[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Welcome back to the second of these two sessions this afternoon about woodblocks and printing.
And we've heard already from, uh, Alex and Andrew about some of the varied histories of these blocks and how they might have survived.
And what we're going to look at now is how we might analyse them more materially and scientifically,
to be able to add extra information from some of the documentary evidence which Andrew just showed to date the blocks as well.
And we're looking at two particular projects related to that.
So first of all, to introduce myself, I'm Julianne Simpson, um,
librarian at Chetham's library in Manchester and also on the Council of the Bibliographical Society who have sponsored this particular session.
We have, um, here Ed Potton, who is, uh, works on a book and library history with a particular focus on the 15th century.
He was formerly keeper of printed books at the John Rylands Library.
In fact, a role I took, uh,
took on after him before I moved to Chethams and then Head of Rare Books and Joint Head of Special Collections at Cambridge University Library.
His current research projects include work on the early history of York Minster Library, the library of the medic and alchemist, William Butler.
And most relevant for today is the production and circulation of metal cut
prints in Germany and the early development of print in between 1450 and 1500.
So he is a principal consultant on an AHRC uh joint DFG project.
Worke de Booke Transitions experimentation and Collaboration in Reaper Graphic Technologies, 1440 -1470,
which investigates paper stocks used to print early printed books, books printed from woodblocks and single leaf wood and metal cuts.
Joining us remotely is Doctor Elizabeth Savage.
She is Senior Lecturer in book history and communications in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London,
and she's also been an Honorary Fellow here at the Bodleian library in the Centre for the Study of the Book.
She also explores how information was printed in Europe between 1400 and 1600,
especially the use of colour in printing and exploring library and museum collections,
and recreating techniques of historically, using historically appropriate printing presses like the bibliography
press Alex showed us some images of and collaborating with heritage scientists.
In 2023, she received a grant from the Bibliographical Society to carbon date a group of wood blocks in Berlin,
and this grant was made possible with a generous legacy from Professor John L Flood,
who was Deputy Director of the Institute of Germanic Studies at the University of London from 1979 to 2002.
And we're very pleased also to have with us today his widow and, uh, in the audience.
Thank you for coming. So, this session will actually be in the form of a conversation between Ed and Elizabeth with myself moderating.
Uh or attempting to moderate, a bit threatening? Yes.
And, um, we will, uh, take up about the first half of the time with some discussion and then open it up to the audience,
both in person and also online. So be ready with your questions
Uh, when we get to that. So first of all, I'm going to throw it over to Elizabeth,
who will give us a bit more of an introduction and background to the projects that Elizabeth and Ed have been working on and the,
uh, types of analysis. So I read to you, Elizabeth.
I'd very much like to to reiterate Julian's thanks to, um, the family of John Flood.
Uh, his scholarship is incredible. Um, and it is a huge honour to be able to contribute in a very small way to his legacy.
Uh, through the research undertaken in the ground. It was named in his honour.
Uh, so I hope in some way he might have found this interesting.
And I hope that, uh, that his family is able to, uh, to appreciate the new kinds of research
uh, that have been inspired by the work that he undertook.
Um, so Ed and I today thought we went to talk to you about why everything you think you know is wrong.
Um, with historical research. Uh, you can never trust the secondary sources.
You always have to go back to the primary. But especially with woodblocks, you cannot trust them either at all.
Um, dating them is incredibly difficult. Uh, linking them to, uh, to printed materials to images or books or anything in between, um,
can be incredibly difficult, especially when they were never actually used to print things.
Um, so today, Ed and I are going to talk to you about some of the ways we have we have tried to date the undateable.
Um, and we think Andrew Handy for that catchy title. Uh, by using watermark evidence, um,
and other conventional techniques of print scholarship all the way through collaborations with uh geochronologists to carbon date historical woodblocks,
some of which are much more modern than they claim to be. Um, Ed, would you like to say anything?
No. I think maybe we should, um, start.
This is the sort of feels like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, coming at the end of the day,
but I thought it might be useful just to talk a little bit in very basic terms about what a woodblock is in terms of, uh, in the printing context.
Um, so we've seen some wonderful examples today.
We've seen a lot of impressions from woodblocks today.
But, um, I want to go back to the very beginning and think about this from the moment that it was a tree.
So the very first thing which happens in the production of a woodblock is that that tree is felled,
and then a plank is cut from along the length of the tree,
so it's cut through the grain, and that plank is then chopped up into smaller sections, more manageable sections into those sections,
And n artist then draws a picture.
They draw what they would like to reproduce in print, and then using a series of gouges, these little V or u shaped tools,
this portion of the surface of the block, which they don't want to take, ink, is gradually lowered down and lowered down, so that leaves in relief.
So standing proud the image that the artist wants to reproduce.
Now that block can then be inked. Ink can either be dabbed on it or rolled on it, and then anything can be put on top of it.
Uh, you can print onto fabric, onto paper, onto parchment.
Um, the medium is put on top and then then a pressure is applied,
and again that pressure can be just your hand, it could be a stone or a pebble.
Um, in Japanese, in eastern printing it's often a spatula or a wooden spoon type object, or it can be a printing press.
And then when you peel that paper or medium back off, what you're left with is a reverse impression of the inked portion of the woodblock.
So and you can see on the screen here sorry woodblocks don't photograph terribly well.
Um, on the left hand side, you can see a woodblock, which coincidentally is one of the Bagford woodblocks that Andrew was just talking about.
And then on the right hand side, you can see the impression that's taken from it.
So we make this distinction between blocks and impressions and what you can see immediately,
well, not very clearly because the slide is so dark, but what you can see is that the impression is a reverse, is a mirror image of the woodblock.
So whatever you want to reproduce has to be carved in relief, but also in reverse.
So this technology is probably our oldest reprographic technology.
So we've been printing in this way for well over a thousand years.
But the modern woodcutters outside are still using pretty much exactly the same process as was used, uh, historically.
So it begins in China well over a thousand years ago.
