The Importance of Libraries by L. J. MacWhirter

Author photo by Kate Gren

L.J. MacWhirter was born just outside London, grew up in the North of England and today lives in Edinburgh with her husband and family. After studying English Literature, Liz went on to become an award-winning copywriter. Black Snow Falling is her début novel for young adults and up. It draws on her fascination with the inner workings of minds and mechanical machines, and how people can be controlled by cultural dynamics. Black Snow Falling launches on 1 August 2018 and is nominated for the First Book Award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

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Without libraries, I doubt I’d have written my début novel for young adults, Black Snow Falling. I doubt I’d even be a writer. I spent my childhood with my nose in books, many from our local library in Bramhall. When I had the idea for this novel, I burrowed into the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Yellow request slips piled up as high as my thumb. Numerous notes became compost. I discovered that the 16th century was the perfect time to locate this story about hopes and dreams snatched away. The book research also revealed key facts that shaped the story.

 “The Rainbow Portrait” of Elizabeth I, which is featured in Black Snow Falling. Photo: Hatfield House

A number of books also feature strongly in the story of Black Snow Falling. Ruth smuggles a book to Silas, her secret love, when they meet in their hiding place in Crowbury woods. Silas is a stable hand who longs for more in life; his hunger is fed by her books. “The words show me other worlds, Ruth,” he says, and it’s driving him to leave Crowbury.

Ruth’s wealthy family possess a whole library, together with a Cabinet of Curiosities from the New World and an Armillary Sphere from Italy.

The Armillary Sphere in Black Snow Falling, representing the geocentric understanding of the heavens.

I decided to make Ruth one of the very few privileged educated young women because this unmasks the sexism of the age. Not only is she to be forced into marriage at the age of 15, but she is to be denied her books, too. My library research had revealed that, at the time, it was actually believed that reading made women infertile – as if using their minds would ruin their wombs. Talk about patriarchal control. A thinking woman was a threat. Dress all the young women in red and you’d be one step away from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Linking reading with fertility is, of course, as nonsensical as the geocentric belief that the earth was at the centre of the universe, which was upheld across the Western world until hundreds of years later.

The 1593 geocentric Armillary Sphere at the Museo Galileo, Florence, which helped to inspire Black Snow Falling

This brings me to another plot-changing fact I found. Everyone has heard of Copernicus and Galileo who proposed that the earth was turning around the sun – the heretical theory of heliocentricity. But I, for one, had never heard of Thomas Digges, who also quietly published a book in 1576 proposing the same. I found this modern copy of his book, The Prognostication Everlasting of Right Good Effect in the National Library of Scotland. I’d only ordered it up from the stacks because I liked the title.

The Prognostication Everlasting of Right Good Effect by Leonard Digges and Thomas Digges 1576, The National Library of Scotland

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Thomas Digges was the ward of John Dee, who owned the second biggest library in the country. Dee’s library numbered over 4,000 books when both Cambridge and Oxford Universities had fewer than 900 between them.

Connecting this to Black Snow Falling, Dee and Digges would have lived at the same time as Ruth and they could have known her adventurous father, the merchant-turned-noble, Earl of Crowbury. So I put Dee and Digges in Black Snow Falling, as one of Ruth’s flashbacks. It was a significant meeting for her because she knew that Copernicus and Digges were both so radical and heretical, her father had to keep their books secret. Their ideas – printed and disseminated – were seen as a threat to the establishment.

Mid the umpteenth draft of the novel, I went with some visiting friends to an Open Day at the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh, just a mile from where I live. Incredibly, there I saw Copernicus’s original book from 1543, De Revolutionibus (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs) in a private library called the Crawford Collection. It is one of only 276 surviving copies. This book shook the world.

 On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs by Nicolas Copernicus, 1543, The Crawford Collection, Royal Observatory of Edinburgh

“Books did have a habit of turning things on their head,” as Ruth says in Black Snow Falling.

Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, placing the sun at the centre of the heavens. The Crawford Collection, Royal Observatory of Edinburgh.

Because she is educated through her love of books, my character Ruth is even more terrified by the prospect of her world snapping shut. The novel is about her struggle to somehow find agency.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the freedom to follow the question, to think, is vital for us individually and for the health of society as a whole. To do this, we all need broad access to books and content to help us see beyond our own horizons. At this time when libraries are closing all over the country, it’s more than doors that are being shut. It will almost certainly close minds, as well.

Black Snow Falling will be published in hardback by Scotland Street Press on 1 August 2018.

The Lost Library of John Dee by Mary Hoffman

I must declare an interest. I based a character in my Stravaganza series on John Dee. William Dethridge is an Elizabethan alchemist, mathematician and calendarist, who started the whole business of "stravagation" in time and space through an alchemical accident with a copper dish.

By 1594, the date of this portrait of John Dee (artist unknown), William Dethridge had made his last stravagation, to avoid execution in Elizabeth's England and was a permanent resident in Talia, my version of Italy in another dimension, in the sixteenth century.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover there was an exhibition about John Dee in London, perhaps surprisingly at the Royal College of Physicians. I hotfooted it there on its first day and was immediately impressed by how beautifully curated it was.

