Well, I'm going to spend 30 minutes also telling you extremely potted history of the
civilian library and telling you a little bit about what you might find in it,
why it was set up, why we might be interested in it.
As Wilma says, I'm rather interested in the history of institutional libraries, particularly in this parish.
It seems to me one of the more interesting things about the body, and is that it's not just a library,
but a library of libraries, and it's the ones inside that, particularly the historic ones that I have an interest in.
Why am I interested in them? Well, they often function as sort of barometers for intellectual history.
If you want to work out what the horizons of scholarship are at a given time, then you need to spend time with library catalogues.
And that's what I do. Well, if you walk into the exhibition room just over there, right on the back against the against the firewall there,
the back of black girl who you will see a huge display case about the size of a library.
And inside, if you look down, you'll see immediately a 15th century English manuscript, which is an astrological manuscript someone is coming from.
It's got a kind of moving vol well, as we call them, turning diagrams in manuscripts.
Next to that, you'll see a copy of not the first, but the second edition of Copernicus, which is 1566, isn't it?
And then next to that, you'll see Kepler's Astronomia Nova, which is quite a big book in which Kepler announces various laws,
most famous obviously being his principle about elliptical orbits.
Next to that, you'll see in many ways what was a much more exciting book.
Galileo's little book on the Starry Messenger, the SIDERIS Nuncio to 1610, in which he says that I have a new thing called the telescope.
And I looked at the moon and I can see all sorts of ridges and mountains and pitted things in the moon.
And he also talks about the new stars. He's he calls them that he's discovered around Jupiter and he talks about the phases of Venus.
That's a really impressive book. Behind that, however, there is a whole row of books and they are printed books from the civilian library.
And as you look at their spines, you'll see on their spines a lot of them have simply John Wallace written on that spine.
I'll come back to that. He is one of the most long serving civilian professors of geometry.
He actually held his chair from 1649 to 1703, which is quite his tenure.
Alongside that, you'll see a lot of other books with a kind of CW monogram on the spine all the way down to tooled and gold.
That's Christopher Wren. And that tells you immediately that two of the big contributors to that library were John Wallace and Christopher Wren.
Well, the civilian library is named after Henry Saville, the founder of the Civilian Professorships.
Saville Fine funds, two professorships, one geometry, one in astronomy in 1619.
He is a quite long lived man. He's born in 1549, dies in 1622.
He was one of the big men, Elizabethan Learned World, and his very good friend was Sir Thomas Bodley.
They were both bigwigs in Merton College, and Bodley was in many ways a patron of learning rather than a scholar of of real significance himself.
Saville was both, and Saville was very much a man who worked in in the in the public sphere, as we would say,
accruing various appointments and honours, but was also a serious scholar who from the 1570s was lecturing in Oxford on astronomy.
Remarkably, he lectures publicly on the Copernican on the Ptolemaic system side by side,
making him really not quite an exponent of component Hinduism as a full physical model,
but certainly an explainer of the mathematical consequences of Republicanism extremely early.
This is in the 1970s when really one can number on on two hands the number of committed companions in Europe.
At that time, people were much more keen on his mathematics.
They weren't quite sold on on the physical system that the mathematics implied.
Well, Saville had an idea in in the second decade of the 17th century to found two chairs in the mathematical arts.
Well, he called them his mathematical readers. And we have one in geometry and one in astronomy.
And obviously they still go on today and they're attached to my college, new college.
The reason why, incidentally, is that initially they didn't have college fellowships, but in the in the 19th century reforms,
some bright spot pointed out that the medieval statutes of New College from the 1370s and
eighties contained provision for two of the 70 fellows to study astronomy if they wished.
And on this piece of. Marianne Witt.
The professors were reassigned to New College in the Victorian reforms, so that's why they were the way they are now.
Well, Saville equipped his professors with a library, and that library sat in the in the Great Tower, the tower of the orders.
As you walk into the body and the thing immediately above your head as you walk through the gate is the original saddle library.
It's now the kind of collection desk in the reading room.
But that was where the civilian professors hung out and they had a study on either side for the geometry professor and the astronomy professor.
And they shared a study in the middle, which is where all their books were.
