The Bookshelf as Womb

Sakura Adachi, a Milanese furniture designer, has designed a bookshelf she calls "the Cave." Those who really enjoy relaxing with a book while surrounded by books will want to order one of these (price: 2250 euros). If you prefer to do most of your reading in bed or at a desk, but like the idea, maybe your dog or cat would like a "cave." That's now also a possibility. Ms. Adachi has come out with a model designed for small dogs and cats. To order, visit her web site: Sakurah.net.

"The Cave" is a recent innovation in the long history of shelving books. For a good summer read see Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (Knopf, 1999). [Hekman Library Z685 .P48 1999] Petroski is an engineer, who has also written books about the pencil and about bridges (and, believe it or not, a forthcoming book in October about the technology and culture of the toothpick). In The Book on the Bookshelf, Petroski takes the reader through various forms of shelving, from the pigeonholing of scrolls and the arrangement of medieval chained books to contemporary library shelving and such fascinating topics as the architecture of the British Museum reading room. The book ends with an appendix which lists a multitude of ways people have arranged the books in their private libraries: not just by title, or author, or size, but by color, by price, by sentimental value, by order of reading, etc.

"How's My Bible Doing?" Dutch Staten Bibles at Hekman Library

Two very wonderful people showed up the other day and presented me with an article from the Grand Rapids Press dated June 10, 1967. According the the article, 40 years ago their mother had donated a 1637 Dutch Staten Bible to Hekman Library. The reporter noted that the Bible had been "desecrated by a sword thrust that nearly destroyed it. The marks of the sword . . . are still visible." The article further speculated that "some soldier surprised the congregation and tried to destroy the Bible." Let your imagination run with that for awhile. (Take a look at the photo on the left.) I'm skeptical about the scenario; I'm not so sure that soldiers were busting heads or spearing Bibles at 17th-century Dutch Reformed church services (16th century - maybe!).

But I did find the Bible and we looked at it together for awhile. Family members had written genealogical information in the front leaves. We've kept it safe these 40 years and will continue to keep it in our Rare Book Room. Maybe their children will come back to take a look again in forty years. It's a large format folio 1637 Dutch Staten Bible. This translation became the standard Bible of the Dutch Reformed Church, corresponding to the "King James Bible" (1611) of English-speaking people, and Luther's translation in Germany. Actually we have four 1637 first editions, as well as numerous later editions. One of my favorites is an 18th-century version with a Dutch East India Company binding (you might say this is an early example of what today we call a "niche Bible" [see also Daniel Radosh, "The Good Book Business," New Yorker (18 December 2006)].


In 1618 at the Dutch Reformed Synod of Dordrecht, one of the first orders of business concerned a new Dutch-language translation of the Bible from the original languages. Six Dutch theologians were appointed to the translation team: three for the Old Testament, Jan Bogerman (1576-1637), Willem Baudartius (1565-1640), and Gerson Bucer (c.1565-1631); and three for the New Testament, Jacob Roland (1562-1632), Festus Hommius (1576-1642), and Anthony Walaeus (1573-1639). The translation also includes the Apocryphal Books. While the first edition of the Bible has a printer's date of 1636, printing actually was completed the following year, and the first copy presented to the Dutch Estates General (which sponsored the publication) on September 17, 1637.

The Staten Bible also has extensive annotations and cross-references. (See the photo of Psalm 100 on the right.) The Synod of Dordt gave the translators a number of guidelines. They were to give brief and clear content summaries for each book and chapter. They were also to add brief marginal explanations if the Greek or Hebrew could not be translated entirely "literally." Unclear passages were to be explained briefly. The annotations are important for the history of interpretation, and have influenced generations of Bible readers in the Dutch Reformed tradition. This was the primary Dutch Bible translation until 1951, and has had considerable linguistic influence on the Dutch language. There is an online Dutch version which includes the annotations as well as information about the translators and other aspects of the Dutch Bible.