But the projects that Elizabeth and I work on focus on the very beginnings of printing from woodblock in Western Europe.
So we're interested in printing Western printing primarily between 1400 and 1600.
So there is a chronology to that. The very earliest, um Western woodcuts, woodcut prints start appearing around 1410 or 1420.
And these are quite simple, quite naive designs, all of which share a lot of similarities,
which suggests that maybe it's quite a small number of workshops that are producing these woodblocks.
Um, they are without, uh, exception, they are devotional images.
So these are um, and throughout most of the 15th century, um, and until it became, until we got, um,
woodcuts used in books, most single sheet material that's produced by wood from woodblocks is devotional in nature.
So these are images of Saiints. They are images of The Passion,
Um, and the intention is that they are circulated as the focus of private devotion.
And as a result, the're used in a series of contexts.
So they're often found pinned to pews or to walls.
They're found pasted into manuscripts and then later into devotional printed books.
Um, and they're found pasted into things like coffrets, these little portable book boxes.
So they fulfil the role of a sort of private devotional aid.
So we have a very small clutch of them from the 1420s, 1410s and 1420s.
About 6 or 7 dozen survive. And then in the 1440s, um, we get a huge expansion in their production.
Um, and we also get, uh, a change in, uh, their nature.
They become much more sophisticated, they start to integrate text, which obviously, if you're carving in reverse, is quite a complicated business.
Um, they start to incorporate architectural designs around the figures that are depicted, scenes in the background.
Then in around 14, somewhere around the mid 1450s, at precisely the time that Gutenberg is inventing printing the movable type,
we get this phenomenon of block books, which, um, Andrew has already mentioned.
So a block book is precisely the same technology.
You take a slightly larger block of wood, plank of wood, and you carve into it two pages in relief and in reverse,
and that block is one of a series of blocks.
You then take impressions from them, and those impressions are then folded up and they're glued together sort of concertina wise.
And those produce a codex, a book. So this is an early means of producing an illustrated book.
And then I suppose finally, in terms of the 15th century, um, we have Gutenberg inventing, uh, printing with movable type in the mid 1450s.
And very rapidly the woodblock starts to be used within the print shop.
So from the very early 1460s, Albert Pfister in Bamberg starts integrating these wooden blocks into pages of type.
Um, and then it sort of takes off, the illustrated book takes off from there.
So the sorts of material that Elizabeth and I work on really all sort of cluster around this 15th and early 16th century period.
But both the objects themselves, the surviving blocks and the impressions are really problematic.
And I might hand back over to Elizabeth, maybe to talk a little bit about blocks and some of the problems we have with those?
Yes. Of course. Uh, can we advance to the next slide, please?
Uh, and actually, this is one of your slides. Uh, but one of the interesting things, uh, that that you can see here is the wood.
Uh, it is a wood block. So you might be thinking, of course, you can see the wood, but when wood blocks are printed,
they're coated with normally black printing ink, and printing ink is a really, really thick, viscous material.
Um, it's, um, it's like a really thick maybe, um, paste more maybe like a solid.
It can, you know, sort of stand up on its own if it's really, really thick.
It is globby and it is opaque and it is permanent and,
As oils that, uh, carry the pigment, uh, the black opaque pigment,
Um, on the surface of the wood, they impregnate the wood.
So after you print, under the impressions of a woodblock with a black ink,
that wood block is going to always be glossy and black.
It makes it a nightmare to photograph, you cannot see the wood, so when you clean it, um, you can you can use a solvent to get the globbyness off.
Um, but you could never remove the ink that's impregnated the surface of the wood.
Um, so here the fact that you can see the, uh, the, the characters that comprise these letters,
Um, and black, that's where the ink was applied. Um, so, you know, it was printed, but there's a lot of wood, brown wood visible around that.
Um, and maybe some of that, um, was applied by the inking board, which is quite big.
Maybe it dropped, maybe that was from the wiping.
So when you put a solvent on and you take a rag and clean it, you end up wiping that diluted ink, uh, around the surface.
Um, maybe it's supplied then. But this block was not printed many times at all.
Maybe just once or once or twice. Um, so I think, Ed, do you want to talk a little bit about the significance of the,
uh, the unprintedness of blocks like this that are in excellent condition?
Yeah. So I mean, the, the, the very condition of them sort of suggests that this is, as we've heard from Andrew,
that this is not a 15th century block that has been been printed from since the 15th century.
Um, and it's interesting, the other blocks, the Bagford blocks, although they're slightly darker than this,
they also give this impression if there's no ink in the wells in the, in the, unprinted in the un inked section.
So to me, um, it's a fair indication that very few impressions have been taken.
Um, so these I suppose these, these blocks are interesting because they sort of they sort of float in space and time.
And I think that's what fascinates Elizabeth and I about these things that they are, um, they are an artefact,
they tend rarely to be signed, they tend rarely to be dated.
Um, and as a consequence, sort of placing them chronologically or geographically is very difficult.
Um, and, Elizabeth, you've been looking at the, the Derschau blocks, of the Derschau blocks that it's a huge collection, um, of these woodblocks.
And I think what we're very interested in is trying to ascertain from this huge corpus of potential material which we could examine,
sort of where do you begin with making sense of that?
So where do you begin with actually saying, this thing looks like it should be from 1464, but it isn't from 1464?
Um, so with this something like Derschau, which is a huge collection, um, how can we sort of interrogate that in new ways to try to work out,
firstly what's a genuine early block and distinguish it from a later block, but also to ask questions about what actually genuine means?
Um. So I mean, Elizabeth, you want to say a little bit more about Derschau now or do you want to do that later on and or we can do it now.
Could you please forward. Uh, I think five slides to the picture of the Landsknecht standing with his staff.
Uh, next one, please. Perfect. Uh, so, Hans Albert von Derschau was the first collector of woodblocks.
Um, as opposed to, say, publisher or printer or practical user.
Um. And he was active, you know, after, uh, the.
