The post below is made on behalf of Dr Adriana Massidda, the first beneficiary of a new library visiting fellowship scheme, jointly offered by King’s and Canning House.

Dr Massidda outlines her research:

Much has been said and written about low-income urban communities in Latin America over the past century. And yet, each study has focused on its current times, and we continue to know little about these communities’ histories. In the case of Lima, the multiplicity of studies about barriadas and pueblos jóvenes (the two names used to name Peruvian shantytowns before and after 1968 respectively) during the 1970s and 1980s offers an excellent platform to start reconstructing, problematising and weaving their histories together.

As a Canning House and King’s College London Visiting Fellow I have been able to access the vast and excellent Canning House Library collection held at the Maughan Library, in both the Foyle Special Collections Library and on the open shelves, to start setting this background. More specifically, the fellowship has awarded me an incredibly productive and inspiring opportunity to lay the foundation for my new research project ‘”Who decides?”: the impact of Habitat I on the urban poor in Latin America’ on the history of Lima’s pueblos jóvenes after 1976 and through an extremely delicate period in Peru – the 1980s. Building on from my previous ten years’ experience studying Buenos Aires, a strikingly different case, the books I found at the Maughan Library allowed me to explore the richness of Lima as a case for the study of urban informality.

Peru

Peru was the first country in Hispanic America where the state recognised residents’ rights to land tenancy (first case by case during the dictatorship of Manuel Odría in the 1940s, and later by law during the government of Manuel Prado in 1961), and also where it systematically assisted residents for self-construction. In fact, Peru was a crucial testing ground for aided self-help, a system where governments provide residents with land for them to build their own housing, and for incremental housing through its high profile ‘Experimental Housing Project’ or PrEVi.

Not least, it became famous for Juan Velasco Alvarado’s celebration of self-built communities as ‘an alternative model of development’ (1968-75). Most crucially, however, residents themselves self-organised at a scale and pace that overshadowed contemporaneous grassroots initiatives in Latin America. This took place in a hemispheric context where the prevailing state perspective was largely that of eradication. The uniqueness of Peru attracted international attention at its time, not least that of English architect John FC Turner, who became perhaps the most renowned global figure in the discussion regarding self-construction.

Habitat I 

In 1976 the United Nations celebrated its first conference on human settlements in Vancouver, also known as Habitat I. The conference materialised the raising interest that housing held for the UN, and is generally considered ‘the moment when grassroots participation in housing production, through aided self-help, moved to the forefront of the international discussion’ (Kozak 2013:3; my translation). Highly innovative at the time, Habitat I was not only attended by the official delegations but also flooded by thousands of young architects, planners and activists who developed a parallel forum to discuss the problems of accelerated urbanisation. Many of them were members of NGOs in low-income countries, working in shantytowns since the previous decade. Turner was a key figure at the congress, and was in fact organiser of the forum that accompanied it.

A working hypothesis and the role of women

I started this project with a working hypothesis: that for all its inspiration, its agitation and its high profile, Habitat I constituted more a closing moment regarding state engagement with grassroots action than a revitalised new start. I had this in mind in relation to both Peru and Argentina. My reading was that, paradoxically and at the global level, the years after 1976 constituted a general shift toward neoliberalism where grassroots organisations saw their leaderships increasingly demobilised and fragmented. Certainly there was a turn to the right after 1976: in Argentina dramatically with our last dictatorship, Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, and its practices of state terrorism; and in Peru in a different way with the dictatorship of Francisco Morales Bermúdez which ended state interest in pueblos jóvenes and gave way, much more gradually, to neoliberalism. In addition, for Lima specifically, if one looks at the momentum and pace of land invasion and self-construction the main peak is in the 1960s, slowing down after the massive and well-known occupation of Pamplona which resulted in Velasco’s setting of Villa El Salvador.

However, for my hypothesis I hadn’t counted on the overpowering role that women played in these processes, especially in Lima. In fact, the UN conference that did mark a turning point in Peruvian grassroots history was not Habitat I but rather the First UN World Conference on Women (Mexico, 1975). With antecedents in the 1960s and 70s, but gaining momentum in the 1980s, a growing series of low-income women’s groups, events and campaigns took place in Peru whereby pueblos jóvenes organisations played a key role. These started with Mothers’ Clubs, continued with the teachers’ and Mother’s Day 1978/81 demonstrations and the 1982 Women’s Meeting at Puno, before culminating with the creation of local institutions such as the Women’s Federation of Villa El Salvador (FEPOMUVES) led by María Elena Moyano.

