I'm good. I'm also welcoming you on behalf of our chair who is with us, but he is with us out in England today, so he wasn't sure about connections and the like. So I am doing the official welcoming, but I'm sure that you'll hear from him at some point in time. I want to remind everybody if you didn't receive that, a little reminder that the program is being recorded, and also that there's a Q and a at the end of the program. And I will also tell you that you can put your questions into the chat. If you visit the chat, you can find a link there to register to become a member of the Friends. And also if you're looking at our website, you can see our past presentations that have been recorded. So again, I welcome everybody. I'm so glad that you could come out on, on a kind of a gray day here, but better than other places in the world for sure. Today's our last program of the summer. I can't believe it is ready coming to a close. We've had a wonderful year and we have omni hadn't had one event that we have to unfortunately postpone. And that is something we're doing What's will. But I hope it's just the postponement we will get to tell you more about when the heroine AAC exhibit and reception will be held. And that's dependent upon, of course, the university. But we do look forward to seeing you on September 26. Again, it's Zoom meeting and that will be with Professor Peter Brooks. He's a Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale, but he's also taught at Princeton as well as Virginia University of Virginia. And he'll be speaking on his book that will be coming out seduced by story, how storytelling taken over reality. And fortunately stand caps will be our moderator. Friend of Peter's. Also. I just want to remind everybody that on October 24th, we will be having an in-person our first live event at a dinner at the National Club or annual full dinner. Our guest speaker will be Fenton O'Toole, who was the Leonard Elm Hilberg visiting professor of Irish letters at Princeton. He is also a course that journalist and an author and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. So we look forward to seeing you at that event and we'll be following the state guidelines as well as the protocols of the night nasa club. And we hope you will abide by them. The invitations will be going out soon. Or staff has been working very conscientiously on making a beautiful, beautiful invitation for you well too, to keep. And we hope that you will abide by those restrictions and keep us all protected. We have plans for our programs right in November, right into 2020, 22. But I'll give you more information on that. But 12. Now, they a cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason. This person needs no introduction, usually because everyone knows the person and how much he has done. But you may not know everything about Randy Hill in that he at first attended Stanford University before he attended Princeton and graduated with a class of 72. And I believe that was in architecture that he had gotten his degree at that time. It followed that was to graduate degrees at Harvard. And he has a Master's of regional planning from the Kennedy School of Government. And then he eventually became a financial advisor at sovereign Financial Group. Is also been part of the Westminster west Minister Foundation. I'm not sure if he's still is. I don't know how that has come along, but I am sure that Randy put an awful lot of time and effort into that project. And he, during that time, had also managed to become a Friends of the Princeton University Library for 34 years. And he ended those six years as chairman in June. I'm very happy to introduce Randy Hill. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Let me thanks to the members of the programs committee who have arranged this series of talks during the past 13 much. And thanks also to Marie Burger, library secretary specialist, has helped this helping to assure that things go smoothly this afternoon. John Fleming. Is the Lewis W. Fairchild class of 2004, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. Professor Emeritus. John was born in Arkansas and after receiving degrees from the university, that's out. And Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. He earned a PhD in medieval literature from Princeton in 1963. John taught for two years at the University of Wisconsin. Then return to Princeton, where he follow in the footsteps of the great Chaucer area and derive w Robinson, junior, teaching generations, a Princeton undergraduates about the world of the Middle Ages. John taught subjects spanning the entire breadth of literary history from courses on the Bible and Old English, two courses on the English novel and American literature. He also taught classes on the Franciscan Order and the history of the English language for Princeton's freshman seminar program, a program that he ablate directed for many years. John was a member, founding member of Princeton's Department of Comparative Literature. And he chaired the English department from 1981 to 1987. During is four decades of teaching on the Princeton faculty. John one, the Howard Berman Award for Distinguished Teaching, and was twice named a National Endowment for the Humanities. See, now back six. Johnny was asked by Princeton undergraduates to write a column for the print Estonian. Way no longer does that, but he continues to write a personal blog. Gladly learn, gladly teach, where he focuses on subjects on a range, wide range of subjects from finally, junking a car long past its prime to the mores of society, the bar society. Recently, he's written about the Meiji exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the resignation of Andrew Cuomo. Now I am someone who finally remembers the days when I would skip the a section of the New York Times, skip the business section, skipped the Art Nouveau, and goes straight to the Op-Ed page to see if Russell Baker had a problem. I think that John's Blog is so insightful, thought-provoking, and humerus very cheapy syndicated or a regular feature of the times. And perhaps someone among you can help make that happen. There. If not, I have a petition here which I ask you all to sign up for that Just jump. This year John was awarded a degree of doctor of, the degree of Doctor of Letters by Princeton University commencement ceremony. He has been a faithful member of the Council of the friends for decades and serves on the editorial board of the Princeton University Library Chronicle. In Jew. The council may John, an honorary member of the Friends? Lorraine, it said, as the event proceeds, please put your questions into the chat box for the Q and a session that will follow this discussion of John's library. Now please welcome John bits and planning. Well Randy, thank you very much and indeed thank all the Power BI or have been for inviting me to give this talk. I'm especially honored by having been made an honorary member of a friends which not only saves 75 bucks, but to relieves me of forgetting to pay it every year, I don't regard myself as a book collector. Simply to somebody who by accident has ended up with a fairly large collection of books. I'm going to try to do something in the next minute that may or may not work. I'm plugged into two computers, one of which is a laptop. I'm going to try to shine the laptop around the room so you see a little bit of the library, which is also our press shelf. And I'm hoping this is going to work. I'm hoping you see why I didn't think you'd get x. What's that? You'd have to mute one of the key computers. Okay. Well, I will mute this one. Now. Is it going to work? Do