Manuscript Circulation Research Articles

Circulation of books, manuscripts, and ideas between Hungary and Italy. Cultural transfers in the environment of György Klimo, Bishop of Pécs (1751-1777)

The period between 1750 and 1800 witnessed a significant transformation in the modernization of Hungarian culture and literature. The members of the ecclesiastical elite, who had completed their studies at the Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum in Rome, played a pivotal role in this process; they emerged as key figures in the Catholic renewal upon their return to Hungary following their studies in Rome. Their contributions extended beyond the revitalization of the Hungarian Catholic Church and religious life, encompassing the reconstruction of bishoprics, the establishment of educational institutions and libraries, and the publication and dissemination of both religious and secular literary works. This dissemination of knowledge was also closely intertwined with the influential court in Vienna. On the one hand, the rich heritage of ancient Rome played a crucial role in reshaping the baroque tradition. High-ranking clerics began to take a keen interest in the historical context of their immediate surroundings, initiating local excavations and conducting research in the Vatican Archives. On the other hand, they were greatly influenced by the vibrant culture of contemporary Rome, including Catholic reform efforts, the patronage of the Roman aristocracy, and the volumes of recent Italian literature. This paper explores the cultural influence of Bishop György Klimo of Pécs through an analysis of his correspondence with members of the ecclesiastical aristocracy in Rome and Vienna. Notably, Klimo made significant contributions to the spreading of Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s ideas in Hungary. He also played a pioneering role in disseminating knowledge by being the first among his contemporaries to open his personal library to the public. Furthermore, he commissioned research at the Vatican to compile a comprehensive history of his diocese. By examining Klimo’s endeavors, we gain valuable insights into the transformative influence of Roman culture on the Baroque tradition in Hungary. Moreover, the analysis sheds light on the distinct and organic development of the Italian line within Hungarian culture.

Learning Middle Armenian at the Court of Meḥmed II

Shortly after the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman court of Meḥmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) began to produce language-learning primers that would teach significant languages of statecraft and knowledge production from around the Mediterranean world. This article sheds light on the court’s pedagogical and ideological engagement with multilingualism through one primer in particular, which bears the shelf mark Ahmet III 2698 in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. We name this primer Meḥmed II’s Hexaglot Grammar, as it was produced for his court and contains an array of languages within it: Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Ancient Greek, Byzantine Greek, Latin, and, finally, the vernacular tongue of Middle Armenian. The presence of many of these languages may seem more readily apparent, but what was Middle Armenian doing at the Ottoman court? As we show, Middle Armenian had a presence at court in more ways than one. Alongside the Hexaglot Grammar, the court also produced an extensive primer for learning the Armenian alphabet (MS Ayasofya 4767, Süleymaniye Library). So, too, did producers of knowledge in Middle Armenian find a home at court, such as Amirdovlat‘ Amasiac‘i, a physician whose extensive corpus of pharmacopeia in Middle Armenian likely made use of the palace library. By exploring the circulation of diverse manuscripts, translators, and intellectuals in Constantinople alongside primers such as the Hexaglot Grammar, this article offers a portrait of the Ottoman court never before seen: a place where the premodern Armenian vernacular not only survived, but, for a time, even thrived.

Greek borrowings and glosses in the translation of "Epitomy" by Constantine Harmenopoulos, made by Epiphanius Slavinetsky

The object of the study was the Greek phrases used in glosses in the Slavic literature of the second half of the XVII century, the subject is their implementation in the translation of the Epitomies by Konstantin Armenopoul, made by Epiphanius Slavinetsky, and the relationship with other works of this scribe. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the use of Greek phrases in glosses in this translation. Particular attention is paid to the compilation of their own classification of marginalia based on available research. Adapting glosses, foreign-language equivalents to Slavic variants in the main text are considered separately, the characteristics of glossaries are given, the data are compared with the material of lexicons that were used by scribes. The novelty of the research consists in the introduction into scientific circulation of manuscripts not previously considered by scientists in the linguistic aspect. The main results of the analysis are to identify the role played by marginalia in the translation of "Epitomies": some of them are aimed at adapting the text for the reader, some are aimed at bringing the text closer to the original and are due to the Greek orientation of the translator. The description of the specifics of the work of the Moscow reference man with marks also clarifies the methodology of editing and searching for a more accurate translation, and also sheds light on the lexical and grammatical features of translations of the Chudovsky Book School of the second half of the XVII century.

Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of Nouvelle Théologie*

Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of <i>Nouvelle Théologie</i>*

Foreword

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The essays gathered here all concern the history, reception, and circulation of various versions of the Jewish ‘Life of Jesus’ (or Toledot Yeshu) in the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth century). Toledot Yeshu is perhaps the most infamous retelling of the gospel narrative of the premodern era. The story is best described as a parody of the Gospels, or perhaps an ‘anti- gospel,’ in which the foundational narrative and basic tenets of Christianity become an opportunity for ridicule and laughter. Jesus himself, whose purportedly shameful origins are narrated in detail, is thus railed as an antihero, a disgruntled student of the rabbis who sought to gain recognition by performing magic and duping the crowds, claiming to be the Messiah foretold by the prophets, but ultimately unable to save himself. The essays gathered in this thematic section of Cromohs are devoted to the early modern contexts of Toledot Yeshu, a period characterised by the dissemination of new versions of the narrative, increased circulation of manuscripts, translations into vernacular languages, and renewed interest—both on the Jewish and on the Christian side—in polemical and apologetic writings.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Indian Ocean networks of Daʿwa, Tijāra, and Khizāna: The Bohras as Manuscript Agents in Yemen

This article focuses on the question of the circulation of manuscripts and khizānāt al-kutub (book treasuries) between the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Subcontinent in the early modern period. More specifically, it explores how a mercantile Shiʿi Ismaʿili community, known as the Ṭayyibī Bohras, operated between Gujarat and Yemen as merchant tycoons, students, pilgrims, administrators, benefactors, and scholars. Drawing on the content as well as the materiality of sources from the Bohra khizāna, I argue that the Indian Bohras were key actors among the Ismaʿilis in Yemen, politically, economically, and socially, rather than passive students and disciples. Via their communal Indian Ocean networks of daʿwa (community) and tijāra (trade), they played a vital role in facilitating the network of mobility and learning of Indian students to Yemen, as well as financing the daʿwa, and securing its survival in India by sending, copying, and requesting manuscripts overseas, a process which continued well into the nineteenth century.

After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures, ed. Rachael Scarborough King

<i>After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures</i>, ed. Rachael Scarborough King

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

Sarah Cowper's "Character" of John Locke

Lady Sarah Cowper (1644-1720) is best known for her commonplace books, which preserve unique and variant versions of poems by Restoration “wits.” She also kept a diary, in which she recorded her readings and meditations. The diary contains an unnoticed encomiastic “Character” of John Locke, composed at his death. It is one of the earliest obituaries of him, but it was commonplaced from other sources. Her use of her sources exemplifies aspects of the manuscript circulation of texts and the ways in which the active selection and redaction of textual material reflected a reader’s own religious, political, and personal preoccupations. Cowper portrays Locke as a moral exemplar and Christian virtuoso, whose orthodoxy she defends, and whose latitudinarian and Whig commitments she shares.

The Ownership and Sale of Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract This article examines the evidence for the circulation and ownership of manuscripts of John Gower’s Middle English poem, Confessio Amantis, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The records of booksellers’ and auction catalogues indicate frequent sales of copies coupled with a generally limited commercial appeal. These records also suggest that some copies were in circulation in this period that cannot be identified with those that now survive. It has also proved possible to add information from sale records about the history of the ownership of individual copies of Gower’s poem.

Eusebius/Jerome’s Chronicon in Iberia up to the Year 1000

Either in Greek, or translated into Latin by Jerome (and later into Armenian by an unknown author), until at least the 13th century, few books have had a greater and more lasting influence on Mediterranean historiography than the Chronicon of Eusebius of Caesarea (CPG 3494). For almost a thousand years, this Chronicon was continuously referred to as a literary model, and it was expanded, abridged, truncated, adapted, or completely rewritten, giving rise to new texts that, in a closer to or more distant way from its model, became, in turn, new models and sources for other new works.In Iberia, this enormous text, in the Latin version made by Jerome, was known from the second half of the 5th century (with Hydatius’ Chronicon; CPL 2263) onwards. In this paper, I will make an history of the the reception of Eusebius/Jerome’s text in Iberia up to year 1000. This paper will be divided in two parts: in the first, I will review the concrete evidence one has today for the circulation of manuscripts transmiting the Chronicon. Even If I have to refer to some more recent examples, they witness the existence of an older tradition whose origin may be traced back into the sixth century. In the second part, I will analyse the evidence for the use of Eusebius/Jerome’s Chronicon by Iberian authors, from Hydatius up to the Christian and Mozarabic authors of the end of the frist millenium.

Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature

Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature

Katrina O’Loughlin. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century.

Katrina O’Loughlin. <i>Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

Reading and Writing on Reading and Writing: Short Poetry on Flyleaves in a Manuscript of the Metrical Grammar (DCA 00065)

Abstract The short pieces discussed in the paper were added between larger texts and on the flyleaves by the scribe himself. Thematically, the poems may be divided in two blocks: the first one contains poems on reading, studying grammar, and on the scribal activities, whereas the second one comprises poetry ascribed to Bar ʿEbrōyō on different topics. The manuscript under discussion – Bar ʿEbrōyō’s (1226–1286) Metrical Grammar (DCA 00065) – was written in 1552 by ʿAbdīšōʿ of Gāzartā, an East Syrian patriarch (1555–1570), poet and copyist. These small pieces forming short verse collections illustrate the complex processes that took place in the manuscript circulation and literary life during the Early Ottoman period. All the short poems were never published or studied before, and for that reason they are placed here in the Appendix in both Syriac original and English translation.

Reading and Writing on Reading and Writing: Short Poetry on Flyleaves in a Manuscript of the Metrical Grammar (DCA 00065)

Abstract The short pieces discussed in the paper were added between larger texts and on the flyleaves by the scribe himself. Thematically, the poems may be divided in two blocks: the first one contains poems on reading, studying grammar, and on the scribal activities, whereas the second one comprises poetry ascribed to Bar ʿEbrōyō on different topics. The manuscript under discussion – Bar ʿEbrōyō’s (1226–1286) Metrical Grammar (DCA 00065) – was written in 1552 by ʿAbdīšōʿ of Gāzartā, an East Syrian patriarch (1555–1570), poet and copyist. These small pieces forming short verse collections illustrate the complex processes that took place in the manuscript circulation and literary life during the Early Ottoman period. All the short poems were never published or studied before, and for that reason they are placed here in the Appendix in both Syriac original and English translation.

Ibadi Copyists in the Mzab Valley, Algeria (9th–10th/15th–16th Century)

Abstract This article examines the circulation of manuscripts in the Mzab Valley in southern Algeria during the 9th–10th/15th–16th centuries in an attempt to identify the most prominent copyists in the region. The primary aim of the paper is to highlight the importance of manuscripts for the Mzab’s Ibadi Muslim community in this period and to demonstrate its impact on the intellectual and cultural life of the region.

Embedded Authorship: Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nineteenth-Century “Transatlantic Bibliopoly”

