Almost Reaching That Peak

Browne (left) & Parker 1912

Belmore Browne was an explorer, artist and writer. Despite his contributions to these areas, he is perhaps most famous for his involvement in early attempts to summit Mt. McKinley. All three of the expeditions Browne was part of failed to reach the top - the last by mere yards.

In 1906, Browne was a member of Frederick Cook's expedition. Cook later claimed to have summited with another member of the expedition, but this was eventually proved false by photographs taken during Browne's second expedition - the Parker-Browne Expedition of 1910.  These photographs show that Cook's peak is actually a much lower peak several miles from the real summit.

Cook's "Fake Peak" at left
showing its relative height to the
real peak (right arrow)

Browne Photographing the
"Fake Peak" during one of the
Parker-Browne Expeditions

The third expedition missed the top by yards.  Severe storms kept the party from the top, despite several attempts to reach it.  This may have been providential as the glacier the expedition members were camped on shattered only hours after they had started back down the mountain. The first true summit of Mt. McKinley was finally achieved by Stuck and Karstens in 1913.

Page from Browne's
Stikine Trip Sketch Book, 1902

In addition to numerous photographs (prints, negatives, and lantern slides) of the various Mt. McKinley expeditions, Browne's papers contain his sketchbooks and diaries as well as scrapbooks and clippings.

Ask for Stef Mss 190. A paper guide to the collection is available in Rauner.

Is Not My Word Like Fire

Long before he dreamed of Dartmouth College, Eleazer Wheelock was a key player in "The Great Awakening." The religious revival of the 1740s enflamed church and civil life in New England. Its stern vision of personal piety and salvation challenged the delicate balance of Puritan life. For Wheelock, the fervor was both religious and physical: this two-week preaching schedule scrawled on the back of some sermon notes shows Wheelock’s popularity as an evangelist. "Upon the Sabbath here, Monday at Hebron, Tuesday at Colchester, Wednesday at Goshen…." And in a letter from 1742, he wrote, "The week before last I preachd 10 sermons... last week I preachd 10 times again... I am exceedingly worn out with constant labour and much watching."

Letter - June 28, 1742

Our current exhibit, "Is Not My Word Like Fire," looks at the Great Awakening and Wheelock's participation. It will be up through the end of June in our Class of 1965 Galleries. You can see Wheelock's itinerary anytime by asking for MS 940, Box 2. The letter is Mss 742378.

Now Serving ...

For the past 230 years, the land that is now occupied by the Hanover Inn has been the site of an inn or tavern. The first proprietor on site was Captain Ebenezer Brewster who had come up from Connecticut with Eleazar Wheelock to serve as the College Steward. In 1782, Brewster converted his home to a tavern. Perhaps tiring of the business of serving drinks to students, Brewster leased the building in 1802 to Mr. Dewey who ran a coffee house there for the next 11 years.

The Curtis Hotel, 1826

In 1813 a new building was erected on the site and this eventually became the Curtis Hotel in 1816. Jonathan Currier purchased the hotel in 1838 and used the building as a private residence and boarding house until 1857. Currier sold the building to Horace Frary who performed extensive renovations on what came to be called the Dartmouth Hotel. The accommodations were spartan - heat was intermittent in rooms that had it and a bath was considered an exotic request. The hotel was destroyed, rather dramatically, in a seven-hour conflagration in 1887.

The Dartmouth Hotel

The Wheelock

Menus and Publicity

Following the fire, the Trustees of the College bought the property and constructed a new hotel on the site that they named the Wheelock. The quality of the construction of the Wheelock was subpar and the building underwent a drastic reconstruction only 12 years later after which it was renamed the Hanover Inn. In 1923 a new wing was added almost doubling the size of the hotel. Avid skiers Ford and Peggy Sayre took over the management of the Inn in 1936, using it as headquarters for their famous ski school. In 1966 the main building, so completely renovated in 1902, was razed and replaced by the façade we are all familiar with.

The Hanover Inn, 1967

Today we watch and wait for the next iteration of the Inn to appear from behind trucks, scaffolding and sheeting. Rumor has it the wait will soon be over; the Inn is set to reopen - at least in part - for Reunion weekend.

Game On

Rauner Library wants you for the "Five Ws" - who, what, where, when, and potentially why. We've collaborated with Digital Humanities Professor Mary Flanagan and Tiltfactor.org to create a series of games based on our large collection of Dartmouth related images. The first one is live now at Alum Tag. (Note that the game site is no longer  available.)

For many of our archival images we have little or no descriptive information other than a very broad topic such as "Winter Carnival" or "Dartmouth Hall." A lot of the key elements are missing - like "Who is that standing to the left of the signpost?" or "What year is this really?" For the image to the right, we only know that is has something to do with the Aegis, Dartmouth's yearbook.

How does it work? The game asks the user to describe the image in as much detail as they can and weighs the data supplied based on frequency and other measures to determine the validity of the users' descriptions. We eventually hope to use this crowd-sourced metadata to enhance our online image collection of Dartmouth College Photographs to make the collection more accessible to users.

Go Play!

Terence

We recently digitized one of our nicest humanist manuscripts: a copy of Terence's Comoediae sex cum argumentis produced in Ferrara in 1462, just a few years prior to the introduction of the printing press in Italy. You can see it in its digital glory, or come in and feel the vellum for the full sensory experience.

