Ecologies of Paper in the Early Modern World: Session 1 | Academic Conference

[00:00:02]uh welcome everybody to paper ecologies in the early modern world a two-day virtual conference coming to you via zoom not from the head of annadale in the english lake district but from the san marino hunting library in southern california my name is steve hindle i'm the director of research at the huntington where i oversee the fellowship program the lecture program and the conference program and it's my pleasure to be your host for the next two days were we gathered in rothenberg hall at the huntington for this program i suspect that we would have had perhaps 80 maybe 100 attendees in the room as of this morning there were 478 registrants for this program so i'd like to start by thanking everybody out there wherever you are for your interest in this program and for taking the time to attend i do hope that the program will offer a substantive distraction from the stress and uncertainty of the last few days so the quality of the paper ecologies program and you can see on screen here the remarkable array of speakers that have been put together is a tribute to the two scholars who've put the line up together uh in their capacity as conveners shira brisbane wave shearer and caroline fowler shira and caroline applied for the funding and resources to support this program almost three years ago so the program has been a long time in the planning and i'm grateful to them for their hard work and for their willingness to reimagine the programme as we were forced to migrate it online i'm equally grateful to all the participants for their willingness to participate despite the fact that they weren't getting all expenses paid to come to southern california i should add as an aside that the competition for conferences to take place at the huntington in 2022 and 23 will shortly be posted on the huntington website with a closing date in the spring of 2021.

[00:02:07]before i briefly introduce shira and caroline i have some thank yous of my own and a couple of housekeeping announcements i'd like to express my personal gratitude to the dedicated and creative staff in the research division at the huntington who've done so much to put the program together to catherine wary miller natalie serrano and juan gomez who have worked tirelessly on the administrative arrangements on publicity design and on processes processes for registration and reimbursement and also to our audio visual production manager ben tuttle aka the voice of god for all his technical assistance and expertise in terms of housekeeping those of you who were registered for the program before 6 pm pst yesterday will have received the bios of all the speakers and the abstracts of their papers and we wanted to do that to ensure that we save time will be no need for formal introductions at the beginning of each presentation each speaker will give a presentation of 15 minutes or so sharing their screen where appropriate and after each group of presentations either shearer or caroline will moderate the q a although the chat function of zoom has been disabled we encourage all of you to use the q a function to submit questions to the panelists finally then let me um introduce you to our two conveners very briefly caroline fowler is star director of the research and academic program at the clark art institute and is the author of drawing and the senses which appeared in 2017 and the art of paper which appeared with yale last year shira brisman is assistant professor in the history of arts department at the university of pennsylvania and the author of albrecht europe and the epistolatory mode of address which appeared in 2016.

[00:04:03]so i'll turn the virtual podium over to shira to introduce the themes of the programme thank you shira thank you so much steve and thank you for that warm welcome and i'd like to thank you you and catherine wary miller for your support of this program and for your creativity and flexibility in its planning so as steve mentioned the idea for this conference emerged in 2018 from conversations with my extraordinary co-organizer caroline fowler many of you are familiar with cairo's research and the contributions she has made to the study of paper in the early modern world as a material and as a surface for our statistic trials when we applied to steve at the huntington with this program he responded with enthusiasm offering us a calendar date of november 2020.

[00:04:56]i remember cara and i laughing because it seems so far away like a pinpoint in some sci-fi future and this week i found an email in which i'd written to her who knows what the world will look like then i actually said that this is before i knew what zoom was it's through cairo's research and the research of many of our panelists and audience members today that have come to think of paper as refused rags torn and pulverized then transformed into a new surface awaiting a mark one of the pleasures of studying early modern paper is handling it making appointments in libraries archives and museums and feeling that jolt in your heart when a colleague at one of those institutions wheels in your cart or delivers your box working with paper is always intimate you touch it you turn it over let your eye catch its stains delight in its marginalia peer through it hold it up to the light feel its fragility and its strength paper is the place of trial and error and error failure and success one of my favorite pieces of paper is at the morgan library in new york it shows a trial that albrecht durer essayed as he was working towards an engraving of adam and eve the drawing is actually two pieces of paper so adam and eve are cut out and they're pushed together and then there's a third vertical strip inserted in between and so we can see the artist cutting and collaging he's trying to determine how close to each other these two figures should be the promise of proximity to paper and to one another and to the paradisical san marino gardens is what enabled carol and me to lure our list of illustrious speakers to participate in this conference we'd like to encourage them to participate as actively in the q a and discussions of one another's papers as they would in person and we thank them for their commitment to our topic and for showing up today from their respective homes and different time zones especially john who's joining us from australia and um we're very grateful to them for happily trading out the california sun for the chance to share their work with a wider audience located all over the world so as a substitute for roaming together in the huntington gardens let me say a few words about the ecologies in the title of our conference today ecologies of paper in the early modern world the world ecology is a relational term it speaks to the interdependency of organisms objects and systems with their endurance one that promotes the conservation of natural resources so what does it mean to construct histories of the ecologies of early modern paper this project might mean that we're focusing on one particular support paper as the locus of human claims upon landscapes the ancient greek word ecos house is embedded in the german okayala g which was coined in the 19th century by ernst heckel this etymology secures the place of architecture as a primary means of mediation between organism and environment one way to situate ecologies of paper then as a method is to think of paper as playing the role of architecture paper as a host to ideas that establish the relationship of humans to land to do this is to focus on documents that distribute resources or restrict their use that attempt to establish the domination of settlers over indigenous populations and their habitats it is to figure the relationship of currency to capitalism and nature to nationhood such an approach to names the authority that paper holds its ability to document charter legalize and establish networks of credit and debt its constitutive role in the structural reshaping of society to test such claims requires challenging the durability of paper against the unrecorded operations of oral traditions migrations destructions and reliances on customary laws while paper has the potential to protect such ephemeralities it can also erase them so paper in the artist studio on the writer's desk under the notary seal and in the printer's shop was never merely a support it served as the site of conversion paper was not only where ideas were externalized with a particular immediacy to become visible expressions and communications but it also embodied the paradox that worthless rags run through the water mill could signify capital paper was on the one hand something to keep over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries handmark sheets such as sketches and correspondences gained increasing material value and imported status as a collected item during this time both drawings and letters made their way into the collections of connoisseurs but paper also traveled far it was imported from african africa to europe then brought by europeans to the colonies of new spain along with domesticated animals weeds disease a spreadable religion and an infrastructure for subjugation so where do these two approaches the one that considers paper as a binding agent between organism and environment and the other that understands paper as involved in a process of remaking where do they meet our conference brings together 12 scholars based in three continents each of whom has a different answer to propose geographically distanced by the pandemic our speakers are brought together by and some will even comment upon our era's virtual alternative to the material properties of paper and the social affordances of shared space so now with um great thanks to caroline and to our speakers i'm going to hand things over to our first speaker as as steve said we are not reading the bios and introductions we're just going to say their names and let them launch so ashish please take us away with the first paper um thank you so much so before before i get started i just