{"id":812,"date":"2020-04-01T13:42:55","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T13:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/?p=812"},"modified":"2020-04-01T13:42:55","modified_gmt":"2020-04-01T13:42:55","slug":"blank-pages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/2020\/04\/01\/blank-pages\/","title":{"rendered":"On blank pages of manuscript letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over a week ago, the excellent Sarah Werner blogged about<\/a> blank pages in early modern printed books. She starts with blank type and moves on to the way in which blank pages are represented in digitised resources without actually being reproduced (cf. “This page intentionally left blank”). It’s a great post and you should go read it now if you haven’t already.<\/p>\n

Her blog post made me think about blank pages in early modern manuscripts. Like blank pages in printed books, they too can be surprisingly interesting. Here are some ways in which blank \u2013 and “blank” \u2013 manuscript pages can be worth a closer look.<\/p>\n

(Note: I mostly work with letters, and have spent most of my time digging around in the British State Papers, and what I have to say here is coloured by the materials I am familiar with. Some of what follows may not hold for the manuscripts you work on.)<\/p>\n

“Blank” manuscript pages<\/h3>\n

When is a blank page actually blank? People appear to have greatly varying criteria for blankness, if we take that to mean ‘a page not worth noting’. For instance, manuscripts in archives are often foliated rather than paginated, but sometimes only pages with text on them are deemed worthy of folio numbers. I’ve blogged about this<\/a> as it applies to the Cecil Papers so I won’t repeat myself here \u2013 in short, empty pages are not always foliated, which makes the boundary between foliation and item numbers fuzzy, and can make citing a ‘blank’ page surprisingly tricky.<\/p>\n

Most of the letters in the British state papers of the early 1600s are written on bifoliums \u2013 sheets of paper folded in two, pretty much the same size as an A3 sheet folded over to form four A4-sized pages. Here’s an example, a letter from Sir Charles Cornwallis, the English ambassador to Spain, to Sir Robert Cecil in London, dated 10 September 1605 (TNA SP 94\/12 ff. 28-29; images from State Papers Online, 1509\u20131714<\/em><\/a> [SPOL]):<\/p>\n

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Very typically, letters in the state papers have text only on the first page, and leave the\u00a0 inside of the bifolium blank (pages 2\u20133, if you like). But even from these tiny images you can see that p. 3 isn’t entirely blank, as in the top right corner there are some numbers: the TNA foliation stamp (“29”), above which is a much older page number (“913”). This page, then, was blank when the letter was sent; when the papers were filed at some point in the 17th century, a page number was added; and when the papers were bound at TNA two centuries later, a folio number was stamped next to it.<\/p>\n

The next document presents a more complex case: this is a letter from Richard Cocks to Thomas Wilson, dated 25 March 1603 (TNA SP 94\/11 ff. 20\u201321; SPOL):<\/p>\n

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Here, the text of the letter continues onto page 2. The following page looks blank at first, until you notice jottings on it; and the verso (p. 4) is half covered with writing. Here are pages 3\u20134 in larger size (click for even bigger versions):<\/p>\n

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In the top right corner of p. 3 there’s the foliation stamp again. But scattered across the page are half a sentence and what looks like calculations of something. These are in the hand of the recipient, so it looks like Wilson at some point used this blank page as scrap paper. And this is also what he did with p. 4 \u2013 even though that was\u00a0not<\/em> blank, as it has the superscription on it:<\/p>\n