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So go and get some books. Hi there. I'm Carla Navi, and this is the New Books in Science Technology and Society podcast. I'm really excited to share a conversation with you today with Daniel Largocci about a book that he helped produce called The Fabrica of Andreas Veselius, a worldwide descriptive census, ownership, and annotations of the 1543 and 1555 editions.
This came out as a long title, right? It came out with a Brill in 2018. And the title gives you a sense of how capacious this volume is. It's a really large volume.
It is beautiful. It's gorgeously illustrated. And it is chock full of all kinds of useful, crucial, fascinating stuff about two major editions and hundreds of copies of those editions of one of the seminal texts for a lot of us who are interested in science studies, history of science and medicine, history of the book, history of anatomy and the body and conceptions and illustrations of bodies, and many, many other related fields. What the book does is it is kind of split into two major parts.
The first part is an introduction that takes us through a lot of what you'll hear us talking about in the course of the interview that you're about to listen to. So this is largely about the kind of introduction to the historiography, I mean, really briefly, the historiography of the text, but also insights into the reception history of the text that come from really detailed painstaking work with existing copies. So annotations, marginalia, bindings, in some cases, images of bugs and information about bugs that are kept and preserved in some of these copies. So it's a really detailed critical analysis.
It's also, as well as being detailed and useful, fascinating. And you'll hear us talk about some of that material in the conversation to come. There's just really, really cool stuff that comes out of the kinds of analyses that they did, and you'll hear about that. But what's also included in the book is a very detailed kind of archive of characteristics of the copies of the texts that they talk about in the first part of the book in a more kind of overview, right critical, analytic sort of a way.
So the book's an archive as well as an analysis. And it's gorgeous that you'll hear us talk about some of the kind of hand-colored, almost crayola-ish technicolor images. You'll hear us talking about censorship of the text. You'll hear us talking about interest in genitalia.
There's a lot of cool stuff to come. And with that, I will let you get to it. And just thank you so much for being part of this conversation by listening for your support of the channel. And I really hope you enjoy this conversation because I definitely did.
Okay, here we go. I'm here today to talk with Daniel Margoty about his new book, The Fabrica of Andreas Vaselius. Welcome back to the new books and STS podcast, Daniel. And thanks so much, both for helping to produce a really beautiful and I think really magic stereo book and also for making time to talk with me about it today.
Thanks for having me on the show. Of course. So we've actually had an opportunity to talk before for the podcast. And this was about your previous book, Commercial Visions, Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, which was also an amazing book.
So I'll just do a shout out about that book or listeners. So let's instead of talking about the traditional what brought you to the field because listeners can consult that podcast for that information. Let's instead talk about how you came to this particular project. So Daniel, can you talk a little bit about what brought you from Commercial Visions to the Vaselius as an object of study?
Right, absolutely. So let me preface everything by saying that this is a co-authored book with two other colleagues, Mark Shamos and Stephen Joffee. So probably they would have slightly different versions of how they got to the book. I basically got to this because in commercial Visions already, I was quite much interested in the history of the book as a discipline and especially on how books were published and printed and produced in the 18th century.
And then roughly around the time that that book was published, I got an inquiry through the New York Academy of Medicine from Stephen Joffee, my co-author, whom I hadn't known beforehand. And he basically got in touch with me and said that he had a really exciting project. He really wanted to know how many copies of Vaselius' fabric are survived today, where they are and what kind of key can we learn about Vaselius and his magisterial adlessophanatomy. And I hesitated a little bit originally about getting into this project.
I talked to a friend from a graduate school and actually from D.A.K.A. at age three. And we discussed that this would be a project that we would be very much interested in. So we, after around the months, we said, okay, let's do it together, the three of us and we embarked on the project.
And given that Vaselius is originally from the low countries and given that he's a book in the history, about the history of the book, I was, let's do it. Let's see, not so much how the book was printed and published because there isn't so much information available how this book was printed and published. Let's focus instead on who owned this book, who read it, what annotations they left in their copies and how they can trace the reception of a spectacular volume and foundation work of medicine. Yeah, that's the story.
Wonderful. And as we'll talk about, I'm sure in the podcast to come, in the moments to come, one of the really exciting things that the book shows is how much you can do by tracing the material history and also the annotations and really reading the annotations critically and creatively and productively to get out all kinds of things about the reception history of the book. So I think a really exciting contribution that the book makes and I'm sure we're gonna talk about that much more like. So let me set the stage a little bit for, just very briefly for listeners who haven't yet had a chance to take a look at the book.