wanted to say thank you to um carol and chyra um for um putting this uh amazing conference together and thank you to um to steve and juan and the the wonderful people at the huntington um it's it's uh it's it's wonderful that we're able to join and and uh uh of course unfortunate that we can't see each other in person um but i i'm so delighted to be here um and and so delighted to everybody for for taking the time to join us today um especially given the shall we say slightly distracting circumstances um we all find ourselves in um i also have to acknowledge that um you know i've i've actually not given a talk with powerpoint on um on zoom before so if if somehow things aren't going um quite right i hope somebody will ping me in the chat and um we'll we'll we'll uh try to sort it out so what i'm going to do right now is so my talk today um just before before we get started i just want to say that i'm going to talk in some ways um although i'm chronicle i i'm the first in the um in the um in the uh um in the in the in the lineup i'm actually kind of gonna be talking from the the chronological end of the period in which we are in which we're discussing so i just wanted to just wanted to say that so i'll get started now um so my talk is called paper early modernity and the matter of american constitutionalism okay so in 1824 an english author named john cartwright sent a copy of a book uh that he had written to thomas jefferson cartwright's book was called the english constitution produced and illustrated and he asked jefferson a question where could one find a copy of the american constitution jefferson replied by invoking anatomy our constitution jefferson informed cartwright could never be located on paper because it was as he put it engraved in our hearts a work created by infusing the rights of nature into the bodies of men by contrast jefferson quipped locating the english constitution required searching into musty records hunting up royal parchments and investigating the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry the american constitution the former president emphatically stated was not really a document but instead particles of matter which composed the bodies of the americans who brought its principles to life during the american revolution jefferson formed cartwright royal subjects had transformed themselves into national citizens by irrigating an imperial political order congested with paper jefferson's fellow founding fathers shared his belief uh that the american revolution had birthed a new political body in which power was divorced from paper um for example uh as alexander hamilton put it in 1775 the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or mostly records instead hamilton declared these rights are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of divinity itself and other revolutionaries as you can see from the screen agree so why were early americans and their transatlantic supporters so determined to divorce the united states constitution from the tangibility of paper after all the u.s constitution is quite obviously a document and americans revere its documentary status and that like the early american ambivalence about the documentary nature of the constitution and their desire to divorce its materiality from its matter to borrow jefferson's words raises a question of how the now well-established interrelationship between paper and statecraft that characterize the world of early modern europe changed as that world was thrown into upheaval during the age of late 18th century revolutions i do not need to remind this audience of the scholarship that has established the centrality to early modern european statecraft of both theories and practices of rule that saw sovereigns attempt to control and direct the production and archivization of official written information as the work of among others nicholas popper and noah millstone has emphasized england was no exception to this pan-european trend for the reformation-era english state saw that like that of its spanish french and dutch counterparts the development of theories and practices of politics that linked concepts of state sovereignty and political wisdom with the production and control of information inscribed on paper a regime of governance via paperwork that again in parallel to the continental confessional regimes refracted into overseas space as england in the 17th century began to establish a nascent empire in both america and in asia but between 1776 and 1783 as we all know the imperial regime came to an end in north america birthing in its stead a new american nation state predicated not upon the theory of monarch of monarchical constitutional sovereignty prevalent in the early modern world but instead a democratic one i will argue that this american way of constitutionalism also represented a break from the distinctive early modern european mode of relating document to statecraft early americans sought to divorce the united states constitution from the tangibility of paper because they believed that doing so was essential to making a new kind of polity ripping apart the patriot attendants that bound the early modern british empires together americans wrote into being a modern form of constitutionalism so when jefferson hamilton paine attacked the british empire's constitution what were they talking about well constitution had multiple meanings in the language of politics that these figures were speaking but none of them refer to our own understanding of constitution as a single document codifying foundational principles for governing and legislating in the nation state rather when people in england and its empire in the 16th 17th 18th centuries spoke of the constitution they were talking about bodies constitution referred to the healthy condition of the human self the sort of constitution that the 16th century english rhetorician and archivist thomas wilson referred to when he opined in his work the art of rhetoric that the temperature of the mind follows the constitution of the body for wilson and other early modern writers on politics and medicine a good constitution was a robust and phys physical and mental self but english people in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries did not confine the language of constitution to discussions of anatomy they also use the language of constitution to talk about the kinds of bodies that humans gave birth to when they conjoined their individual cells into a government this was the body that the english jurist william blackstone was referring to in his commentaries on the laws of england we defined the constitution as a division of power within the body politic between a single person an aristocratical assembly and a kind of democracy acting together like three different powers and mechanics blackstone wrote these parts the person the assembly and the democracy jointly impel the machine of government in a direction which constitutes the true line of the liberty and happiness of the community for blackstone and his british contemporaries constitution meant the division of the responsibilities of governance between a monarch crown the single person a house of lords euristic radical assembly and house of commons the kind of democracy when each of these three parts of the body was well constituted and when each worked well with the others the corpus of state was healthy now visually this well-constituted state looked like the coherent artificial body which graced the cover of the masterpiece of 17th century english political thought thomas hobb's leviathan for the first edition of leviathan published in 1651 hobbes and the engraver abraham bossie designed a frontispiece that visually depicted the ideal government described in the text in the center hobbs and bossie place the figure of the sovereign whose body is literally and figuratively made out of the consent of a multitude of individual bodies to its rule this coherent body of state a unity made out of a multiplicity seamlessly bound together is peacefully is peaceful and well ordered in short it is well constituted physically and politically while hobbs vision of politics was forcing key respects out of step with the major currents of mid 17th century english political philosophy his definition of work around the concept of constitution expressed a common cultural currency early modern english audiences knew that jesus christ contained the community of all believers when his body manifested of course in the institution of the church and the practices of the eucharist they extended the homology to the state which contained the individual bodies of its subjects within a skeletal unity of shared laws customs and norms constitution in this sense referred to the harmonious body that bound multiples into a well-working singular but the state constituted by the consent of many bodies to the rule of a singular sovereign is not the only constitution which hobbes and bossy visualized their illustration benefits another early modern meaning of constitution one which hobbes explored in great detail and leviathan the ideal internal division of the sovereign body into houses words its parts organical hobbes gave the sparks organical of the sovereign and a public ministers and he defined the public minister as someone employed by the sovereign to represent the person of the state in the administration of public business these public ministers hobbes wrote resume with the nerves and tendons that move the several limbs of a body natural like the nerves and tendons of a natural body the public ministers parceled among themselves the responsibilities for administering different parts of the artificial sovereign body hobbs here was describing a manifest a manifestation of constitution as administration for hobbes the healthy body of state was not only one in which individuals coalesced and consented to the ruler to establish a healthy polity and escape a state of nature where life was nasty british and short for hobbes the healthy corpus of state was also one in which the nervous system the public ministers