And after German unification, which was in 1870,
so there is a surge of interest in and in establishing collections and interpreting collections that um,
with it. So the story of a German cultural heritage, rather than many separate, um,
cultural heritage heritages in areas from the Holy Roman Empire that were German speaking.
And so he created a collection of woodblocks, not editable and prints and many other things, but especially the woodblocks,
uh, that showed the development of, of art making, um, in mostly the German speaking areas from its origins.
Um, up until his, uh, up until his death.
Um, no, what you're looking at here is a what seems to be.
So, um, you're looking at a woodblock, the, um, recto or the line side, a side view the verso or the coloured side,
and then an impression, uh, that shows how the, the lined and the tone side, uh, combined to create a single image.
Well, this is, um, when I started this research several years ago, this was one of the only,
uh, several dozen colour woodcuts known from early modern German speaking ones.
Uh, these kinds of soldiers with a really fancy clothing were called Landsknecht, and they were, um,
mercenary soldiers who had wild and radical fashion, with permission from the emperor himself to wear special clothing and special colours.
Um, and legend has it that's in compensation for the life being so short.
So they were known for their raucous behaviour and wild fashion, and are many woodcuts made of this fashion.
Now, this one is exceptional because it's printed in it in colour.
Um, and the colour palettes for printing were very limited at this time and fairly drab and also,
um, because it seems to show sort of halo around, uh, parts of it.
And so, uh, it was sort it was odd that it was printed in colour because normally these woodcuts were hand painted and really bright.
Uh, we might even say garish to our eyes' palettes.
Um, and this halo, you can see the edge of it is sort of scalloped.
Um, makes this seem to be a test print or a proof impression that tests the alignment of the, the tone and the key blocks.
Make sure they aligned correctly.
Uh, before the cutter, then sort of scooped out all the, the rest of the, um, what seems to be the background in tone.
So undocumented, unprecedented evidence for woodblock working practices in early modern Germany.
Well, I don't think that's true. Um, this is the only known impression of it.
Um. It was, I've found that all impressions that survive and every glam gallery, library,
archive and museum worldwide, I've been able to track down copies of this, um, all identical.
And they all are taken from the 1810 uh re strikes, uh, a volume that collects new impressions of all of Derschau's old woodblocks.
Um, so this is an this seems to be an 18th century, um, or early 19th century
woodblock created to be printed for the first time in 1810, um, and very recently.
So the the print collection in Berlin has um,
we took advantage of the closures due to Covid to do some incredibly detailed cataloguing projects of large bodies of their collection,
and that includes a Derschau collection of woodblocks. So for the first time, they have been thoroughly catalogued and digitised.
And you're looking at some of the results here. So hundreds of these blocks are now available to researchers for the first time.
Um, what you can see is what we were talking about earlier.
They're suspiciously clean. They're in really good condition.
Um. And you can see the,
so I don't know if you can see my mask on the image. You probably can.
Um, the the key, block in black has a bit of that opaque glossiness that ink impregnated into it, but not a lot.
Um, so it hasn't been printed in white too many times. And then the, um.
The Tom block seems to have traces of two colours.
One is a really, really bad, a really thin red ink which could have been used for proofing.
There's only a faint traces of it, and only in several places.
And then it has the, the green,
uh, which remains in areas that were sort of rougher or cut away,
so all of the smooth printed areas it's been wiped completely clean from,
Um, so I would imagine this was printed in colour besides a proof only once and only for the, uh, 1810, uh, restructs.
Um, so I started wondering how how can we know?
How can we tell? Um, I can use humanities research methods to say, well, something smells wrong.
I think these are much later. I don't think these are actually from the, uh, 1520s, 1540s, which the iconography would suggest.
Um, so with the support of the John Flood funding and with Ed's involvement, uh, we.
Add some conservators at Berlin. Remove little bits of the wood in ways that are not visible to the eye.
There's no visible changes, and burn them up so they could be carbon dated.
Uh, can you go backwards? One slide, please? Um, yes.
There you go. Uh, and so here I can imagine the shock in the room about removing, uh, physical material for destructive testing,
but here you can see the hand of the conservator removing very small pieces of wood.
You can see a before and after of the, of one of the blocks,
it's a different block. It's one of the group that was tested. So there is effectively no perceptible, uh, difference.
And it was considered that the research value of the testing would be more significant than the, um,
any minor change, uh, for the removal of material from the already existing worm damage or existing holes.
And then you can see on the in the next picture the sort of pencil head size fragments of wood that were removed.
Um, and so what we found complicates the story a bit.
Uh, do you want to talk about carbon dating a bit?
Um, actually, you're probably better placed to talk about that, having just written that.
Just written. Ed and I have collaborated on an article in the volume Printing Things that Francesco Burke and I editing for
Proceedings of the British Academy in collaboration with the geochronologist and conservation team who undertook this,
which should be coming out next year. Fingers crossed. Um.
Well, and this followed in the footsteps of Ed's earlier research into the pioneering carbon dating of a medieval woodblock that so can't be medieval.
Um. But we found that the wood could have been, um.
The wood could have been from a much earlier time, or it could have been, uh, from the 18th century.
Uh, we found that it's incredibly difficult to use the information from carbon dating,
Uh, in most cases, uh, to a certain the timeline of the production of a woodblock.
So what looks like this, uh, they grow from a tree.
They're taken from a tree, as Ed said. And the carbon in the atmosphere is trapped in each ring.
Um, so when you if you were to, say, unlock or open up a ring of a tree, you can see the carbon levels in the atmosphere at that moment.
Um, so it's often said that the carbon dating tells you when the tree was felled or it died.
Uh, but that's not true. It, um, reveals the level of carbon in that atmosphere when that ring grew when that was created.
And, thanks for woodblocks like these, uh, but tend to be chosen because they're more stable.
They don't, um, bend over time, so they're taken closer to the core of the tree.
But if you're talking about trees that are giant and centuries old,
it can be very difficult to know where the position of that plank was within the tree.
Um, and if the tree several hundred years old, then carbon dating each of the rings can show the range from,
uh, 200 years ago to the, uh, to the present.
