RMMLA-Huntington Library Research Grant

The Huntington Library has a rich collection of rare books and manuscripts principally in the fields of British and American history and literature. Other research strengths include 15th-century books, history of science, and maritime history.

For the general public, the Library has on display some of the finest rare books and manuscripts of Anglo-American civilization. Among the treasures on exhibition are the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum, the double-elephant folio edition of Audubon's Birds of America, and an unsurpassed collection of the early editions of Shakespeare's works.

For qualified scholars, the Huntington is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States in its fields of specialization. Altogether, there are about five million items available for research. For more information on the Huntington, visit their site on the WWW at http://www.huntington.org/.

This year's RMMLA-Huntington Library Research Grant, carrying a stipend of $2,000 to cover one month of residency and research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, goes to Allison Ksiazkiewicz (York University) for her project entitled "The Visual Culture of Natural History of the 19th Century and Contemporary Nations of Wilderness in American Landscape Painting".

The application deadline for the RMMLA-Huntington Library Research Grant is February 1 (postmark deadline) to the Secretariat. Criteria for selection include value of the project, appropriateness of the research to material available at the Huntington, promise and experience of the researcher, and proposed use of and dissemination of the project results.

To apply, please submit BY EMAIL ATTACHMENT (no longer print application) to rmmla@wsu.edu an application packet (written in English only) which includes the following:

• A current curriculum vitae (maximum 2 pages);
• A description of the proposed project indicating which Huntington materials will be used and the approximate dates of the research residency;
• A cover letter in which the applicant states that, if chosen as the recipient, s/he (a) will use all funds for the purpose of research; (b) will serve on the selection committee for the following year's competition; and (c) will submit a 2-3 page final report within six months of the project's completion.

Recent RMMLA-Huntington Library Research Grant recipients include:

• 2006 - Katarzyna Rutkowski (University of Colorado, Boulder) : "Channeling the Genius Loci: Lydgate, Milton and the Dialectics of Place in Late Medieval Bury and Early Modern Cambridge."
• 2005 - Miles Kimball (Texas Tech University): "The Visual and Textual Rhetoric of Civic Boosterism."
• 2004 - Vanessa Coloura (University of California, Santa Barbara): "Aphra Behn and Spectacle on the Restoration Stage"
• 2003 - Diana Solomon (University of California, Santa Barbara): "Textual Excess: Actresses' Prologues and Epilogues on the London Stage, 1660-1731"
• 2002 - Lucy Morrison (Pennsylvania State University, Hazleton): "Literary and Business Correspondence of British Romantic Women Writers"
• 2001 - Stacy Burton (University of Nevada, Reno): "Travel, Narrative, Modernity: Flânerie in the Twentieth Century"
• 2000 - Carol Poster (Montana State University): "The Early Modern Enthymeme"
• 1998 - Marjorie Swann (University of Kansas)
• 1993 - Alex Pettit (University of North Texas)
• 1990 - Bruce W. Young (Brigham Young University)

2006 Report submitted from Katarzyna Maria Rutkowski
(University of Colorado, Boulder):

"At once archaic and contemporary to his times, John Lydgate’s Troy Book is a perfect example of the authorial anxiety concerning the repetition of past mistakes and the instigation of a new history. It is the first of his works commissioned by a king, and is an examination of the genealogical trajectory that intimately connects England to its antique roots. During my one-month stay at the Huntington Library, I engaged with this text’s various print permutations in Britain from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and presented the results of this archival research at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo last spring. My project follows the narrator of the Troy Book as he grapples with the complexities of translating his microcosmic ideal into a viable new macrocosmic Subject of the state. Throughout his epic, the heroes of Troy are the ground on which Lydgate explores the tensions between the necessity to respect tradition and counsel, and the compulsion to write new worlds. Through these figures, and through Hector particularly, Lydgate defines a laureate position that enables him to step into his emerging role as official poet of the Lancastrian dynasty, one who is able to personally influence the destiny of the nation for which he writes.

This presentation was the direct consequence of your organization’s generosity. The RMMLA-Huntington Fellowship afforded me an unparalleled chance to immerse myself in the Huntington’s breathtakingly diverse holdings, and to meet an incredible number of world-renowned scholars working in a variety of fields. Although I have studied at archives in both the U.S. and Great Britain on numerous occasions, I consider this experience to be by far the most rewarding of my academic career to date. Thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity!"

2005 Report submitted from Miles Kimball
(Texas Tech University):

"My project was entitled "The Visual Rhetoric of Civic Boosterism." The basic idea behind the project was to use The Huntington’s collections to chart the development of visual rhetoric as it was brought into play to promote the many new cities of the California migration boom. My thesis was that these documents held an interesting story that could tell us a lot about the growth of visual displays in marketing and business communication, right during a period in which these modes of communication came to a high level of development. I was interested particularly in the mixture of visual persuasive techniques and technical data used by developers of new cities in California, including panoramic views, charts, and graphs.