worked harmoniously to constitute government now in hobbes europe sovereigns made the constituted body of the state whole to in hobbs words make it resemble with the body natural by controlling the stuff which flowed through it like blood paper the creation of written records by governments of course had a long history in the regions that became europe but as this audience knows from the 11th century there was a marked increase in the generation of texts by both secular and ecclesiastical administrators bring these bodies politic to life required that their ministerial nervous systems pump paper documents through their institutional capillaries through writing things down on paper these sovereigns could make their reason visible something that hobbes expressed explicitly in leviathan as the as one of the essential components of the condition of being governed as he put it the will of another cannot be understood by his own word and for hobbes in in the quotations that are on the screen which i'm going to skip talking about uh given in the interest of time um uh as in a civil government um the sovereign made its power visible only by making a written and published declaration of the law compete with manifest signs that it preceded from the sovereign's will in short civil government made its reason visible by writing seeing like an early modern statesman was a project of paperwork or to borrow hobbs own words the knowledge of public registers that is to say the knowledge of the books in which the public laws were recorded these public registers of course took a variety of forms um and in the uh slide you that you see um on the screen i've taken uh an aspect of this from the early imperial state which is to say uh the the um the 1606 charter issued by james the first to the virginia company to settle trade and propagate this ring at christianity in the lands uh around a tributary of the chesapeake bay um that the company uh in a tribute to the sovereign called the james river and which is today of course uh the lands of virginia now for hobbes um this act of of of of writing laws um was the work of the sovereign itself and of course collected together this body of written laws made up the constitution of the state inscribed in the actual um in in the materiality of paper itself so i'm going to skip uh these slides and in the in the early modern period of course the the creation of um uh uh bodies of uh uh corporate bodies reflected um the the the desire of sovereigns um to to do this and to um uh create um uh uh modes of um uh uh controlling paper within imperial systems but in england in 1649 and in france in 1793 right revolutionaries cut off the heads of kings but to return to where i started this paper in 1776 uh revolutionaries uh also dismembered the imperial body entirely um something of course evocatively captured in this contemporary cartoon by an unknown political or uh satirist but as with the quotations that i started out this talk with jefferson uh payne uh and other um and other revolutionary theorists what they were doing in trying to distinguish uh their own constitution from an imperial constitution that was deeply bound to the circulation of paper archives as as hobbs and others had theorized was to bring in the corpus of empire of that which and bound its parts together into a constituted whole paper um what they did instead was to develop a constitution that in the singularity of its written document um separated uh the the materiality of paper as constituted and theorized by uh the early modern state into the singularity of just one document in doing so the american revolutionaries brought into being a truly different kind of state modern one in which singular document not a profusion of paperwork could capture the financial principles of government moreover this new american constitution had a different relationship to the body politic it codified these foundational principles but unlike the state that hops theorized paperwork did not create them the american constitution existed as a spirit that circulated through the different bodies of those animated to admitted to the polity one that could inhabit a new political corpus the story early americans tell ends of course with the rise of the modern state the united states whose modernity is said to reside in the fact that it has the world's first written constitution as i have suggested briefly today the innovation of the us constitution and perhaps the age of atlantic world constitution of which it was one part in which brought to an end um the early modern paper regimes which we are theorizing in this conference like not in the fact that it was written but instead in the way that it really related paper to the polity we can only understand this innovative quality when we tell the history of early modernity early empires in early america not just as a story of how nation states were constituted but also how a documented modernity was made thanks thank you very much that was great um we are going to save the questions and discussion for the end for the after these collection of papers um so we will move on to the next paper um cheryl friendly paper print and activism wonderful so um good morning and good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world i'm really happy to be joining uh this wonderful gathering of scholars and i just wanted to begin by acknowledging um cairo steve shira juan and the wonderful staff at the huntington as well as my fellow panelists i'm really excited to share my work today and um and really i took the time to um just think about the introductory notes that you provided us with shira and thinking about the reason for this gathering and um also the notion of you know ecologies and the time period in which we're all operating uh today and and tomorrow with the conference um and and i really took to heart some of the points that you made around how we might want to think about our own subject areas and and sort of the ephemerality the tactile nature of paper itself in our presentations in the work that we do maybe that's why we're attracted to the work that we do i know i'm a complete and total nerd i claim it and i love it and i enjoy uh greatly going into archives and making discoveries and archives and and it's not just the tactile nature of paper but it's also the way that it smells the way that it looks um and to find uh in the work that i've done with an image that i'm showing you here an image that i call the slave ship icon to be able to find different versions of the same print in archives around the world has been something that has been much of my work for quite some time but just an exciting and exhilarating kind of thing that i look forward to sharing with you today so um i want to begin by talking about not just the image that i'm showing you here but different iterations of it today to say that much of my work is focused on this image it's called sometimes description of a slave ship sometimes it has a very long uh 18th century title given to it by a british abolitionist based initially in plymouth and later than in london i call it the slave ship icon and i'm just going to share with you why i thought i would focus on this moment which is about the span of approximately 18 months and then we'll go later on in the history and genealogy of this print and so by 1790 british and american abolitionists had printed at least six different engravings representing the tightly packed hold of a slave ship each one with a distinct format and varying degrees of descriptive text these are the earliest examples of what i call the slave ship icon they involve a genealogy a complex progression and transformation in which image and text change but the rel the then but then relations between image and text are also fundamentally altered these versions of the abolitionist engraving testify to the flourishing print culture of the late 18th century and to the ways that religious and political groups employed this rapidly changing medium to develop one of the first grassroots political campaigns the quaker-led system of abolitionist committees in england provided a ready vehicle for the dissemination of illustrated pamphlets tracks and broadsides and so we're going to be looking at a number of different versions of this of this image in my presentation and one of the things that i also just wanted to point out um in the example that i'm showing you here from the american museum a publication uh based in the u.s in the late 18th century the states from 1789 one of the things that i love about the impression that you see here before you is that you can see that it's it's weathered it's stained it's been folded uh it you can also see here on the right hand side uh the way in which it was also attached to a larger publication so there's printed text behind it as well so this kind of gets at this notion of you know being able to touch and the need to to touch and understand the different kinds of weight and quality on which the image that you see before you is is printed on paper now i also wanted to introduce a figure in my talk today that i often introduce this work with a man named olada equiano who was once an enslaved african uh captured from the west coast of africa at the age of approximately 11. he was by the time he writes the book that i'm showing you here an ex-slave and a free man of color living in london he was also an outspoken opponent of the slave trade who regularly described his personal experience of slavery in public gatherings his public performances had gained equiano such a reputation that by the time a letter that i'm going to read to you appeared in the public advertiser in 1789 he was on the verge of publishing his enormously successful autobiography by subscription and by subscription that is to raise awareness for and also funding for the abolitionist campaign that was happening in and around london and other parts of the united kingdom uh his book was called the interesting narrative of the life of allata equiano or gustavus fossa the african and it was published in march of 1789.