Uh, so we've had additional challenges in carbon dating this, but the interpreting the results.
But the results are not inconsistent, uh, with a much later production.
But that doesn't mean that these wood blocks are fakes. Um, Ed, do you want to talk about your carbon dating and backward now?
Yeah. So the interesting thing, I think Bagford, and I've got the Bagford block at the beginning there that we have.
So. Okay. So. So the radiocarbon dating can give you a certain amount of data.
But the problem with radiocarbon dating is that it gives you data in sort of, uh, blocks.
So it says this could be between these dates based on the carbon decay, or it could be between these dates, or it could be between these dates.
So it sounds like it's actually a very unhelpful, um, process.
But what we've learned from the earlier talks today is that context is everything for these things.
So the radio, radiocarbon dating is useful when it's put alongside other contextual information.
So Bagfords blocks, for example, when the radiocarbon dating was done on the Rylands Apocalypse block, which purported
Is there, which is this woman? Um, which was long,
Which was long thought to be the, the only surviving woodblock from which a block book impression was taken.
The radiocarbon dating came up with three possible um, uh, date ranges and, uh,
two of those were problematic because of the contextual information that we know about that block.
So, for example, um, we know that this block was in the ownership of um, Earl Spencer by 1800.
So one of the ranges was 1820 - 1860 can't possibly be right.
So we can strike that one off. The other one of the other date ranges was from 1340 to 1400.
And you think, well, block books, we know now from the work of Allan Stevenson and other people that block books, uh,
start to appear at precisely the same moment in the 1450s that Gutenberg is inventing, uh, experimenting with movable type.
So by using that contextual evidence, you're able actually to strike out those two outlier dates and just leave you with one particular date,
which in the case of the Rylands block was pretty specific.
It was between 1684 and 1812.
And lo and behold, we've got Bagford writing to Thomas Hearne at the beginning of the 18th century,
saying, I'm in the process of making these wood blocks.
So it's a nice example of how the contextual evidence, the sort of bibliographical communication which takes place around these things over centuries,
um, actually allows us to make more sense of that radiocarbon dating.
And I think when we come towards the end of this, Elizabeth, we might talk a little bit more about the sort of limitations,
but also the potential for wider carbon dating for these, for these objects.
Um, shall I say a little bit about impressions?
First, I do want to say first very quickly, is that the fact that this medieval woodblock is actually not medieval, um, doesn't cheapen it.
It doesn't make it just a fake or a fraud or a forgery.
Um, Ed suspects, and I think he's absolutely right, uh, that it's instead a way to explore, honour or document, uh, earlier craft practices.
Um, these and we think there are probably very many of them that just haven't yet been identified, uh, were created, uh, similar to the, uh,
to the block in the Derschau collection at a moment of the creation of bibliograph or print
historical study or moments of, of particular cultural importance for print history.
Um, we think they might have been research tools or, uh, as Ed has said,
a facsimile in the in an era before technologies of exact reproduction existed.
Uh, so in a way, the facsimile of a technique or of an approach rather than of an image.
Um, and I think this builds in some ways from, um,
what Andrew and Alex have been saying about us standing on the shoulders of the giants who ran libraries in previous generations,
uh, they were the ones who were commissioning these and working with, uh, with printmakers and block cutters to ensure that they were accurate.
Uh, and as Ed has found in the correspondence, they, they knew this.
They were not fooled.
It's later generations and our generation who have been taken in by the accuracy and precision of the work that they were so invested in,
and we have misinterpreted it.
Um, but that so we think that actually the later production of these medieval that early modern woodblocks add significantly to their research value.
It's a completely new way of interpreting the historical record,
these objects that have come down to us and appreciating the, the research of the past
that they represent and the role that they have in creating a sort of an antiquarian,
uh, form of antiquarian scholarship, that established the fields of book history and print histories.
We know what. Bagford has had a very, very bad press over the years.
So Bagford, Bagford put together this collection, enormous collection of printed and manuscript fragments.
So he was famously referred to as the Biblioclast, the sort of breaker of books.
Um, I think over the past sort of 30 or 40 years, we've completely reassessed the way that we understand him,
and there's, a there's a wonderful article, um, which looks at Bagford in a new light, um, uh, by,
Wright. And it basically, he points out, the back foot is a bibliographical pioneer in just about every aspect of what he does.
And I think Elizabeth and I would argue that this is what's going on here.
You know, Bagford was working at a time when the word facsimile hadn't yet been invented.
So there is no concept of what a facsimile is.
So Bagford is travelling around the continent, going to Haarlem, visiting Mainz, Mainz, looking at all these examples of early printing,
and trying to work out how he's going to express in the the, the abortive history of printing that never happens, how he's going to get this across.
And he realises that this is a visual medium, so he needs to produce a visual representation.
But he sees no issue with taking one bit of a block book, combining it with a text from a letter press book,
and then creating a sort of composite imaginary object which illustrates all the points that he wants to make in his essay.
So it's not a duplicitous activity. He would never I don't think we ever thought of it in that way.
It is more about, um, producing something which illustrates physically the materiality of the things that he's been studying.
So it's a super interesting thing. I think we're sort of really.
So the question around the Rylands block has always been, is it a fake or is it real?
And actually, the question is a much more nuanced one than that.
It's not real. But actually in many respects, it's much more interesting as a composite object from the late 17th,
early 18th century, uh, than it might be as a 15th century block
dare I say it. Um, and that's where things like the Derschau collection are going to be so interesting.
So Elizabeth and I, my suspicion is that actually there is a huge amount of, uh,
woodblock material which either floats without any identification or dating at all because people don't know how to approach it,
0r more likely, it's, um, been put across as either a genuine 15th or 16th century object or a fake.
And I think what we're interested in is a larger endeavour to look at that and
try and work out whether the techniques of radiocarbon dating and the various
other contextual things that we've talked about today can allow us to sort of
draw some lines around these various different clutches of woodblock material,
which would allow us to say, okay,
this sort of stuff does look like from the carbon dating and from the context that it might actually be from the 15th or 16th century.