So in the words of the book, and this is a quote, it is the aim of this census to reveal the complex reading history of the fabric across 475 years, tracing how owners reacted to its complex arguments and fascinating images and to show how the fabric has close ties to political and economic power inflected the way it was studied. Okay, so that's the stated aim and I think it's put very articulately so I just wanted to give it in those words. Now the census reconstructs a previously unknown segment of the reception history of the fabric by surveying all the surviving copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Basel that Visalia himself supervised. So let's kind of start there a little bit Daniel.
Why those two particular editions, right? Why the 1543 and 1555 edition? Again, for listeners who might not be familiar with the text. Right, okay, absolutely.
So there are good pragmatic and more theoretically oriented reasons. So the fabric is printed for the first time in 1543, it is published in the very first days of August and it is a foliar volume of over 600 pages of text, over 220 woodcuts. It's a big textbook that is expensive. And basically, then a lot of other editions come out afterwards, just as we know in the early modern period, reprinting is quite frequent.
The 1555 edition is the only other edition that is of the same size, in fact, it has a hundred of pages of more text, yeah, but it is still a large foliar. It is supervised by Baselius again and it is printed by the same publisher. So what we have here is two editions that are, you know, within limits, more or less identical and are in that the same audience reach people who can afford to spend roughly a month worth of dinners on this book. I think such as a piece of cover calculated that, you know, the price of the fabric is the equivalent of 28 fish dinners in contemporary Basel.
So there are other editions. There is a five-ratty edition of 1552 that comes out with basically no illustrations. There is a smaller edition from 1568. There are abbreviations, translations, etc., etc.
But our aim was really to figure out what this original material object printed in multiple copies changes in medicine, how people react to it. Because obviously if you print a different format, in a different format, a smaller version, the reaction will be different. And our question was really not to focus on how the message of the fabric changes as it is printed in a variety of formats, but rather is there anything that stays the same as long as the format is the same? Right.
Now one of the really interesting points that you make in the introduction, I think is really important for any of us who are doing history of the book, or really for any of us who might not be working on or committed personally to contributing to the literature on the book as material objects, right? But who might be interested in questions of not just what is an author, but what is a book, right? These are also really interesting theoretical questions about identity and individuality and what it is we're studying when we're studying something, right? What makes something into itself?
This is all a complex way of leading into the very practical question of deciding when you had a copy of the fabric in hand or when you had access to it, how do you know that it counts as a copy, right? So in other words, how did you decide what counted as a copy of one of these 1543 or 1555 editions? Because some of them were like bound with other things, right? So can you talk a little bit about that process for you personally of deciding when something counted as a copy of the fabric that you were going to include in the census?
Right, so there are two ways of answering to that question. The first one is, is this a real original edition or is this a fake printed in the late 20th century to fool owners and researchers of the census? And because this is such a big book, it is not really easy to fake it, right? If it's a small book like the famous case of Galileo, Cider and Lucius, it is relatively easy to fool it because it's a couple of pages.
This is a really big book. We haven't encountered complete outright fault juries. Yeah. The other question is however, what is a copy in the sense that when do we say this is a 1543 edition?
It's more complex, right? What do you do when all you have is the frontispiece, the illustration with the title page that survives of a book because in the 19th century, someone cut it out, framed it and exhibited it on the walls. We decided that that was not a copy on no particular theoretical considerations but because it would have made out much more difficult. Is, let's say, a hundred pages of the book cut out once and not preserved in the library, there is such a copy in San Francisco.
Does that count as the fabric up? We said, okay, if it's already more than a hundred pages then yeah, that's counted as a copy of the fabric and let's talk about it because there may be interesting things to say about it. And then again, what do you do when sometimes in the 19th or 20th centuries, a book dealer had a slightly damaged copy of the fabricer, in fact two damaged copies of the fabricer and instead of selling two damaged copies for peanuts, decided to create one complete copy from those two fragmented copies so that now we have a hybrid copy where half of the pages is from one edition, half of the pages from another edition. Does that count as one or two fabricals?
And this is like, okay, let's count it as two fabricals because originally those were two separate copies. I mean, my favorite example is in Princeton, it is one book but one of the illustrations is from a different edition and you can notice this because there is a woodworm, a bookworm, very nicely going through the book, then stopping digging a hole at that illustration, kind of climbing up through the book and then climbing back after that illustration and going through the rest of the book. And then we obviously realized that it's not the bookworm avoiding that particular page or rather, that particle is page was inserted into the book after the bookworm had done its job. So then again, this is one way of saying, okay, this is one copy but some of the pages are from a different copy that no longer exists.