Like Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, a key speaker in the UN Women’s conference, the women leading these movements were not necessarily feminist – at least not in the way in which their North American and European counterparts conceptualised it. Key points of contention were, for example, work (a burden rather than a right for low-income women), family planning and the idea of sisterhood. However they were leading Latin American struggles for better living conditions alongside, if not before, men, and as such Domitila discussed women’s role at the conference. Through her voice, and the role of these low-income women, Second Wave feminism started to take a turn globally toward attention to the intertwined dimensions of marginalisation that we nowadays describe as intersectionality. Meanwhile, the relevance of women’s movements in Peru was such that armed group Shining Path saw them as a threat to its own influence and murdered several of them, including Moyano. Their struggles continue, however, and in the present day women’s collectives constitute a key actor in Lima’s shantytowns.

Conclusions and acknowledgements

Through my use of the treasure of books and documents in the Canning House Collection at the Maughan Library, I was able to simultaneously expand, support, and challenge my initial assumptions. In other words, my original hypothesis can be said to have been partially verified, but through my use of the collection I discovered a much more complex, and under-studied, set of arrangements that now constitute the key standing point to continue developing this project.

In addition, through my fellowship I could consult other invaluable archives held by London institutions, such as the Latin American collection held at Senate House, the John FC Turner Archive held at the University of Westminster, and the British Library newspapers collections.

I am grateful to Canning House for their warm welcome and for supporting my project; to the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies department at King’s for their inspirational events as well as the encouraging conversations I had with our colleagues there; and to the librarians and archivists of all the collections I consulted for their assistance and generosity. I regard the writing of low-income communities’ histories as an emerging field at the moment and through this project I endeavour to continue opening it.

This post is made on behalf of Brandon High, Special Collections Officer in the Foyle Special Collections Library, who has recently been cataloguing items for the HG Adler and Jeremy Adler collections described below.

By Brandon High

The collections of the novelist, poet and distinguished historian of the Holocaust HG Adler (1910-88) and his son, the eminent literary scholar, novelist and poet Professor Jeremy Adler, have for a long time added an extremely valuable dimension to the Foyle Special Collections Library. An exhibition on the Holocaust in 2006, held in the Weston Room at the Maughan Library, was based on materials from the HG Adler Collection

This piece concerns the career of the comparatively little known but fascinating poet and anthropologist Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52), who was a friend of HG Adler from childhood. Steiner appointed HG Adler as his literary executor.

In common with his close personal friends, HG Adler and Elias Canetti, Steiner’s work was concerned with the causes and consequences of the Holocaust. Through the generosity of Professor Jeremy Adler, several items relating to him have recently been added to both the Jeremy Adler collection and the HG Adler collection.

Background

Steiner was born in Prague in 1909 to middle class German-speaking Jewish parents, who were able to fund his prolonged university studies. The ongoing emancipation of the Jews in Central Europe, coupled with the rise of a new pseudo-scientific antisemitism in the late 19th century, created new cultural tensions for Jewish intellectuals such as Steiner. These found expression in the fictions of Franz Kafka. Like Steiner, Kafka was an educated German-speaking Jew in Prague.

Steiner’s position as a minority within a minority (as a Jew within a German-speaking minority within a majority Czech culture) gave him a particular vantage point as an anthropologist. He also embodied within himself the clash between tradition and modernity, as a practising Orthodox Jew whose intellectual outlook was imbued with Marxism.

Steiner’s intellectual formation

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Steiner acquired an extremely broad and deep knowledge of philology, Semitic languages, the social sciences and Marxism, through his university studies and private reading. He had become a polymath before he had reached 30.

By the mid-1930s, when he had arrived in Britain for further study in London and Oxford, Steiner was already better educated than most British anthropologists. The breadth of his interests in German literature, the social sciences and Zionism is reflected in the books from his library now in our collections.

Steiner as anthropologist

When Steiner was establishing his reputation, he suffered two huge personal blows. In 1942, his parents perished in Treblinka. Shortly afterwards, he began to suffer the persistent ill health which would result in his very premature death.

His only book length anthropological work was Taboo, (1956) of which there are several copies in the Jeremy Adler Collection. This is a critique of the theories of taboo as propounded by intellectuals since the mid-19th century, including those of the founder of anthropology, Sir James Frazer (1854-1941). Steiner exposes their ideas about the role of taboo in pre-modern societies as fatally undermined by their assumption that their own societies were the summit of human achievement.

