Early Print Research Articles

Morphological Spelling

This study aims at contributing to the discussion on the role of the early printers in the regularisation and standardisation of the English spelling. It assesses the degree of early printers’ (in)consistency concerning morphological spelling, in particular the spelling of third person singular present tense (indicative) inflectional endings of verbs in six editions of The book of good maners (1487–1526), printed by William Caxton, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. The analysis suggests that early printers could have been interested in regularising spelling already before normative guidance from scholars became available in the form of grammars and spelling books, that is before the middle of the sixteenth century. However, the levels of the printers’ spelling consistency varied, depending on the particular printing house and edition.

The Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography: A Strategy for Research, Cataloging, Imaging, and Exhibition

ABSTRACT The Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography comprises more than 7000 items from the 1830s to 1900. Of special interest are approximately 1000 salt prints, 50 photogenic drawings, and 300 paper negatives from the earliest decades of photography by many key photographers. Formed by Harrison D. Horblit (1912–1988), the collection was given to Harvard University in 1995. Horblit bought widely and without applying aesthetic judgements that tend to shape fine art collections, resulting in a collection containing unique material for the social history of photography and examples of the range of photographic processes used in the nineteenth century. In 2016, Houghton Library, Harvard University’s principal rare book and special collections library, began to update catalog records and digitize the holdings in the Horblit Collection in order to improve access. This paper describes the strategies for safe handling during cataloging, imaging and exhibition of photogenic drawings and early salted paper prints. Harvard Library Imaging Services and Weissman Preservation Center devised a procedure for imaging the many light sensitive and early experimental photographs. These practical procedures, including studio and exhibition space modification and the special handling workflow will be outlined.

Bloomfield in America

ABSTRACT This paper examines the early printings of Bloomfield's works in the USA, of which there were very many. Some tried to duplicate the British illustrations; others did not. Some were illustrated anew by American printmakers. All of the efforts show an effort to domesticate Bloomfield, the working-class poet, to the American landscape, or to an idea of America as a society in which the class distinctions that marked Bloomfield’s life and career would be erased. The paper concentrates on the early American editions of The Farmer’s Boy and Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, with particular attention to the paratextual matter, especially where it modifies information in the British editions, to the illustrations (if any), and to reviews and advertisements for Bloomfield’s poems in American journals and newspapers. The aim is to lay the groundwork for an examination of the ways in which Bloomfield’s poetry served as an inspiration for young American poets, a subject almost entirely unexplored.

Rukopisný Litevský slovník v kontextu české baltistiky první poloviny 19. století: koncepční záměr slovníku a otázka autorství

This study focuses on the manuscript Litevský slovník [Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language] (shelf mark IV A 11), kept at the Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books of the National Museum Library. This handwritten lexicographic relic is dated to the first half of the 19th century and contains 1,701 entries. The nature of the Lithuanian Dictionary determines its significance. It is a comprehensive and complete philological study (organised alphabetically from A to Ž) that tries to answer crucial questions of Balto-Slavic relations. This article places the Lithuanian Dictionary within the context of Czech Baltic studies, particularly focusing on the matter of its authorship. Concerning this question, the article builds on previous research, in which F. L. Čelakovský was suggested as the likely author of the Dictionary. It updates previous research and adds new findings revealed by a professional handwriting analysis. A separate chapter focuses on the nature of the work, demonstrating the character of the Lithuanian Dictionary on several examples.

Setting the Basis for Success in the Competency-Based Curriculum: Experiential Instruction Process Issues in Emergent Reading in Kenya

Study after study has shown that reading is the single most important skill necessary for success in school and life. Emergent reading is the first stage in the developmental continuum in learning to read and consists of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are presumed to be developmental precursors to conventional reading. In other words, students who are unable to grasp early print concepts as emergent readers may experience difficulty with reading later. In this regard, multiple assessments of reading have reported poor reading achievement in Kenyan primary school children. The Uwezo studies since 2010, for instance, have highlighted a reading crisis. The reports indicate that there has been no improvement in reading from the inception of the study despite the government launching intervention programs among them ‘Tayari’ and ‘Tusome’ which were meant to improve reading skills. This study investigated the instructional process issues in emergent reading in a bid to unravel this predicament. The study was carried out in Bureti Sub-County in Kericho County. It involved a sample of 95 pre-primary 1 teachers randomly selected from public and private schools. Data was collected using an observation checklist, a questionnaire a focused group discussion and was analysed descriptively. Instructional process factors found to impede experiential emergent reading strategies included unclear goals for reading lessons, pressure from parents for quicker learning outcomes, time allocated for the experiences was insufficient, that the teachers were overloaded with other responsibilities, large pupil numbers, among others. The results of the study will inform evidence-based policy on the implementation of the Competency-based Curriculum in Kenya and any other part of the world.