This set of material looks like it's from the 17th century,
and is as I say,
all grist to the mill of this idea that there's this great fermentation going on at that moment about the history of printing and understanding it,
and it's a tool for doing that, and then this set of material is perhaps early 19th century and was produced
by booksellers who wanted to be duplicitous and produce something which is a,
you know, a fake. Um, so there's another metal cut at Rylands, which we I've been looking at recently,
which does actually look like it might be a fabrication of the early 19th century, but it's been printed on paper from the early 16th century.
So somebody is being very, very clever there about creating something which looks even if you look at the paper,
it looks like a genuine object that isn't, um, but at the moment we're really only sort of dipping our toe in the water with that.
I think there's a lot to be done to explore the relationship to what became a neo-Gothic movement.
Um, you know, Viollet-le-Duc's restoration of Notre Dame and Paris has been, uh, in some cases mocked.
He made it more medieval than the medieval ever was, but, uh
at the same time he was, uh.
He was pioneering an architecture ways of honouring and exploring and building on what he understood as the division of the, uh, creators.
Um, and I think there's a huge amount of honour and respect and
work invested in the revival and the continuation of medieval and early modern
craft practices in wedlock that bears a huge amount of further explanation.
Um, both the exploration with the fundamental research identifying objects, uh, processes, data,
and also understanding the intellectual and the broader culture cultural context in which this took place.
So I talk a little bit about impressions now. Yes. Um. Find the right slide.
Okay, so if woodblocks are difficult to date, impressions in some respects are even more difficult to date.
So we've already touched, uh, Alex touched on the idea of the sort of, uh, transient nature of these things.
Most of the output from woodblock in the periods that Elizabeth and I are interested in is very ephemeral.
Um, it survives in tiny quantities, you know, a thousand impressions may be taken,
may have been taken in the 15th century, but maybe only 1 or 2 actually survive today.
Um, and they survive in context, which makes them sometimes difficult to make sense of.
So I mentioned this so that the coffret on the right hand, on the left hand side there is, you know,
this is a print which in the 15th century was pasted into a book box, makes it very difficult for us to study it.
It's great for the context, but it makes it very difficult to for us to study it as an object.
Uh, the middle woodcut is actually printed directly into a medieval manuscript, so it's not a print,
it was printed into the manuscript itself. And then on the right hand side, this is a bit of a cheat,
it's a metal cut rather than a woodcut,
but it's to give the make the point that these things the most common place we find them surviving is pasted into manuscripts and printed books.
Um, so their context makes them complicated, but also their means of production makes them complicated.
So printing from woodblocks is not like book printing.
So when we're printing letterpress books, we have this concept of the addition.
So when you're printing a large press book, you set the type to print a particular set of pages,
you ink that type and you take off 500 or 1000 impressions of it
and then you wash that type, you break it and redistribute it and use the same type to make different pages and print 500 of them.
And that is a sort of an addition printing. Printing from woodblocks is different.
So once you've put the effort into creating the woodblock, I mean, you can change it subtly,
you can continue to cut away at it, but fundamentally it is what it is.
And as a consequence, the printers have single sheet material from woodblocks.
Um, it's a much more akin to print on demand than addition printing.
And so you may have an artist or woodcutter who cuts a block in 1450, and they print 100 impressions from it in 1450, uh,
five years later, that block is owned by somebody completely different, and five years later they take another 50 impressions of it.
Or they cut colour but on black on the back. And so both sides of the block could have centuries of difference between the data and the design.
Yeah. So suddenly they stopped printing, printing it in two colours.
Um, and that can go on for a long time.
So I know of one block which we know was, um, being produced in the 1420s, and impressions are still being taken off of it in the early 16th century.
So. In terms of dating impressions,
we have this great problem that you're if you're lucky, you've got a crack in the block or a bit of the side border falls off.
And that allows you to say that this one comes after this one in a chronology.
But often you don't even have that. So all you have is a series of impressions, um, which can sometimes be dated from their context.
So, you know, if it was printed in a manuscript that was completed in 1464, you've got some context.
But a huge number of these things float entirely without context.
Um, print collectors had a habit of removing them from context, so they survive today in, um, albums and portfolios.
Um, and that causes a problem because you can't, it's very difficult to pin down an impression.
Um, if you don't have clues based on the cracks in the block or any or any context to go on.
So we are fortunate, though, in that, um, there is a sort of hidden secret clue within the paper stocks used for printing this material.
So the chap on the left here is, uh, Gerhard Piccard.
Um, Piccard was a watermark obsessive.
So Gerhard Picard had this idea that as part of the production process of paper, um, paper is made by using essentially a gigantic flat metal sieve,
and you dip that into a a tub of, um, liquid in which there's a suspension of rag fibres.
You lift it up, the water pours out of the bottom, you give it a shake, and the fibres then lock together,
and when they dry, that forms a piece of paper.
And almost without exception, in the 15th century, paper makers attached onto the wire frame a small bent piece of wire,
which might be the shape of a bull's head, or a unicorn, or a crown,
and that watermark survives in the paper. And Piccard had the idea that if you could draw enough, take off tracings of
these watermarks and put together a sort of data set that was large enough,
you could start to use those mount watermarks to put papers in particular places at particular times.
So his idea was that if I find in a single sheet print somewhere the watermark which is in the middle here,
I can consult his gigantic printed volumes, which thankfully are now online
um, and if I find that Piccard found this particular watermark in papers which were being used in the city accounts of Haarlem between 1460 and 1465,
I can be fairly certain within a couple of years that the date of the paper that I've got links up with,
the date of the paper, that the watermarks that he found. So that's the basis for watermark studies.
Um, and I just thought I taught you very quickly through one example, um, to see how it works.
Um, so the item on the left hand side here is the famous Rylandss, uh, Saint Christopher.
So this is a 15th century woodcut that survives, pasted to the inside of a book binding in the John Rylands Library.