This also gave them access to the top of the tower, which they had some pointed telescopes at the sky.
And I might tell you a little bit about the instruments that they had as well.
An early modern library tends to contain books, but also other things, typically coins.
The Saville Library doesn't have coins, but instruments as well.
Mathematical instruments, and these have a library has quite a few of those that I'll tell you about in a minute.
Well, this library was augmented down the centuries by the holders of the civilian chair until it really
conked out in the late Victorian period and was handed over to the body in its entirety in 1884.
It had always, as it were, been geographically part of the problem, but it was institutionally separate.
But nonetheless, I'm going to tell you a little bit about about this library,
as it's really one of the most historically significant scientific libraries in the West.
And it contains both manuscripts and printed books almost entirely in mathematics, but with some very interesting exceptions as well.
It was also a library that accrued various manuscripts that were presented to it by people, I think by the late 17th century.
It was clearly being thought of as a place where one could deposit important objects, and I'll mention a few of those.
Well, first of all, some professors, when the chair in geometry was founded, 1619, the first holder was a man called Henry Briggs.
He was followed by a man called Peter Turner.
Then by the exceptionally long lived John Wallis, who as the eminent series of 17th century Oxford Writers Room.
And then following his death in 1783, Edmund Halley by that point and civilian professors were living in New College Lane.
John Wallace Head back to that house just on your left hand side as you go down your college lane of the crook.
The corner. And when Wallace died, Wallace, his son, arranged for the two professors to hold the lease of that house in perpetuity,
which they did until, in historical terms, quite recently.
That is why there is a turret on top of that building. That was the observatory of the civilian professors in the early 18th century.
And Edmund, how you will have used that turret? I had a visit last week from three people from London who wanted to see it.
The turret is not particularly interesting. The birds got in and trashed the place, but we whitewashed it and there's a 19th century telescope in it,
but it's at the top of the student staircase.
So I had to give the students notice on Saturday morning that we were going to crash in at midday and walk up the staircase,
scattering the students as we went. As for the astronomy professor, the first one there, again by chance found in 1690, was John Bainbridge,
an interesting character who was then followed by John Greaves, who's an extremely interesting man.
And I'll tell you a bit about because he went to Egypt, that was followed by Seth Ward,
one of the we associate him with the Wilkins crowd in modern war and actually taught the civilian
trustees into allowing him to build telescopes off the top of the central tower of Wadham.
And so the astronomy towns of Oxford, roughly the Central Bodleian Tower, the Walden Tower, and then College Lane.
That's the three historical ones that the civilian professors were using.
After him comes Christopher Wren, and after him comes an interesting meteorologist called Edward Beaumont.
And then finally, David Gregory, who's a name you'll know. Well, Saville has close connections with Bodley.
As I said, they were both the grandees of Martin College, and Bodley appointed Saville as one of the executors to his will.
Bodley also asked Saville for various bits and bobs for the library itself,
which has opened obviously a decade and a half before the civilian professor's.
And, says Saville, is quite a significant turn into the body in itself.
And these these donations are quite separate from from the civilian chairs.
When they die, is he he gives us silver salt with his arms on it worth £20 to Saville.
In his will, Saville clearly thought about his new foundation,
the the library that he wanted to attach to his chairs in terms that were very influenced by Bodley.
Yesterday I was looking at a collection of papers now known as Saville 1 to 1, which is various bits and bobs that were scraped together and bound up.
And one of them contains in Saville's extremely scratchy handwriting.
Saville has really bad. Handwriting, his ideas about how he wanted his chair to function and how he wanted his library to function.
He wanted a parchment registry of his books to be kept. And he wants this to be held by the keeper of the library.
So he actually sees this really is as quite intertwined with the body and connections, even at this date.
He says that books can be lent, which is a very interesting provision.
That's not true of the both of them, but only to the two professors who hold the chairs.
And it's quite strict. They have to give caution money worth the value of the book before they're allowed to loan it.
And they all have to be returned every year in order for an annual check to take place, which is again following the statutes of the body at the time.
So one thing I learnt yesterday was that the civilian library actually was set up
to mimic the body in collections and that makes sense is held in the same place.