For those who do not read Dutch, an English translation exists. In 1645 the Westminster Assembly persuaded Theodore Haak (1605-1690) to begin work on an English translation of the Staten Bible. Haak's translation (he didn't include the cross-references or the Apocrypha) was finally issued in 1657, with the title: The Dutch Annotations Upon the whole Bible . . . A facsimile edition was published in 2002 by the Gereformeerde Bijbelstichting (ISBN 90-72186-31-1 , HL RareBk BS195 .H25 1657a). For those with access to Early English Books Online (EEBO), here's a durable URL link to Haak's translation.

Dressing for Pastoral Success at the Festival of Homiletics

A few days ago one of my favorite bloggers, PeaceBang, wrote a short note about someone she had seen at the Festival of Homiletics in Nashville last week:

[I just want to ] send a short note to the young male clergydude who was wearing a tie-dye teeshirt in the most garish shades of orange and blue, shorts and bright orange Crocs:
Sweetheart, Jesus wants you for a sunbeam, not an acid trip.

This brings me to a recent book by Russell Smith, Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress (Thomas Dunne, 2007). It's not the usual candidate for a mention among the top fifty theology reference books of the year. But the clergy person does have to dress, and ought to think hard about clothes and their appropriateness for the situation. This is about "contextualization," folks. Whether you like it or not, what you wear, when you wear it, and how you wear it communicates something. In January of 2005 when VP Dick Cheney wore a fur-hooded parka, snow boots, and a wool toque to the somber ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he communicated something. All the European dignitaries present wore formal, dark woolen overcoats and clothing more fitting for the occasion. For clergy, if you're Roman Catholic or Orthodox, many of those decisions are already prescribed for you. But we Protestant clergy have choices to make. Smith is a little too formal for my own taste, but his book is well-informed, witty, entertaining and very readable. While it's not directed to clergy, you can do some of your own travelling here. In some situations, in some congregations, it might be perfectly appropriate to conduct a winter graveside service in brightly colored Gore-Tex. But you might at least read Smith to know your alternatives. What does it mean when the invitation says "Black Tie" or "Black Tie Optional"? What options do you have for shirts, suits, shoes and facial hair? What sort of connotations does a bow-tie have? There are other books out there about dress, but if your public library has Smith, check it out.

I know -- what about female clergy? Back to PeaceBang's blog -- Beauty Tips for Ministers , subtitled: "Because you're in the public eye, and God knows you've got to look good." PeaceBang (pseudonym for a young female Unitarian/Universalist minister) shares her observations about clothing trends and grooming for female and male clergy. See a recent article about her in Calvin Seminary's student publication, Kerux. Her observations on the recent Festival of Homiletics in Nashville, for example, cover matters of great weight, facial hair, men's hair styles, women's footwear, and dirty knapsacks.

I'm a librarian, so I can't help but give a few historical resources about clergy clothing:

• Graeme Murdock, "Dressed to Repress?: Protestant Clerical Dress and the Regulation of Morality in Early Modern Europe," Fashion Theory 4, no. 2 (2000):179-200. Get this through the database Wilson Select Plus (through Hekman Library; search for it by typing in 3 or 4 keywords from the title). This article considers how Reformed and Protestant Churches across Europe dealt with issues of appropriate dress for clergy (and clergy families).
  



• Reimar Zeller, Prediger des Evangeliums: Erben der Reformation im Spiegel der Kunst (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 1998) HL N8180 .Z45 1998
  (I know it's German, but you're looking at the illustrations.) A collection of portrayals of Protestant preachers in art up to the mid-20th century.
  



• Dress: Sources for Clerical Costume -- Lambeth Palace Library's guide to sources for the costume of both pre-Reformation English clergy and post-Reformation Anglican clergy.

And finally, to put this all in perspective, a good word from John Chrysostom (not a bad dresser himself) from his sermon Judge not, that you be not judged

". . .such rich attire is like a pile of withering hay. Beautiful garments are good for worms and moths. When they set upon such a man, they will strip him bare . . . But he who is clothed in virtue cannot be harmed by worms nor even by death itself."

Faith and Wartime Letters

This weekend I read Andrew Carroll's Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Over the past nine years Carroll has assembled an archive of letters (or e-mails) written by U.S. soldiers involved in any combat operation from the American Revolution to the present day. The letters in the present collection were selected because they deal with issues of spirituality, religion, and theodicy. There are two letters written by brothers fighting on opposing sides of the Civil War, letters by chaplains, letters that attest to strengthened faith and letters that address the question of God's presence or absence in the face of the unspeakable suffering of wartime. I give it a high recommendation, especially as food for thought as we think about the disastrous tragedy of this present war in Iraq. These letters help us get inside the lives and thoughts of some of the participants in war. Several of the letters in this book are available online through Random House.