[00:35:25]but the image that i'm referring to and the one that he actually refers to himself in a letter is this one here that was published by the plymouth committee it's called plan of an african ship's lower deck with negros in the proportion of only one to a ton it was published in in very late 1788 by a committee at plymouth that was gathered together to bring about an end to the slave trade they were part of the society for affecting the abolition of the slave trade and this was a committee that was very much engaged in the local ongoings in in and around plymouth and was privy to a report that came out in late 1788 that looked at the number of slave ships that had egregiously um over packed their ships with human cargo another thing to point out about this print not only was it a vehicle for the abolitionist committee and for activism around ending the slave trade initially and then later slavery as an institution in the british colonies and and around the world it was also a print that came about in 1788 because in the british parliament a bill was being introduced to regulate the slave trade this was called the dolben act of 1788 and when abolitionists came up with the idea to expose for the very first time two british eyes the system in which enslaved africans were transported across the atlantic they were actually referring to this dolben act that was uh being argued in parliament in the summer of 1780 to say that even regulation that is limiting the number of people to be carried across the atlantic in shackles below decks was an atrocity in and of itself so equiano in his own words released a letter in the public advertiser a local newspaper on february 14 1789 this is again about a month before his own book is published stating quote having seen a plate representing the form in which negroes are stowed on board the guinea ships which you are pleased to send to the reverend mr clarkson a worthy friend of mine i was filled with love and gratitude towards you for your humane interference on behalf of my opposed countrymen excuse me oppressed countrymen um and so so in this uh this brief letter um equiano not only refers to this plate but he also refers to how important it is for him not only to see this plate but also to see the four page pamphlet that accompanied the plate and this four page pamphlet had the text that described what it was that that those who viewed the plate would see and the the point i want to make here is that when this image is first made by abolitionists it's one as you can see it's divided between a women's room a boy's room a girl's room you can see these these figures that are drawn in a proportion of only one to a ton again referring to the dolben act to regulate the slave trade the figures are meticulously drawn but also incredibly uniform sort of in the shape of a plan view of a ship and the four page pamphlet describes an an appeal from the abolitionist that describes the the conditions below deck why the slave trade is something that is is uh is is abhorrent and against humanity and needs to be abolished and the ways that regular people and parliamentarians can themselves engage in helping to bring about awareness and consensus in ending the slave trade this was shared not only with um with thomas clarkson and other other members of the london committee it was also something that was taken up by the london committee it was critiqued and one of the things that was said that they wanted to see a different version of this image quickly the committee at plymouth came up with a broadside and one of the points that i wanted to make here is that what we see is a transformation in in the medium and the format in which this image is delivered first it is an oblong print accompanied by a four-page pamphlet and now we see that it's combined image and text in a broadside form on the left in addition to um including the abolition committee seal which we see here i mean this version is from uh the the friends house in london which was hand drawn on it um you can see this word uh cat of nine tales to lacerate the negro one of the things that was missing from the very first version though was the lack of showing any type of violence against the black body usually pictured instead by by shackles which you can see here in the detail so this was added in the print that was later made into a broadside by the by the committee at plymouth and then this is another thing that i wanted to share just in terms of i know we're not talking about prints here when i talk about this medallion but uh this image of the kneeling slave which was another competing image for the abolitionists is one that was modeled into a medallion by by wedgwood and also popular with supporters of abolition by the time the london committee transformed this print it transforms this print it becomes plan and sections of the slave ship they put the text that was accompanying the original print by the plymouth committee below in the broadside and they also include seven numbered sections and they put it into the shape of a ship and or one might say a naval architectural format to give one the sense of in three dimensions what it might be like to see um in and around or see oneself in the space on on on as as one of the figures that's depicted in the print and if we look at other versions and the the transformation that i think is really apparent is the way this this print is circulated around the so-called black atlantic and to think about how the circulation um really moves quickly when the committee at plymouth makes its initial print it sends it to london but it also um has the idea of making this print sent to other places including to philadelphia and the example that i'm showing you here by the new society for promoting the abolition of slavery entitled remarks on the slave trade was really transformational because by this time in philadelphia there have been laws passed to implement the gradual abolition of slavery and so instead of saying its only remarks on the slave trade you'll notice that they're also talking about bringing about the abolition of slavery in this print here and so we see different versions popping up not just in london um in other parts of the uk but also in the united states and in philadelphia this version that discusses again the abolition of slavery and they say explicitly that that's what they are interested in doing is something that we see again published in the american museum uh this publication that i initially discussed in the very first slide and then when we moved forward um with the london committee by 1789 in may they published description of the slave ship and again this is another version with the seven numbered sections but here with the title instead of being planned in sections perhaps referring to naval architectural drawings with the word description there's a way in which a more scientific appeal is being made to ending this humanitarian tragedy this print again becomes something that is appealing to people like william wilberforce who makes a very strong appeal to parliament in 1790 and actually takes this print and lays it inside of a wooden model that he passes around to members of parliament in 1790 when he makes his very moving appeal before them another thing to point out too about the different iterations of this print that are made is that depending on who who was to receive the print it would mean that perhaps say a steel plate or a copper plate engraving might be used instead of a wood plate or wood block engraving and so the members of parliament receiving a description of the slave ship would have received a copper plate engraving instead of a wood block engraving similarly in other places in france the comptomer bow had a model of a slave ship made as well based on this and then when we move on to 1794 people like carl bernard watched from wadstrom travels to west africa and ends up writing a book called essay on colonization that later argues for the colonization of africa and suggests that because of insurrections that we see in this insert here in this version of his plan and sections of the slave ship are a reason to stop the transatlantic slave trade this image continues to appear in abolitionist tracks we see in the coming years all the way through 1807 and beyond and this is just abstract of the evidence another abolitionist track and by 1822 after the 1807 abolition of the slave trade by the uk 1808 in the united states we see the british royal navy patrolling the seas and capturing illegally trading slave ships including those like the spanish schooner josefa maracayera and others such as this one the vigilante and these are also published showing that the way ships are made and technology has transformed the slave trade is also part of the kinds of prints that we see the last image that i want to share with you is a very contemporary image from just a decade ago this is a two-page spread from an auction in new york at swann galleries of african americana where we see three different versions of this print and these are three different versions one from the us one from the uk um and one from from europe in the upper left hand corner and i'll leave it there and look forward to having a conversation with you later thank you thank you so much cheryl i'm very impressed how our first two speakers have stuck so closely to time um it is appreciated and and i myself already have quite a few questions and resonances between the first two papers so i very much look forward to hearing your paper john and next we will have john gagne's paper toward a history of the conservation