Any researcher on visual representation knows that the indexing of charts, graphs, maps, and photographs in most collections typically does not follow a consistent model from collection to collection or cataloguer to cataloguer. To one cataloguer, the word "chart" might mean only nautical charts; to another, "chart" and "map" might be synonymous. One might specify "panoramic view," while another might call this genre a "bird’s-eye view" or more generically, just another map. None seems to have a consistent method of describing statistical and information graphics, such as the bar graphs and line graphs that became increasingly common during the period I was studying. Some cataloguers might use only the most generic and least useful term "illustration" or not record visual materials at all. These disparities and inconsistencies are not the fault of the cataloguers; frankly, only in the last few decades has a more consistent terminology for visual forms even been proposed, and not all collections have adopted this terminology.

In short, at The Huntington and many other collections where I have conducted research on visual communication I find that the most useful technique is often simply to browse strategically through collections of likely documents. This browsing is not casual at each collection, I develop a sense of the kinds of documents most likely to have the visual forms I find my interesting, and I am able to chart the organizations, agencies, and individuals who were most forward-thinking in adopting new visual communication techniques in this period. My research then follows these leads to documents that are more in line with my research.

An additional complication in using electronic finding aids is the fact that many of the documents using visual communication techniques are unsigned and uncatalogued. Like most business documents, they bear a title and perhaps a corporate authorship, but their actual authorship is often difficult or impossible to ascertain. And because they are essentially ephemera, they lie on the bottom of most collection’s priority as far as cataloguing is concerned.

Considering these difficulties, imagine my delight at finding "The California File" at The Huntington. On hearing of my project, the Huntington staff quickly directed my efforts to this old-fashioned card file, which proved to be a bonanza of likely documents. "The California File" records the Huntington’s deep resources in California history, especially its many civic and business documents from the period of around 1850-1920. Although as at most collections the cataloguing did not consistently refer to Because the file is organized by city, I was able to focus my efforts on the growth of documentation surrounding a few fascinating civic developers who used visual communication techniques to convince people to migrate to California. Specifically, I concentrated on the cities of Berkeley, Oakland, and Benecia in the north; Atascadero and Pasadena in the mid-state; and Coronado Beach in the south. All of these cities had enthusiastic developers some so enthusiastic that they promoted cities that did not yet exist.

Atascadero, for example, was a city pulled out of nothing by E. G. Lewis just before World War I. Atascadero was one of the country’s first planned communities. Lewis, a wealthy publisher of women’s magazines, determined to buy a ranch in the area east of Morro Bay and promote the growth of a community designed specifically for upper-middle class citizens. To boost its growth, Lewis first built a printing facility on the ranch, then began printing thousands of expensive circulars which he distributed widely across the country. These documents are fascinating for their visual approach to communication, taking advantage of the latest printing technologies to convince prospective homeowners to buy homesteads in Atascadero. They incorporate a wealth of carefully staged halftone photographs that emphasize the orderliness and fruitfulness of the area, often by including fold-out collages showing orchards, houses, and the grand facades of Lewis’s civic buildings.

In a sense, Lewis used the techniques and visual rhetoric of illustrated magazine journalism to promote a vision of community. But this vision was ultimately illusory. Lewis failed in his attempts to bring an adequate number of investors to Atascadero, and he ultimately died broke and penniless. Although Atascadero is now a living, if somewhat sleepy community, the planned community founded on paper never materialized. Truly, it was an imaginary city.

Other cities were more successful, perhaps because they were marketing pioneers, if not actual ones. Pasadena was also created out of nothing by a group of investors who bought a ranch and subdivided it. Their visual techniques relied particularly on panoramic views of the growing community. Like Lewis in Atascadero, these techniques gave prospective buyers a simplified vision of the city, emphasizing its more planned and positive features. But perhaps because their employment of these patterns arose years before Lewis’s, their rhetoric was much more successful in attracting wealthy homeowners and investors, such as David Berry Gamble, heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune, who moved his family to Pasadena to take up residence in one of the many Greene and Greene-designed homes. But even successful cities such as Pasadena were developed through promotional materials that literally painted a picture of a beautiful, healthy, and ideal city growing in the promised land of California.

The documents I analyzed at The Huntington provide a counterpoint to earlier promotional documents in the history of our nation, such as Arthur Barlowe’s "Discourse on Virginia" (1584) and the White-HariotdeBry map of Virginia (1590), which have been analyzed by my colleague Michael Moran at the University of Georgia. Moran argues convincingly that these documents were less intended as factual reports than as promotional documents, emphasizing the beauty and fruitfulness of the land, as well as the advantages of climate and opportunity. The civic boosterism of California cities continued this trend all the way to the western end of the continent and the end of the colonial era.

