Day 10

Today, to my shock and surprise, I actually did some work. I also sat in on another class I'll be dipping in and out of; a lot of the lectures will be repeating information I've already covered twice or thrice in my own coursework. Today was mainly an introductory session which I attended to meet the professors and suss things out; I incidentally got to witness a lot of MA students here in London to study the Great Genius Shakespeare get their first taste of historicist kool-aid. It does burn a little going down the first time, but they'll get used to it.

This evening, I attended a lecture and reception at the British Library to celebrate their acquisition of the only known complete copy of the 1595 English translation of the book De Arte Natandi. The book, as those of you who know Latin may have already surmised, is a how-to-swim manual, according to the lecture only the second known printed work on swimming and its English translation the first known book on the subject in English. It's appearance at the end of the sixteenth century has a great deal to do with humanism and a renewed interest in and appreciation for classical texts. Julius Caesar was a great swimmer in his day, apparently, something about swimming in the Nile during a naval battle while holding important documents above his head. And if it was good enough for Caesar then, by God, it was good enough for the gentry of sixteenth century England. (People who worked around water had always had to know how to swim, of course, but it was not until swimming Became a Roman Thing to Do that it was promoted as sport rather than practical skill.)

So there's this book, which is weird and wonderful on at least two fronts. The first concerns its author, one Everard Digby, whose career as a senior fellow at Cambridge came to a rather awkward end: as the blurb for the lecture puts it, "Everard Digby was a rumbustious Tudor scholar, thrown out of Cambridge for offences ranging from crypto-Catholicism to fishing when he should have been in chapel and blowing a horn and shouting round his college."

The second is the books woodcut illustrations, of which there are forty-three. Each consists of one of five frames showing a waterside scene (riverbanks, the edge of a lake, and so on) into which a central block has been inserted bearing a figure demonstrating the particular stroke or trick under discussion in the accompanying passage. These range from something like our modern breast stroke and backstroke (the crawl is a nineteenth century invention. Unless it's not. There was quite the debate over this during the Q&A.) to tricks, like swimming while holding something above water in each hand or swimming while trimming one's toenails, that suggest Digby viewed swimming as rather more akin to acrobatics than a form of transportation.

A few examples taken from the Latin original can be found here. The Latin version is STC 6839 and the English translation is STC 6840, if any of you with EEBO access would like to take a look at the full series.

Anyway, it's a funny little book, and it was nice to learn a little more about it. The reception afterwards gave me the chance to add the British Library to the big list of Cultural Institutions in which I Have Had a Drink, and I should think a bit about what other London places needed to be added to those rolls before I leave here.