you think this? Here's the layout of my library, fresh shop. And I now I'm going to simply talk. This is about half the library. I guess as I say, I only have a collection of books at the same time. I've always enjoyed to look at my books, touch my books, and smell my books. In fact, I'm the author of aid unread article called George guessing and the smell of books. Maybe you've heard or not heard of George guessing. I'm sure you've heard. Know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the smell of old books. As a student, I came to think that uniform sets were particularly cool. And I still have a few things that I gathered in the 19 fifties before I left college. Harper's used to do a uniform series called Harper's modern classics. And you could write your name. On the inside of them. They had a printed x vigorous notice. I thought that was really terrific. And of course after I got to Oxford, like everybody else there, I soon acquired a couple of shelves of the old Penguin Books, the orange and buff books. And like every other owner of such books, over the years, I watched them fall apart, turned to dust, and disintegrate entirely. But one or two, you can see how yellow the pages are inside. I guess that was the beginning of my collecting books. I got in many, as many as I could. I now however, regard all paperback books with extreme prejudice. I don't think books ought to be published in paperback. And I, as they started to become very cheap on the market, I became a sucker for old leather bound sets of authors that you may or may not have heard of, which also disintegrate on your shelves. But I do have many of them. And I'm a bookbinder as well as a book collector. I suppose I got a windfall of a large number of the classic Garnier, which are the French version of our bilingual all Latin classical library. And I've bound up about a 100 of them in different colors. I thought of sunniest was rather Florida. So I did that. Now, before moving on to things marginally more substantial, I probably need to say a couple of words about my engagement with material books. About 970. My wife and I, Joan and I founded something we call the pilgrim press. For me, the pilgrims I was thinking of were medieval pilgrims, such as those who go on the Canterbury pilgrimage. Joan was even then contemplating, are dreaming about one day. Eventually waiting a plan which he has now done of walking more than 1000 miles from the east of France to Santiago de Compostela, which was one of the great pilgrimages of the Middle, Middle Ages, turned out that there already was a pilgrim press, Protestant hymnal makers. And eventually when we got a little bit successful, they got mad at me. And so I had to add a subtitle. It is the pilgrim press, also known as the prince Fred printers. Prince fred being a beautiful mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks, which I owned for about five years before it was forcibly purchased by the government to become part of our first national river, the Buffalo National river. But I can show you a couple of things that are quite rare because I printed them. One of my masterwork so far as I'm concerned is a serious scholarly book. Two poems attributed to joy cometh fury, edited by Marjorie Reeves, who the late great historian from Oxford, who was the world's greatest authority on medieval apocalyptic movements and thinkers. And of course, Joachim of Fiore. Was it the head of, of that group? This is a beautiful book, if I say so myself. We got help from undergraduates in the printing of it. And there was an undergraduate who was very good at coloring wood blocks and colored in all the illustrations in the book. Now a few years after that, I was about 970 in 176. I don't have time. He'll be glad to know to tell you the shaggy dog stories that go with every move here. But by a combination of blind luck and gross fraud, I was appointed the resident visiting fellow at the William Morris Centre in London, which is how was housed in his gorgeous townhouse, Georgian townhouse, right on the river upper Mall, very near Hammersmith bridge. The William Morris society later fell upon hard times. And say Dunaway, the actress, bought the house and it's all gone downhill since then. Now, a lawyer owns the house, but you have there for a year and in the basement of helm Scott house, they still had it. Did you tell him Scott houses where the great kelps got editions were all printed. It's caddy corner to a way overpopulated pub called the dove, where the greatest of all the English book binders, Compton Sanderson lived and competence, Anderson and Morris were thick, as thick as thieves. Now, in the basement They did have some rudiments of all the printing equipment, which we were able to persuade ourselves might have been looked upon by William Morris. And I have here printed by myself a thin volume, Morris and medievalism. My price, my job forgetting this free year and a fantastic mansion for a whole year in London was that I had to give a series of lectures called Morris and medievalism. And that's when I got so interested in really the 999 century medieval lists such as Karl Marx, john Ruskin. In fact, if you look at 19th century intellectual history, in my opinion, it was all done by medieval, was trying to accommodate modernity to the middle ages. 20 way. Here is this bibliography. It's uncut so I can't open that page to you. As far as I know, this is a unique item, hand printed on William Morris's press in the bottom mobility William Morris, his house by me for sale, 3000 dollars. Let me know. Now. Hey, hey, height. I don't think it has any market value, but as great sentimental that 1976 was the year incidentally of the cast and Quince and T n3. Bill shiny and his wife came over, visited us at Kelm Scott house very briefly before we all had to go together to the opening of the cast and show at the British Library in a minivan. It's not easy for five people to get into a minivan. And that's probably a story. Best left for another time. Well, it was this. With this background. I want to turn to the way that my books have interacted with my, my scholarly life. I won't say that all book collectors are more interested in the book than what is in them. But I think that that is true in some cases. With me it's quite the opposite. I don't really have many, many truly rare books, but I have a lot of books that mean a lot to me. And they have, they have molded my idea of the humanities. We use that word. The word is becoming more and more degraded. As you probably know, it originally simply was meant as a distinction in the curriculum between the good to Raju money or is that more humane part of academic study? And divine science or theology, so secular literature. But a person who is greatly influenced me in thinking about this was the great oxford historian and Archaeologist, RG calling would, in his book, The idea of history. So many of the books to which I turn are at least 50 years old and in my opinion, holder value. Very well indeed, calling would try to define the humanities as being what he called the study of artefacts of human intellection. What a great phrase. Artifacts that human intellection. Everybody knows what the artifacts of material and industrial operation are. The pots you find around the ruins of buildings and so on. Calling would said that actually the humanities depended upon artifacts of human intellection, what men and women have fought over centuries. But of course he left one thing out. Because what men and women have fought in centuries past is available to us only through other artifacts. That is to say bibliographical