 We have another 15th-century Terence that is worth looking at for comparison: Comodiae (Strassburg: Johann Gruninger, 1496). While the manuscript has a simple design connoting a quiet dignity, with many annotations in a contemporary hand, the printed copy from 1496 is far more extravagant and theatrical. Not only does it contain dozens of hand-colored woodcuts and ample rubrication, it also has a prankster's doodles (date unknown) throughout.

The manuscript is Codex MS 001999, and the book is Incun 125.

Order of the Golden Fleece

We continue to build our collection of vernacular secular manuscripts with our latest acquisition, The Statutes of the Order of the Golden Fleece. It was most likely produced in 1531 at the request of Charles V to be distributed to all of the knights of the Order. This copy is utilitarian in that it was meant to be used, but also had enough decorative flourish to make it a treasured object.

At first, it seems the manuscript is an anachronism: 80 years after the invention of moveable type, it is still entirely done by hand. But printing in the early hand-press era demanded scale to make it profitable. If you only needed 50 copies (and the Order of the Golden Fleece was limited to 50 members) then it would have been cheaper to produce manuscript copies than set the type and print them. Generally speaking, printing only pays for itself after about 200 copies, but then it can become quite profitable. Still, members of the Order would have expected something more dignified than print, and this manuscript fits the bill.

The description of the manuscript from Les Enluminures included this account of the Order and the manuscript in hand:

The most renowned of all chivalric orders, the Order of the Golden Fleece was founded in 1430 by Phillip the Good, duke of Burgundy (1396-1467) "out of respect for God and for the advancement of the Christian Faith." It was instituted as a Burgundian alternative to the influential Order of the Garter, founded in 1348 by Edward III, and designed to strengthen the allegiance of Phillip's vassals and friendly foreign states to his realm.

The Order of the Golden Fleece, whose first chapter was held in 1431, came to be considered the highest order of knighthood. It originally included twenty-four knights; the 1431 statutes fixed the number admitted to 31 (later increased to 51 by Charles V in 1516, and then to sixty-two by Philip IV) and four officers (Chancellor, Treasurer, King of Arms, and Greffier). Upon being inducted as a member, each knight received, in addition to the famous collar from which a gold enameled pendant of the Golden Fleece was suspended, a copy of the Statutes—also referred to as a "quayer de l’ordre"—most often in manuscript form and copied on vellum. The official language of the Order, and therefore of the manuscripts, was the langue bourguignonne, but from the sixteenth century some manuscripts were copied in Latin. Following the death of a knight, the copy of the Statutes and the collar were supposed to be returned to the Archives of the Order, but this rule was not rigorously respected and numerous copies of the Statutes remained in circulation.

This manuscript is a copy of the Statutes enacted in 1531 after the chapter held in Tournai; it includes the thirteen additions made to the statutes up to that year. The manuscript was certainly copied before 1545, the year of the chapter held in Utrecht where a new draft of the Statutes was instituted with 68 articles rather than the traditional 66. During the chapter of 1531, complaints were voiced concerning the numerous copies of the Statutes in circulation whose content was both erroneous and incomplete. Hence the greffier Laurent de Blioul was ordered by Charles V (1500-1558) to have 50 new exemplars copied, some in French, others in Latin, complete with thirteen added articles, to be distributed to all the knights (Reiffenberg, 1830, p. 382-7, and de Lannoy, 2000, p. 38). Payment for sixteen copies was recorded in October, 1532 (Korteweg in Cockshaw and Van den Bergen-Pantens, 1966, p. 43, note 48). The present manuscript is probably one of these "revised" copies (Korteweg, in Cockshaw and Van den Bergen-Pantens, 1966, p. 43, note 50 lists nine additional copies in public collections). Presumably most of the existing knights already owned luxury illuminated copies of the text, which they would not want to discard, so they would have needed relatively plain, practical volumes (such as the present one), with an accurate text, rather than a new lavishly illuminated copy. 

You can see it by asking for  Codex MS 003234.

Say It With Flowers

Roses are the perennially favorite flower for sending as gifts.  But what are you really saying when you send someone a dozen roses?  According to Sarah Hale's Flora's Interpreter (Boston: Thomas H. Webb; Co., 1833) it depends on the type of rose and the shape of the flower.

A red rose bud signifies a wish that the receiver remain ever pure and lovely while a damask rose hints at a bashful love. However, beware sending a thornless rose which is associated with a feeling of ingratitude or the dark Chinese rose with its message that the sender has been forsaken. Worse yet, is the withered white rose of despair.

Hale lists numerous other flowers and ascribes a sentiment to each. She also provides a poem illustrating the associated sentiment, a literary extract mentioning the flower by name, the flower's scientific name and a brief description of it's characteristics and origin.

The language of flowers is thought to have evolved out of the eastern tradition, particularly that of Turkey, of associating certain objects with specific meanings. Lady Mary Montagu, who visited Turkey in the early eighteenth century, is credited with one of the earliest English accounts of this custom.  In the book Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M---Y W---y M----e (London: Homer and Milton, 1766), she details much of what she saw as typical Turkish life, including the language of objects. Interestingly enough, our copy, printed by "Homer and Milton," appears to be a pirated edition of the work and, according to the accompanying letter of provenance, may be the only existing copy of this particular printing.

Find out more about the language of flowers by asking for Rare Book GR 780 .H35 1833. Lady Mary's often scandalous accounts of Turkish life are found in Rare Book DA 501 .M7 L48.