So these are the issues, like what counts as a book, if it is damaged, how much damage needs to be done to the book until you say this is no longer a proper copy? So we could easily talk just about that, right? For the next hour, I mean, it's so fascinating. And I love the bookworm, I love the story about the bookworm.
But let's talk a little bit about the kind of practicalities in another sense of doing this research, right? How did you locate these copies? And maybe another way of putting this is what were some for you of the most important tools that you used to do this kind of census work and to just find out what was out there and where it was. Right, so basically the question is, how do you know how many copies of this book survive and where they are?
And back a couple of decades ago, you basically have a couple of guesses which libraries may own a copy and then your content libraries and ask them, according to your catalogs, do you have a copy? Obviously the bias would be towards those libraries that you believe you have such copy, previous researchers tend to have a belief that it's primarily Western European and American major libraries that have a copy. And then you need to get in touch with private owners and you can start book dealers and try to try out information from them who they saw copies to. Things have changed and evolved because we have the internet and frankly the honest answer is you find most copies by doing Google search.
It is particularly the case with the fabric. Obviously you start with WorldCat, you start with a variety of Union Catalo's that list the holdings of the nation's libraries. You use all sorts of search engines for that, but those we'll recover only maybe half of what we have found. The other half, Google search have sweet because the fabric is a famous book.
Therefore every library, even those without an online catalogue, will boast about it on their website. And usually it's on a page called Art Treasures. So as long as you put into Google search where's alias fabricate treasure in a variety of languages, you will find the web pages of books saying, Art Treasures, we have a Copernicus, we have a Newton, we have a Vesavius, yeah. And this doesn't work with lesser known books, less famous books, less expensive books, which is a shame because no one boasts about having a little known 17th century retract that is still quite important for history, but they boast about this.
And then once you've done that, Google search, you do a little Facebook search, you send out letters to mailing lists, you ask friends, and when it comes to private owners, you still go to book dealers and ask them, could you please tell me who you saw this book to? And they will either forward your email or not. Many of the book dealers were extremely helpful. So we will be able to get in touch with some private owners by the total of them.
And so I gather from a little bit of the conversation that we had before this, that it's not the case that Fabrica is now only in major institutional libraries, or even the hands of private owners that are particularly wealthy. You had mentioned there's some really interesting, unusual places where Fabrica's are today. So can you talk a little bit about that? Where do you find them today that perhaps might be surprising for listeners?
Right, so first of all, not all of them are in Europe. They were unable probably to document every copy surviving outside Europe and America. Many countries with a huge history of medicine, very far becoming, have ended up simply do not have currently online information about the library holdings, and we were unable to go and visit every country in the world to do that. So there is advice.
Nonetheless, we were able to find that there is a copy in Rio de Janeiro. We found it online. We found some copies in Mexico, because Japan has been a major hub for rare book collecting in the past 30 days. We found a good number of copies there.
And then within Europe and in America, we found that many lesser non-nibraries have a copy. So for instance, in Germany, several high schools have a copy. I visited personally one such high school in Steinfoot, in Germany, not very far from the Dutchmorder, where you go into a 1960s building, filled with high school students running around. You're welcomed by the local amazing librarian who was extremely helpful, and he brings you into the library of the high school 400 years ago.
And literally in that building from the 1960s, they have a climate control room where all the books from the foundations of the high school, because it was founded 400 years ago, and just became transformed at new locations. You see the complete library of what the high school had back then. Medieval manuscripts, legal tractates, philosophical treatises, and one copy of the Fabrika did a couple of cryptidignons about the radius. And yeah.
No, I'm just laughing. This is just a fascinating story. I'm sorry, go on. Yeah, and again, you go into monasteries, and it turns out that the Fabrika was in monasteries, and it still is that there is again in Poland, a 1950s, 60s concrete building of a monastery in Austin that looks extremely modernist, but they have an amazing credible collection going back through centuries, and they have two copies of the Fabrika.
One of them had been there for quite a while. The other one walked over to the border after 1945 when the Library of Königsberg was destroyed, and this copy ended up on the Polish side of the border a couple of years later. So these are the places where you find them. Little time libraries in Italy, in France, you just need to have a car and drive around, and you just find them everywhere.
You know you need to write a novel now. That's a fictionalized account of some amazing, rare book sleuth, who's following copies of the Fabrika all over and stumbles upon some nefarious business, and cool, vesalius related stuff happens. So just when you make your civilians of dollars on this amazing novel, you're gonna write about this. Think back to this moment, and I'm gonna just say, you know, it all be in here.