artifacts. Those works of human intellection have had to be written down. But a due to aim for a kind of immortality. Probably remember the great definition by classic definition by Milton. A good book is the precious lifeblood of the master spirit and maul than treasured up on purpose to life beyond wife. Or I think of the line in Pope. I hope pope is going to come back someday. He's Alexander Pope, early 18th century put. Because there's a great deal of wisdom. And he's talking about a Virgil's writing of The Aeneid. When first young marrow. Marrow is what they called Virgil white at F1, first young marrow and his boundless mind, a work tout last immortal. Rome, designed the book written to celebrate the city. As long outlived the city that it was meant to celebrate. Well, ha, there are three fields that I've tried to study in medieval European humanism. They are the religious life of the Middle Ages, which I don't mean in a vague sense, but in a rather technical one. Meaning crudely, the changing nature of the religious orders and the impact that the varying emphases that the religious orders brought to their religious life, how that influenced culture. The continuity of the classical tradition in the Middle Ages. Most sensationally, I suppose, brought to mind by Dante, who writes the Christian epic. Using as his guide, a pagan poet and philosopher who by his own theology, is doomed never to be able to come into the paradise. And then of course, I spent a lot of time with two great poets, john the MN in France, the principal author of the Rwandan the rows, which was the most popular poem, vernacular poem of the entire Middle Ages. And it has come down to us in hundreds of copies. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the illustrations, the illustrated manuscripts and roll onto the rose. And of course, you know the great poet Chaucer. And my great contribution, if I made a great contribution there, I think was in undergraduate teaching. So when I think about my library and when I think about my whole life of the scholarship, I think, I tend to think in terms of personal connections. I'm very interested in who's read the books that I'm reading before. Whose own the books that I've I'm reading. Ownership of a book is. After all, temporary, the term book history can mean many things. But since history is usually the study of the past, and since most of the books in my library, what did belong to somebody else, I tend to be interested in where my books have come from. So Randy, if you're still there, you might suggested direction for us to go at this point. Yeah. Hi, I not need muted. You're muted green. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, John. We would also like to hear about some of the details of how you came by some the charges in your collection in your possession, I should say. And that first, you received as a gift, brow and unmarried young woman who was a shame but require a singer, I believe. Yes. I believe I believe on good authority since we hope this out beforehand. I believe you are referring to a book given to me by miss joan Newman of St. Anne's College, Oxford, precisely for the last 59 years, has been my wife. And she was then, and is now a considerable musician. She was the member is something called the Scala contour from a very high quality vocal group that has gone on from glory to glory. And we were getting fairly serious, but I didn't know how serious until she came back from a tour and a red. So with this volume, which is Petrarch, the works of Petrarch in a very small volume for a small format. Here is the title page. It'll Petrarca go lieu of a brand a di Chiara Cianni in Lione appraiser 1551. This book, though, it is the Italian text of Petrarch, was actually printed in Leone by Yom Reais, who I didn't know very much about at the time. Who was one kind of typical merchant, entrepreneur, humanist scholar. He did all the editorial work himself. But he was interested in making money. He's exactly the kind of guy that Bob Darnton. Wonderful work on in the 18th century French book trade as introduced to us and made rather, rather famous. I didn't know at the time, nobody knew very much about Ray. I didn't know at the time that the only person who had written about this book maker and scholar was actually one of my own eventual colleagues, Natalie, Natalie Zemin Davis had the book for many years before she joined the faculty. But she, in 960, six, published in a collection of essays published at the University of Toronto Press about early humans is printing. She wrote, she did an article on Yom Reais. And he's a very interesting guy. He says this, I passed many years of my youth in Italy, and I perhaps learned it's language better than my own. One of the odd things about scholarship is that it's always imperfect and being improved. And Natalie, although she made a bibliography of Rey, she actually missed this edition. Which is not surprising because it was the same year that he brought out a Vulgate Bible. And that was much more important to him financially. And then the pitcher. Now there's some interesting features about this book where you hear a lot about cancellation these days. In the 16th century. If they didn't like you or they didn't like it, they really chancel do. And here are, there are about five poems in the collection that are like that. And if you look at the top part of this and it's backwards in my screen. I hope it's right up in yours. This is sodded a 114. From the MPS Babylon from which all shame is fled. All good is banished. The house of grief, the mother of error. I've also fled to prolong my life. Now, Patriarch was writing that from a little jerk water place in the vote clues which Joan and I came to know pretty well, named that mallow sen. It's a few miles away from Avignon. And this hideous beast that he's fleeing is of course, the papacy. Then, in the so-called Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God. The French had captured the Pope, carried him off to Avignon. And for a fair period in the third-quarter, the 14th century. That's where the, the, the Pope was. So this book was, I can't say it was cheap, but it was not a fancy addition of Petrarch. It was meant for as much of the general market as there would have been in Leone. And notice it's just assume that there is going to be a readership for Italian works. I don't need to tell you about Petrarch. I'm sure. He dominates European love poetry for at least 300 years. He sets up the humanistic straw man of Latin versus the vernacular. He writes his love poetry in the vernacular. And then he writes in Latin about how only in Latin Can you write serious books? He was a saint. Augustine. Want to be, as you probably know. Augustine had said famously, the one line that most people believe most people know from the Confessions is make me chaste, Lord, but not yet. Well. Petrarch made a career of this. He wrote 365 poems in the cans urinary about it. And he wrote endless philosophical dialogues with this conflict between keratitis and, and Cupid toss. So you can ask me, I suppose. I mean, Patriarch was a great poet. He did dominate love poetry for 300 years. It was highly opinionated, highly opinionated political figure. He was a serious Latin scholar, and he actually began to study Greek. He was a fake monk. He was probably the chief founder of the humanistic tradition. I've spent my life studying and around which I've built my library. And it just wonderful it, I have a book that is, have so many associations. Is this? Well, you can then ask for me what I meant by the humanistic tradition and how it relates to some of my favorite