Pictures of Hell

Very few people today would read Dante's Divine Comedy as literal truth, but Renaissance commentaries, especially those that emerged from Florence and Venice, often treated the poem as a divinely inspired work. A close reading of Dante could reveal the structure of the heavens and hell. The following images come from Alessandro Vellvtello's "Descriptione de lo Inferno" in Dante con l'espositioni di Christoforo Landino, et d'Alessandro Vellvtello (Venice: Appresso Giouamnattista, Marchio Sessa, et fratelli, 1578).

You can see the book by asking for Rare PQ4302.B78.

Romaunt of the Rose

This Thursday, November 17th, Stephen Nichols of the Johns Hopkins University will give a lecture, "Dartmouth's Rose Undying," on our 14th-century manuscript of the Roman de la Rose. We are pretty infatuated with this manuscript, and have blogged about it in the past. The lecture is free and open to the public and a reception will follow where you can see the manuscript in the flesh.

In addition to our manuscript copy, we have many editions of Chaucer's translation, The Romaunt of the Rose. We have several 16th-century editions, and this one from 1687 with an interesting commentary:

In this Book the Authour hath many glaunces at the Hypocrisie of the Clergy; whereby he got himself such hatred amongst them that Gerson, Chancellour of Paris, writeth thus of him: saith he, There was one called Johannes Meldinensis, who wrote a Book called, The Romaunt of the Rose; which Book if I only had, and that there were no more in the World, if I might have five hundred pound for the same, I would rather burn it than take the Money. He sayeth more, That if he thought the Authour thereof did not repent him for that Book before he dyed, he would vouchsafe to pray for him no more than he would for Judas that betrayed Christ.

To take a look, ask for Val 823 C39 I16.  The Manuscript is Codex MS 003206.

For Gallant and Meritorious Service

On September 29, 1864, Samuel Augustus Duncan, Dartmouth '58, then a Lieutenant Colonel in command of the Color Troops of the 4th Brigade of the 3rd Division of the XVIII Corps, led his men on a heroic and tragic charge up New Market Heights.

New Market Heights is a hill about 8 miles south east of Richmond, Virginia. On that morning in 1864 the top of the hill was fortified and held by General John Gregg of the Confederate Army. Gregg’s 2,000 men were part of a set of strategic fortifications put in place by General Robert E. Lee to keep the Union Army from reaching Richmond. These fortifications had been frustrating attempts by General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac to push the confederates southward.

Colonel Duncan’s brigade in conjunction with the 6th Brigade, both under the command of General Paine, was to spearhead the attack. The African American soldiers were chosen for this task because General Butler, an advocate for the use of Colored Troops, wanted to prove to the world that they would and could fight.

The confederate forces were well aware of the, supposed, surprise attack on their stronghold. They waited until Duncan and his men, who had made their way to the hill over swampy ground in the dark, were well entangled in the abates (sharpened sticks driven into the ground as a defense) before opening fire. The officers and color bearers were quickly eliminated as they made easy targets. Duncan himself was wounded four times. His men suffered 452 casualties including 63 killed. After two days of fighting the Union troops finally drove the Confederate forces from the hill.

In a letter home to his mother from the hospital on October 6, 1864, Duncan describes his wounds and recovery. But he also speaks proudly of his men, "You will see that they all [the New York papers]—the Herald even—praise the Colored Troops of Genl. Paine’s command for what they did on the 29th."

Duncan was honored for "gallant and meritorious service." He went on to become a patent lawyer after the war. Samuel A. Duncan died in 1895 at the age of 69.

Ask for the Samuel Duncan papers, MS-541.

W. W. Dewey and the "Old Dartmouth Cemetery"

In 1797, William Worthington Dewey, a local farmer, decided to begin an "accurate record" of all the "Deaths in the Vicinity of Dartmouth College." At the time the only records available were those kept by the churches, which seldom indicated the causes of death. Dewey was determined to change that. His record would not only reflect that information but would also benefit from his own observations and knowledge about the deceased.

His comments ran the gamut from the mundane to the unintentionally humorous. While there are descriptions pertaining to the status of the deceased, such as "consort of" or "a transient person," more often they are lengthy descriptions of the circumstances of the person's death. John Russell, for example, who died in 1795, was "gorged to death by an enraged bullock with which he was contending," while Frederick Weizer, a "native of Germany," was "one day dining very heartily [when] he swallowed a very large piece of meat which caught in his throat and caused almost instant death." Mr. Samuel Bingham, who died in 1804"

had been indisposed for three years and all the while was rather an enormous eater… He likewise grew very corpulent and unwieldy… He finally died suddenly… He then weighed over 300 pounds. To examine him internally after death it was necessary to cut over four inches through a clear fat substance. It took 6 men at each relief to support the bier while conveying him to the grave.

In the summer of 1807, Dewey's record was "purloined" and he abandoned the project for the next few years. "On the solicitation of some friends" he began again in 1810, using his own "recollection" and some "extraneous assistance" to reconstruct the register up to that date. He continued the record until 1859, two years before his death at the age of 84.

