generalisations which I can’t justify, but I can definitely make claims about the material in my edition, where this does not seem to occur: people seem to be consistent in using NS/OS according to their surroundings or, when deviating from their given practice, make this change explicit.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?

To be honest, I’m really quite proud of my newest publication, “Early East India Company merchants and a rare word for sex” (forthcoming June 2011 in Words in Dictionaries and History. Essays in honour of R.W. McConchie). It’s an investigation of cultural history through looking at a bawdy word that comes up a single time in the letters of the English East India Company merchants in Japan (1613-1623). I start by trawling through a huge pile of Early and Late Modern English dictionaries, then get to the beef and discuss the word and its instances in EModE and LModE texts. Somehow in my conclusion I manage to bring in the various strands and add even more, so that an investigation of historical lexicography turns into an insight on Early Modern English merchants and their reading habits, and their taste of satirical texts.

Anyway, check it out, it’s quite fun, honest! (You can always skip the bit about dictionaries.)

But my point for this blog arises from the observation that people use euphemisms when talking about sex. For scholars, as someone put it, this happens by “hiding it behind learned curtains”. That is, when discussing the naughty stuff, switch to Latin. Other people switch register (like those I discuss in my aforesaid article), or language: for instance, when Samuel Pepys writes in his diary about liaisons with women other than his wife, he often switches to French:

“I [went] to St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and there saw at church my pretty Betty Michell, and thence to the Abbey, and so to Mrs. Martin, and there did what ‘je voudrais avec her …” (3rd June 1666, emphasis mine)

Anyway. The other day I read an interesting piece in the Japan Times Online about a late-19th-century Japanese traveller who visited Europe. The article is really a book review of the traveller’s memoirs, and in it there occurs the following paragraph:

He then goes on to detail over several pages, replete with quoted poetry and scholarly allusions, the ramifications for both geisha and customer of the practice [of buying sexual favours from geisha]. One understands — though there won’t be many modern Western readers who laugh out loud — that this use of a scholarly register and erudite references, augmented with bushels of pedantic detail, to discuss commercial sex and seduction is intended to be humorous.

Switching register as a marker of satire and humour I guess is a very common phenomenon — I’m sure we’ve all sent friends emails mimicking news flashes. In the case of the book reviewed in JTO, I found it amusing to find a reference to “learned curtains” being used for satirical effect – rather than straightforward euphemism – to talk about sexual practices. It makes a nice contrast to the works I looked at in and for my article.

I wonder if someone’s looked at this (kind of) practice in more detail?

1 Spaniard is worth 100 oranges

From SP 94/14 ff. 47-48, Cocks to Wilson as usual:

“the news is still confermed that the hollanders haue taken & Sunke all those Spanish gallions, & now is anexed that they haue Carid the Spaniards into Barberry, and Soulde them for Slaues, to say, on[e] Spaniard for 100 of orrenges & 4 or 5 for a bife / & 5 or 6 Spaniards in Exchange for on[e] ffleminge”

At this time (1607), not only were the English, Dutch, French and Spanish bickering with each other at sea, there were also pirates of all nations who would happily rob their own kinsmen. And this was a favourite sport: capture a ship and sail it to North Africa (“Barbary”), sell the captives for slaves, and take the loot home.

What I love about this above passage is the idea that the “Hollanders” have captured enough Spaniards to esteem them of little value – a man being worth only 100 oranges (!) sounds dirt cheap, as does 4 or 5 for “a beef”, or 5-6 in exchange for one Dutch or Flemish prisoner or slave kept in Barbary.

“French news”

Most of the time, Cocks (whose letters I’m working on) includes a disclaimer when he reports on news and rumours of, shall we say, less credibility:

“but I doe not beleeve that to be trew / for it is french news”
(SP 94/13 f.69r)

This made me think of national stereotypes and classic insults, but in fact it is not intended quite in that way, but rather:

“this is the comon report but most comonly french news proue false” (SP 94/12 f.89v)

..so instead of Cocks equating ‘French’ news as inherently false, he rather makes sure to underline that his sources come from France, and thus likely are street rumours, which more often than not prove not to be true, and therefore caveat lector:

“but this is french news / & therfore I refer both that and the rest vnto your better Consideration” (SP 94/13 f.19r)

But if he was perfectly aware that some of the news he relayed were ‘French’, why would he report them to England? In fact, he was directed to include such rumours in his reports. As Cocks himself acknowledged, his superiors at home were perfectly aware that:

“by the market fowlkes, a man may know how the market goeth”
(SP 94/14 f.126v)

Demonstration sign palaeography

I’ve been focussing on palaeography quite heavily recently, so naturally that was what attracted me in this image:
AlJazeera(AFP)
“Egyptian protesters gather for a demonstration at Tahrir Square in Cairo on the sixth day of angry revolt [AFP]”
(Taken from Al Jazeera, © AFP I guess..)

