The Book of Michael of Rhodes is a beautifully done facsimile edition, with a transcription of the manuscript, a translation, and a companion volume of interpretive essays on the manuscript, its sources, early shipbuilding, and the life of Michael of Rhodes. Michael was not a famous man: he was a Greek sailor from Rhodes who, sometime in the early-fifteenth century, joined the Venetian fleet as an oarsman in a galley and served for the next forty years or so in various ranks in the merchant fleet and navy of Venice, rising from oarsman to the highest ranks a non-noble could hold in the Venetian merchant fleet. His book is the earliest autobiographical book we have concerning the life of a sailor, as well as the earliest illustrated text on shipbuilding. As such it is a fascinating document concerning the life, interests, and skills of an early modern sailor.
The edition is in three volumes: the first is a very nicely produced full-color facsimile of the manuscript; the second is a transcription and translation of the manuscript, which is, as would be expected, in Venetian dialect; the third volume is a heavily illustrated collection of essays on Michael’s life and the various topics he writes about in the manuscript.
The manuscript contains a writing about a number of different subjects: a large part of it concerns mathematical formulas and problems of different kinds; some would probably have been of use to Michael in his work, others look as though they are there simply because he liked this sort of puzzle. The manuscript also contains information about Michael’s life and voyages; ways to figure when Easter occurs; and astrological lore, some of which is related to other things, like when to let blood or give medicine. Another section of the manuscript gives a series of prayers and incantations. It also contains a portolan, a description of how to get to and enter ports.
Of major interest to scholars of maritime folklife are the sections where Michael describes shipbuilding and the making of sails and rigging, which are, as David McGee writes in his essay in the third volume, “The Shipbuilding Text of Michael of Rhodes,” “the first known design drawings in the history of shipbuilding” (211). As is clear from the essayists, there is some controversy over just how accurate Michael’s designs for ships are, and what purpose they served. McGee’s essay is the best argued of these essays, and I follow him in thinking that the pictures are a reasonably accurate portrayal of the process of shipbuilding, but that Michael’s purpose lay elsewhere than in describing shipbuilding. As McGee notes, “[i]n each case Michael says he will provide instructions on completing a ship at sea” (239, emphasis in original). What Michael is most concerned with, then, is not the work done in the shipyard, but rather “completing a ship for sea (or ‘fitting out’) [which] includes setting up the standing and running rigging, hanging the rudders, and generally making sure that all of the necessary stores and equipment are on board” (239). As McGee notes further, “[t]his was a particularly important task with regard to the merchant galleys [all of the ships Michael describes are merchant ships], because they came from the dockyards with masts but little else.” And though “ultimate responsibility for fitting out the ship belonged to the noble patron of the ship, practical responsibility belonged to sailors [like Michael of Rhodes] who actually knew how to do it” (239). But even if we have an idea of what Michael’s purpose was in making his detailed descriptions of ships, figuring out who this manuscript was intended for has been a problem, and no two authors of the essays agree: McGee, for instance, thinks that it was intended to be used to teach “merchants and noblemen to identify equipment of which they were ignorant” (241), but that, like all the guesses, is just that, a guess. Michael himself left no indication of why he wrote the book.
The volume of essays is a very helpful guide to Michael’s manuscript, and I would highlight three essays as being of particular interest to folklife scholars: Alan M. Stahl’s account of Michael’s life and Venetian history in “Michael of Rhodes: Mariner in Service to Venice,” pages 35–98; David McGee’s essay on “The Shipbuilding Text of Michael of Rhodes,” pages 211–242; and Mauro Bandioli’s “Early Shipbuilding Records and the Book of Michael of Rhodes,” pages 243–280.
As Pamela Long points out in her preface to volume three, even though the manuscript has been known of since at least the 1960s, when a detailed description in a Sotheby’s catalogue caught the attention of scholars, it has only recently been available to scholars for study. The current owner gave permission for the manuscript to be studied and for this edition and facsimile to be prepared (vii). Scholars of maritime folklife have much to be grateful for that this has happened. This manuscript is a treasure trove of information on maritime folklife in the fifteenth century, information that was not usually preserved because, as with so much during that time, it was preserved in oral traditions, not the written record. And, fortunately too, Long and her collaborators have given us an excellent edition of this invaluable manuscript.
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[Review length: 883 words • Review posted on April 13, 2011]