And its fame has rested for generations on the fact that it it was long thought to be the earliest dated piece of Western printing.
So if you look in the bottom right hand corner, you couldn't see the Latin date 1423.
So from its discovery in, uh, the late 18th century, this print has been lauded as this sort of, uh,
hugely significant moment in that it puts a line in the sand that allows us to say that this was produced in 1423,
it's the earliest dated Western impression.
However, it is a problematic print for all sorts of reasons, and the main reason is that it looks absolutely nothing like a print from the 1420s.
So I mentioned at the beginning that these prints, these very early prints, are very naive.
They lack the sort of the look at the definition and the flowing robes and the definition in the beard and in the facial expressions.
Uh, this is kind of like watching a 1980s movie and seeing an iPhone in it.
It just doesn't ring true. Um, so from the very outset,
this object was was raised eyebrows because it sits entirely out of our sort of art historical context and understanding of that period.
So a couple of years ago, uh, we finally managed to extract, with Julianne's help, uh, a watermark from the paper,
which was extremely difficult because it had been pasted to the wooden board of this binding for 500 years.
But we did finally get, uh, a watermark out of it.
And the watermark, thankfully, is quite characteristic.
Um, so when you go to Piccard, you find this is just a small selection of, uh, of the of the type matches that we found.
And to cut a very long story short, the papers which have this characteristic watermark in don't start to appear until the mid 1430s,
and they're mostly used in the late 1430s and early 14.
40s. So using the watermark evidence, you're able to I mean, we can't conclusively say that this isn't a woodcut dated from 1423,
still being printed in the 1440s,
but it does add significant weight to the argument that with all that contextual material, the bibliographical debate,
which has gone on around this for a century and a half, and with these sort of glaring stylistic problems that we have,
placing this into the established chronology, that the watermark evidence does strongly suggest that this is not a woodcut from 1423.
So. The project, which I am involved in, uh, the AHRC project is looking at block books,
which we've talked about, and looking at paper stocks and trying to map trying to do this exercise,
but on a much larger scale to look at the watermarks that we find in all extant examples of block books,
and to look at what that tells us about the chronology in the sequence of that block, of those block books,
but also to compare it to the watermarks taken from paper, from single sheet material, um, and letter press books printed before 1470.
So the traditional view of this has always been you have one group of people producing single sheet material in one place,
you have another group of people producing block books in another place at a different time,
and then you have letterpress printers are doing something different. Actually, we think that's probably not the case.
And if we can link up paper stocks between these three different endeavours,
what we might be able to show is they are reprographic technologies,
which are all taking place in the same places at the same times, but and done by the same people.
Um. So that's paper.
Elizabeth, should we talk a bit about the limitations? Of what we.
And let me just. So I said at the start, you when you're doing historical research, you can never trust rethink.
You know, you have to go back to the the secondary literature.
You can't trust that you have to go back to the objects and then you can't trust them either.
And so Ed and I has been doing everything we can to find out more about these objects.
And we can't trust our findings either.
Um, to some degree, as Edward say, it's incredibly complicated.
Um, woodblocks are not just chunks of wood. They're part of
um, dead organisms and that their physical characteristics can reflect conditions of their,
of course, in their lifetime of handling after the felling or death of the tree.
Um, an accurate dating could reflect the, um, the time that the block was cut or seasoned, um, from a plank of wood.
Uh, so the block itself was prepared. The dating could reflect the time that a design was created.
Um, uh, maybe it was at the same time, or maybe it was generations or centuries later that, uh, that design was actually cut into the wood.
That's another point for dating. Um, sometimes you have, especially for old, beaten up, um, not very good wood blocks with the outline.
The block for back, Uh, the reverse will be cut with, um, a tone side, or come back to freshen it up to give new life to it.
So the design of that can have another dating, the cutting of that kind of another dating and then the impressions,
actual printing of one side or both of the other can have any range of readings.
So when we say a wood block dates to, uh, circa 1500 or circa 1600 or any other specific date, uh,
we could be talking about, uh, scientifically validated, uh, hypotheses about the dating of the wood itself.
Uh, we could be talking about art historical, contextual information about the design.
We could be talking about print historical or, uh, historical craft aspects that informed the dating of the cutting itself.
Um, of one side or the other side, or for evidence to that, uh, cutting, sometimes if they were applied to a broken piece was removed and then an,
a new piece was inserted, or maybe something that added more value, like a, uh, a fake monogram of a famous artist could be added in.
Um. And sometimes the dating refers to the impression which is on a piece of paper,
which has a watermark which is absolutely firmly datable to a specific location to a specific place in time.
That paper lasted, maybe. That, uh, paper stock was used decades, generations, centuries later, in a different place in time for a different project.
So we're doing everything we can to find reliable methodologies that draw
together on humanities and STEM approaches to dating these kinds of materials.
Uh, the papers, the printing inks, uh, and the wood itself.
But as I said, you can't trust the secondary sources.
You can't trust the primary objects. And for woodblocks you just have to do your best.
Yeah. We also have a fundamental problem in, um, there's all of this depends on a large body of data.
So radiocarbon dating itself depends on the fact that for generations we've recorded the rate these things.
So we have this, this this chronology against which we compare things.
Um, radiocarbon, carbon dating of woodblocks is in its infancy.
I mean, what three examples now, Elizabeth.
Um, have been. So two. There are two examples that were published. Um.
That have been that are impressed. One of them is the carbon dating undertaken at the, the, uh, of the um.
Uh the Vernoff in Paris of their Bois Protat, which is the oldest woodblock used for printing in in the west, was used for block printing on textile.
Uh, stylistically the design is dated to the 1380s ish.
Um, the wood itself is carbon dated to the early 1100s, which it could mean
it was taken from inside the core of a very, very large tree, uh, that was felled 200 years after the tree was planted and started to grow.
Um, so that's not in or it was old with.
It was very well seasoned and reused from a different project. Um, so having a knowing that the wood is from the early 11 hundreds or thousands, uh.