texts and some of my favorite scholars. If you wanted to do that. Randy. Yes, If you could go onto that because I think that gee, why why didn't talk about some of the copies that you've got a tax. And and, and I would again like you to just explain a bit more about this humanistic tradition and, and how it relates to some of some of the Scala is that you have so much spent so much of your time in line. So if you'll go a little bit into depth on how do we appreciate it. Okay. I'll I'll certainly try try to do that and then I might start with an addition of an avid. I think if you think of the least religious, the most, nasa, at the most secular, sexy Randy. However you want to call him poet of the classical tradition. It would certainly be avid. Fact he got troubled in his own lifetime has no he was banished on account is probably something he'd said about the emperors daughter. And I have here one volume of a four volume work. Work there, the works of, of it in the text by the great scan of the great Dutch scholar, Peter Berman. This was a republic cation in Oxford in the early 19th century. A video and that's known as Oprah, a text you We're money. But I'd like you to see who would belong to. It belonged to the great literary scholar, William Payton. Her WFP curve. You see that belong to some aristocrat before that. That's what you have on this this side. Now, conducting research in one's own personal library is often a richly emotional experience. Since you may be interacting not merely with the information or contents of the book, but what is the personal associations of the book himself? This book, look again. It was belong to WIP Kerr and it was given by him in memory of him to University College London. I'll say something about that in a second as well. The other scholar is a man named Hastings rationale. And I'll look at one of his books in a moment. He was a scholar of a very, very different kind. But it turns out that both her and rationale, who was an Anglican clergyman and the author of this. Still to me, amazing three-volume history of the universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Both of them died. They were both born in about the middle of the 19th century and they died in the early twenties. And that meant that when I went to look them up and sweat up there, biographies, I went to the same volume of the Dictionary of National Biography. Now, when I was in graduate school, the great gods who walk the halls of my gosh at that time, Jed Bentley, who has land. And so I said to the graduate students, for whatever else you do, don't spend a dime on in putting food into your child's mouth until you have bought a copy of the Dictionary of National Biography, which was of course, not as likely as flying to the moon. But when I became a full professor, I then had enough money to buy one. And I found one. I found so many books at the cranberry bookworm. And every book I pick up has something interesting in it. And you see this, this belonged to the eminent Hamilton tier. Maybe there's somebody in this audience old enough to know who I'm talking about? Hamilton tier was assertive, adjunct member of the English department back in the 30s and an associate dean. And this says November 3rd, 937, 12th birthday of my daughter, Pamela. What a nice thing. Well, the Internet, you can find out anything about anybody. Probably wrong, but very, very quickly. So I was able to find out about his daughter Pamela, who ten years later, when she was 23, was busy marrying Charles foresee of the class of 47. A happy event, sadly followed by their divorce, which is an another Google search. But that's neither here nor there. Who was Hamilton could hear? He was an associate, associate, some librarian, Dean of the College. They used to have mini when I first came here. And my, my dear friend and benefactor, Jerry Finch, I hope some of you do remember Jeremiah finch. He was an Associate Dean of the College. And one day I was talking with him in his office. And he said, and I said, Yeah, I think Princeton is a really pretty stuffy place. And I wish this place would kind of loosen up a bit. And he said, John, I'm going to tell you about Hamilton put tiers Saturday night. I could feel the walls of his time kind of shaking. And just then the telephone rang and he said, I have to catch you later. And he never caught me a layer. You probably remember that. Coleridge, I think it was aching. 1798, Coleridge hopped himself up on opium, fell into a trance. Had a fantastic dream, woke up and started writing the world's greatest poem. Kubla Khan. And when he's halfway through the poem, somebody arrived and knocked on the door. And in his autobiography, allies is a gentleman on business from Porlock. The guy stayed for an hour. And by the time he left, Coleridge who's no longer high, and it was never able to finish. Kubla Khan and the great John Livingston lows, who wrote an incredible work of scholarship called The Road to Zanadu, which is why a great sort of murder mystery of English professor who says this. If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn and quartered. It is the man on business from Porlock, while it's also the guy who called up Jerry Finch. And so I never found out about Hamilton tiers Saturday night. Well, WIP CER 855 to 923 when he died while mountain climbing in the Alps is sort of my ideal of the humanistic literary scholar was humanism. Humanism was the attempt of people in the European, Middle Ages and Renaissance to accommodate their revealed religion, that is to say Christianity. To the great treasures of classical antiquity, which they knew had not been written by Christians and had been written before Christianity, and so on. How can you make these two things come two together? And this is also in a certain sense. But Kerr was trying, trying to do. He wrote a couple of really great books, epoch and romance. And a book called the dark, the dark ages. Like the book, the books, I would recommend to you that there are not many literary scholars whose works you want to sit in that whose essays you want to sit down and read? After ten years. Many cases not after 10 minutes, certainly not after a century. But the two volumes of the collected works WE peaker are really exceptions to this. Per new. A very simple truth that some of my colleagues unfortunately have not learned. All literature is written in language. And the first thing you have to do if you're going to study literature is to master language your own, and others in which the literature is, is, is written. Now, what did I do with it? With my Berman text? Here it is. I want you to look at how beautiful the type is in this edition. That's the very beginning of the RAM media amorphous of oven. The romania amorphous. Romania means medicines. Ovid wrote an art of love to books directed to men. How to find the girls, are going to find them. What to do with them when you find them. Third book written to the girls, how to make the most out of being found. And then a fourth book, which is a tongue and cheek Palin node. That is, I take it all back. I'm just kidding. This is bad stuff. You probably don't want to mess with it. And what those opening line say is that Cupid looked down and saw the first two lines. I'd retinue this poem. And he said, oh, I see, you're declaring war on me and audits is narrow. No, not me. I'm your guy. And I'm really I'm really faithful to you at all time. But the avid text I want you to bear in mind for just a second is this one. Here. It's about, it's from a morays of 18. And what it says is there's a certain old hag, whoever wishes to make her acquaintance with the