Since then Dewey's record has been used by many researchers including Professor Arthur H. Chivers who, in the 1950s, mapped and recorded in six volumes all of the grave marker descriptions in the Old Dartmouth Cemetery, verifying their authenticity through correspondence with the surviving families of the deceased.

List of Deaths in the Vicinity of Dartmouth College, including likewise the hamlet usually called Greensborough from AD 1769 to 1859 will be on display in the Rauner Reading Room through the month of November.

Professor Chivers records The Dartmouth Cemetery can be found in The Collection of New Hampshire and Vermont Cemeteries, DH-38, Box 2.

GOTO LINE 1

In 1964, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz produced the first version of the programming language Dartmouth BASIC. As part of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, one of the goals of the project was to provide less-technically inclined users with a way to use a computer without having to learn as many of the specialized mathematical skills that had been necessary up until that time.

Based on earlier languages, especially FORTRAN II and ALGOL 60, Dartmouth BASIC was a more user-friendly language and made heavy use of English words for statements. In his oral history interview from 2002, Kurtz relates that "Kemeny had the idea that all statements in BASIC, not just most, but all of them should start with an English word" as this would be more intuitive and easily remembered by users. Kurtz goes on to say that "bringing computing to the people, having a simplified user interface that really was simple to use, using English words that were easy to remember" were all part of what made Dartmouth BASIC so useful and widespread.  Shown here are Kurtz and Kemeny with True BASIC, one of the successors to Dartmouth BASIC.

Rauner Library holds the papers of John Kemeny (MS-988) and Thomas Kurtz (MS-1144), as well as numerous other resources related to the development of BASIC.

A Triple-Headed Monster

One of the more depressing Victorian novels you can read is George Gissing's New Grub Street. Set in London, it chronicles Victorian literary men and women struggling to make a living from their pens. New Grub Street came out in 1891 in the typical format of the day: a novel in three volumes. The "triple-decker" was designed to maximize profits for publishers and lending libraries. It allowed libraries to charge a greater fee to subscribers. Think of Netflix, you can pay one fee for a single DVD or a higher fee for three simultaneous DVDs. A library subscriber would need to shell out more for three volumes than one.

Gissing's anti-hero, the popular Jasper Milvain, discusses the tyranny of the format with Edwin Reardon, the novel's most tragic figure:

Milvain began to expatiate on that well-worn topic, the evils of the three-volume system.

"A triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists. One might design an allegorical cartoon for a comic literary paper...."

"For anyone in my position," said Reardon, "how is it possible to abandon the three volumes? It is a question of payment. An author of moderate repute may live on a yearly three-volume novel--I mean the man who is obliged to sell his book out and out, and who gets from one to two hundred pounds for it. But he would have to produce four one-volume novels to obtain the same income; and I doubt whether he could get so many published within twelve months. And here comes in the benefit of the libraries; from the commercial point of view the libraries are indispensable. Do you suppose the public would support the present number of novelists if each book had to be purchased? A sudden change to that system would throw three-fourths of the novelists out of work."

"But there is no reason why the libraries shouldn't circulate novels in one volume."

"Profits would be less, I suppose. People would take the minimum subscription."

In the first volume of New Grub Street, Reardon finds himself destroying his health and his family trying to stretch a thin story over three-volumes: "Reardon's story was in itself weak, and this second volume had to consist almost entirely of padding." The Victorian reader, first encountering the book in its triple-decker format, must have dreaded picking up the second volume of New Grub Street after that warning.

Come see the book in all three volumes by asking for Val 826 G44 T641.

A Dissertation Concerning Vampires

One of the earliest works on vampires and how to deal with them is Dom Augustin Calmet's Dissertations Upon the Apparitions of Angels, Daemons, and Ghosts, and Concerning the Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (London, M. Cooper, 1759). In his lengthy treatise, first published in France in 1746, Calmet examines many different occurrences and types of vampirism, which he claims is a new phenomenon not known in ancient times. Calmet writes that "It is common... to see men, who have been dead several years... come again, walk about, infest villages, torment men and cattle, suck the blood of their relations... and, at last, occasion their death."

Fortunately, Calmet also presents the only sure method of defeating such a creature. According to Calmet, "digging them out of their graves, impaling them, cutting of their heads, taking out their hearts, and burning their bodies" is necessary to prevent further calamity.

Oddly enough, Calmet himself seems to be of two minds about the whole subject. In his preface, he writes that those who believe in vampires will "accuse me of rashness and presumption... for denying their [vampires] existence" while others will "blame me for throwing away my time in writing upon this subject, which is... frivolous and trifling." Calmet ultimately sidesteps the whole issue by concluding that whether or not vampires are real, he has done humanity a service by either debunking the myth or presenting people with a means to deal with such creatures.

Ask for Oliver 6 to read the whole treatise.