Embedded Authorship: Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nineteenth-Century “Transatlantic Bibliopoly” Tim Sommer (bio) I. Transatlantic Circulation between the “Two Englands” In 1870, Thomas Carlyle donated a large part of his private library to Harvard University in an effort to demonstrate his “gratitude to New England” for its encouraging reception of his writings over the previous three and a half decades.1 Carlyle’s American friend and one-time de facto literary agent Ralph Waldo Emerson had emphatically urged that Harvard, his own alma mater, would be “the right beneficiary, as being the mother real or adoptive of a great number of” Carlyle’s “lovers & readers in America.”2 The role of the intermediary in the scheme fell to Charles Eliot Norton, a fellow Harvard graduate and transatlantic man of letters who subsequently became the first editor of the Carlyle–Emerson correspondence. As a gesture at once material and diplomatic, the gift, Norton suggested, would further consolidate a “bond between the people of the two Englands.”3 Through this public recognition of the support of his American “lovers & readers,” Carlyle was paying back his debt in the form of books, the same currency in which he had originally incurred it. When the volumes from his shelves arrived in Cambridge, this transatlantic migration of material objects provided the concluding chapter to a long history of exchanges that had seen the circulation of manuscripts, proof sheets, individual copies, and whole cargoes of Carlyle’s and Emerson’s books between Britain and the United States. This sustained Anglo-American interaction had not only established a lasting bond between the two writers, but also contributed to the emergence of the interconnected print market of what Norton described as “the two Englands.” While the study of transatlantic literary relations has burgeoned over the past two decades, only a fraction of the critical output this scholarship has [End Page 352] generated is concerned with such specifically book historical contexts and with tackling the archival evidence required to answer the questions they raise.4 Still largely dominated by a history of ideas approach, the field has for a long time “neglected the material exchanges of transatlantic culture” in favor of inquiries into transnational influences and conceptual transfer.5 A simultaneous flourishing of research in the history of the book has, on the other hand, yielded similarly few instances of scholarship devoted to topics that genuinely cut across the boundaries of national book markets and regionally specific print cultures.6 In a recent survey of the nexus between these two scholarly traditions, Emily Todd has accordingly called for new work that engages both paradigms at the same time. “Transatlantic studies needs book history,” she argues, just as much as the latter needs the former.7 A subfield in which the history of the book has already made a contribution to our understanding of transatlantic literary culture is the study of nineteenth-century practices and discourses of reprinting. Catalyzed by Meredith McGill’s pioneering American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003), research in this area has retraced in rich historical detail the manifold “routes” that texts were traveling in a complex international system of book and periodical publishing.8 Described as subject to decontextualization, reformatting, and decentralized dissemination, writing here tends to take precedence over authors, who often figure as the hapless victims of impersonal market structures that extend far beyond single individuals. Where reprinting is read as a practice that “disrupted the connections of books as human transmissions and de-valued the author’s text,” publication emerges “as an independently signifying act”—independent, that is, from authors as historical agents and participants in the publishing process.9 Looking at the close collaboration between Carlyle and Emerson and recovering the extent of their involvement with the print market reveals a different picture of the place of authors in nineteenth-century reprint culture. Confronted with a vibrant transatlantic market environment in which their writings from the late 1830s onwards were increasingly targeted by unauthorized reprinters, the two entered the fray and took up the roles of agents and editors to reassert their intellectual, legal, and economic authority over their texts. The transatlantic culture of print in...

Libros miniare potestis: Religious women’s agency, literacy, and monastic book collections in Late Medieval Northern Italy

Recent scholarship on women’s relationships with books has covered various issues: book production and collection, women’s education, and literacy, in close relation to spirituality and liturgy in the case of religious women. Research has focused on Central and Northern Europe, and more recently on Central Italy, whereas Southern and Northern Italian women’s monasteries remain less well-known. This chapter will address the libraries and scriptoria in some North-eastern Italian female monasteries, during the Late Middle Ages. They will be compared with other examples from Northern and Central Italy, and from other territories, mainly the Iberian Peninsula and Germany. The fragmentation and scarcity of the known corpus of medieval liturgical sources stemming from these monasteries makes the holistic approach adopted here crucial for this research. Sources such as library catalogues, chronicles, sacristy inventories, official city property registers: the Castastico or Estimo, will be taken into account. Miscellaneous volumes will be discussed as vehicles for the transfer of knowledge, exploring the close relationships between liturgy and learning. Finally, this article will examine nuns’ role in promoting the circulation of manuscripts through different networks, as well as in the production of liturgical books, alone or in collaboration with friars or priests or external illuminators. The word ‘miniare’ will be reconsidered to distinguish nun’s work – mainly the execution of pen-illuminated initials in red and blue ink – from the illumination of historiated initials by lay illuminators.

Book-borrowing in the early Middle Ages: a case study of Servatus Lupus (c. 805–862)

During the so-called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, books circulated fluidly through networks that linked monasteries, schools, and private libraries. Some manuscripts were transported in order to serve as exemplars to copy and verify corrupted texts. Through complex social mechanisms, manuscripts were exchanged between scholars in the ninth century. The letters of Servatus Lupus, also called Lupus of Ferrières, suggest that the practice of lending was a social process primarily based on trust, reputation, and mutual obligation between scholars. This paper proposes a new understanding of the social mechanisms involved in the circulation of manuscripts during the peak of book production in the Carolingian period.

The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature. Tina Skouen. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Pp. x+234.

The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature. Tina Skouen. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Pp. x+234.