Issue 8 Michaelmas Term 2018

Issue 8 Michaelmas Term 2018

THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE LIBRARY Issue 8 Michaelmas Term 2018 Inside this issue: New Light on a Forgotten Astronomer—Will Poole David Constantine on Modern Poetry in Translation Archibald H. Sayce and his Papers at The Queen’s College, Oxford elcome to Issue 8 of Insight. After the new building special of last year we W have reverted to our normal format of articles associated with the Library’s collections. The first article is by Will Poole of New College who last wrote a piece for Insight five years ago. Will, a regular reader of our special collections, has recently been to Queen’s Library several times to consult a series of tiny seventeenth century mathematical L-R: Helen Constantine, David Constantine and Clare Pollard pictured notebooks by Richard Rawlinson, student and in discussion at our exhibition event. Fellow of Queen’s during the turbulent years of the Civil War and the Cromwellian Protectorate. Will’s Our final substantive article is by Silvia Alaura and article casts Marco Bonechi from the Consiglio Nazionale delle light on this Ricerche (CNR) in Rome. Marco and Silvia spent fascinating several weeks last December investigating the Sayce and little Papers kept in the College Library, and have written known a wide-ranging account of the life and career of one astronomer of the fascinating late nineteenth/early twentieth of the century personalities of Queen’s, for whom the seventeenth University created a Chair of Assyriology in 1891. century scientific The final pages of this issue highlight the current revolution. library exhibition curated by recent graduate Sarah One of Gouldesbrough, which is based on her DPhil Rawlinson’s subject and is entitled Images of Epic: Representations of Rawlinson Mathematical Notebook, circa 1646. exquisite Homer and his Works from the Archive to the Comic Book. (Queen’s MS346) manuscripts (pictured) has recently featured as our “book of the I am very grateful to all the contributors who wrote month” in the New Library. for this year’s issue and to my colleague, Sarah Arkle, who took many of the photographs and undertook Earlier this year, our thematic exhibition installed in the typesetting. I would also like to express my both the Upper Library and the New Library was gratitude to the college’s Director of entitled Opening the Frontiers: Modern Poetry in Communications, Emily Downing, for the new Translation in the Sixties and Since. It was co-curated by design. David Constantine, who has expanded on the associated talk he and co-curators gave at the launch of the exhibition to write about the lasting political If you have ideas for future articles or indeed and cultural importance of translating and would like to contribute, please contact me disseminating poetry around the globe. The article E-mail: [email protected] and the exhibition celebrate the fact that Queen’s Tel: 01865 279213 Library has recently received a substantial run of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation which David and Amanda Saville, Librarian, October 2018 Helen Constantine co-edited from 2003-12. 2 setting, three dons had gathered to observe the eclipse. They were the Savilian Professor of Geometry, John Wallis, and two younger dons ‘most expert in mathematical matters’, Christopher Wren of All Souls, and Richard Rawlinson of Queen’s. The three men set up a telescope to project the image of the sun onto a piece of paper, so that the progress of n 12 August 1654, in one of the the eclipse could be marked at regular intervals on opening conflicts of the Russo-Polish the paper. Rawlinson later engraved onto a brass OWar of 1654–1667, a Polish-Lithuanian army plate the observations they had made, and the image conquered a numerically superior Russian force in was published as part of Wallis’s later account of the the Battle of Skhlow. Just as the Russians began to eclipse. Wallis was not a natural acknowledger of cross the Dnieper river, the Polish surprised them, assistance, but Rawlinson memorialized his own role driving them back into the water. In seizing the by signing his engraving: ‘Ri: Rawlinson cælavit’, element of surprise, the combined Polish forces were ‘Richard Rawlinson engraved this’. assisted by an unlikely ally—a solar eclipse. The names of Christopher Wren and John Wallis remain well known, but who was this forgotten astronomer of Queen’s? Richard Rawlinson was born, probably in 1618, in Milnthorpe, Westmorland, one of the college’s traditional recruiting territories, and entered Queen’s in 1636 as an eighteen year-old of plebeian rank. It is very likely he was the first member of his family to attend university. In 1640 he was elected a Taberdar, and the next year he took his BA. Life in Oxford was soon to be turned upside-down, however, with the outbreak