of the pre-modern documentary heritage thank you thanks carol can everyone hear me and see everything yes yes great um thanks to our organizers thanks for being here everyone in 1765 um [Music] johan christoph gutterer the historian and professor of diplomatics at gottingen suggested that the world of written documents was akin to an ecological system what gator had in mind was to interpret human script with the linnaean system of classification linnaeus the celebrated swedish naturalist proposed in the 1730s that nature was much like human society made up of kingdoms subdivisible into classes orders genera and species this was the rational systematicity that gatherer found so enticing a vision of universal order that could in turn be reapplied to the products of human society in his elements of the universal arts of diplomatics the professor laid out what he called linnaesmus graphicus or scriptural linnaeanism a system borrowed from botany to study the history of written culture i who on the one hand are devoted to the art of diplomatics and on the other hand i'm firmly convinced that nature and art are largely the same so admire the beauty and excellence of linnaeus's method that i believe it can easily be adapted to the classification of writing as gatherer was writing networks across the continent were collaborating to identify the earliest known piece of european rag paper in 1765 the exact state was still in formulation gatherer setting ongoing discussions in gertingen's eridite journals referenced numerous stated european papers from the early 14th century but also a recently identified piece from 1239 and discussion about still earlier fragments when historians and diplomatists ran into trouble answering such questions got to return to chemists if in doubt about paper being made from cotton wool or flax a doubt that actually remained unrelieved for well over a century a chemist he says could dissolve a fragment in chemicals to reveal its constituent parts so i begin today with johan christophe gastro for two reasons first to suggest the way that visions of europe's documentary culture as an ecological landscape was already formally enunciated by the middle of the 18th century the idea that scholars of paper and parchment could import classification systems wholesale from the natural sciences is a testament to the long conceptual history undergirding our conference team even if qatar were thinking more about scripts classification than paper's materiality we course to the similitude between art and nature the artifice of human culture and its inelectable connection to the organic world would be profoundly generative for subsequent generations efforts to preserve libraries and archives and second to illustrate how gatora expected to find not just conceptual aid for natural scientists but practical help botanists could inspire new systems and chemists could identify paper's fibers the field and the laboratory were becoming places where historical problems might be solved this brings me to the simple case i'd like to make today that post-enlightenment methods of library and archive conservation emerge from precisely this intersection between medievalists and natural scientists that is on one hand scholars and caretakers of europe's late antique medieval and early modern cultural production and on the other chemists botanists pharmacists and eventually physicists and microbiologists it was an interaction that produced particular fruit in the decades straddling 1900 and even though i'll focus mostly on italy in the next few minutes the effort was vastly transnational around 1900 the scientific discourse i identified with guterrer sometimes squarely ecological or medical resurfaced as the salient framework for advancing new theories and practices of conservation to see books and manuscripts as living things as organisms was a step toward reimagining their preservation 19th century europe saw two formative movements in collaborative research that are worth outlining first the liberalization of previously private libraries and archives stimulated study of the newly accessible pre-revolutionary writings that ashish was talking about the french government institutionalized that energy in 1821 with the foundation of the economy devoted to diplomatics that is philology paleography bibliography and archival sciences it soon became a pilgrimage site for europe's librarians and historians second governments institutionalized the natural sciences with polytechnical schools and research institutes devoted to experimental study flying the same banner of science and also of nationalism institutions both humanistic and scientific built fresh research agendas for the industrial age and train specialists to solve its problems one of those problems was the decay of books and manuscripts there is a long and still under-researched history of document conservation in europe grounded in the late middle ages reports spauls sparse but revealing of conservators activities show us the attention they paid over generations to dusting rebinding copying and relocation specific challenges however faced the 19th century napoleon's wars exported then inexpertly repatriated scores of repositories the new generations of archivally oriented historians vied to investigate them among these institutions was the vatican which opened its doors to researchers in 1880 and this is an engraving of the napoleonic exportation of the vatican archive freshly housed in 1880 in a new building and accessible to scholars the vatican was able to take part in the reassessing of europe's uh documentary conditions some of the news was not good and not only at the vatican part of the problem was scholarship itself alarms steadily grew around parchment palm cests whose substratum of text became more legible through the application of a tincture that proved to be corrosive paper proved susceptible not only to corrosion by its own ink but also to the usual array of threats including damp mold and vermin the tool for confronting these dangers was a better understanding of the constituent materials of skin and plant pulp long-standing mysteries about the organic makeup of historical paper had already been one of the nodes of contact between historians and botanical microscopists in the early 19th century these collaborations across europe over decades uh often concerned ancient papyrus and it was pepperological study that in 1880s vienna united the plant physiologist julius visner and the scholar of islamic paper yosef funkarabatsek using histological analyses wiezner clarified that paper made of pure cotton had never existed as a precursor to rag paper 18th century chemists those gatterer invoked a few minutes ago had been misled by other physical characteristics that gave false evidence of cotton's presence and here you can see wiesner showing us the difference between cotton a fiber of cotton on the left and a fiber of flax on the right wiesner's results soon appeared in the footnotes of scholars ranging from medievalists to engineers among the latter was wilhelm herzberg director of paper and textile engineering at the royal prussian testing bureau devoted to the improvement of the paper trade and the establishment of official paper standards across german lands here you can see how solutions of iodine potassium on the left or chlorine zinc iodine on the right tinted cotton and flax straw pulp and wood pulp different colors to help identify modern papers otherwise inseparable constituents collaboration between the royal testing bureau's paper division and europe's archivists and librarians emerged from a landmark conference on manuscript preservation at saint gaul switzerland in the autumn of 1898 convened by the german jesuit prefect of the vatican library franz erla a specialist in 14th century scholastic the conference assembled a remarkable cast of scholarly institution directors many of them with manuscripts in tow to confront three major issues europe's oldest manuscripts palimpsests corroded by chemical reagents and paper manuscripts conservation on the last category addressed sorry conversation on the last category that is paper addressed the possible remedies to corrosive vitriol inks including possibly using silk veils and starch baths the dresden archivist otto posse here's a just showing you um an image of the newspaper from singkal announcing the conference the dresden archivist otto passa fearful of widespread moisture damage across european repositories proposed an international experimental workshop to offer remedial solutions the director of berlin's royal testing bureau subsequently visited the vatican to advise the group regarding the utility of new chemicals particularly a compound called zapon which kept military maps dry in the rain and which dresden had already adopted to reinforce historical papers but caution ruled and the members opted for animal gelatin rather than zapon this was actually all for the better because zappone proved to be highly flammable the delegates elected a permanent steering committee whose names you see here all of them leading scholars of late antique or medieval studies to petition european governments for funding ultimately the octogenarian classicist teodor momsen secured 10 000 marks from the prussian government to support photography campaigns of the most delicate codices and to advance research on paid parchment and paper at the vatican library the funds permitted the expansion of a vatican laboratory already in operation in one of his notebooks in 1892 the vatican library director franz erle imagined the wholesale transformation