Steiner made an important contribution to anthropology’s critique of its own history as a discipline. Although this work is not directly concerned with the Holocaust and antisemitism, it does examine the ways in which one culture can view other cultures with contempt. It concerns itself indirectly with the intellectual conditions which could cause genocide to occur.

Steiner and Canetti

While he was studying in Vienna, Franz Steiner formed a significant friendship with the writer Elias Canetti (1905-94), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Canetti was also a friend of HG Adler.

Canetti’s novel, Auto-da-fé (1935), of which there are three copies in the HG Adler Collection with the author’s inscription, can be viewed as an anthropological study of a society where individuals have become so atomised and are so obsessed with pursuing their private concerns that society is in danger of devouring itself. This novel reflects Steiner’s own theories about the way in which modern societies have internalised demonic forces which were hitherto natural and external.

Steiner as poet

Steiner regarded his poetic vocation as more important than his work as a social scientist. Much of his poetry, particularly his long poem, ‘Prayer in the garden’, a copy of the first English translation of which is included in the Jeremy Adler Collection, is inspired directly by the Holocaust. The particular event which inspired this poem was the sinking of the Struma, a Jewish refugee ship, in the Black Sea in February 1942, after Great Britain and Turkey had both denied refuge to its passengers. This, and the fate of his parents in Treblinka in the same year, convinced Steiner that the whole of Europe was responsible for the Holocaust, and that the destiny of the Jewish people lay in Palestine.

Although Steiner’s work has been overshadowed by poets such as Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, Celan regarded Steiner’s work highly. Steiner’s work shares with Celan a concern with the adequacy of language in general, and the German language in particular, to encompass the Holocaust.

Steiner and Iris Murdoch

A very rare volume of Steiner’s poetry, In Babylons Nischen (In the Niches of Babylon), has been recently added to the HG Adler Collection, with HG Adler’s own provenance. This volume was due to be published in 1950, but was aborted at proof-stage. Two copies were produced, one for HG Adler, and one for the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-99).

After Steiner’s death, HG Adler asked Murdoch to have his copy bound. It is this copy which is now in the HG Adler Collection, a moving testimony to relationships cut short all too prematurely.

Murdoch was a close friend of Steiner, with whom he had a deep intellectual affinity. He appears as a character in her novel The flight from the enchanter (1956), a copy of which with the author’s inscription is in the HG Adler Collection.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Professor Jeremy Adler for granting permission to use the images reproduced here. They are from:

Jeremy Adler, Richard Fardon. Selected writings / Franz Baerman Steiner. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999

Select bibliography

Jeremy Adler, Richard Fardon, Carol Lisa Tully (Editors). From Prague poet to Oxford anthropologist: Frank Baermann Steiner celebrated: essays and translations. München:, [London]: Iudicium, Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 2003

Michael Mack. Anthropology as memory: Elias Canetti’s and Franz Baermann Steiner’s responses to the Shoah. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2001

This article is written by Heather Anderson, Special Collections Assistant.

Charles Leadbetter. A treatise of eclipses of the sun and moon: for thirty-five years, commencing anno 1715, ending 1749. London: printed for John Wilcox, at the Green-Dragon, in Little-Britain, MDCCXXXI [1731]
Foyle Special Collections Rare books collection QB542.L3 LEA

Earlier this year, the Foyle Special Collections Library acquired a copy of A treatise of eclipses of the sun and moon, by Charles Leadbetter (1681–1744), a work which records and predicts solar and lunar eclipses and includes accompanying astrological predictions.

As well as being a work of great interest relating to astronomy, mathematics and astrology, this publication also contains attractive woodcut illustrations throughout. I had the opportunity to catalogue this publication, which gave me the chance to learn a bit about the work and its author, and allowed me to gain experience of cataloguing a rare book.

Charles Leadbetter

Charles Leadbetter was an English astronomer and mathematician. Originally from Lancashire, Leadbetter worked for the local Excise Office until 1713, before moving to London in 1715, where he wrote and edited works on positional astronomy and on forms of measurement, such as gauging.

From his establishment at the Hand and Pen in Cock Lane, Shoreditch, he also taught a number of subjects and offered measuring services, as we can see in an advertisement for his business printed in our copy of A treatise of eclipses, which reads:

Arts and Sciences, Mathematical; proffered and taught by the author hereof, at the Hand and Pen, in Cock-Lane, near Shore-Ditch, London: viz. vulgar and decimal arithmetick, trigonometry, astronomy, surveying, gauging, dialling and navigating: Who also performs all sorts of measuring, either for master or workman, with care and expedition, at reasonable rates.