You have 10% of the right. So Daniel, it's one of the really striking things already, I think in a conversation is how important the books, really, the copies are as material objects, and we're gonna talk about that at more length in the conversation to come. But importantly, I think it has already been clear that's not to the detriment of digital research methods, or other ways of reading and experiencing books in their histories that seem just as differently, but in an important way, really significant to the project. So in the introduction to the book, you talk about a number of kind of distant methods.
I don't wanna call it distant reading because that's a different kind of thing, but ways of overcoming problems with distance and access that were mediated in part digitally. You mentioned that, for example, the research process combined not just personal visits, or use not just personal visits, but also relied in part on questionnaires and photographs that were sent to you from intermediaries that had access to copies that you couldn't personally go and kind of physically look at, right? So that's one way that a kind of technologies of distance contributed to making this book what it is, but more specifically, you also talk about a database, right? That was part of your research process.
And I believe there was also a website for the project. So all told, it seems that digital methods were a really important part of the work done here. So I would love it if you could talk a little bit about the ways that digital research methods, and potentially we can call this digital humanities if you want to shape the project. Great, yeah, I never thought about it this way, but you're absolutely right.
It is a digital project. So some researchers were able to see every single surviving copy of a particle book, Owen Dingrich definitely did this with the Copernicus Census, because of the lack of time and because we were working within a limited timeframe, decided to ask the help of friends, colleagues, and librarians. So whenever we had a friend who was going to a place that we were not going to be able to visit, we were like, can you please visit the local library with a camera and just take pictures of every single page of the book, or alternatively, every single page where you see the smallest underlining or note written in by somebody? And many of our friends said yes to it, and we are extremely thankful to them.
And hopefully some of them said that they actually really enjoyed going into a rare book library and engaging with an amazing book. And then we have to say the library has been amazingly helpful. We sent out inquiries to hundreds of libraries, and we told them, could you please read your public cover to cover and tell us if there are any annotations? And the vast majority of libraries said, yes, of course, I would love to do that.
We sent us images. In some cases, they digitized the whole volume for us and or provided information or said, you really need to come and see this in person because this is so exciting. And we had a questioner software where people could basically send in information, upload information, upload images, and it worked wonderfully. Then we basically need to create a database where we could store all of this.
We have now information on over 700 copies that we know of. So in each case, we had to record every single owner of that book from the past and the present that we know about. We had to record what kind of binding it is. We had to figure out what kind of annotations there are in the books.
And most importantly, we decided to note on what pages annotations are present. So in each book, or at least in as many as we could and in the vast majority cases, we could be listed every single page that has an annotation or an underlining. And fortunately, there are very cheap database software that allow you to do this. And it made our life much easier.
And we could actually do some quantitative analysis of who on this book in 1700, what percentages of those owners is a trace, a physician, or a Mary's secret. We could calculate on which page there are the most annotations if you compare all the copies and things like that. And then we created a website because we know that we haven't found every single copy in the world. So the updates are constantly going on our website right now that complement the book.
It's called vazealioscensus.com. And we provide additional information. And we welcome any listener that has a public talk, Chris, let us know about it unless we've been already in touch. Wonderful.
And one of the things that's really striking about your description of the annotations, and the kinds of analysis that you and your co-authors brought to bear on reading those annotations is that you're really clear in distinguishing between a kind of typical reader, an example reader, where you're taking us through one case of a reader who made annotations that are somehow representative of something larger. And when you are using these database statistical methods to talk about averages instead. And I just mention this because the book is really, really helpful in part because of this specificity and because of the way you are very careful about telling us what methods contributed to what kinds of analyses. It's really useful as a model for how one might bring together digital research methods and a real attentiveness to the materiality of the object to create a cohesive story that couldn't be what it is without both of those components being here.
So let's talk a little bit about the materiality here. The census really pays special attention to the fabric as a material object. And this becomes crucial to the analysis. It argues that there were physical constraints that shaped how the book was read, so including its large size, its number of woodcuts, its elegant typesetting, and also its value, its price.
And so this is one of the reasons, one of perhaps many reasons why making a decision to look at copies of editions where Vesalius was actually involved in the production makes sense because one of the things that the census is arguing is that those decisions, that intentionality that he made as an author in part determines the later reception history and the price history of this book. So intention was actually important to the historical study that the book is offering, and we'll get to that in a moment. So this also is important in contributing to some existing and outstanding historiographical debates about books and prints and publishing. Early in the book, you mentioned that the book supports a weak version of Isonstein's thesis in a book called The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
And you argue that, at least within the bounds of early modern Europe, the folio format, the large scale woodcuts, the complex textual arguments of the fabrica, in the words of the book, strongly conditioned the response of readers. So Daniel, could you talk a little bit about this for us in terms of what you take to be the most significant historiographical contributions that the study's making to how we understand this book print publication history? Right, so basically what we have come, the authors have come away from after doing our census, was a strong impression that it mattered, a tremendous load, that this was an expensive book at the time, with fabulous illustrations and a large format. And in a certain sense, this was the decision that Veselius made together with the printer, Johannes O'Riness, and probably together with the illustrator, Yasli Vintankalka, that this will be a luxury coffee table style book.