propers, let him Listen. Dips is by name. Her name derives from reality because she never has seen the morning. And, uh, so once you resolver, now dip SAS, you can see what it probably means. You don't want to dip. So maniac is, if you've read rabble a dip, so Zohar dip SAS. Means a thirsty woman. And this type that he presents here of the key, a cackling old lady you see are everywhere in Renaissance painting. You see are everywhere in Renaissance fiction. There's especially a big, a lot of it in Hispanic Iberian poetry. Try to bear that in mind because they give you a tiny mini lecture in a minute on the biggest English example of this literary type of the cackling old woman. And that is of course, the Wife of Bath. Well, Hastings ran. Hastings re-install, was a seminary professor, had much less of a public life, herded. But nonetheless, it is my ideal of the genius amateur scholar II really was a theologian and an ethicist. He just for the **** of it, decided he would write a 1000 pages on the Medieval, the medieval universities of Europe. Here is one of his books. This is one volume of a 26 volume set of the works of the early church father. Origin. Unbelievable. They are in a low match was one of the great textual scholars of the early 19th century. And it has his, I've written him. But it says from the library of RIP on Hall at Oxford. Get it, Don't of it. Hastings rationale, gift of Hastings rationale. Now I want to pause and ***** for just a second. Have you noticed? And if there are any librarians listening to me, I hope you will hear this. Have you noticed that both of these books were given by great scholars to important academic libraries who then sold them to commercial booksellers. That's the way I got mine. It's almost impossible. Get rid of a skull, hopefully library like mine. I'm having to kind of began to think about this right now. But I'd say if you are a scholarly library and one of your great scholars gives you a book, don't settle, sell it, sell it to some penny ante bookseller down in the Charing Cross Road, the way that the University of London did and the major Theological Seminary of the Church of England did remnant all. Okay, that's the end of my gripe. About, about that. Well, the great historians of the 18th, a great historian of 18th century Britain, William Leckie, who some of you will know it for his famous history of European morals. At some point points out the extraordinary contribution made by underemployed Anglican clergy to all branches of science and learning. In the Victorian period. You've got all these guys. They were out there and maybe reading morning prayer once a week or something like that. Having tea with the lord of the manor on a, on a Wednesday. And they had very little else to do. So they wrote books about everything, science, technology, literature, history. We all remember the parotid treatment that so brilliantly made by George Eliot in Middlemarch of Mr. Casado been, remember Mr. cassava and who is endlessly writing a key to all mythologies, desperately trying to avoid the implications of the new smart, sharp, skeptical German biblical criticism. Well, there were lots of others who were doing important work as well. Now what I learned from, from Hastings rationale was the importance of the distinction between the trivium and the quad Gridium in medieval education, I'm, I'm sure you know those terms. There were seven, liberal, liberal arts. The, the first three, recall the trivium, a, we're rhetoric, grammar and logic. You had to study these before going on to arithmetic. Astronomy, music, and so on. They are the skills of literacy, reading and writing well. And of course, it was here where the whole humanistic emphasis was. Because the texts that people were reading in these universities were either actual classical poetry, especially Avid and Virgil or modern, that is 12th century poetry that had been written to kind of look like that. And the whole idea of this humanistic enterprise was somehow or another, join the Bible, which was taken as a revealed text. How could It's trues be made to reconcile with the great beauties of classical poetry. And there was a great deal of ink spelled on that. Some of you will know the constellation of philosophy of Boethius. One of the most widely read books of the early Middle Ages. Boethius has several poems in which he gives allegorical interpretations of classical topics in order to make them seem. Teach you show how they correspond to the teachings of the Bible. For example, the myth of the Golden Age seem to him perfectly obvious that, that was the story of Genesis simply written in another way. Anyway, I got some idea of the man rationale. Hastings. If you look at the annotations he's made in pencil, 20 all 26 volumes, half in latin, half in Greek. And every few pages he's seen something that he wants to note. And right here, I'll never read all the works of origin. Maybe I'll be able to read. They're going to **** sheet that Hastings rationale for, wrote for me. Well, what was the main study in the medieval university? We think it's giving lectures on how many angels can dance on the head of the pin. Not at all. The great product of medieval scholarship was biblical exegesis, theology. The word theology didn't even exist. Probably a good idea. I noticed that most of the theological books, my wife, hazardous small, thin paperbacks. And they have been assigned by the Library of Congress with the heading BS. That doesn't mix. I've been to it. But do the in the Middle Ages, they talked about a study in the sacred page. And a very great deal of my EKG rate, a great deal of my work has dealt with the way the Bible was interpreted in the Middle Ages. And He's doing the interpreting. Randy, do you think this might be a point at which to talk a little bit my string and differences organism. Well, yes, I gave you if he if he would, and if you could tell us a little bit about that. And you know, Ovid seems to be removed from, from your work on St. Francis or the Medieval Francis in art and literature. And you were, I'm probably best known on campus for teaching undergraduates, that Chaucer course. So how do you bridge the gaps? How do you read Chaucer, I should imagine, has major presence in your library. Tell us a bit more. Well, volumes have their ends of words. Yes. I mean, here there are another personal intrusion. I was lucky enough to be both the student and the successor to DWR Robertson, who I've had a long life in the academy. And I will say that to this day I have never met a more brilliant literary scholar and dw Robertson. And, but there's a lot of anxiety goes with being somebody's disciple. And when I came to Princeton, he was at the height of his powers. He certainly was the world's greatest draw Syrian. And there was every reason in the world did he should teach the Chaucer course. Forever. In his famous book, a preface to Chaucer, he has a line that says something like this. What I've said here is broadly true of almost every author in the Middle Ages comma, except perhaps for a few excentric Franciscans. Now, that was an invitation to me. I thought, okay, you're going to do Chaucer and you're going to be teaching that Chaucer course forever. I'm going to go find out about these eccentric friend Franciscans. And I did. Hi, Yeah, I got so interested in the figure of St. Francis and in the huge impact that beginning in the 13th century and moving rapidly that into the period of the vernacular realization of European literature. European literature until about 1200 is Latin. I mean there, Beowulf and a few other things. But for all intents and purposes, you're