Carroll heads up the Legacy Project, which collects and preserves wartime letters. While there is no complete online digitization project for the archive, there are a number of web sites which exhibit letters from the project:

In partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Insitute of American History, the Legacy Project is exhibiting letters and audio recordings of the correspondences .

PBS produced a critically-acclaimed documentary titled "War Letters," based on Andrew Carroll's national bestseller of the same name, and letters featured in that program can be seen by clicking the link that says "Featured Letters." PBS also provides a brief bibliography related to wartime letters.

History Channel also produced a documentary, "Dear Home," based on World War II letters in the Legacy Project's collection, and has made some of these letters available.

Carroll has edited several previous collections of letters in book format, among them are:

War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (New York: Scribner, repr. 2002)

Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters -- and One Man's Search to Find Them (New York: Scribner, 2005)

Mary Douglas, 1921-2007

Mary Tew Douglas, an anthropologist with wide-ranging interests, died on 16 May 2007. (See the obituary in the London Times.) Her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) [HL GN494 .D6] was a cross-cultural study of cleanliness, pollution and taboo and their roles in ritual systems. She argued that rather than being primarily about hygiene, these systems served to provide order to a perceived chaotic world. She applied this to the dietary codes of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and has greatly influenced subsequent interpretation of these books.

In her later years she turned to biblical interpretation with

• In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (JSOT, 1993; repr. Oxford, 2001)[HL BS1265.2 .D68 1993]
• Leviticus as Literature (Oxford, 1999) [HL BS1255.2 .D68 1999]
  
• Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford, 2004) [HL BS1171.3 .D68 2004

Her latest book, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (Yale, 2007) [HL PN212 .D68 2007], is a revision of her Terry Lectures at Yale in 2003. She used the term "ring compositions" to refer to chiastic (also called "pediment") literary structures which occur in more lengthy literary compositions, such as the Iliad, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the book of Numbers, and certain Zoroastrian hymns.

ARTstor

Hekman Library is pleased to announce that we've purchased online access to ARTstor, a magnificent database containing over 500,000 images covering art, architecture, and archaeology. ARTstor includes software tools that support a wide range of teaching and research uses, including viewing and analyzing images through zooming and panning features, saving groups of images online, and annotating images. ARTstor has great potential as a resource for faculty and student presentations, research papers, and web pages. Each image comes with a detailed description that allows for effective searching.

In the area of religion and theology, ARTstor users can easily find images related to the study of worship, iconography, liturgical arts, church architecture, church history, and other areas. See the handout ARTstor Resources in Religious Studies and also those for Classical Studies and History.

For more information, access ARTstor to find a wide variety of tutorials and explanatory materials. From off-campus, be sure to access the database through the library website rather than directly On a more technical note, you will have to disable your popup blockers to use ARTstor. Click on Using ARTstor to see how to do this.

From Scroll to Codex: A Big Shift in Information Technology

One of the major technological shifts that took place in early Christianity was the transition from the book as scroll (a long roll of paper or parchment) to the book as codex (folded sheets of paper stitched together into bundles protected by a wrapper of thicker material). In Christianity and the Transformation of the Boook: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Belknap Press, 2006) [HL BR67.2 .G73 2006] Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams sketch out how this revolutionary change in the technology of the book took place in the book production of Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea in the third and fourth centuries. The codex afforded significant advantages over the scroll for the study and comparison of rival versions of Scripture (e.g., Origen's Hexapla, a 6-column parallel version of Scripture) and the study and writing of history (e.g., Eusebius' historical work and chronologies). See the review by Eamon Duffy, "Early Christian Impresarios," New York Review of Books 54:5 (29 March 2007).

From scroll to codex didn't happen without stress. This video from Norwegian television gives us a possible scenario from a medieval IT Help Desk (though user frustration was probably focused in the early Christian era rather than the late medieval setting portrayed in the video):