My plans for this research this summer include developing a manuscript for submission to the Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC), which has shown itself to be very receptive to historical studies in these disciplines. Fortunately, JBTC is also willing to publish images, which should allow me to show my research to its greatest effect."

2004 Report submitted from Vanessa Coloura
(University of California, Santa Barbara):

"During my residency at the Huntington Library [March 7-April 11, 2005], I had the opportunity to look at many seventeenth-century sources that helped me to situate Aphra Behn within the context of Restoration theatre and culture. I organized my dissertation research on Behn and the London stage around the following questions: What spectacles does this production call for? In what ways are they implemented? What do Behn and her fellow professional playwrights say about the use of spectacle? My examination of the earliest print publications of the plays was crucial in establishing how spectacle was initially staged and possibly changed with the growing sophistication of theaters and their machinery. In addition to many of the early editions of works by Aphra Behn, I was also able to peruse the Huntington’s impressively broad range of works by her contemporaries, such as John Dryden and Nat Lee. For example, their copy of the 1693 edition of Lee’s A Duke and No Duke enabled me to compare its defense of farce with that of Behn’s in the epistle dedicatory to The Emperor of the Moon. In addition, the Huntington collection was immensely useful in deepening my understanding more about Behn’s use of the brazen head. Behn’s most spectacular play, The Emperor of the Moon, uses one to deliver the prologue. This first spectacular device of the play is rich in allusions to Friar Bacon’s speaking head that is produced through black magic. I found Behn’s use of the device to be a potent insignia -- one that has been almost entirely unaddressed in Behn studies.

These are just a few rich areas that I was able to explore and now look forward to incorporating into my dissertation. I look forward to returning there again to do further work with such an extraordinary collection and very helpful and warm staff."

2003 Report submitted from Diana Solomon
(University of California, Santa Barbara):

"The resources available to me during my RMMLA-sponsored month at the Huntington enabled me to complete research on one chapter and conceive a second for my dissertation project, "Textual Excess: Actresses’ Prologues and Epilogues on the London Stage, 1660-1731." I arrived on August 15, ready to conduct research on my chapter about one of the first and most celebrated London actresses, Anne Bracegirdle. My chapter, "Anne Bracegirdle’s Breaches," asks how this actress, known as the "Romantick Virgin," obtained a reputation for purity at a time when for women, performing "publicly showing one’s body for material gain" was akin to whoring. Excelling at tragedy, Bracegirdle also played sexual roles and delivered bawdy prologues and epilogues, an apparent contradiction with her public reputation that I sought to understand. The Huntington’s collection of numerous editions of Bracegirdle’s plays, by authors such as William Congreve, Thomas D’Urfey, Thomas S outherne, and Nicholas Rowe, allowed me to trace the nature and duration of her reputation. For example, the Huntington owns editions of Congreve’s play, Love for Love from 1695, 1697, and 1710; the first two contain a prologue full of innuendo designed for her to deliver, but the third reflects Congreve’s efforts to preserve his work as great literature, and omits the prologue. The Huntington also contains important late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century theater histories such as Gerard Langbaine’s and Edmund Curll’s that contain eyewitness accounts of Bracegirdle and her peers; and periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Journal (1692-94) that announced and described her performances. My time at the Huntington allowed me to conduct the primary research for an article based on this chapter, which has been accepted for publication in the journal 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era.

While at the Huntington, I also discovered documents detailing the murder of Bracegirdle’s leading man and suspected lover, the actor William Mountfort. In 1692, frustrated by her rebuffs, one of Bracegirdle’s suitors enlisted a friend, Charles Lord Mohun, to help him murder Mountfort. The Huntington owns a copy of Mohun’s printed trial, handwritten trial notes, and manuscripts of an elegy for the dead actor and a satire on his mourners. The library also possesses a 1695 songbook with an image of Bracegirdle on the cover, and original scores of songs written for her to perform. These documents enabled me to realize the shift in Bracegirdle’s career; she performed in tragedies and sober comedies in the year leading up to the murder, but primarily witty musical comedies afterward. In the latter, she also developed a reputation as a singer, and performed songs that demonstrated the lyricist’s and composer’s sympathy for her plight. Inspired by these documents, which were augmented by those discovered during my subsequent fellowship at the Clark Library, I conceived a new chapter for the project. I will be presenting my findings as a featured speaker at the "Daring Women of the Enlightenment" symposium, held March 11-13, 2004, at the Noel Collection at Louisiana State University-Shreveport. I am grateful to the RMMLA for giving me the opportunity to work with these archival documents at the Huntington Library."

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