thinking about a Latin literature. After that, it becomes increasingly the vernacular languages of the individual countries. Francis and the Dominicans to wear out to exploit the vernacular languages. I think my most influential book, probably by far, is a book called An Introduction to the Franciscan literature of the Middle Ages. Title that doesn't have much sex and pizzazz, but actually tells you what is in the book. And by the time I'd written that, I knew more than I in a certain sense wanted to know about Franciscan literature. And I began to see so much of Italian painting beginning in the 14th century, but particularly in the 15th and 16th centuries. Is written, is painted in a Franciscan milieu or with some kind of Franciscan spin to it. And I started looking in these paintings and reading what traditional scholars said about him. And I saw that I had one advantage I wanted to great artist or end. But I'd at least read the right books, which they hadn't. The right books being the books written by medieval Franciscans. So I wrote a book of which I'm quite proud, slightly tendentious and polemical about what I think is the greatest Renaissance painting in America. Namely Giovanni Bellini's painting of St. Francis in the Desert in the Frick Collection. And whenever I go there, Not that I have been able to go there for a couple of years. I feel I own painting because I really know it's about anyway. That was a, that was in a, in a sense a sidelight. Give me I gotta say one or two words. Simply because I have written, written down one or two books about greatest comp election code, compilation of medieval biblical exegesis. And the it is by 16th and 17th century. Flemish Jesuit named Cornelius Lipid a is real name was then stain. But they turn that into, into Latin when he became the professor of Biblical Studies at the, at the Jesuit house in Rome. And everybody calls them. Cornea is an op-ed, a Cornelius of the stone. The Jesuit order is outside my period, really, it's post medieval. But the contributions to scholarship that they made, that the Jesuits made was absolutely fan, fantastic. Now I have an 11 volumes of court Cornelius, lot of appetite. The text of this beautiful book. This belong to the Jesuit house in Dresden. And you can see you get the Bible text in large type. And then page after page of commentary. And what this commentary is mainly is an anthology of all the church fathers. So any renaissance or medieval scholar of Renaissance or medieval European. Literature really ought to, ought to know about this. Now I asked you to look, had a text earlier of, of it in which he describes this old woman character, the, the dip SAS figure. She thirsted. Going to give you a mini lecture out of Cornelia, solid lipid, a out-of-home about the Wife of Bath. If you know anything about Chaucer, you may remember the Wife of Bath because she has an unforgettable, pulls up this text too so you can see it. These are the opening lines of her, of her self portrait. She just starts talking and she says, experience. Though they're re, even if there were no authority in this world, would be enough for me to tell you about the wove it is in marriage because since I was 12 years old, I've had five husbands at the church door. That's where people got married in the Middle Ages. And they were all pretty good guys. But in truth, somebody told me a while ago that since Christ only went to one wedding at Cana in Galilee, by that same example, he taught me that I should only go to one wedding. That as I should only be married once. You can see the tricky interpretation there, says, and also here what a sharp word. Jesus spoke on a certain occasion beside a well, in reproof for the Samaritan woman. He said, you've had five husbands. And that man who has you now is not your husband. He said that. But what he meant, I cannot say. Now the Wife of Bath just means the woman of Bath is a milliner. It's unlikely that such a person would even be literate. But he or she is spouting some very sophisticated biblical exegesis. Both the passages that she chooses come from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus go to the famous occasion which Jesus turned water into wine. He got at a wedding. They ran out of the wine. People said Do something. He did it, turn the water into wine. His mother, her actually was the person who asked him to turn the water into wine. So you've got a thirsty woman there. Then a little bit later, he's walking in some area. Among the Samaritans, people that the Jews don't have anything to do with. And he's all alone and he sits down on a well, it's not just any well, Jacob's Well, it's the actual Jacob's. Well, I don't know if your Bible scholars, but both in the Hebrew scriptures, wells are the place to pick up girls. Yes, this is where people come together and it's kind of erotically charged situation. He's sitting on the edge of a, well, a woman comes up and says, But her jug, I've, I've come to get something to drink. Jesus says, give me something to drink. Says you're, you're a Jew. I'm a Samaritan. You don't have anything to do with us. This is if you know you're talking to you, give me something to drink. Who drinks this water? Will thirst again. But who drinks? The water that I can offer will never thirst. She has a great line. Vera the PSR, I perceive that thou art a profit. I would, I would say. I would say so. He says, go find your husband. Said I don't have a husband. **** right. Says Jesus. You don't have a husband. You've had five husbands. And the guy you're Schacht up with right now is not even her husband. Wow, She says that this is, this is some this is some profit. Well, if I had time, I would show you how the text of an avid and his thirsty woman has been woven here with two Bible stories, not interpreted literally, but interpreted allegorically. As Dante. What have done to create a sort of intellectual fabric operates as a living woman, but really is a walking. I idea. A lot of my work has had to do with stuff like that. Now we're, I'm going on it some length, but I guarantee you I can grow on it much greater length. But I do promise you that I have a lot of questions and a gathering in the chat. I'm going to say, Hey, I want to say one thing about my post retirement, Burke. Yeah, Because I have it shows a side of the library I haven't talked about yet and I'm not sure if some other things as well. When I retired, I decided madly thought I was going to do a completely new kind of work. I was here, I'd been surrounded for all these years by famous writers, people who actually made money out of their books. I was going to publish some books within big shot New York publisher and make some money. And I did everything except the making money part, but I did publish two books with Norton. One called the anti-communist manifestos, and one called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. And then I wrote a book about a Portuguese poem of the Renaissance that was more along my normal lines. Now, this anti-communist manifest, this book, has been very successful often with people I would not necessarily be too successful with, but that's neither here nor there. I got very interested in Kessler's Darkness at Noon, which I taught in one of the humanities courses. And I then saw that in the late 30s and then the four 1940s, there was a lot of literary warfare relay between communists and anti-communists. Some of these anti-communists were left wing as well as right-wing. And I told you I was a bookbinder and I used to go to the cranberry bookworm where they would sell you a whole big bang of books for $1. And I bought the biggest