The other thing I saw yesterday, which was rather fun, is that I tracked down what this this early list of books probably is,
which is the the indenture that Saville makes with the university about what books he's going to give to his professors.
It's probably a manuscript about 16, 20, and it turned up in the tiny little boxes of roll.
And it's quite rare to find rolls in body and records.
They're very common in other forms of administrative document. But early modern rules in libraries are quite rare,
and it's about this wide between three and a half metres long, and they unrolls all the way down like that.
So I had to kind of arrange it down with snake weights down the table and and see what was there.
And Saville's scratchy signature is right at the bottom three and a half metres down.
Well, Saville gives this set of books and manuscripts.
He actually, it's often said for those who the library, library nerds,
it's often said he gives printed books and then he later thinks about manuscripts.
This is not true. He's obviously giving in this in this list several manuscripts of his own and indeed several of his own writings.
And it's in this donation to establish his chair that he hands over.
A lot of annotated books, very important in the history of mathematics, is annotated books,
because you often copy down chains of assumptions of great mathematicians knew track them across Europe and he hands over his own lecture notes,
particularly the lectures from the 1570s that he's been giving.
And that's that's how we have those texts.
So his little manuscript that he hands over with all the books is headed for the use chiefly of the mathematical readers who may borrow any of them,
putting in a sufficient real caution, which must mean insufficient caution.
And he's crossed out, written real above, by which he wants to underscore that the cash value of the books has to be put down.
As I look down at this, the kind of things that you see are Greek, Latin, English, Italian books.
He's very keen on Italian books as well.
He has all the standard ancient writers, of course, but he has some modern writers as well, which, given the date, are rather interesting.
Scala Ajar on the psyche, Lloyd digs and writes the great English practical mathematicians William Gilbert,
the big man of English science at the time, his book on the magnets of 1600 and Saville's own papers.
And this is the library which is put in that room, which is just over the over the town,
and it grows very, very significant in the 17th century, and then it slows down after that.
Many of the manuscripts that Saville gave of Greek mathematical manuscripts, they are actually quite recent.
An awful lot of them are are 14th, 15th century copies of all the texts.
So Saville has been picking up on the continent quite a lot of recent copies of mathematical texts,
which underscores once again that mathematical publishing is expensive and slow.
And as a result, the circulation of mathematical texts in manuscript continues really quite late.
Various other genres are easier to print, mathematical books are hard, and the proofreading is particularly difficult for mathematical books.
Looking at the manuscripts themselves that are in the sample collection today,
you can see that successive professors have started donating their papers.
Peter Turner, who I mentioned earlier on, he gives a whole stack of manuscripts.
One of them, which I was looking at, is a copy of Apollonius.
His comics had actually been Saville's own manuscripts and Saville gave it to Turner and Turner gave it back to the Sabbath library.
And this bears collections down the side from a manuscript in Paris that shows that Saville has been travelling and collating mathematical texts,
having is is a serious scholar himself. This manuscript also shows how the professors kept things in use.
It has diagrams added to it, and they were added by David Gregory in 1707.
So there we have a text which is been collated by the main man given to one of his professors,
given back to the library, taken out a century of almost a century later, and drawn over by a subsequent professor.
This manuscript itself actually then, was the manuscript from which the printed edition of this text in 1710 was set.
And that's actually something which is quite common in the Sappho manuscripts is the manuscripts behind Oxford printed books.
There are four or five manuscripts that were used to print out mathematical texts, particularly by John Wallace,
who had a habit of getting manuscripts made up for the press, printing from them, and then depositing them back in the library.
Some of the manuscripts have common origins people are interested in in the deep history of libraries behind libraries.
There's a whole group of these manuscripts that ultimately came from the Franciscan Monks of Doncaster, which is rather, rather interesting,
at least two of which then bear the signature of the Elizabethan mathematician John Dean, who will be known to to all of you.
And so I presume all of those Doncaster manuscripts came through D and that they eventually ended up in Saville's hands.
And then in his library, one of these, which is a copy of Boethius, his arithmetic is actually presented to by a man called Christopher Saxton.
Some of you will know as the great Elizabethan cartographer.
So there's a lot of patterns of exchange and donation hiding around in the Southern manuscripts.
