The Conveyor

Bodleian Library Wood 401(121)

At the Seminar on the history of the book, Giles Bergel told us about the Wandering Jew’s Chronicle, a broadside ballad first published in 1634 and updated in at least 14 subsequent editions up to the 19th century. As these were turbulent times for England and the monarchy, the use of an unbroken portrait gallery of monarchs to illustrate most of the versions suggests a royalist theme, and the “Whiggish”, triumphalist view of English history.

Visual representations of history are a fascinating subject in themselves, and Bergel also showed the first use in print of a stemma, much used by historians of texts, in an 1827 publication, Carl Johan Schlyter’s Corpus iuris Sueo-Gotorum antiqui.

A reader was looking at a volume of broadside ballads, Wood 401, with a view to confirming whether the copy of “The wandering Jew’s chronicle” was really from 1634 as labelled in our main online catalogue (converted record).  This got me thinking again about the opportunities we might have to update the ballads database; so far we’ve investigated using a web service, mnemosyne, to link our ICONCLASS codes to a general index of codes, so linking our ballad woodcut material with emblems from other collections. But equally nice would be to allow people who are working on bibliographies of a particular ballad to link in to our examples — to form paths through the collection, that the simple browsing and indexing doesn’t really highlight, only exposes.