Libraries in Constantinople
Sir, – Conrad Leyser’s review of Andrew Louth’s Greek East and Latin West
(September 26) is written with a subtext occupying the first, second, third,
and final paragraphs, in which it is suggested that much of the late antique
literary heritage fell victim to the habits of ninth-century copyists.
Leyser starts by underestimating the range of the revolution in handwriting
that occurred in the 800s. Not only Latin and Greek, but Arabic as well
underwent a profound transformation from majuscule and Coptic hands to
minuscule or, as it is tellingly named in Arabic, naskhi (=copyists’) hands,
which are less ornamental, but faster to produce, and usually take up less
space.
The illustration that accompanies the review, of a fourth-century bible, shows
majuscule Greek at its best, but a great deal of surviving majuscule is not
open and rounded like this example but compressed horizontally to a point of
seriously decreased legibility. A well-known inability of later readers to
distinguish EIC from EK is one result of this compression.
All late antique books were written on perishable, organic materials, and none
of them was housed in a climate-controlled environment. Thefts, floods, roof
leaks and fires all took their toll, although Leyser is quite correct in
dismissing the puerile stories about the library of Alexandria itself.
Constantinople probably carried off much of what remained in Alexandria from
the fourth to the seventh centuries, so that if we seek a time when books
were lost to fire, the conflagrations in the first three centuries of
Constantinople’s history, together with the disastrous three consecutive
fires of 1204, are probably most to blame.
Simple organic decay, however, may account for the largest proportion of loss.
Istanbul is damp for most of the year, and book pages, once soiled with oil
and dirt from human fingers, can mildew into illegibility at an alarming
rate. In the mid-1960s, the American Research Institute in Turkey was housed
in a seaside summer residence at the south-eastern tip of Istanbul. The
nucleus of its planned library was mistakenly shelved in a tower of the
historic sea-wall that formed part of the estate. Within six months, mildew
had made some items unsalvageable, and the atmosphere in the stack rooms had
become rather toxic. This history must have been prefigured in many
libraries across Constantinople during the Byzantine centuries. Paris, Rome,
Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo will have had similar experiences.
The two centuries preceding the ninth were not good times for books. War,
natural disasters and decay continued their inroads on the majuscule
heritage, but copyists were less and less active. The first chapter of Paul
Lemerle’s Le Premier Humanisme byzantin paints a gloomy picture of literacy
in that time, and things were no better in the Latin West and not much
better in the Islamic Caliphate.
The invention of the three minuscules (including naskhi) should not be seen as
causing the loss of the heritage from late antiquity, but rather as a
response across three cultures to the realization that unless the copyists
got to work fast, there might be nothing left to copy.
PIERRE MacKAY
Department of Classics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195.
Access
Sir, – I don’t know which musicologists Paul Hillier (Letters, September 26)
has been reading to feel that the discipline is more incomprehensible to
outsiders than any other. Almost all musicology is accessible to any
humanities scholar with an interest in history and texts; only at the
analytical (ie, semi-scientific) end does technical language intrude, as it
does in other contexts where terminological precision is necessary, like
maths and science. It is the nature and glory of scholarly disciplines to
operate with a high degree of specialism, and of the anti-intellectual to
damn them for being deeper than the reader. Hillier and some TLS music
reviewers seem to expect musicology to serve performers and composers, and
to say only things that are already known or easily comprehended. We do not
ask the same of quantum physicists. This feisty attitude to musicology
smacks of the hypochondriac’s refusal to listen to the professional opinion
of a physician. Some musicians may not like musicology, but they are free to
ignore it. Many non-specialist music lovers are grateful to musicologists
for undertaking the detailed research that allows them to write so
accessibly and elegantly in series such as the Master Musicians or Cambridge
University Press’s Music Handbooks and Companions.
There have been many TLS letters in recent months that have battered
musicologists, but nobody addresses the broader question, which is why
musicology is expected to limit its investigations to the level of the
casual reader, performer, or composer whose specialist business is not
musicology. There seems to be a heavy middle-class investment in the
conceited idea that music is a pastime about which any dinner party guest
knows as much as the Professor at Cambridge. Clive James makes some
insupportable points about Stravinsky, and Hillier rightly takes him to task
for them, but Hillier cannot have it both ways. To write intelligently and
well about a thing, one must dedicate time to its study, and to consulting
the dedicated study of other experts, as distilled in their published
writings and in their conference papers. One cannot be expert on music
without reading about it any more than one can be expert on biology simply
by virtue of having and using a body. If that were so, then Olympic medal
winners, whose knowledge of the use and development of the body is very
remarkable, should be invited to review studies of macromolecular
crystallography.