The manuscripts also contain saddles in translation of Ptolemy's almagest, with the commentaries of Theon and covered sea lots.
And that was actually the text on which Savall gained his M.A.
So it's really his kind of thesis, if you like, which is hanging around there.
There are also a set of four manuscripts, which are his lecture notes from 1570, which, as I say,
are very exciting for historians of science because they show what was going on at the cutting edge of
mathematics in astronomy in the 1570s in Oxford and Saville in the standard Oxford Indian Way is not dogmatic.
A very important thing to understand about the history of science in the English universities is that,
particularly in the post reformation universities,
they prided themselves on not banning texts on Catholic University, said, you know, you can't read this and don't regard it until it is corrected.
The Protestants, rightly or wrongly, in England, certainly in less than the low countries, prided themselves on not censoring.
But the concomitant of that is that they also did not like saying very solidly, we believe in Copernicus, we believe this.
So that would be to fall into the error of dogmatism again.
So when I say that Saville lectures on different systems side by side, I don't want to say that he's some sort of pussyfooting fence sitter.
I wouldn't say that this is real intellectual honesty of that time to say, well,
there are various theories about how this might work and the English pride
themselves on the Libertas philosophy and the right through the 17th century.
Well, what else can we find there? John Greaves I mentioned earlier on, I said he he travelled in the Orient.
John Greaves. His papers were there. He is my favourite of the civilian professors.
He was a metro allergist. He wrote books about the Roman coinage and the weights of coinage, a very technical form of numismatics,
quite different from the there's a picture of a pretty emperor on this.
He was really interested in ancient weights and measures, but he was also extremely interested in the pyramids.
In the 1630s, he goes out to Egypt with a set of Oxford mathematical tools on his back.
He takes a camel ride to the Great Pyramids and he crawls inside and he measures it with instruments from Oxford.
He comes back and he publishes a book called Pyramids of Great Fire, which is all about his journeys into the pyramids.
He it's an extremely sensible book and it contains some remarkable statements in it for the Bosnian people here.
He refers to a Chinese map in his keeping, which is an extremely interesting remark.
I have some ideas about what that map is. It's not the seldom map, but it is.
There are earlier maps of China knocking around the developing not as famous as the Sultan, not that I know of at least two.
And I really do wonder where his map of China went.
He said it's printed in China. Is it so it's a real one that's come across.
Well, Greaves was walking around in the pyramids and he had a notebook with him.
And you can order up in this type of manuscripts today.
And I think it's clearly been in his pocket on on camelback, because the thing is, is bent round like this.
It follows the line of one's thigh. And it is an extraordinary thing.
It has pencil hieroglyphs in it that must have been drawn from hieroglyphic reliefs in the 1630s.
That's quite a wandering around for a civilian professor at the time.
And it really is, I think, one of the most astonishing objects I know in the population, but that went into the Saville manuscripts.
What was his interest in the pyramids? If I digress very slightly, it's crazier than it sounds.
Greaves said that in the modern world,
we have such a problem with the weights and measures in different countries using different weights and measures.
If only we could all agree on a kind of, you know, a metre in a box somewhere, then we could all understand what we were saying.
And he says, Well, the interior dimensions of the great chamber in Great Pyramid have remained unchanged for thousands of years.
Why don't we adopt that as the international standard of measurement, which is quite an idea.
It didn't catch all that interesting.
Orientalism, by the way, is also. Witnessed in the papers and a rather surprising manuscript as well.
Saville, 48, which is the manuscripts of William Adams, who some of you will know is a navigator of the period who went to Japan.
Siam coach in China on a series of different voyages between 1614 and 1690.
And that manuscript was deposited in the Saville Papers where it was not recognised for centuries until the early 20th century.
Someone dug it out and said, This is amazing and I can tell you who it is as well.
And that was only published in 1916. Well, there are various unpublished works as well, which are contemporary to the the time of the civilian shows.
I was looking yesterday a rather peculiar, enormous manuscript by my Uncle John Chambers, who was a relatively minor academic.
He was a fan of Eton, but he wrote this enormous manuscript called A Confrontation of Astrological Demonology.
