Thursday, December 13, 2018

Inside the List

Tina Jordan, "Inside the List," New York Times Book Review, Oct. 7, 2018, p. 24.
     In the summer of 1994, not long after finishing her dissertation, [1] Deborah Harkness stumbled on a long-lost manuscript in the stacks of Oxford's centuries-old Bodleian Library. "It once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, the mathematician and alchemist John Dee [2]. It was called 'The Book of Soyga,' and he prized it above all of his other texts. I found it, hiding in plain sight, among the Bodley manuscripts," [3] she says. Harkness -- now a historian of science and medicine at the University of California -- wove the experience into her best-selling All Souls trilogy, a rich, sprawling historical fantasy about a vampire scientist, a history professor who discovers she's a witch and an enchanted manuscript a the Bodleian. 
 COMMENT

     On Oct. 7, 2018 Harkness' novel Time's Convert was #3 on the New York Times Print/Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List. Her inspiration was a manuscript that people knew about, but up until 1994 nobody knew of any extant copy.  I can only imagine the thrill!  Finding and and holding that piece of history inspired the invention of an  entire fictional world populated by supernatural characters. 


    The most exciting thing I ever found in the stacks was a set of uncatalogued Alta Avalanche Studies recording early experiments that led to modern avalanche control techniques.  It's not nearly as exciting as finding The Book of Soyga, but I still remember the astonishment and the prickle of recognition when I realized that I was holding piece of history. I have never felt anything like that spooky sense of touching history looking at a digital reproduction. I believe that a digitized copy of The Book of Soyga might have had equal utility for writing a PhD thesis, but I doubt it would have ever inspired a series of bestselling novels. 


[1] Deborah E. Harkness, “The Scientific Reformation: John Dee and the Restitution of Nature” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of California Davis, 1994).
[2] Deborah E. Harkness. John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[3] The Bodley Manuscripts are a miscellaneous collection of manuscripts formed at Oxford University in 1761.

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