And there is a lot of argument in the historiography, how many different ways we can interpret a book, how the reception of the book diverges from the authors' intentions, how many unintended readings of a work of literature, of a work of science emerged throughout the centuries. And we completely agree with that, because indeed Veselius was read in very different ways throughout the centuries and diuretically different interpretations of it. At the same time, it seemed to us that the majority, and I would even risk a large majority of readers, in the 16th century and early 17th century, so the original audience of the book was quite homogeneous. It was an international audience of the elites of European society.
And they were, one could argue, the mentors of the Republic of Lattas, what kind of American people was in the period, they were learning Latinx readers. And it seemed to us that they tended to react in fairly predictable ways to the book. They were interested in certain parts in it, they read the text in a certain manner, and they constantly went back to the ancient medical authority Galen, because they wanted to know what Galen says about what Rosélius is writing. So we found constant patterns, and it didn't quite matter whether it was an English physician or an Italian priest who was reading a book.
There are some regional variations, and there is a huge difference between 16th century readers and 19th century and 20th century readers, but within the boundaries of early modern Europe, we were actually starting to find that, yes, the shape of the book conditions height is red, because the price restricts it into one very thin slice of contemporary society. Some of those readings reflect you know, they say this is attention, people read it as Rosélius wants the book to be read, and in other cases, people read it differently from what Rosélius wanted them to do, but nonetheless, their response is a uniform misreading of the authorial intention. So that's the short answer to this. That's awesome, and you've brought up a bunch of things that I was planning on that I'd like to ask you to elaborate a little bit, so this is perfect.
So you talked a little bit about the significance of the book as something that had a very high price, right? And you mentioned this at various points in the census, right? It's a consistent with the value, the consistently high value, almost, right? Consistently of the book is really a theme throughout the census.
You talk about, and we'll talk about this a little bit in the second half of the interview, I think, you talk about the fact that the price has remained steadily high except for a dip in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we'll talk about that a little bit. And the way, as you just mentioned, that the pricing was strongly conditioned by the material qualities of the book. Now, there were various ways that readers and owners of the book maintained that value or tried to, at least make an effort to maintain that value, and that included binding it, right? And there are some really amazing images of some of these bindings that you provide in the census.
Also, for me, what was really striking, and this is kind of embarrassing because as an early modern historian that I didn't realize people do this, given the rare books that I'm used to working with, which are usually in Chinese and Manju, people are hand coloring their copies, right? And there's some amazing images of this. There's one of the cover of the book that looks like almost like technicolor. It's like someone got a box of crayon le crayons and just went to town on one of these images in like a super exciting way.
So Daniel, I would just love to invite you to talk a little bit maybe about hand coloring specifically, but more generally about the importance of your ability to reproduce these images in the census and the work that the images that are in the census of the bindings, of dead flies, of hand coloring examples do for the argument and the larger work that the book does. Right, so absolutely. So we do have a number of wonderful images in the book of bindings and hand coloring. And some of those bindings, pigskin bindings are the most beautiful thing, you know, one can imagine.
They are elaborately blind stamped with illustrations. You find images of German amperers, Jesus, Virgin and the Child, a variety of saints in these images in these bindings. And they make wonderful covers. And obviously they raise the price of the volume considerably.
In the case of, you know, a 1552 edition of a fabric cup, which we don't discuss here, the price of the binding exceeds the price of the actual book. And nowadays it is selling for huge amounts of money, simply because of its extremely special binding. Now when you come to hand coloring, that is quite interesting. So it turns out that in only modern Europe, it was possible for some books to be hand colored by the printer for the customer.
It seems to us that the fabric cup wasn't hand colored in the printing shop. People actually said, okay, we want this book hand colored once they have purchased the book. And sometimes it was for decorative purposes and they read wild in it. There is a copy still in Basel today, which has wonderful flowers on the margins, reminding you of late medieval prayer books that have Laura margins.
