We’re on the second half of the kids’ fall break, and spent the majority of our time focused on getting a family car (more on that below!). But we also spent some of our evenings taking the first steps into Middle Earth, with a beautiful illustrated edition of The Hobbit.
Research
Reading Week at St Andrews! This is a week in which students have no classes, and all are encouraged to rest and recover for the push to Christmas. I will offer a massive congratulations to the newly-declared Dr. Zachary Brookman, who successfully passed his viva on the development of printing, bookselling, and library culture in the seventeenth-century Swiss Confederacy.
- Immanuel Tremellius, a Christian Hebraist scholar in sixteenth century France, was one of the most successful publishers of the Book of books, the Bible. His Latin translation of the bible was the most successful Protestant printing of a book which was rapidly becoming seen as “Catholic.” It’s important to remember that this is only a modern understanding to think of Jerome’s Vulgate as something inherently Catholic.
- Once the Vulgate and Sixto-Clementine revision of that work, both of which were clearly aimed at a Catholic audience, are removed, Tremellius’ Bible went through more than twice as many editions as all other Latin translations of the Bible combined.
- Just as the Jews of the New Testament era saw the Old Testament as the Bible, so most of the early Reformation age saw the Vulgate as the Bible.
- Emmanuel Tremellius’ Latin Bible (1575-79) as a Pillar of the Calvinist Faith, Kenneth Austin, Ashgate, Ashgate Publishing, 2006, 31-32.
- The early Quaker movement exemplifies the relative maturity of the press in the 1650s: its main core of preachers, dubbed the ‘First Publishers of Truth’, exploited printed pamphlets with great efficiency from the outset.7 In 1653 one Quaker author boasted that the pamphlets in circulation were already ‘sufficient for the downfall of Antichrist’s kingdom’, another that books were very serviceable for ‘convincing the world.’8 A handful of pamphlets was published in 1652; by 1655, around one hundred pamphlets were published, an average of two new titles each week. These were mainly unlicensed, and printed, mostly in London, in print runs of between three and six hundred. From the mid-1650s, tens of thousands of Quaker pamphlets were circulating across England, Scotland and Wales; some of these were exported to Ireland, France, Germany and Holland, and others still further afield.9
- Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1820, edited by Roeland Harms, et al., BRILL, 2013.
Reading
I’m spending time going through my initial wave of book-buying upon our arrival six weeks ago. If it seems that I might be simply nestling up to my supervisors, that is correct. I figure that if we are going to be in a scholarly dialogue for the next couple of years, it might be wise to see where their own research has taken them over the years.
- The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age, Andrew Pettegree & Arthur der Weduwen (Yale University Press, 2020)
- How did a small nation whose population never exceeded two million people, become the dominant cultural power in the seventeenth century? Pettegree and der Weduwen it was partly due to their persistent pursuit of economic maximization, best seen in the Dutch approach to buying and selling books.
- The Library: A Fragile History, Andrew Pettegree and Arther der Weduwen (Basic Books, 2020)
- The best-selling book from the duo which also serves as my thesis supervisors, this work explores the history of mankind’s penchant for storing and displaying knowledge. At its core is the question of what defines a library? Is it the content? The purpose? The sponsor? All of these, along with several fascinating tidbits that will lead to more thesis research on my behalf, are found within!
Real Life
It’s a girl! We are the proud owners of a newly imported, 2016 Nissan Serena, otherwise known as a people carrier. It can seat up to eight, and is relatively comparable to our old Honda Odyssey. What makes it stand out, however, is just how much larger it is than 95% of the other vehicles in the U.K. Cars are just smaller here, so finding something with the seating capacity we needed automatically put us into the largest class of vehicles. Just another small way that smaller families are the norm in the U.K., and how a big family makes you stick out.
That said, the world is a little different when you change your perspective from that of a pedestrian to that of a drive. It’s honestly very odd how much changes when you go from walking a town to driving it. You see things that you had not seen before, and you miss things that were otherwise part of every walk on the sidewalks. Either way, we are thankful for more time spent out on the roads, and are excited for the new parts of Fife, Scotland, and the U.K. that a car will open for us.
LINDSEY – I had an opportunity to spend time with some of the school moms over this week. Play dates were scheduled and tea was had. We have a hope that we will show love to the community in the school and pray for opportunities to share our hope in Jesus. The church here equips us with very obvious and outspoken opportunities to invite the curious, not-yet believers to hear the gospel. One such event comes in the winter with a wreath making day that is quite popular. Praise God, one mama has already accepted the invitation to make a wreath, experience the fellowship of God and hear the gospel proclaimed.
Conclusion
Darby and I found THIS SONG earlier in the summer that has always been stuck in our heads. When we were riding back from Lochgelly with our new car, on a lovely autumn evening, it came on. We got to belt it out and have a great time together, one of those core memories a dad and daughter get to share. Enjoy!
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