Unlike the Celts exhibition, which I wrote about on 1st February and which I saw on the same day, it was not marred by woozy sub-Enya massage room music. The signage and labels are a model of clarity and they have managed to make a modestly-sized display of real interest.

Kate Birkwood has pieced together the life of John Dee (1527 -1609) through the annotations of his books - a feat all the more remarkable since his library was ransacked and dispersed in 1583, when he left England for the continent and stayed away five years.

At  over 3,000 books and 1,000 manuscripts it was a library worth ransacking, unusually large for the period as a private collection. About a hundred of the volumes stolen from his house in Mortlake are now in the hands of the RCP, complete with their marginalia.

Dee's copy of Quintilian Institutiorum Oratoriarum 1540

Arnaldus de Villanova Opera 1527

Many of the pilfered books ended up in the possession of one Nicholas Saunder (1563 - 1649), but it isn't certain that he was the thief. Whether or not he was, he certainly knew the books had belonged to Dee, since he tried to obliterate the older man's signature and other marks. Saunder's collection passed to Henry Pierrepoint, Marquis of Dorchester (1606 - 1680), who was another bibliophile. Upon Dorchester's death his family presented them to the RCP.

Cicero Omnia Opera vol 2

Trinity College, Cambridge and the British Library each hold a copy of John Dee's library catalogue, made before 1583. Dee had been a student at St. John's, Cambridge and became a founding Fellow of Trinity in 1546, under Henry Vlll. Some of these books, including the Cicero above, date from his student days, when, "I was so vehemently bent to studie that ... I did inviolably keepe this order: only to sleepe four houres every night."

Something today's students might find familiar, for other reasons. And who hasn't doodled in the margins of a text book?

He had two famous patrons: William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who some think was the Mr W. H., dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who certainly was Elizabeth the First's favourite. It was Dudley who introduced Dee to the queen and he took the astrologer's advice about the most auspicious date for her coronation - 15 January 1559.

John Dee performing an experiment in front of Elizabeth l

This is a painting by the 19th century artist Henry Gillard Glindoni. It has been X-rayed to reveal that Dee is standing within a circle of skulls! It's not known whether this is based on some now lost information about the queen's visit to Dee's house in Mortlake or was a product of Glindoni's imagination. But the later decision to removed the circle of skulls and other alchemical objects must have been an attempt to tone down the "black magic" aspects of Dee's reputation.

They were what got him into trouble with an earlier queen, Mary Tudor. He was arrested for witchcraft in May 1555, accused of casting the horoscopes of the queen and others of her family but was never convicted. He had in fact entered the Tudor court four years earlier, as a young man, and we know he received a pension from Edward Vl. Remarkable really that he survived through four monarchs, technically five, since he lived till 1609, six years after James l of England and Vl of Scotland took the throne. But by then John Dee's own star had waned and he played no part in the Jacobean court.

As well as the books and marginalia, there are some lovely objects in this exhibition:

John Dee's crystal Science Museum, London

Magical disc, Trustees of the British Museum

But to return to the books, I learned something completely new about John Dee - he was the first person to suggest that there might be a national library! In fact he petitioned Queen Mary in 1556 to start one but, perhaps because of his earlier arrest, she did not grant his request.

Scholar, courtier, magician, as the exhibition labels him, and a supporter of libraries. No wonder I was always interested in him.

For anyone who can't get down to London before 29th July this year, I recommend Benjamin Woolley's book The Queen's Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr Dee (HarperCollins 2001).

Master Kelley's Big Joke? by Laurie Graham

If you love books and you enjoy a mystery the Voynich manuscript is right up your street. It’s a delicious little book, part herbal, part guide to the cosmos, and lavishly illustrated. The only problem is that no-one can identify any of the plants featured in the drawings and no-one can read a word of the text. 

Wilfred Voynich was a Polish bookseller who claimed to have picked up the mysterious volume at a book sale in Italy in 1912.  As attempt after attempt at deciphering it failed he was accused of fakery but science has eventually exonerated Mr Voynich. The vellum on which the book is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15^th century, the gall ink and pigments are also from the 15th or 16th century. So although it does appear to be an elaborate hoax, it predates Voynich by at least 400 years.

The history of ownership of book is patchy. It seems to have gathered dust on the shelves of a Jesuit college for at least two hundred years, but the trail leads back to Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia during the 16th century. Rudolf was a dabbler and a collector. He was interested in astronomy and alchemy, he collected plants and animals and well, any oddities that took his fancy. The Voynich manuscript seems like just the kind of thing that would have appealed to him. But how did he come by it?

There have been as many suggestions about the authorship of the book as there have attempts at deciphering it  -  it defeated even the Bletchley Park code crackers  -  but in my opinion there’s quite a compelling case for bringing in Messrs Dee and Kelley for questioning.



