Middle English Printing's Infancy

Lately our Rare Book and Manuscript Metadata Librarian has been spending a portion of his time reviewing our incunable collection and, as a result, we have the opportunity to learn more about the volumes in our collection. An incunable, as you may already know, is the term commonly used to identify a book that was printed on a printing press using moveable type in 15th-century Europe. The name is derived from the Latin word for "cradle"and is meant in this context to refer to the infancy of printing in the West. We currently have nearly two hundred copies in our collection out of roughly thirty thousand individual editions that were printed during the period.

Most incunables were printed in Latin, which makes sense considering that this was the language of the intelligentsia of the time. Today, however, we're showing off a rarer breed of book. Only about a quarter of all incurables were printed in the vernacular instead of Latin, and of those perhaps around fifty editions were printed in Middle English. And we have one of them here at Rauner.

The first Middle English vernacular edition of Vitas Patrum, or Lives of the Fathers, was printed in London, England, in 1495 by Wynken De Worde. Vitas Patrum is a compilation of narratives and sayings associated with the early patriarchs of the Christian Church that was originally transcribed from Greek into Latin in the late 4th century. Over a thousand years later, William Caxton translated the book into Middle English. Caxton was the first person to introduce the printing press to England (1476), and De Worde was his protégé. One of the most interesting details of this edition, in our opinion, is the way in which the typeface has clearly been designed to imitate English vernacular handwriting of the era.

To see one of the earliest books ever printed in English, come to Rauner and ask for Incunable 65.

Weekly Sings in Webster

We recently ran into something interesting in our files on the Student Army Training Corps. The SATC was a federal program implemented during World War I, intended to speed along young men's readiness to go to war by allowing them to participate in both college classes and military training. Dartmouth was a participating school, and tucked into some other information provided to the program's instructors is a report compiled from several universities on the practice of singing in the SATC.

Organized singing as recreation, communal activity, and morale boost was apparently common enough in SATC units that the War Department felt it necessary to gather data on how it manifested at different institutions, "as a matter of information and a means of comparing results... as suggestions for possible future developments." Dartmouth is a contributor and reports that weekly sings would be hosted in Webster Hall of "the entire S.A.T.C. (nearly 1000 men)... on the stage were a grand piano and a combined band and orchestra of about 50." This became a popular event beyond the participants themselves, drawing a public audience from nearby towns that grew every week. 

Before Webster Hall housed Rauner Library it was an auditorium -- and you can tell from the acoustics if you've ever visited.  A thousand men singing in this space must have made quite the noise!

To read more about SATC sings, ask for DO-12 Box 6289 Folder 1.