There are fully hand colored copies in Poland, in the Netherlands as well, where you basically have every image very carefully colored and it looks stunningly beautiful. What is interesting is you also have readers going crazy. So sometimes indeed, as if you know, it was picking up a crayon and just hand coloring parts, there is one image where someone, you know, one of the famous muscle nine images of the fabric has in the background a couple of houses and the heel and the person picks up the crayon and they hand colored three of the houses in the background and they leave the rest of the image untouched. And you want the violinists, they were interested in hand coloring those houses.
You have an image, I think in Rotwaave, that sort of like one image in the whole book is hand colored. It turns out to be the labia of the female reproductive organs that are hand colored red. And you wonder why that reader decided to pick that particular image of the janitors and why they decided to color red. And you have a whole, realistic image in Italy and Fermil, where there is an illustration in the fabric of showing a table with all the surgical instruments you need to use for a dissection and someone painted blood on those surgical instruments, creating an image of basically sharp, nice, big blood on them.
And again, you wonder why did you do that exactly? So that's right, that red labia. So you call this sexual coloring in the book and this raises an opportunity for us to talk about something that's really interesting in the analysis of the copies of the book that the census offers. So when you talk about the approach of the typical reader, but also the average reader, I think this is also true, there was a special attention that the census shows that you could see in the annotations and including some of this hand coloring to a particular book of the fabric of this is book five.
And there was a special attention within that to issues of generation, issues of reproduction, issues of menstrual flow, male lactation, genitalia in the book. So readers, from what it seems you could tell from the annotations and the ways that they actually treated the physicality of the book were particularly interested in this history of generation, reproduction, genitalia, lactation, menstruation. Daniel, can you talk a little bit about why that was? Sort of what does that help us understand about the context in which they were reading, about why that was of particular interest for readers that you saw?
Right, so the interest in generation and the sexual organs is quite complex and it's quite striking. The very first copy I ever saw was a copy that I saw in Budapest, Hungary over winter holidays, where I went into the local library and asked for the copy of the fabric and I opened it and all the male genitalia were excised from that copy. And I was like, oh my gosh, why is someone interested in the genitalia of the book? And then what as we were doing the census or three of us, we were realising that basically in many copies, the readers just turn to those pages that focus on issues of generation, how babies are born, why women menstruate and what it tells us about human anatomy.
And this is not exactly surprising. Remember, this is a book that is primarily by male physicians, later priests and very few women on a copy of this book. Some of them inherited in later centuries some of them were calling it with their husbands, but as far as I can document it, the first female owner of a fabric up to purchase a copy on her own by Zitin Spring 2017. Hundreds of years after the book.
So the fascination of man with female sexuality and generation has been well-documented and Katie Park has a wonderful tracing sort of like how similar issues are at hand already at the birth of anatomy and then especially with the zenis. And basically what we found was that this is absolutely right. The readers know very little about childbirth and the secrets of women and they want to know more about it. And basically we were like, no, another copy by someone underlines the word highman.
High interesting, probably the most frequently underlined word in the fabric that is the word highman. And basically they wanted to know as we are doing the book based on our findings is in many cases the male readers wanted to know why women are promiscuous, how God created a body for them that makes them promiscuous but at the same time limits their engagement in a darker sex. And they wanted to draw conclusions, as male readers, why frankly they, the male elite members of the society should be ruling in a patriarchal society and oversight seeing the activities of women and controlling female sexuality. And you mentioned also in the book that even Vesalia himself is interested in issues of how to control women's sexual pleasure, right?
And like he writes about how God did this. So it's not just right, the readers, it's also the part of the way that the author created the text that speaks to or that contributes to some of this. Right, yeah, I mean, obviously the front this piece of this book that very first indeed shows Vesalia's dissecting the uterus of a female criminal. I mean, that makes it quite obvious sort of like, it is an exemplary case of the male gaze, so to speak.
And Vesalia's makes an extremely important argument that basically women, there is a reason why women cannot control their uterine muscles because if they could control their uterine muscles, they could close their uterus and make sure that no semen enters there and therefore they would have a method of contraception. And Vesalia says that God created women not to be able to control their uterus so that they don't have methods of contraception, therefore they have to leave their sexuality. And Vesalia says that is a good thing. And many of the readers of the period will say, indeed that is a good thing.
So, so in a sense, Vesalia's in so far as give to the gender and sexual politics of the age, resonated very well with that part of society that he was saying in his book at. Now you mentioned a little bit earlier, Daniel, that readers not only use the book in ways that were conditioned by decisions that Vesalia's made and intentions that he had, along with the publisher, along with the artist, but some readers also based on your analysis of the materiality of the book and the annotations, used the book or read the book in ways that Vesalia's did not anticipate, did not intend. Is there any kind of striking example of that that comes to mind for you that you might wanna talk about? Yes, so first of all, one of the striking things is that Vesalia's launches his book as a revolutionary volume that is supposedly completely changed the history of medicine and what it means in Renaissance Europe, it means he is overriding and erasing the ancient tradition.