of what he still called the book bindery into a modern lab with dedicated personnel who would stay abreast of the latest findings and prepare as he says a short list of various damages observed in codices for example a consumption of outer margins b diseases of parchment or paper and that's an important number b is important for us and c simple fractures in 1896 airlift followed through by appointing a permanent vatican manuscript restorer carlo madre two years later a florentine library director guido biaggi encouraged readers of italy's leading bibliographical journal to think physiologically he wrote manuscripts too are living beings and in the world of public and private libraries we find individuals with robust constitutions but also the wimps weaklings anemics and finally the ill and infirm bibliography still does not have among its numerous subdivisions space reserved for pathology but from this point forward bibliographical pathology should have its adherents and treatises as vegetable pathology does already an emergency soon confronted carlo marie the vatican's newly appointed restorer with this exact challenge in january 1904 the national library of turin went up in flames as rescuers worked to toss books out of the windows the ceiling of the manuscript room collapsed burying most of the collection in burning ash more than half of the library's manuscripts were consumed others singed and sopping languished in the mud of a nearby tobacco factory for weeks airla the director of the vatican traveled to turin immediately and prevailed upon the civic commissioners to set up a temporary laboratory for damaged materials in the nearby university the restoration team led by the vatican's madre had to think physiologically how to stop the books from fermenting and putrefying they separated paper from parchment and swiftly set up a therapeutic environments at the university's laboratory of materia medica first they erected extraction hoods over drying books and kept them cold to reduce bacterial growth then they constructed humidity chambers lined with zinc slabs and wet clay to re-soften parchment books that had become rigid twisted blocks so they could be unbound re-stretched and flattened in performing this triage the team's chemical findings began unintentionally to produce historical data whiter parchments tended to be older than the 12th century later vellum contained higher concentrations of lime pigment compounds in medieval illumination reacted differently to the heat of fire and moisture of conservation and this shows you one of their charts which shows you the correlation of age of parchment to its reaction to moist heat in other words new histories were the byproducts of these chemical analyses anything but temporary this laboratorio di materia medica housed carlo mare and his team for 13 years of work on the damaged codices until madre's death in 1918. a decade later one restorer fretted that madre's work while prodigious left the techniques for paper restoration in quote a phase we might call primordial uh only timidly applying silk crepeline and badly reconstructing page edges it was true marie's workshop at the vatican and turin had devoted most of their energies primarily to parchment paper's specific therapies remained to be elaborated the critical voice i just quoted was a barely 30 year old neapolitan named alfonso gallo who took up the challenge of paper restoration trained in diplomatics and medieval paleography at naples he studied medicine before returning to higher degrees in bibliography by 1929 he had been appointed inspector general of libraries in the ministry of public education and helped to found a small book restoration laboratory run by the monks at the abbey of grataferrata that project became the germ of a much more ambitious national institute in rome chartered in 1938 the institute of the pathology of the book a research and conservation center dedicated to a gallow called the illnesses of books this is the slide i'm going for a book he wrote is composed of an amalgam of organic and inorganic materials not in their original state but having undergone various transformations this is a draft for encyclopedia entry he goes on through the intervention of physical and biological agents they are subjected to wear and tear decay and degeneration that change a book's appearance and structure until its state of comfort conservation is compromised because of the morphological similarities that these changes share with morbid conditions that befall animals and vegetables they have been called illnesses of books as luck had it and to bring us full circle to linnaeus in 1938 rome's botanical institute housed in a 19th century mansion on the slopes of the viminal hill surrounded by botanical gardens and newly built chemistry botany and pharmaceutical labs relocated to the university campus gallo and his institute moved in installing further labs for physics microbiology entomology paper technology chemistry a paper making workshop a restoration studio a disinfection chamber a library and a museum and you can see some of those spaces in this slide a 1930s educational film called the hospital of books shows the staff busy in their labs here's the disinfection chamber here they are removing uh insects from books and in one scene they work even still on books scorched in the fire of turin there's much more to say about gallo's role in medicalizing the book a new posture in which restorers campaigned like humanitarians to reimagine cultural heritage as a feeling thing alive to wellness and malady but let me just conclude by suggesting that by the 1930s the book in conservators parlance had fully revealed itself as an ecological entity an amalgam of organic and inorganic materials where vegetable fibers animal gelatins bacterial colonies mold spores and insect larvae constituted a system that was the inescapably the stuff of the aging patrimony of europe but also the landscape out of which tools could be developed to save it thank you great thank you john so we have about 21 minutes now for um q a and conversation and as shira stated at the beginning we do want to encourage our panelists to ask to ask the first questions because we brought you all together because we wanted you to be in conversation but we are also thrilled to receive questions via the q a and i will be looking at those um and and so just to start i think i think for me these papers have come together in in a really interesting way all of them pointing towards productive ways in which to think about the importance of ways in which we we think about the metaphorics of paper vis-a-vis the body and you know beginning with the shisha's paper and the the changing relationship between the constitution of the body politic and its archival history in the age of revolution and i think what's so what came out from me in your paper in relationship to cheryl zashish is that of course this wasn't only the age of the french revolution but also the haitian revolution right and and so thinking about the ways in which it wasn't only we can think about for the founding fathers in their mind perhaps it wasn't only the the sovereign body being beheaded but also the question of of the enslaved body within their colonies and awareness of of the role of that body and the formation of the colonies um and i think john's paper was was really instructive and important for continuing to think about how how these books and archives are thought of as as the the living documents the living continuing bodies um that we care for and in order to think about our relationship to history so i want to open it up to the panelists first at it if they have any questions or comments and and then we can move it out to the um to the the q a to the the larger audience yeah well i i was just going gonna say that i mean one of the things um that and this also goes to uh both to to your uh um uh uh cow's questions and then i i think also too uh i see that megan baumham are uh uh as questions in the in the q a i mean one of the things that struck me is listening to um to all the papers in in just kind of a broad sense is the way in which it seems to me that centering paper troubles some of the boundaries and categories and conventional divisions that we tend to make perhaps as as historians or or as students of the past between different forms of knowledge and it was struck in some ways by the resonances and the overlaps between um you know medicine and um you know history and experimental life the archive and the lab these different spaces that often we think of perhaps from our own you know contemporary vantage point as distinct sites i think that all of the um uh all of the papers sort of showed and pointed to the way in which you know in in this early modern world there are these immense resonances between material practice in what we often historicize as as different from distinct sites of knowledge and that was kind of one of the most immediate things that just jumped out at me thinking about the the the presentation sort of from um this the you know from um the the visual the the bureaucratic the medical um you know paper scene seems to be troubles these these sort of the the at least perhaps this is historiographical um categories thank you could i add to that ashish and i just wanted to say i really enjoyed all the papers and i um i think i i i just love the way they seem to fit together so you know uh congratulations to the organizers for for seeing those uh threads that go together and um i think to your your point of sheets one of the things that um that that i would like to