You know, doesn't confirm or deny, uh, the stylistic dating of the design to the 1370s, 80s.
Uh, then we have Ed's groundbreaking, uh, carbon dating of Alfred blocks.
Um, coming up, we hope next year at the volume printing things, uh, there'll be the the carbon dating,
the results of the carbon dating of two blocks from the Joshua collection, which was funded by the John Flood
grant.
we're very, very grateful for, uh, as well as a handbook about, uh, a manual about what carbon dating means for research and for print institutions.
Are there very specific considerations, for example, about contaminants like printing ink that gets absorbed into the wood that we need to be careful.
Um, and then there's another example of carbon dating that, uh, will be published in that volume.
Uh, which is in an Eastern European context.
And again, has really surprising outcomes, that mean we have a huge amount of reinterpretation to undertake as research continues.
But these are individual data points, their silos of data, and it is incredibly hard to know what they represent.
Um, we don't have the body of research that say furniture history, um, depends on for authenticating or uh,
potentially even making attributions of places or areas or, uh, periods or even workshops of production.
So we're at a very early starting point. So maybe it's telling us what we know and what we don't know.
And encourage those of you who, uh, who work in heritage collections that have woodblocks or who own them yourselves,
to dig little holes into existing holes and send them off for carbon dating and let us know what you find.
I mean, that is part of our part of our shtick, is this is a sort of call to arms.
You know, we've got all of this material. Um, it is a it is invasive, but it is invasive in a very minor way.
Um, and especially with an existing damage. Yeah, yeah.
And if we do, you know, we do need to build up a better data set.
You know, at the moment, as Elizabeth says, we've got a handful of outlying things.
Um, we need the context to make more sense of that.
Um, visitors are understandably wary about taking a scalpel to the back of a woodblock.
Um, but the potential for what we can learn from this is, is enormous, I think, for these objects, which was floated,
it is one thing which has really come out today. It's the fact that these things have they, they sort of float,
nobody really knows quite where they sit or what to do with them.
So sometimes they're in museums, sometimes they're in libraries, sometimes they're in archives.
Um. It feels like sometimes they're in workshops.
Yeah. And quite often there in workshops, as Alex had said. Yeah, yeah.
Um, so it feels like there's a sort of groundswell of interest in them at the moment that, you know,
it's a good moment to sort of actually start thinking sort of holistically about how we approach all of that.
Um, I'm conscious that we were supposed to only talk with half an hour and ask questions,
and we're now five minutes from the end, but should we are there?
Does anyone have any questions for Elizabeth or I? So the question was about, um, data sets and about whether, uh,
we're relying on published data sets or whether there is a sort of informal network of people doing this.
I think the answer is that up until now, this has been very much an informal network.
It's been a group of like minded, interested people, um, who have been pursuing independent projects.
I what we would like, I think, is to try and secure some funding to do a larger project focussed on a particular collection of blocks.
And, you know, Derschau would be a wonderful one to wonderful one to work on.
Um, but yeah, the moment the fundamental problem is that there just hasn't been.
I mean, watermarks are very different, a great deal of work has been done on them.
But this the sort of application of, uh, STEM technologies to woodblock,
so there's, there's also dendrochronology is another, um, way of looking at these.
The DNA, DNA analysis of the, the wood blocks, which might help us identify whether, for example, this is a tree which is gigantic,
so we have to question the date range because the block could have been taken from anywhere in it,
or whether actually this is a very small tree which only lives for 50 years.
So we can be much more confident about the dating. So but at the moment that work just isn't really being done.
Elizabeth, do you want to add anything to that? We don't know
what we don't know. Uh, at the minute we know so little, and we have so many questions about the scientific,
about scientifically validated facts that we do have that we know even less than we did, when we started in some ways.
Um, we have so many questions.
And the only way to answer those questions and to refine those questions is to build up a critical mass of raw data that that we can analyse.
And as Ed said, one of the best ways to do that is just to get digging in a collection.
Um, the collection, any collection, any, um, individual wood block, uh, at this point in scholarship?
Will add significantly to scholarship. Uh, if somebody is able to
Um, to undertake the DNA analysis of a historical woodblock that would effectively constitute 100% of the published scholarship.
The use of this technique, um, to understand this category of heritage material would be absolutely groundbreaking.
Um, aDNA, or ancient DNA, uh, technology can be a bit hit and miss because DNA does degrade.
But there are ways of doing this. Um, if the, the aDNA of timber from shipwrecks.
It's been in saltwater for centuries can be retrieved.
There must be a way to retrieve it from woodblocks. Um, if somebody has a group of ten woodblocks and they wanted to undertake the,
the carbon dating of them to see what they could find that would
Um, you know triple the quantity of published and unpublished results of carbon dating of European heritage wood blocks that currently exist.
So there's enormous scope for significant contributions to scholarship, with really a minimum amount of work required within collections.
I think Derschau is an incredible collection,
I think that the collections within, um, Oxford and Cambridge and other university libraries are incredible collections.
Um, I but to be honest, any single book analysed in any of these ways can alone constitute a significant contribution to scholarship.
But yes, if if it is possible to, uh, collaborate with a collection to get a much better overview of the,
and the results of the, of the fuller analysis of a number of blocks.
That would be incredible, and build on John pledge legacy.
So if anybody here is interested, please do be in touch with me.
Thank you. That was incredibly interesting. Um, I just wanted to ask when you said when they do carbon dating and you might
come up with kind of three different sets of dates and you use other factors,
why is it that they're coming up with three kind of random and separate?
Um presumably not random, but how are they getting those different dates?
Well, therein lies the question, Elizabeth. So this is science.
Answer science. Yeah. Yes. So we are not scientists and we have been trying to one of the purposes of the article,
which Elizabeth and I have been writing for the printing things volume,
is to try and give print historians and conservatives who work in our world a sort of basic understanding of how radio, radiocarbon dating works.
Um, it is it is a well-established.
So you talk to archaeologists, radiocarbon people about this, and you asked them this and they said, well, this is a well-established technique.