And Vesalia's sometimes quite vehemently attacks Jay Len in his book. As it turns out, this didn't quite work out. Vesalia's readers basically heeded to the good old adage. There's no such thing as bad advertising.
Whenever Vesalia says, Jay Len is wrong, they go to to Galen, they look up their copies of Galen, they say, actually, let's see, is Galen really wrong? And what we find, and I think others have also found it in recent years, I think Ian McLean has recently published a work on it, is what they find is that actually, Galen is interesting and is sometimes better than Vesalia's. So like an extremely vicious attack on your enemies, backfires, and you suddenly see readers writing when the march is no here, Vesalia's erring, Galen is right, or in some cases they say, yes, Vesalia's is right, Galen is wrong, but that doesn't mean that antiquity is wrong because Aristotle on the other hand is totally cool. So suddenly you see these debates emerging where Vesalia's becomes one more ancient authority and you have Galen, Aristotle, and Vesalia's having this sort of like three-way fight amongst each other and the readers are educating, okay, two points for Aristotle, one point for you.
That's great, thank you so much. And the book also pays interesting and careful attention to other issues that come out of reading the annotations very carefully, including the ways that readers prioritize personal observation alongside book learning, the way that they engaged ancient authority, as you just mentioned, alongside Vesalia's own commentary. And also you talk a little bit in the book about the fact that readers actually seem slightly more interested in the text than in the illustration. So there's all kinds of really fascinating material for listeners who haven't yet had a chance to take a look at the census on usage of the book, on reception of the book that comes out of really fascinating analyses of these annotations and marginalia and material aspects of the book.
Now what you also offer though in the course of the census is a kind of broad scope history of changing patterns of ownership over hundreds of years at the study encompasses. In the past 400 years, as you've talked a little bit about and as the book shows in great detail, the fabric has moved from wealthy private physicians, right? And you talked a little bit about this initial audience of elites, this kind of international elite group within European society into monastic libraries in the 17th and 18th centuries and then into the collections of public and university libraries, among other things. But these are just kind of major trends that the book identifies.
Now, one of the really important, decisive moments in this history of ownership patterns in the book, over hundreds of years, is the late 18th century. Daniel, can you talk about, for listeners, again, who aren't familiar with this history, what happens in the late 18th century and what is the impact in ownership patterns of the book? Right, so let me tell you that in a few words. Remember, this book is originally on primarily biomedical professionals, no surprise that.
What happens then is that in the course of the 17th and early 18th centuries, many, many such copies tend to end up in the libraries of religious institutions. In a characteristic way, the male physician dies, his wife doesn't know what to do with his book and she donates it to the local religious order so that in exchange for the book, the order will pray for his husband's soul. This is a fairly typical pattern. And then what happens in the Enlightenment is a drastic change that is many monastic orders are abolished throughout Europe.
And this is well known, this is the history of secularization. What we tend to forget is that this means that huge amounts of libraries change ownership in this period. Basically, what you see is that millions and millions and millions of books do away from monastic libraries, just in Bavaria, I remember reading some that six million books change owners. So the history of the Fabrikar changing ownership is a history of this bigger changing library history.
And what you see is that the Fabrikar starts to enter public, state and university libraries and the Red Book rooms, as we know them today, are established roughly in the years about 1800 and the Red Book as a concept is born. Thank you so much. Now, part of before we move to our conclusion, I just want to highlight and ask you a little bit about something that you said as part of what you were talking about a little bit earlier. When we were talking about the special interests that readers placed on issues of reproduction in genitalia and how individual copies of the text had alterations to the images, right?
From what the publishers had ostensibly originally produced, you mentioned that you would come across images where the male genitalia were taken away in some way. Now, in the census itself, this is part of a larger discussion of censorship of the text, which sometimes involved censorship of images of the vagina and penis. It sometimes censored other sorts of things. Can you talk a little bit for listeners about some of what for you might be most interesting about Catholic censorship of the text and how decisive or not that was in shaping the reception history of the Fabrikar?
Right, so what you find really interestingly is that within Catholic Europe, the Fabrikar was censored to a certain degree. It was censored more so in Spain and less so in other Catholic countries, it seems, so to speak, that the Montipysonist Spanish Inquisition indeed shows up always. What you find here really more seriously is that there were two issues with this book. Number eight, the printer was a Protestant.