EDWARD GADSBY
33 Relton Way, Hartlepool.
Mailer for mayor
Sir, – The “corrections” in the TLS (September 26) give the year of Norman
Mailer’s run for mayor as 1969, and not 1961 as I wrote in my Commentary on
H. L. Humes (September 12). Mailer actually had two mayoral bids, the first
was managed by Humes in 1960–61, the second in 1969.
DARREN CARLAW
2 Bowburn Close, Wardley, Gateshead.
Scutari
Sir, – In contending that “Crimean war statistics show that deaths from the
dominant local cause – not wounds but ‘zymotic’ diseases – declined sharply
after [Florence Nightingale’s] sanitary and dietary interventions”, Gigi
Santow (Letters, September 26) is at risk of falling into a trap of the post
hoc propter hoc variety. My comments on the probable limitations of
Nightingale’s personal contribution to the fall in the death rate follow
Mark Bostridge’s scrupulous and full assessment of both the evidence and the
analyses of other historians in the substantial biography which I reviewed
on September 12. Considering the theory that Nightingale contributed to the
terms of reference of the Sanitary Commission sent out to the East and with
whom she worked closely, Bostridge concludes (p249) that this remains
“purely speculative”. He continues:
A not unrelated notion, prevalent among an older generation of historians, but
still to be found in popular historical writing today, is that the dramatic
decrease in mortality at Scutari in the first months of 1855 is directly
attributable to Florence Nightingale herself. This was transparently not so.
The only claim she made for her work, privately, in letters to the Herberts,
but never publicly, was that “We pulled this hospital through for 4 months &
without us, it would have come to a standstill.” In this conclusion she was
undoubtedly correct.
In effect she was suggesting “without us it could have been much worse”.
Nightingale did contribute organizational drive, backbone and her political
connections to the efforts of those already in the Crimea; and when the war
was over she was skilful in using her competence as a statistician in
arguing the case for structural reform in army medical provision, as Sir
Richard Stone argued in his Raffaele Mattioli Lectures. The initial
experiences in the Boer War (see e.g. Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens,
1988, especially p205) show how hard, difficult and prolonged that campaign
had to be.
GILLIAN SUTHERLAND
Newnham College, Cambridge.
Banking
Sir, – I am surprised to see P. G. Wodehouse left out of the list of writers
who worked in banking or accountancy (see NB, September 5). Having left
Dulwich, Wodehouse was forced to abandon university plans by the fall of the
rupee’s value that occurred at the turn of the century (his father was paid
in Indian currency). Instead, he took a position at the Hongkong
and Shanghai Bank (today’s HSBC), where he remained for over a year.
ANDREW CUSACK
The New Criterion, 900 Broadway, Suite 602, New York 10003.
Historians
Sir, – In his essay about historians and history (September 26), Ian Mortimer
quoted a passage from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited that begins: “though
God cannot alter the past, historians can . . . ”. This witticism in fact
came originally from Butler’s friend Henry Festing Jones. In Further
Extracts from the Notebooks of Samuel Butler, Butler recorded a conversation
with Jones under the heading “HISTORIANS”: “I said to Jones that whatever
else God can do he cannot alter the past. Jones replied, ‘No doubt that is
the reason why he is obliged to connive at the existence of historians’”.
JAMES W. THIRSK
1 Hadlow Castle, Hadlow, Tonbridge.
Pocahontas
Sir, – Christine Bold regrets that my book, Pocahontas, Little Wanton, is
about white myths of Pocahontas, not about the “Native Americans”
themselves, “whom [I tend] to lump together as ‘Indians’” (In Brief,
September 26). She would have learnt from my book, however, that Pocahontas
was a Powhatan Indian, not a Rappahannock, as she tells your readers.
NEIL RENNIE
English Department, University College, London WC1.
Let’s polka
Sir, – In NB (September 5) J. C. writes: “Why has waltz survived as both verb
and noun, but polka only as the latter?”. J. C. has obviously never attended
a wedding in Saskatchewan. I have been fortunate enough to enjoy quite a few
of them, and nothing would cause the dance floor to become more crowded than
the band leader or DJ calling out “Let’s polka!”
JAMES M. SKIDMORE
222 Herbert Street, Waterloo, Ontario.
Arctic
Sir, – With reference to Ralf Britz’s review of Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish
(September 12), there is no such thing as the Canadian Antarctic. There is a
Canadian Arctic, and Ellesmere Island is part of it. The island is located
off the northwest coast of Greenland, but is generally considered to be part
of Canada.
ANNE QUICK
27 Lost Channel Court, Thomasburg, Ontario.