maybe throw into you know what we will what we can continue to think about with regards to paper um is you know is is the way in which it can um you know it has this ability to to be um yes something that you know that moves around that that can be sent around that is it's it's ephemeral right and it has um the ability i think in terms of you know activism to on the one hand be um you know very much under the radar like when i think about the transportation of you know um late 18th century prince in the age of right you know revolution um in the age of really trying to think of you know what is you know what is the right of man what is a body politic um um that that these you know little papers you know as small as they are um you know we've seen how soiled they can get that they you know they make it across um the atlantic and then they're put to different use um the one of the points i was trying to to to make about the the transformation from say you know a printed image and a separate pamphlet to a broadside is that that's something that can become um public right the broadside can be posted in public and it can be performed and i think that there's a certain performative quality to paper um that that we should also be thinking about whether it's reading a visual image or reading text that um also you know in many ways interjects with reading um that you know that that visual image and and i think the last point um that i'll just make right now too is is thinking about um you know yes what kinds of images survive in archives um we're all talking about this early modern era we know what's going on we know that they're you know their revolutions in haiti and france and the us in so many different places uh we also know that the transatlantic slave trade is something that's affecting the atlantic world if we're going to talk about this this part of you know the globe and um i was really struck by the last paper and thinking about okay well where are these archives in which these these these um paper these pieces of ephemeral paper where do they reside um you know when i think about the research that i did for for my work i i had to travel to quite a few places but it's often not going to be say to places in the caribbean where you know images like this also would have would have circulated and also may have been you know archived as well so i think that you know that thinking about the archives thinking about preservation um and and even i'm gonna throw something else in i said i wasn't going to but um but also thinking about um you know um uh whether or not um some of these these images or objects um should be in in one archive or another um so in another part of the work that that i do a big question is is um around you know repatriation of objects um and images that have been um taken um without um without agreements um or taken you know in war or stolen and and i think that that might be just something that we could consider as we continue to have the conversations uh about these images and objects and pieces of paper that that circulate that's great thank you so much cheryl for um for extending those thoughts john would you like to um add in here at all i uh i'm feeling you know sort of like uh pulled in many different directions because there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the printed chat as we're also doing the live chat so it's sort of like i'm feeling i'm feeling like i don't i don't quite have a formulated thought other than to say that like i feel like what's emerging too as well for me from our three talks is the interesting um position of like advocacy here is that like there's something or like vibrancy or something like i you know i see sujata mentioned in the chat this idea of vibrant matter i think like that's interesting in one sense that there's like i think ashish points to the you know this this idea of the constitutionalism as having something like um alive to it i mean the as soon as you start to think of these um these networks as systems that are living um but you know then all of a sudden you need advocates and um you know in a way cheryl's you know this is it's all about advocacy in cheryl's case with abolitionism pulling in this sort of um the need to recognize the living and in a way that's also kind of what my um my archivists are doing as well is that they're sort of they're having this moment that i actually think you know i focused on them mostly the 20th century but i think it actually does go back there are interesting routes in the 18th century about uh you know living patrimony that needs that need agents or and and advocates so i think that there's an interesting kind of um thread of uh thinking that has to do with um you know standing up for things that you don't uh you hadn't really given much thought to but that need help and i think that they're just like paper seems to like um the conversation about papers uh organism seems to pull in that direction sometimes yeah i think that's a great point i mean perhaps if we um highlight one of the questions in the chat that seems to address some of these questions lisa pond mentioned that one point that came out for me in all three papers is the question of how different materials formats i.e paper parchment broad size page pamphlets could all fill complete nuance a single quote-unquote ecological niche um so i don't know i mean in some ways i'm the nature of this format means that i can't ask lisa to expand vocally a little bit although perhaps if she's listening she could type in a little more here um but uh but i think it's true we're i mean i think there is a way in which also that came out in particularly as sheesh and john's paper is that we're we're equally discussing paper and parchment in many ways and i mean these are and the the constitution obviously is as much about parchment as paper and and john's is also as much about um parchment and paper um and and so i think that's also something that we could pull out a little bit more um but also in terms of thinking about john's point and this question of vibrancy and the vibrancy of these materials and and caring for them um but also cheryl's point about repatriation and i i do think that there is obviously a very complicated history there as well right if we think about for example the europeans coming to the americas and and destroying primarily the the paper work there that co-existed and then taking very few about you know less than 20 manuscripts back to european libraries to care for them so there's also this this complicated um settler colonial history of of destruction and care that kind of went hand in hand with these archival histories um does anyone would any of our i can add something just to what you said cara which which is just um you know the the institution i ended with which is the institute for the pathology the book still exists in rome and interestingly they they do carry on essentially a kind of humanitarian mission i mean just thinking about your point about the location of archives from the 1930s they served as a kind of um international aid center for all kinds of patrimony items that were sent to them from all over the world so you know whether from india parts of south america there were items that governments saw as crucial to their you know cultural formation that they basically shipped to italy to have conserved and that's still the role that they fill they do it pro bono with the trade-off being that they learn the science of the book from the cases they undertake and then they send them back to wherever they came from so i mean the the the institution still sees itself as kind of like internationally globally distributed working on cases whatever it may be even though they began sort of as a italian focused organization very quickly they became a kind of global uh hospital for this kind of question that's really interesting john thank you for for including that um do would any of the other participants in the conference like to weigh in it at any point in this conversation jennifer i have a question um thank you all for a great set of papers um starting us off this question was spawn triggered specifically by cheryl's paper but maybe it'll have resonances with the other speakers as well i was really struck by that caption in the early slave icon slave ship icon of the image being represented at a scale of one to a ton and thinking about the need on the one hand for the image to represent recognizable bodies but on the other hand striving to capture the brutality and density of the way in which people were packed into these holds and it also um made me think about this common fact that we know right that in the era of hand paper making the size of paper was determined by the span of our arms because the mold has to be held by somebody and moved by somebody and um also thinking back to shira's comments about the kind of the embodied relationship to paper and i just wondered if um i guess my specific question is whether there were people tested other scales of representation for the slave ship icon but more generally i'm just interested in sort of raising this question of scale and paper generally yeah that's a that's a great um that's a great question and um the the the quotation and the the title is is is really kind of a quotation um from any of the deliberations and arguments that took place in parliament in the summer of 1788 around the dulbent act to regulate the slave trade and so with that quotation as title the plymouth abolition committee that came up with this image was was really trying to um in many ways push back against