Tea at Trianon: Creating Books in the Sixteenth Century

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, November 6, 2023

Creating Books in the Sixteenth Century

From History...the Interesting Bits:

Throughout the Tudor period, as well as for centuries before and since, the original work would have to be written out in long hand with pen and ink, occasionally on parchment but increasingly on paper. It is actually easier to make corrections on parchment because the ink can be scraped off the surface layer but it’s far more difficult with paper because the ink soaks right in. All corrections, re-writes and edits had to be copied out again which makes me ever grateful for my computer. Love poems were often exquisitely written in the final version and given as gifts to the beloved. Surprisingly, the idea of the typewriter was thought up in the mid-seventeenth century when an anonymous Englishman applied for a patent for just such a machine, supplying a full description, drawings and diagrams of his invention. Nothing ever came of it at the time, as far as we know, but more recently, the device was constructed from the diagrams and it worked! What a boon that would have been to authors and poets. (Read more.)