With the British Library still offline and so largely unusable, and without a trip to Paris this month, I’ve mainly been working at home, though with a few side trips to libraries and archives in the UK.

SOAS has a special collections room I’ve used before, and I went back to look at a personnel file relating to Walter Henning, about his World War Two internment, and the main personnel file for Mary Boyce. Boyce was a student of Henning’s who did a PhD at Cambridge supervised by him and Harold Bailey. Perhaps the most interesting thing in the Boyce file for me concerned the research she did after the war on the German Turfan manuscripts. These had been removed from Berlin for safe-keeping during the war, but afterwards were separated, some ending up in Mainz in West Germany, and some going back to what was now East Berlin. Some were lost at this time, and so had to be catalogued on the basis of photographs. Boyce got funding to do some of this work, but had to apply for an East German visa to travel to East Berlin direct, where she spent a few summers, rather than cross from West Berlin. She notes how this work between the two Germanies was conducted in a way that was scholarly and professional, without “consideration of country or politics”, but I suspect there is more to it than that. There’s an interesting story here about textual scholarship combined with geopolitics, though it’s some distance from the focus of what I’m doing. Henning was involved in this work in at least two periods – in the 1920 and early 1930s as a student and then editor of Friedrich Carl Andreas, and after the war as advisor to Boyce. Andreas, incidentally, was married to the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, whose links to Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke are well known. Henning had left Germany in the mid-1930s, in part because he was engaged to a Jewish woman. 

Working with SOAS special collections also means I have a SOAS library card, and it has got an exceptional collection in the library itself. That, UCL and the Bodleian in Oxford have allowed me to do some work with things that I think the British Library has, but which I can’t currently access. I have been to the Warburg Institute too, but the building work there has meant it is disrupted and often noisy. 

I also visited a few other UK archives. For the first time I went to the National Archives in Kew. I’ve never had a reason to go before, but there were a couple of minor things I wanted to see. But the main reason was not related to this project at all. I had heard that at the start of 2023 some files relating to British prisoners of war in Germany in the Second World War had become available. These were German records, transferred to the UK. My grandfather was a POW, and so I was curious to take a look. There isn’t much there, but what there is fits with what I already knew about his two years in Germany, though adds some dates and detail which I only knew broadly before. 

Balliol College, University of Oxford has some T.S. Eliot papers and books, gifted by Jean de Menasce. As I’ve mentioned before, de Menasce is an interesting figure in the story I want to tell about Benveniste. Eliot knew de Menasce from his time in Oxford, and de Menasce was one of his early translators into French. There are some books dedicated to de Menasce, some letters and manuscripts. I say a little more about that visit here. I also went back to the Royal Geographical Society to look at a bit more of the correspondence between Aurel Stein and John Scott Keltie, president of the Society. This was from 1911-20, outside the period of the second expedition which took in the Dunhuang caves. There are some interesting comments about Stein learning of the fate of Robert Scott’s south pole expedition, or about how bad a speaker Rudyard Kipling was. Since I was there, I also requested to look at two artefacts they have from Stein’s travels, including a tape measure lost by Sven Hedin near Lop Nor in Central Asia in 1901, and found five years later by Stein. Stein returned it to Hedin at an RGS dinner, and Hedin later presented it to the Society, engraved with a brief version of this story. There is a photo here.

I now have written up the accounts of the first two decades of Benveniste’s teaching, initially at the EPHE and then both there and at the Collège de France. His archive has only has a partial record of this aspect of his work, with much lost when his apartment was ransacked in the war. There are good, albeit brief, records of the courses in the Annuaires of the EPHE and Collège de France, and so I have accounts of 1927-34 in one chapter on his early career, and 1934-49 in a chapter on the mid period, where there is a break of four years when he was in exile during the war. When I turn to the later parts of his career I plan to write up an account of records of the next two decades of teaching – though with a break in 1956-57 when he was recovering from a heart attack – until 1969 when a stroke leading to aphasia prevented him from teaching in the last six years of his life.

Many of the courses were thematic, and here the loss of his notes is particularly unfortunate. Some of the classes were reading and translation exercises, where he worked with reproductions, transcriptions and critical editions, adding his commentary and corrections as he went. This was especially the case with his courses at the EPHE on Iranian. The texts Benveniste used in the classroom might have been the best ones available at the time, but they are often difficult to find today. With some it wasn’t immediately clear to me what text he actually meant, but I think I worked them all out in the end. While I do try to find a physical copy in one of the many libraries I use, sometimes I do have to resort to Warwick’s document delivery service, previously inter-library loan, but now called ‘Get it for me’. I suspect their work is made harder by the British Library problems. Usually my requests of them are difficult, as if they were easily available I’d locate them myself. But the team are very good – in the past couple of weeks they’ve tracked down an Italian edition of a Pahlavi text, and a German edition of a Hittite prayer, both about 100 years old.

A little story from the archives I found amusing. A professor wanted to take a book out from his institution’s library, but was told it was not for borrowing. Apparently, he complained, and was told to contact the institution’s Director. He did, in an excessively long letter. The librarian was called upon to respond, but said the book was indeed restricted. They noted this professor had demanded the borrowing status be changed on the spot; and added that he made several such requests. This was exacerbated, the librarian suggested, by his living so far from campus he couldn’t use the library as often as other staff. The Director agreed, revoked the professor’s special permission to live further away, and demanded that he move to within thirty miles of the institution. Grudgingly he did. Never cross a librarian!

I have some weeks in Paris in February and March. I’m hoping to finish my initial survey of the Dumézil archives, and move to a look at the Benveniste archives. From updates on the British Library website, it seems it is going to be months, at least, before service is fully resumed there. I am fortunate in that earlier in October I’d done all the work I need to do there with manuscripts – the Aurel Stein correspondence with Paul Pelliot and Robert Gauthiot. I understand manuscripts are currently unavailable, even with known shelfmarks. There are loads of printed things I’d like to consult there, but almost everything is available somewhere else. Even if it means crossing London or adding to the next Oxford or Paris visit I can manage. People using manuscripts and some rare books are really out of luck. Things have probably reached a stage where PhDs, post-docs, research projects etc. which are dependent on BL collections are going to need reassessment and institutional support.

Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications, including the still-delayed reedition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series, The Archaeology of Foucault, has now been out for a year; and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” is also published, with some papers available open access.