that you know that that that um debt formula um for for regulation so that's that's where that um that comes from but but to your point about about scale and you know and and and i'm actually i'm i'm i was a a paper maker at one point in my life you know um a long long time ago but um but you know i'm imagining like picking up those decals and you know doing the work but um but yeah you know i think i think one of the things that that wanted that made me want to um present just this section is to again about scale is to see how they quickly went from realizing that that having these things separate that is having the image separate from the the text which is really moving i didn't really have time to um to share that but they talk about how you know the figures are shackled two by two speaking of scale how much there's only a certain amount of space allotted to depending on what your gender is and what your age is a certain amount of space etc etc um and um but but how you know they quickly realized that these two things need to come together in order for it to be um something that that anyone who looks at this um and reads can really understand the enormity of the problem that's trying to be tr that they're trying to solve um and with regards to um you know just the practicalities of scale of this kind of abolitionist uh uh you know propaganda um uh primarily the i would say the largest you know um literally the largest uh broadsides were approximately like 20 by by 25 maybe 20 by 28 inches and by almost the turn of the of the 19th century over 200 000 impressions have been made and circulated around the atlantic rim and i could say more but i'd rather have my fellow panelists say something at that scale too yeah thank you thank you i mean one other thing i will add um though is that and i tried to show this towards the end of the presentation that um initially uh the image is based on a frigate style ship a very popular you know commercial ship of the late 18th century by the early 19th century after the slave trade is abolished and the british royal navy is patrolling and capturing illegally um ships illegally trading and enslaved africans um the the impressions that they draw um which are usually large broadsides that are folded up into abolitionist tracks um those are impressions based on different kinds of of sailing vessels because by that time you know 30 40 50 years later shipping technology has changed and there's another um i think they're also trying to make a different kind of statement too because even with you know a much smaller space for ships that can more quickly make it across the atlantic to elude the the royal navy and so on there's even less space for for human life and yet they still try to you know have the same numbers in terms of you know scale of return if you will john or sheesh would you like to weigh in on questions of scale or or the performativity of paper the ways in which these works are also about performance as much as they are about simply kind of existing as documents yeah you know what one of the things that struck me um uh from um uh you know listening to all the papers and and i think that this this uh to some extent may also kind of speak to the um to the question of of performance is that i mean the you know the the odd way in which our um you know our study of these materials even when we're we're we're so attentive to um you know even when we try to be attentive to the materiality both of of the the things that we study and also to the to the ways in which they were being thought about in the um you know in these in these past times and especially in the early modern period um you know there's an extent to which i think one of the things that i mean to some extent strikes me is just like there there's so many aspects of this um you know of this early modern world in which i think all of us are excavating in which you know i mean paper is is um and paper flows through and touches sort of the the practices and the lived experiences of people in this early modern period in which in ways that i think it's in in ways that i think like um often like we as historians like even as we're so attentive to this stuff like uh like there's even like more that we could there there's just so many further steps that we can go and and take and and i was just like as i was thinking um as i was listening to um uh uh you know especially to to to john's paper um i was thinking of course about you know diplomatics as both um as both you know a science of administration in early modern europe and something that's both um done as practice but also as theory um in the sense that you know there are diplomatists who are engaged in the practice and the study of documentation but then of course there are people who write in you know for lack of a better term like propositional terms about what that study means both as a kind of a practice but also in connection to governance in the state in you know the work of of mabion for example but you know we can also i think look at a lot of um i was just like making a list um as i was listening to the papers of just like how many people one could um sort of pull out from the sort of the canon of let's say early modern um political thought and see their sort of imprecation within bureaucratic systems in ways that usually we we just never talk about but maybe we should more like you know i mean like david hume for example right is is is a secretary to the british ambassador to france in the 1760s adam smith was a you know was a scottish customs commission commissioner um uh uh adam ferguson was a um was a a diplomatic secretary to the the british embassy to the uh to the american rebel you know to the to the american revolutionaries during the american revolution and it in all of that in all of those times you know these sort of the these figures who we often discuss in terms of you know the the the high propositional again for lack of a better term intellectual work are are you know directly experienced the materialities in the in the you know in some ways the mundanity is right of paper as you know as tangible um uh lived um you know as tangible live things and how do we think i mean in some ways like how do we think the early modern and particularly you know early modern intellectual history in a way that can be attentive right precisely to just how foundational right that material experience is you know whether it's um you know uh adam smith right not just thinking about political economy as a theorized practice but also thinking about right literally customs books which he's handling as a scottish commissioner or right we can you know go back a little further right machiavelli thinking not just about um a statecraft as theory but also right in his various entanglements as a bureaucrat right dealing with you know with paper right diplomatics is both a as as both kind of a high intellectual practice right but also i mean machiavelli wright is a is a secretary right he's a bureaucrat he just he does paperwork i mean all the time where in our history of the early how in our history how can we think the early modern in a way that is attentive you know to those kinds of implications and again like i i mean i i'm going to make a blanket statement i bet that you we could take virtually any you know big name out of right the early modern early one intellectual history and we'll find right that they are very deeply invested in and very deeply sensitive to the tangibility of paper and material practice in a way that you know we're just beginning to to we've only we've hardly gotten past the surface of what that might mean for our for the way in which we think the early modern i think that's a great point ashish i know john wants to respond i know this is a question deep to his heart and research so i want to give him a chance to respond but i also want to be a bureaucrat myself and attend to our own material existence on zoom and we do have a promise of a break so i i'm going to ask john for a quick response and and then we'll have a break and then we'll start the next session john yeah thanks carol i just wanted to sort of make a 30-second point that i think she clarified for me now and also in what you said earlier about sort of labs and archives of space of knowledge and this relates to the point of performativity which i did not think i had anything to say about until just now which is that you know there is something about um scientific work on archival objects the the lab as a space of knowledge where you see materials react and it's delightful right so there's like the delight of something changing you know you put a tincture on a piece of paper it changes color and you're like oh my god we can read the letters so i think there's on one hand and it's about time as well the slow time of the archive and the fast time of the lab that in the lab everything changes immediately and you learn something and then the archive everything's moving super slow and so this idea of the you know the decay and the test the slow and the fast uh you know she's just pointing about practice and theory i think there's a lot to unpack there and that's it yeah i think that's all great thank you so much everyone for this first panel it was really i have a lot of questions and ideas and thank you to our audience for joining us um and we will reconvene steve is that correct at at um 10 45 pacific standard time let's do let's do 10.50 i think we all need 15 minutes away from the screen but i'd like to echo your thanks to all three speakers and for the discussion really terrific start thank you so much