And it's this enormous book with wonderful binding the royal arms inside.
It is written in a beautiful calligraphic hand, and it is obviously written for the king.
And it has the King James the first his arms inside it. And I'm not entirely sure what therefore it is doing in the Saville manuscripts,
but my my guess is that it was written not for the king, but somehow it was given to Saville instead.
The two men had connections together and ended up in the Seattle library.
Why is this manuscript important? I wondered.
And the answer to this, I think, is this Saville's statutes for his chair contain a very interesting cause,
which is that his professors shall not lecture on astrology.
That is, in intellectual terms, a rather modernist statement.
SAVILLE Like actually quite a lot of Calvinist theologians at the time in
Scotland probably would have identified themselves as in that particular parish,
had a healthy scepticism about astrology, judicial astrology.
And Saville is remarkable in saying that mathematical lecturers will not treat of astrology,
which is really one of the major functions of mathematical knowledge at the time, is the calculation of astrological problems.
If Saville says that's that's not what I'm interested in. Chambers is also not interested in it.
And this is a book about how ridiculous astrology is. And I think that is why it's in the Saville Library.
We assume from the other end of that argument that it's it's a kind of it's a done deal by that time, but it really isn't.
And the civilian foundation in being anti astrological is really quite remarkable at the time.
Well, I mentioned some instruments, and I want to tell you a little bit about what you might find there as well,
which isn't book the Greaves Brothers. I mentioned John Greaves, the man inside the pyramid.
He had a brother called Thomas Greaves, who was also a remarkable academic at the time.
They were both orientalists as well, and they were some of the early proficient scholars of Arabic in the university.
There's a very interesting connection between Arabic and the civilian charts.
Quite a few of the later professors were the leading Arabists of that time as well.
Edward Bernard is a particular example and Edmund Halley as well,
who repeatedly taught himself Arabic by looking at parallel Arabic, Greek and working out from there if one believes that.
But the Greaves brothers bequeathed to the civilian study a set of instruments,
and this was thought important enough that the list was printed in a late 17th century catalogue of Oxford books.
The acidity in establishments remarkable in this catalogue because all the
printed books were were listed and printed in what we call Bernard's catalogue,
which is the first Indian catalogue of manuscripts. And the only known manuscript things in it are the civilian books and the civilian instruments.
So it was clearly thought of as an extremely important, integral phenomenon, important enough to be catalogued as one.
And looking down the list, what the brothers gave.
So if you're walking into what is now the catalogue room in the or the collection desk in the more reading room in the late 17th century,
there you would have found an astrolabe,
a quadrant to sextant, to optics, a mural quadrant of quadrant with telescopes fitted onto each of its arms to a six and a 15 foot telescope.
A pendulum clock very important, a wooden globe, a demonstration cone,
a pair of great compasses, and all of Euclid's elements in diagrams carved in wood.
I wonder what happened to them. So let me think of the civilian library as it appeared from the 1650s.
We must imagine it not just is filled with books and manuscripts, but also with instruments probably hung on the wall.
Most of them, some of the manuscript teaching tools from the restoration survive actually used, which is remarkable.
There are some astronomical tables, diagrams this and diagrams of moving parts, for instance, and there are various charts as well.
But we're used to teaching were hung on the walls. We associate most of these with John Wallace.
And any of you are interested in this? These are Sabu 100 and 105.
If you want to see what the teaching charts for the civilian foundation look like.
Well, Wallace also presented his library with quite a lot of material manuscripts that were given to Wallace.
Wallace took his duties in the university very seriously, some would say too seriously.
He was also the keeper of the archives,
and you will recognise him from Anthony Wood's diaries and perhaps from the gruesome portrayal of his instance of the finger post as a miserable,
rather messed up WALLACE Which I suspect is unfortunately quite close to the truth.
Wallace presents manuscripts that he'd use for various mathematical works.
One of them is in the hand of the great patio group for Humphry Wanli, who had the most beautiful facsimile hand of the time.
He was the genius of manuscript scholarship in the late 17th, early 18th century, and Wallace engaged him to produce copies of texts for the press.
And so that is why we have warmly copying magical manuscripts in the civilian library.
