{"id":465,"date":"2013-06-19T11:00:07","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/?p=465"},"modified":"2013-06-23T07:53:58","modified_gmt":"2013-06-23T07:53:58","slug":"a-document-speaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/a-document-speaks\/","title":{"rendered":"A Document Speaks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even in its first few lines, the ‘Foot Voyage’ had provided some pretty startling insights, and raised some pretty big questions<\/a>. But it clearly promised, and raised, many more: what else could be hidden in this less than prepossessing thing? There wasn’t time, on that first visit, to make a thorough transcription, so it seemed best to try to take a proper look at the whole document, and then to gauge the extent of the account I had begun to read.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The manuscript had obviously not attracted much attention for a very long time. While this can be a problem, of course – and the evidence of mouse bites and water damage wasn’t all that encouraging – it also meant that it didn’t seem to have been much tampered with. It looked like these were all of the original sheets, still bound together in their original order. No later owner had had it trimmed or rebound, losing either marginal text or evidence of how it was put together. These 32 leaves, or 64 pages, were made from 8 sheets of paper; each sheet had been folded twice to produce ‘quarto<\/a>‘ sized gatherings. The outermost leaves, both front and back, seemed not to have been opened to make separate pages; they were also made of a different kind of paper from that used by the writer of the account. It looked as if they had been added on to provide some basic covers for the sheets they enclosed. The whole thing had been stitched along the spine in a basic but competent fashion; leafing through the pages it was easy to see that this had happened after the account had been written, since the ends of some lines disappeared under the stitching.<\/p>\n

\"Shelton,<\/a>

Thomas Shelton, Tachygraphy<\/p><\/div>\n

There was, though, evidence of a further early stage in its history. At what appeared to be the back of the manuscript there were several pages of code or cipher in a seventeenth century hand, all of it upside down: someone had \u2018reversed\u2019 the manuscript, and begun to write on the blank pages left at its end. This was hardly unusual \u2013 people in the seventeenth century were disinclined to waste paper, and often used up blank pages and spaces even in printed books. But that indicated that this little manuscript had been repurposed fairly early on its history, since the coded writing made use of the system of shorthand <\/a>devised by Thomas Shelton, first published in its full form in a 1635 book entitled Tachygraphy<\/i><\/a>, and used most famously by Samuel Pepys<\/a> in his diary. The writer here, though, had written out nothing more exciting than the first chapters of the Book of Job \u2013 shorthand exercises, perhaps.<\/p>\n

So what could be made of this? Someone had made themselves a little booklet, written the account in it, then bound it between paper covers and stitched it all together. The attempt to enclose and protect perhaps suggested that it had been intended for circulation among readers, rather than to lie in a private desk. At some point, possibly as early as a decade after it was made, it had found itself in the possession of an owner who was more interested in practising shorthand than in reading up on the adventures of Ben Jonson. And then there were no further signs of ownership or use. The waves, as it were, closed over it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even in its first few lines, the ‘Foot Voyage’ had provided some pretty startling insights, and raised some pretty big questions. But it clearly promised, and raised, many more: what else could be hidden in this less than prepossessing thing? … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-manuscript"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":476,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions\/476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/ben-jonsons-walk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}