Dr Dee

Dr John Dee is famous as Elizabeth I’s astrologer and scientific advisor. Less well-known is Edward Kelley who became Dee’s collaborator in the 1580s. Kelley was a crystal-gazer or scryer, and as John Dee’s stock as a scientist fell he turned more and more to investigating the supernatural. Kelley claimed to be able to commune with angels and to understand their Celestial or Enochian language which he translated for Dr Dee. They made quite a team.


 In the 1580s Dee and Kelley left England to try to make some money  -  there was no job security in Queen Elizabeth’s court. Their travels took them across central Europe and they are known to have visited Emperor Rudolf in Prague.  It isn’t a long stretch to imagine how they might have cooked up a scheme to sell the Emperor something for his cabinet of curiosities: a book in an unknown language.  

Edward Kelley

Kelley had a prior conviction for coining so confecting a language wouldn’t have been a big career move. He was also, by the way, the step-father of Elizabeth Weston. Weston was that rare creature, a published 17^th century female poet and she apparently owed her education to her enlightened step-father.

But to return to the Voynich manuscript, it is a singular thing. The script runs from left to right with no obvious punctuation and the language has about 25 characters. The illustrations, sometimes fantastical, sometimes very close to but not faithful images of known plants, are liberally decorated with stars and strange nymph-like figures. There are similarities with the images Hildegard of Bingen drew when she was seeing visions, or suffering from migraines, whichever you prefer.

Emperor Rudolf is reckoned to have paid 600 ducats for the book, which would have been about 2 kilograms worth of gold. Could it be the handiwork of Kelley and Dee? They would certainly have been glad of the money. But the case remains open and I suppose always will. This little book of mysteries now resides at Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book Library. A cynical, money-making fake or a glorious 16th century joke? I leave you to decide.

THE STARS' TENNIS BALLS by Ann Swinfen

We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.
            John Webster (1580?-1625?), The Duchess of Malfi, IV.iv.52 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
            William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar, I.ii.134

It seems appropriate on this astronomically important day, which sees the spring equinox and an eclipse of the sun, to take a brief look at the relationship between celestial bodies and humankind. 

The two quotations above from near contemporary Renaissance dramatists reflect two diametrically opposed views: is our fate determined at our birth by certain conjunctions of the stars, or is our fate in our own hands? It is the age-old dispute between predestination and freewill, which has torn mankind apart in violent religious disputes. If it is less bitter nowadays, it is perhaps because we live in a largely secular society. 

When for thousands of years humans lived in a world free of light pollution, it is little wonder that they looked up at a night sky peopled by a changeable moon and wheeling stars and believed that their own lives must be inextricably linked to these distant and unknowable bodies. Early peoples developed extensive astronomical knowledge, as demonstrated by their monuments like Stonehenge:

and Maes Howe:

Tales of the gods living amongst the celestial bodies must have existed long before writing and are firmly embedded in the traditions of all early nations. The Greeks saw and named images in the patterns of the stars which we still recognise today in the symbols of the Zodiac.

The wise men, coming from the east, were led to the birthplace of Jesus by a wandering star, which may have been a comet.

Comets, even more than fixed stars, evoked wonder by their seeming visitations from some incomprehensible Elsewhere and by their mysterious transit of the heavens. Surely they must foretell some joyous event or – more likely – disaster. The Norman invasion of England:

Even more terrifying is an eclipse of the sun, when (depending on your religion) the sun is gobbled up and spat out by some monster, or the hand of God blots out the sun as a warning to mankind of His power and mankind’s helplessness. According to Virgil, there was an eclipse of the sun on the day Julius Caesar was murdered:

If our fate is somehow tied up with the movement and positions of the stars, especially at the moment of our birth, then surely a man skilled in reading the heavens can help us make sense of our lives, warn us of times and places to avoid, inform us of appropriate dates for important ceremonies, even foretell our death. The art of drawing up astrological charts was known to the Romans and persisted right through the Renaissance and beyond, until the development of science in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment cast scorn on such beliefs.

Simon Foreman

 Simon Foreman, apothecary, alchemist, astrologer and serial rapist was a contemporary of our dramatists Shakespeare and Webster. He made a very comfortable living out of the preparation of astrological charts for his clients, who came from every walk of life. (At any rate, those who could afford his fees.) 

John Dee

Another contemporary, Dr John Dee, mathematician, mystic, book collector, alchemist, astrologer, and amanuensis to angels, cast charts for the greatest in the land. Queen Elizabeth I chose the most auspicious date for her coronation based on his advice, and she was a woman of immense intelligence and learning. It was not merely the ignorant and gullible who believed in the influence of the stars.

Today, of course, we know better. Or do we? Why, then, do magazines and newspapers persist in publishing predictions based, it is claimed, on reading the stars? And it seems that the ancient debate about predestination versus freewill must continue for ever.

 By the way, I’m a Libra, so that must mean that I am a rational, well-balanced person, mustn’t it?

Ann Swinfenhttp://www.annswinfen.com