The other major donor of the period, as I mentioned, who we shouldn't forget, is Christopher Wren.
And as I said, you can immediately tell his books because they have this CW monogram all the way down the spine.
And they are, as one would expect, chiefly mathematical well to conclude about what happened after them in the 18th century.
Like most things in Oxford, the library went to sleep, and not an immense amount happens.
The civilian professors at that point were happily ensconced in New College Lane,
and it would be wonderful to know what exactly Halley was observing from that tower as a new college name.
This was after many of the of the headline discoveries of Halley, but he can't be doing nothing.
And I would very much like a historian of astronomy to work that problem out.
The chair, however, was revitalised in the early 19th century by a figure known to you in the history of science is Stephen Peter Rigo.
He is remarkable because he swapped chairs in 1827.
He is, I think, the only civilian professor who held both chairs, held one for a few decades.
And that's what over until the end of the few decades, which technically means he had to swap house in New College Lane.
I don't know if he did, but I one half was for one professor and one half was for the other.
And then they came to a deal and swapped over at some point.
But I don't know if Rigo had to sort of, you know, take his bed linen next door and he switched that.
But anyway, he revitalised the library completely.
He was very interested in the history of science as well, and he buys a lot of valuable manuscripts and donates them to the saddle collection.
So we're in the rather weird position of. Looking at early modern objects that were actually Victorian purchases and then placed back in the library.
He was a historian of science, as I say, as well as a as a practising mathematician.
He wrote a book on the publication of Newton's Principio, for instance,
and he edited several sets of letters of all the scientists that many of us would have come across inside this other library that survives.
Rather interestingly, lists of all the undergraduates who attended his lectures is because you have to pay a fee.
It's a sort of extra course. And right from 1811 to 1838, all these lists survive,
which is an interesting window into who was interested in the teaching of astronomy and geometry in the university.
These were actually placed in the civilian study, not by Rega, but by his successor, who rejoices in the name Baden-Powell.
And he is the father of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts.
So it's rather peculiar, fellows, of you college, to think that the founder of the Scouts was playing in the garden and you call his name.
Well, the later history of the library as an institution can be summarised briefly.
The Saville Room, which is the name for the room that was over the tower, was handed over fully to the body in 1834,
and they agreed that they would find a kind of cupboard to chuck all the stuff in.
And this was in the southeast angle of the of the quadrangle.
So the bit were the kind of the old shop shops and that was called the Saville Study into which all the stuff was really pushed,
which I think is a sign that it was not really an active resource anymore in in 1884.
As I say, the library was formally made over to the the building.
And that's an acknowledgement, I think, that the contents of the civilian study had become of historical interest rather than practical interest
of the professors who don't really have any serious engagement with the books from that point of view.
But the legacy of the civilian chairs as a historical construct was maintained by the library.
And in fairness to the board then there is a good deal of interest shown in the civilian papers in the early 20th century.
In 1914, for instance, medieval manuscript fragments that were used for binding printed books were following the custom in Oxford at the time,
taken out of all the civilian printed books and placed in a in a separate manuscript.
So if you look at a manuscript, several, 1 to 6,
you will find all these chunks of medieval cut up medieval manuscripts that were stripped out of the printed books.
And this had a library in 1978, really quite recently.
Stephen Rekos people who actually purchased at auction Sotheby's and were added to the body and library here.
So it seems to me that the library has taken over custodianship of this internal library and has done so well.
And that's really the ongoing responsibility of the library as well as its privilege.
The building has swallowed up several libraries and those acts of swallowing are in themselves
historically interesting as markers of how we divide up knowledge and how the disciplines are curated,
and how the history of the disciplines is curated and the body and has swallowed up quite a few scientific libraries, we could say.
Perhaps the other major one to think about is the Ashmolean Library that came in the 19th century as well.
But anyway, that is the civilian library.
It's an extremely important library in and of itself, but it has a lot of stories internally about the professors and what they did,
whether it's crawling through pyramids or stalking around New College Lane, but also some stories behind the books,
particularly the medieval manuscripts of who had owned those texts in the Middle Ages.
And as such, it is one of the most interesting and accurate barometers for the history of particularly mathematics and astronomy in the period.
Thank you very much.