It just is. You know, that's that's the reason, you know, it's a scientific technique.
It is to do with these calibration curves. Is that right, Elizabeth?
It starts in space.
So, uh, there's a certain kind of cosmic ray that penetrates through its atmosphere that becomes a specific form of carbon, carbon 14.
And this is incredibly variable year on year, but it's consistent across the world.
Um, I say across the world, there's three different ways in which consist there's northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere and, uh, oceanic bodies.
So within each of those three, it's consistent, uh, year on year.
Um, but it might be the measurements in the northern and southern hemisphere or oceanic bodies might be different.
Uh, so for us, we're looking only at the measurements from the northern hemisphere.
Um, and so there's a huge amount of,
of organic material that has been subject to carbon dating since carbon dating developed, uh, several generations ago.
And, uh, because and because of that, Um
a large body of scientists around the world have been able to collaborate for, for generations,
Now to say here is something that we know. Absolutely.
Uh, this tree ring absolutely is from the tree ring found in this year, or this object is absolutely dated to this moment in time.
And we know that the amount of carbon 14 in it is this point ,and we know the next year is that point.
And so there's international standards.
Uh, this is publicly available data, uh, where you see sort of curves that go like this year on year as the carbon 14 levels change over time.
And so what we what we ask the geochronologist to do when we send the little pencil shaping sized bits
of wood from wood blocks is to find out what the levels of what the level of carbon 14 is in them,
and then to knock them against those, uh, those really wobbly curves.
And so if the numbers, the numbers have to line up.
And so if the, the number matches, say this, a level that is found where the curve goes here and here and here,
then the geochronologist will say it's consistent with the amount of carbon that was in the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere in this period,
this period, in this period. And we can say, well, we know that this refers to,
Um, I don't know, a. Of a saint who was seen as anathema in England at this time.
So it can't be made in this year. And we know that this year is far too early because the material would have degraded.
So maybe using humanities contextual scholarship, we can say this
point where it matches is more likely of this of the three possible matches.
Does that make sense? While we're thinking about that, I just have to,
I think these are one, possibly one word answers and, uh, questions.
Um, how many medieval woodblocks survive?
Uh, well, we don't know the answer. What do you mean by medieval? Yeah, exactly.
All right. Um, it's, it's probably that there are there ,is a there, how many zeros?
Maybe. There are a group of blocks which are considered to be medieval.
But then the Rylands block was considered to be medieval.
The Derschau blocks were considered to be 16th century.
There are contemporary German collections that include some of the material that's medieval,
early modern, but created later out of a point of antiquarian interest.
So these are not unique. We think this represents a much larger. And then you get into the more complicated aspect of reused materials.
So impressions of things which weren't actually originally intended to be printed from which might be of any date.
So it's a really difficult question to answer. We we don't know at the moment.
Um, that another one line answer may be, um, what is a tone block, and how many blocks are carved on both sides? Over to you.
Elizabeth. Okay, so if we could go back to those the slide that shows the, um, the block from the Derschau collection.
So there's three pictures of the same piece of wood. Uh, one of them has an outline and black.
And that's normally what we would call the wood block.
Um, because it was printed with colour as well.
Um, from a different block. Then we we then segregate that into a key or line block.
A key means outline. So in CMYK printing it's cyan magenta yellow and key for black.
Uh so we use key for that black outline.
Um and normally that can be printed independently to make sense legible if nothing else is printed but not always.
And then the tone block is the area that's cut for the colour.
Um, so here I'm saying to key block and tone block. Really it's key side and tone side of the same block.
Uh, very, very few survive. I have found a number of examples of two sided blocks, um, cut with a key block on one side, and often a much what
seems to be a much later, um, a tone block cut, possibly to rev up the, the sales of a damaged block up, but I don't know.
Um, I've seen them in, not in art historical contexts, um, but in book printing contexts.
And the vast majority that I have seen are, um, possibly from the 15th or early 16th century and in a French archive that has left them, uh,
unassessioned and not just on catalogue,
but unassessioned for over 100 years because they're not fit into any standard cataloguing or descriptive procedures.
They don't know what to do with them. Um, and they don't know how to best care for them.
Uh, so that's a bit awkward. So I can't publish on this, but I know they exist.
And if you want to reach out to me, I'll be glad to discuss what I know privately. I will read out
a question has come from Father Katz. Um, and I.
I don't know if it's been, um.
I glad to hear, um, uh, regarding the wood sample or samples that was taken from a block that produced three very different date ranges,
Was that a single sample or multiple ones taken from the same block?
And even if multiple samples were taken from a single block, how could those indicate dates over hundreds of years?
Um, that's probably say a small woodblock might capture rings that grow over a relatively short period.
But I guess the the the way that this differs from a previous question is,
was it one wood sample or multiple ones from the same block that produced three different date ranges?
So I think some of the question has been answered by the answer to the previous question.
In terms of the Rylands sampling, that was a single sample.
Um, but actually the contextual evidence with the Rylands block was so strong that it actually fell exactly where we expected it to.
So I think best practice probably is to take a series of samples from a series of different areas.
Conservators are for obvious reasons, less keen to take multiple samples.
But, you know, again, we're still working on the sort of methodologies for doing this.
Um, and as I say, the paper that Elizabeth and I are co-authoring with various other people tackles a lot of these questions,
and particularly these questions around how do we interpret the information that the radiocarbon people give back to us?
Um, and the sort of caveats that we need to consider, um, when, when looking at that data,
the sample does consist of all of the little pencil shavings type pieces of wood.
Um, so one reason why they're different date ranges is within the results is that
those samples could be taken from different rings that show different numbers.
But overall they give a picture that's accurate for the artefact itself. If there are
no other questions. Uh, thank you, everyone, for attending.
Uh, here in the room and everyone online. We hope that was enlightening.
It may well have raised more questions than we were able to answer, but that's, uh, we hope, the beginning of some new and exciting research.
And do look out for the article and other publications from Ed and from Elizabeth coming up in the near future.
So thank you again. Thank you.