books I could find with no other intention then to tear them apart and use the old bookbinding, the old book binding board for bindings like I'll be showing you a minute ago, that was the cheapest way I could get it. And one time I came back with a book and instead of tearing it apart, I actually started reading it in. Once I'd read a few pages, I couldn't turn it down, put it down out of the night Jan vault, and never heard of the book. Never heard of the person. Slightly embarrassing, since it was the best selling book in America in 941, a runaway bestseller. It is a fantastic story, the story of a communist agent working in the maritime unions in the north coast of Germany. And as a communist agent and Sabbath to her and so on. He travels all over the world. He does all sorts of stuff. He comes to America in 1926 on the orders of the party. He is supposed to murder a man. He doesn't murder him, but he names him and is sent to San Quentin Prison in San Quentin. He take some extension courses in creative writing from the University of California. He's deported in 1929, goes back to Germany just in time to get really caught up in the street brawling between the Nazis and the Communists and sign flees to America again in 930, eight or 39. Goes to New York. It's a fantastic story. Lives in somebody's back yard and a pup tent. And writes this dynamite book. How did the night, which purports to be his autobiography actually it's full of fictional stuff. Well, when this hit the press, it cause the hugest think you can imagine, the American Communist Party was still pretty powerful. Hole smaller numbers but still pretty powerful. And they were doing everything they could to get this guy deported. Well, it's a long story. I've written about it in The Chronicle, the library chronicle. Because I discovered I had read this book. I never heard him. I said, Is there anything else by this author. I went over to the Firestone catalog and I discovered that within 60 days, the last 60 days, a huge archive of Falcon, falcon had been added to. The Princeton collections, it had been in the Historical Society of the State of Maryland and it just kinda came nearby. That's another story I started. Won't go into that. Anyway. That Elton, whose real name was Richard trams, was in really deep hot water. Incidentally, this is the one kind of serious contribution to world scholarship I've made in a certain sense. That is, my book has put Jan. Veltman on the map. There was an international conference in France a year ago. My wife is just handed me a note saying shut up and answer the questions, which I will in just a second, but I want to tell you 11 more thing you here. I felt and I couldn't go to this conference because I was too ill. But i'm, I'm now in correspondence with experts on communism, all of all of the Berlin sign. In order to be able to stay in the United States. Felton had to pull off an amazing trick. He had to get his I get a pardon from the Governor of the State of California, first of all, for this crime that had been incarcerated for I in California. And he had to have the goodwill of the Attorney General of the Biddle, the Attorney General of the United States. He was able to pull both of these things off. And how did he do it? In my book, I faked it. I saw some of his friends were one of his friends was the head of the ACLU. Roger Baldwin. Baldwin a very important guy. He had a bunch of anti-communist friends. And in my book I suggested that he, that, that's the way he he got his partner. Then two weeks ago, my wife was making me throw away a lot of the books I bought. When I was writing about John Bell 10. He had a big problem. The moment that his book came out with his big problem really was he was about to be deported, but he didn't think that was his problem. He thought his problem was, how can I write another book quickly enough to benefit from this huge windfall I've just just gotten. He didn't have anything in the work, so to speak. But he had a bunch of old essays that he'd written in that correspondence course in San Quentin in the late 1920s. And so I write about this in the anti-communist manifest. This is quite an amusing story. He put together this book called bend in the river. And bend in the river is the title of one of these essays. Now, the trouble is there like assignments for English 1, 0, 1. What gets you a B plus in an assignment in English 101 is not a best selling book in the American commercial market. So this book flopped. But I bought up a couple of copies of it, which I never really looked at until I went to throw it away. And here's what I found is one of these book. Do you see what? I will read it to you in a minute. It says to Mary Gallagher in appreciation of her gallant and selfless friendship. Jan Veltman, March 12th, 1942. Now with my friend and old student, Christine stand cell, there's a great historian of early fem, radical feminism. I'm trying to find out who Mary Gallagher was and write a little essay about her. She was the head of the Defense Committee for Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. I hope that mean something to you. Second only to Sacco and Vanzetti. Mooney and billings were the greatest left wing Martyrs of the labor movement in the first half of the 20th century. They were railroaded into, into San Quentin. And this woman, Mary Gallagher, governor. In other words, I could have answered my own question as to who got vouch and the pardon from the governor of California. If I'd only open this book and read with intelligence. They my dedication there. Okay. I will now yield. Thank you John so much. This has been wonderful, but we have all the, they have a number of questions and Murray is going to help us by reading some of them and we will hopefully get through a number of them. Sure. I have a couple of questions about publishing and bookbinding. First from Richard cleary, you spoke of having your own publishing company. Was that vertically integrated? And if so, is that still possible for that size business? And another from Lydia. When and where, where did you learn the art of bookbinding? I'll start by answering the first question and show how ill-prepared I am to answered because I don't understand what the phrase vertically structured means. When John and I started printing books, binding them as best we could, advertising them as best we could, and then selling them. Incidentally, if you want to find out how many of your friends are secret poets, get a printing press. People kept coming say, John, do you think you could do a few? A few, a few of my poems. Bookbinding high. I learned mainly by taking books apart and by reading. There are several really good bookbinding books. There's one I recommend by somebody, a woman named Johnson, called creative bookbinding. It gives you all the essentials and then a lot of stuff as well. Around 970 there was a huge, it was the final movement from letterpress printing to offset lithography. You probably know what the difference is. Letterpress printing actually depends as it had since the days of Gutenberg. It depends on a metal face of type, touching the actual ink and then being pressed physically against a piece of paper. Offset lithography does not work that way. It's a completely different process. And in the early days, you could buy used printing equipment, they were giving it away. And as for precedent for type, mostly when you went to these auctions, they were throwing it into barrels and selling it as scrap. So we got a lot of really good equipment. Now this stuff is like hen's teeth. It's very, it's antique. It's very precious. And if you think books