Leadbetter was described in his obituary in the Penny London post as ‘greatly esteem’d for his comprehensive knowledge in the Mathematical Sciences’.

A treatise of eclipses of the sun and moon

In this work Leadbetter records and predicts eclipses occurring from 1715 to 1749, and also includes forecasts for the transits of Venus and Mercury over the sun and the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn up to 1821. The copy held in the Foyle Special Collections Library is an enlarged edition of the 1717 first edition.

In his introduction, addressed ‘To the sons of Urania’ (Urania being the muse of astronomy in Greek mythology), Leadbetter indicates that his text is aimed at the general reader with an interest in astronomy: ‘my only aim in this treatise is to instruct the ignorant who either loves or desires to be taught the knowledge of these things”.

The majority of the work is then dedicated to comprehensively recording and predicting all solar and lunar eclipses that will occur from 1715 to 1749. Leadbetter forecasts the number of eclipses that will occur each year, specifying the type of eclipse and the date and time of its occurrence. He also notes if and how it will appear to observers in London and includes calculations, showing the reader how he came to his conclusions.

Many of the eclipses described are accompanied by a woodcut illustration. These illustrations show the degree to which the sun or moon will be eclipsed, along with visible stars and planets. Each woodcut, rather charmingly, has facial features, with facial expressions often varying for different lunar and solar representations.

The author also accompanies the most significant eclipses with astrological predictions. He outlines the consequences of certain eclipses and accompanies these prophecies with diagrams displaying the twelve astrological houses.

Catastrophic predictions

The majority of the astrological predictions in the book are catastrophic in nature. For example, the lunar eclipse of 9 September 1717:

This eclipse… falls in the 12th House of Heaven; this signifies sedition, cruel and inhumane actions of soldiers, sea-fights and death of fish, great floods of water, death of vulgar people; and being in the 12th House, it foreshews sorrow and imprisonment to the common sort of people….

The solar eclipse of 13 July 1721 is forecast to have similarly cataclysmic consequences:

It falls in the beginning of the regal sign Leo, and in the 11th House of Heaven, signifies the death of a mighty prince, violent mischiefs, cruelty and toil, a scarcity of corn and fruit; murders, thefts, abortions to women with child.

The eclipses, however, are occasionally an augury of more favourable circumstances, such as the partial lunar eclipse of 23 January 1730, which should bring ‘peace and plenty upon mankind in general, both by land and sea’.

Provenance

This copy of Leadbetter’s work page is stamped ‘v. Zach’ on the title page and has corrections throughout by a former owner. It is probable that the owner was German Hungarian astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach (1754-1832), a central figure in the discipline who lived in London from 1783 to 1786.

This owner has corrected some calculations and misprints throughout the text and has also amended the dates of forecasts for Venus and Mercury passing over the sun from 1786-1799, which implies that he may have observed these planetary transits. Each of the dates added are only a few days following Leadbetter’s predictions.

The cataloguing process

Having recently been on a CILIP training day at Lambeth Palace that covered the use of DCRM(B) (Descriptive cataloguing of rare materials (books)), I was delighted to have the opportunity to put my learning into practice by cataloguing this newly acquired publication.

When cataloguing a rare book, creating a full description of the specific copy is important, as individual copies often have unique features. In the case of this book, recording evidence of the item’s provenance, which includes the owner’s book stamp and corrections throughout, is essential, as researchers may have an interest in the history of the book’s ownership.

Recording further details on the physical nature of the item, such as the woodcuts and the binding, was also important, as these details may be relevant to researchers interested in the book as a physical object. Ensuring significant printed elements of the book are transcribed as they appear on the page, such as the title page and imprint, and noting additional printed features such as advertisements and pagination was also necessary as these details can vary in other copies of an early printed work (even those of the same edition).

Cataloguing this publication was a great opportunity to look at a fascinating 18th century printed work in detail. The cataloguing process gave me the chance to consider how various aspects of a rare publication may be of interest to researchers, from the book’s subject matter to its physical and printed elements. Researchers are welcome to consult this work in the Foyle Special Collections Library.

Bibliography

DJ Bryden, ‘Leadbetter, Charles (1681–1744)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16233, accessed 22 Sept 2017]

BS Capp. Astrology and the popular press: English almanacs 1500-1800. London: Faber, 1979

Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Franz Xaver von Zach’, [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Xaver-von-Zach, accessed 22 Sept 2017]