Anyway, so questions that interest me are things like “what bits do you need to make a letter/character?”, and “how can you tell a character is a certain character?”, and “what are characteristic (heh) features of characters?”.

In this light, it is interesting to see things like the banner in the above image. Features of interest:
– double “t” realized as majuscule letters, and ligatured
– “th” also ligatured, with the cross-stroke of “t” passing through the ascender of “h”
– “f” contains a loop – perhaps more usual in cursive scripts
– “g” raised above the line (descender and all) so that it is as high as letters with ascenders

Btw I do not intend this to be a comment on, say, the writing skill of those who native tongue is written in something else than the Roman alphabet (and in any case it is the native writers who do the oddest things – although I’ll have to come back to odd palaeographical details some other time). This post was obviously influenced by the ongoing events in Egypt, and is meant, in part, as a sign of solidarity. So glad to see very little violence and bloodshed. There’s too much of that in the world as is.

pig calligraphy

Not depicting pigs, I should say. Look at this example from a calligraphy manual from 1597:

pig-script

Looks like gibberish or code, but then your eye gets accustomed to the nudge in the middle of each letter, and it becomes readable. Voila, ig-pay alligraphy-cay.

(The above image was copied from the Digital Scriptorium of Columbia University Libraries / UC Berkeley (Google them. It’s an awesome site.) and is © Columbia University. I shouldn’t be using it like this, but look at it. Just look at it.)

Rant about code (“MS Office uses XML”)

The new .docx etc formats of the newer versions of Microsoft Office are done in XML. Hence the -x in the extension. The problem with this, however, is something we all know: all MS programs are bloated pieces of shit. Those of you who occasionally fiddle with HTML will probably have experimented with the oh-this-is-convenient “save as HTML” function in Word, only to look at the resulting code in stunned admiration of the amount of resulting crap MS has managed to program Office to include.

This is a different version of the same story (ie. a rant):

When I transcribe documents, I do this using plain text editors, and then save the resulting transcriptions as rtfs (ie. “rich text format”, plain text + moderate formatting). Mostly, I use the TextEdit program that comes in macs; occasionally I have used MS Word and saved as rtfs. The results look alike, but are different underneath the hood – and the fact that gives this away is the size of the text file, as the same document can be either 4KB or 49KB, depending on whether I’ve done it in TextEdit or MS Word.

Right, so here’s a clip of the text document in question – as you can see, there is very little formatting to deal with:

Looking at the code of this rtf file (I use a nifty little code editor called Smultron 😀 ), you can see that there’s not much code in there – as it should be:

But when I save it as rtf in MS Word, the difference is obvious and pronounced. This is the beginning of the resulting document viewed in Smultron:

..and this is the section of the text corresponding to those in images 1 and 2 above.

Check out and compare the stats at the bottom of images 2 and 4. Clearly MS Word is insane. The rtf saved from Word is twelve times the size it need be, and fifteen times the length in characters. The amount of code in the sane version is about 1,000 characters: in the MS Word version, it’s about 44,000 characters. Fourty-four thousand characters!!

So what’s my point? I guess this: Know Your Tools. At the very least, learn their failings, weaknesses and limitations.

NaTheWriMo Day 30 and then some

I meant to post this before Christmas – got derailed for a couple of weeks after my last post (did finish revising the article!), but then got in a week’s worth of NaTheWriMoing before Christmas, so let’s pretend I wrote this wrap-up message then.

Right. How did it go; how did I do? Let’s look at the figures.

NaTheWriMo November 2010
Day: 30
Word count: 4,200
Transcription word count: 45,850
Blog entries: 15

Plusses and minuses:

+ achieved 50k words!
– only 10% of it for thesis chapters

+ produced text nigh daily
– didn’t produce text daily

+ even this silly self-imposed deadline helped

I’d say that overall this was a positive experience, and I do intend to revisit it next year, probably in February.

Right, in the meanwhile, the year will change, and resolutions need be made. Maybe the odd blog post too, but we shall see..

NaTheWriMo Day 24: Wrong month

This is really the wrong month for me to be doing a NaTheWriMo. What I’m doing atm is fiddling around with the specs of my edition – this includes lots of thinking about little things, namely how to represent manuscript feature X in my finished digital edition, and thus it involves less of the Writing Out Stuff At Length. But never mind, I’ll wrap it up having done more than nil, and that’s something. I hope to finish editorial fiddling about – as well as the edition itself (for the most part) (inshallah) – by the end of the year, so I think I’ll come back to having a NaTheWriMo in January.

..actually, the last couple days have been spent in going over my latest article. I do hate revision so. It’s a good article, but I’ve got A Problem which needs Solving, and it’s bloody hard to do without a) breaking the flow, b) seriously increasing the word count, or c) spending several days on it. Bah. I think I’ll ditch it for now and return to it come next month.

NaTheWriMo November 2010
Day: 24
Word count: 4,135
Transcription word count: 26,000
Blog entries: 14