are hard to get rid of, how am I going to get rid of my seven tons of printing presses and type? I don't know. But you can teach yourself bookbinding and you can usually, well, I don't think an actual book binders are getting really thin on the ground. There was an old guy, Mr. Smith here in town, who gave me some tips. He was a hand book binder. But now you know, if you go to you need these copying agencies as the students do. They have mechanical machines that come up with a really half-caste of pseudo, whether binding it works for a thesis, but you wouldn't want on your book. I don't know. Sorry. Sam. Next us from reaching black me, my wife. I think that's when you discussed a little bit earlier. My wife, I'm a deferral medieval. We're began her graduate studies at Princeton. Recently speculated that Christian fundamentalists interpreting the Bible literal because allegorical readings race too many interpretive possibilities with you agree. He also asked, I recall that you want to claim that one use of words C, income media, has implications that go far beyond the length of that word. Could you share that hypothesis with us? Though? I see I see Huff J-shaped here. Well, I, you know, I'm always saying brilliant things so they tell you you can't. And the ones that I can't remember, I'm not able to explicate. Iga screen. Do. Thank you. Biblical interpretation. Actually, one of the professors that were retired, a friend of mine, Carl fried frolic, retired from these seminary few years ago, wrote a book about how in to a certain degree, the allegorical interpretation of scripture is becoming fairly commonplace among modern, modern theologians. I mean, if you say, say Martin Luther King's famous, I Have a Dream. Speech is a pure example of medieval allegorical interpretation of a text. It's the same text that Dante interprets in his famous letter to con grande day Della Scala. When he says, if you're going to read this book, you have to understand. It's written like that poem about the exit is Salma a 114 in xy to Israel. They Egypt when the children of Egypt, when the children of Israel came out of Egypt. That is, anytime you come out of Egypt, come out of captivity, you are. Yeah, you're heading for salvation or liberation. Now, that is what that speech of Martin Luther King is based on. He wanted to medieval as he wasn't thinking. I think I'm going to do some medieval here, if that's how he understands the meaning, the meaning of the Exodus. Now, about the literal interpretation of the Bible, the medieval people tended to kinda try to have it both ways. That is, there's no, Yes The text is. It is good to really true. There really was an atom and there really wasn't IV. But more important is this other meaning that it lies more deeply. And the genre of exegesis. What became the means by which all theological discussion was carrying on. There was a standard textbook in the medieval universities. It was called the sentences, sentence EI of Peter Lombard. And all it is is a bunch of conundrums from the Bible. Like one of the, I can't remember. One of the passions stories says Jesus was wearing a scarlet robe. And one of them says he was wearing a purple robe. Well, since Peter Lombard watch is it, was he wearing a scarlet robe or a purple Robin? You can imagine how theologians talk their way out of that. Or there's, so I think it's in the book of Judges. Says the trees of the forest got together and elected themselves the King. What is the literal interpretation of that text while you have to discuss that as well. So the biblical allegory was the mode of discourse. Now for all, all, all kinds of games and political, you probably know there are no, Some of you will know the book by Ken trow, canter Ravich, the King's Two Bodies in which he discusses the political importance of variance allegorical interpretation supply to biblical texts. Kate, I'm last two questions. M1 is, would you call Shakespeare humanists? And longer as mine. I don't know how much time we have forgot who asked you to this class are lambda for a cell. When I, if I can't call Shakespeare humanist, I don't know who I could call a humanist. He's, there's, if there's a famous book about Shakespeare's education called Shakespeare's small Latin named less Greek. Because Ben Johnson, who was a big shot classical scholar, said, although we had small Latin and Greek, still, he wrote all these great place, all the heresies about Shakespeare, like who wrote Shakespeare? The answer to the question, who wrote Shakespeare? Shakespeare, but was it Lord Revere? Was it Francis Bacon? They all grow out of the idea that somebody who hadn't been to a university could not possibly have written a whole those learned place. Well, nonsense. If you went to grammar school, which we know he did in Stratford on Avon, he knew more Latin and Greek than future majors in the class thinks at Princeton University, at least. And it's who you know. He's constantly drawing on this, putting it in a Christian context. They've been lots of interesting studies along those lines. Orlando fury, Awesome. Well, I used to think orlando furious, who was the greatest of the Renaissance epics until I came upon luis to kimono inch, the great poet, Portuguese poet and, and, and his Lucy edge. And I believe that it even more than hurry AASHTO or boy yard or really any of the others. Captures, imitates the conventions of the Classical epic. In a way, Dante does it. Best of all. If you really, it's not in his form, but in his content. I mean, Dante was partly brilliantly mixes. He has monsters, he has historical characters, he has legendary characters. Yes, mythological characters, Biblical characters, people next door. And you know, in Florence, they're all mixed together in the same. And that what is what I take to be sort of the, the, the essence of this humanistic spirit. It's trying to show a look at a Midsummer Night's Dream, for example. That is Chaucer's knight sale. You may remember story of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta and so on. In Chaucer. It has a more pagan presentation even than it does in Shakespeare. But you can see that the ethical framework is mainstream Christian. I don't know if that answers the question. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Alright. Alright. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, all right. If you would've done in the afternoon for us, she got some remarks on lowering your R mu. One minute. Okay. There now. Okay. This has been an amazing afternoon. I hope for everyone. Certainly it has been for me. It's been phenomenal. I am so surprised that even with my wouldn't, I can't even say limited knowledge. I really don't have the knowledge. I can follow you, John, and I could listen to you and enjoy every moment of it. I'm taking notes as far as other things now that I want to read. And to me, that is just a wonderful way to spend an afternoon and a wonderful way for me to try to finish my education. I hope that everybody here has some benefit from this and really gotten to know you and appreciate you even more than they ever had before. So I thank you so much for joining us and Randy, I thank you so much for bringing out some of the other stories that a gentleman has shared with us. And I hope that we could spend another afternoon together. It may be another small talk and hopefully at somebody's home that we could appreciate you even more. So thank you and I thank everybody for being here and and staying with us for this, this wonderful conversation and hope to see you next month for stand Cats and Peter Brooks. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.