of civil war, and in late 1642 the king and his troops were forced to retreat to Oxford, which became for the next three and a half years the headquarters of the royalist campaign. This is when we hear our first distinctive news about Rawlinson, who had evidently been reading books on fortification, which he then put to good use. As the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood recalled, The Works and Fortifications also did now go on apace, and those in St Clement’s Parish, on the East side of Oxford, were about this time begun. Which, Plate from Wallis’ Opera Mathematica in Queen’s College Upper Library, with other Fortifications about the City, were mostly depicting the solar eclipse observed by Rawlinson in 1654. (40b.B.3) contrived by one Richard Rallingson, Bach. of Arts of Queen’s College, who also had drawn a Mathematical The Poles reckoned by the Gregorian calendar, but Scheme or Plot of the Garrison. (History and in Oxford, still on the Julian calendar, that same day Antiquities, vol. 2, p. 462) was 2 August 1654. There, in a more peaceful 3 Rawlinson (he is frequently encountered as of getting a promising young man with undeniable ‘Rallingson’) successfully managed to attract royal royalist sympathies out of town at a difficult time. attention, and in recompense for his work Charles I ordered that he be created MA at once, a degree duly Rawlinson did not stay away for too long, however: conferred upon Rawlinson by Convocation. we find notices of him in the college records throughout the 1640s and 1650s, serving variously as Rawlinson was soon made a full fellow of the a tutor, as one of the two annual treasurers, and as college, and at about this time he ought to have ‘Magister puerorum’, or the choristers’ schoolmaster. taken holy orders too. He dragged his feet, however, The college accounts show that he drew his fellow’s seemingly out of nervousness about the future stipend of £4 per annum every year until 1665/6, direction of the Anglican Church, facing defeat, and without exception. Rawlinson, in other words, was by the time he was fully ordained, albeit in secret, one of those royalist dons who found a way of living Royalist Oxford was indeed on the brink of under an unpalatable Parliamentary regime by surrender to the Parliamentary forces. When the keeping out of the sight, and largely out of the mind, town fell, Rawlinson was prudently granted leave by of the new authorities. In this way, the man who was the governing body of Queen’s to absent himself for said to have designed the royalist defences of Oxford one year, or even longer ‘should it prove necessary’. (pictured below) was never formally ejected from his Indeed, when the Parliamentary Visitors came fellowship. soberly to the doors of the college, Rawlinson could not be found. The Provost of Queen’s, Gerard Langbaine, described him as ‘a very excellent yong man, extremely studious, a general Scholar; but a most eminent Mathematicien’—but in the same letter to the authorities Langbaine was making feeble excuses for Rawlinson’s nonappearance, blaming it on aristocratic intervention. What seems to have happened is that Rawlinson was whisked off as a private tutor to Henry Pierrepont, Marquess of Dorchester, a safe way Iconographia Oxoniae, showing Oxford’s defences, from Wood’s Historia et antiquitates Vniversitatis Oxoniensis (Queen’s Upper Library 52.f.13) 4 In the interregnum Queen’s specialized in this kind Rawlinson as a potential successor, hoping that the of temporizing. While Rawlinson was discreetly universally respected Selden might amplify this praise clinging to his fellowship, the college became a home in the right ears. The great physician, inventor, and for many young men of royalist cloth, for instance statistician William Petty, whom Rawlinson must the well-to-do pair Robert Southwell and Joseph have got to know at Oxford, also wrote in support Williamson, both students in the 1650s, both future of Rawlinson’s candidacy, noting in Rawlinson’s knights, and both future Presidents of the Royal favour the ‘Bookes of his Owne compiling & Society of London. (Southwell’s student poetical Instruments of his owne hands making’. In the event notebook survives in the Bodleian, and offers a the far superior Lawrence Rooke of Wadham got the fascinating glimpse of Queen’s literary life in this job. decade.) Occasionally royalist sympathy lost its restraint: in 1657, for instance, one of Rawlinson’s own pupils, Lancelot Addison—we will encounter him again—delivered a supposedly comic oration in the university so inflammatory against the puritans that he was forced to recant in Convocation upon his knees. But in general Rawlinson’s milieu cultivated tact, and scholarly energies were directed to pursuits that were, or at least seemed, politically neutral.

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