And this was a huge issue. Oparinus as a Protestant printer was put on the index right from its beginnings in the late 1850s. And therefore, any book published by that printer needed to be censored one way or another. And indeed, in many cases, what you find that the name of the printer is mentioned three or four times in the book, those mentions are carefully blacked out by a reader or by the local censor in a certain copy.
And the other issue is that, as we have discussed, Veselius shows images of the genitals and that is erotic and licentious and may be used for pornographic purposes. Therefore, in many monasteries or in many Catholic areas, the owners need to excise those images or black them out or draw something on them. There is a wonderful image in a French library where basically they could speed those on the genitals. So the sudden little male dudes and the muscle men tend to wear all kinds of swimming trunk like clothes.
So there is that. And what it really makes us wonder is what does censorship actually achieve? Most of the copies were not really censored even in Catholic countries. So the metric of the books isn't censored.
When you cross out the name of the printer, Oparinus, you still have access to the book. When certain passages are crossed out, it's only a very few sentences. There is an anecdote of a monk who has a mistress that obviously needs to go. There is only one copy of the 700 that censors that passage blackens it out.
And then there is a little hand drawn on the margins by the reader saying, pay attention to this. This is censored. Therefore, it is exciting and interesting. So try to read it beyond the black ink.
So in a certain censorship, when you blacken out a part of the book, it makes you realize that this is exciting and important knowledge. So what we were wondering is that, yes, the Fabricae censored, the reading is limited and controlled, but it is probably not by making the information unavailable completely, because most of the Fabricae's text is available to Catholic readers as well. Censorship works in more complex, more insidious ways. First of all, we find that in Catholic Europe, more copies ended up in religious institutional libraries than in private hands.
So basically, the church was able to limit who gets access to the book. And once you are at the monastery, you can read the book because you are already trained well enough to deal with all the problematic issues that you have in it. And on the other hand, or at another level, Veselius himself was very much aware of the fact that the Catholic church paid a close attention to what he said in the books that he published in Europe. And sometimes he says he censored himself.
So we think that this book is not censored too heavily, partly because what Veselius says conprons to Catholic teachings. And sometimes he says, I could say more about that I'm worried about the theologians. So we clearly see that he's thinking about it. And therefore, Censorship doesn't work always in the most of its manners, but it's not just about blackening about text, it's about who can access the book and how the authors have already started them.
And frankly, coming from, you know, socially, sister in Europe, you know, this is a pattern that you'll be fine repeating centuries later in other parts of the world still. So Daniel, this has been completely fascinating. And I'm actually sorry that we're already at our conclusion because there's so much more we can talk about. But for the time being, is there anything that we didn't have a chance to talk about but that you'd like to mention for listeners?
And perhaps, especially for listeners who haven't yet had a chance to read the book? Well, I would recommend that they read the book. I think that, you know, what we need to mention maybe is that this book contains an analysis of our findings, but we also make an attempt to describe every single copy that we know of in quite some detail. And there is sort of like a catalog of each about each copy of the details on the annotations, records of ownership, bindings, and physical condition of the book in the end.
So we claim that there was, you know, that we found certain patterns how this book was read. And now the invite the readers to look through the second part of the book can say, actually look what is really interesting, how different every single copy is and all the general and everything that we established are actually wrong. So we look forward to such responses. Right, and so the text itself is not just an analysis, but it also is a kind of archive.
So it's, I think, an amazing resource for readers, not just because of the analysis that we talked about, but also because as you said of all of the analyses to come from what you've offered us in the second part of the book. Speaking of sort of what you might offer us in the future, Daniel, now that the book is out and congratulations, what else are you working on now? What can we look forward to reading what we're experiencing from you in the future? So I have currently three small projects going on.
One of them is a really short, but I think exciting article on how Machiavelli's Prince was read in World War II and how people found surprise surprise that Machiavelli helped them understand what Hitler was doing. And then I have two other projects, one focusing on the furious fact that most of the early modern museums and their foundations, the Prince Likundst Klamas of Northern Europe tended to be on the second floor of Stavons. And I want to learn a little bit more about why it is that people arranged their sort of like Prince Likundst Klamas in such a way that warehouses and curious cities are kept are the same buildings. And the last project I really want to learn more about ships shipbuilding and how sort of like knowledge about shipbuilding circulated in the world, in the early modern period, and really in the world going beyond sort of the continent that I've been studying for a bit too long.
Well, let's talk about all of those projects when they're ready. And in the meantime, thank you so much for talking with me about this book. It's amazing and it really has been a pleasure. Thank you, Carlisle.
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