Forms, Handbills and Affixed Posters

Abstract In 2018, we published an article that provided a first attempt to survey the whole output of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Our estimate was a minimum of 357,500 editions. This calculation did not yet include the world of ephemeral forms, handbills and posters. The survival of such commercial or private notices is microscopically small, compared to what must have been produced. It is nevertheless vital for our understanding of the print trade that we attempt to capture the complexities of this lost world: this was work that sustained printshops. It was also the form which most acutely influenced commerce, government and social life. Here we wish to offer an introduction to this most elusive genre of the early modern print world, document the myriad ways in which print infiltrated the daily life of people, and offer some hypotheses on the likely total output of certain forms of ephemeral print.

Centres and Peripheries: Early-Modern British Writers in a European Context

Abstract The ESTC has privileged a view of Britain's early print culture focused on London, while making it hard to look at British contributions to continental print cultures. But there were readers in early-modern Britain who were acculturated elsewhere. Scots bought most of their books on the continent, preferring Latin or French to English, and published on the continent, bypassing London. In Britain as a whole, there are effectively three centres for British print culture, London, ‘Rome’ and ‘Geneva’. The Netherlands printed for the English market, notably illicit bibles with Geneva notes, and particularly successful books were often issued there in Dutch or French, while British writers in Latin fed into continental literary fashions. Take-up of English literature as such was limited, partly because the Dutch did not admire English poetics. Most of what the Dutch translated from English was political or religious. Some English protestant writers were massively successful in translation, but translation into Dutch was almost always a first step from which their work was disseminated.

Meaning and understanding in intellectual history

ABSTRACT This article responds to Quentin Skinner’s chapter ‘Hobbes and the Humanist Frontispiece’ in his book From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics by raising methodological questions concerning meaning and understanding in the study of intellectual history. It focuses on three methodological issues pertaining to the examination of visual contexts in intellectual history, and specifically pertaining to the study of early modern European print culture. First, it raises the question of how one should parse instances of co-authorship – especially those in which one of the purported authors of a print is also responsible for producing a related text. When multiple hands are involved in the making of an image that accompanies a written text authored by one of these hands, how does this impact the ways in which we should describe, explain, and interpret the image under consideration? Second, the article raises questions concerning the practice of editing early modern prints for interpretive purposes. It asks whether and when historians working today should and should not try to look beyond the lines printed on the page. Third, it re-examines the slippery problem of influence and what the conditions of influence are when dealing with political iconography.

Pirates and Publicity: The Making and Unmaking of Early Modern Pirates in English and Scottish Popular Print

This essay contrasts scholarship on printed authority within buccaneer ethnographies, contemporary apologetics for colonial enterprise, and the role of publicity in the delineation of piracy within print to ask: ‘when is a pirate not a pirate?’. Beginning with the ethnographies relating to the buccaneers’ crossing of the Isthmus of Darien during the ‘Pacific Adventure’ (1679–1682), this paper describes how the buccaneers escaped prosecution through their literary materials and became socially rehabilitated as credible explorers. Drawing on materials which highlight the diverse readings of piracy within the different ‘news-cultures’ and maritime traditions which existed in the Atlantic archipelago, this paper develops an argument for a ‘popular’ conception and interpretation of piracy within publicity and periodical print which reflects its utility within competing political and maritime enterprises. Using contrasting examples of the negotiation and renegotiation of what constituted ‘piracy’ within the promotion of the attempted colonisation of the Isthmus of Darien by the Company of Scotland (1696–1700), and the literary campaign which surrounded the trial of the crew of the Worcester for piracy in 1705, this essay argues for the role of ‘public opinion’ and popular print culture in the making and unmaking of pirates in early modern anglophone print.

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 by Megan L. Cook

Reviewed by: The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 by Megan L. Cook Alexandra Gillespie Megan L. Cook. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. x, 288. 12 illus. $59.95. We—and I use that "we" advisedly, to mean we readers of the reviews section of Studies in the Age of Chaucer—know that Chaucer was an important figure in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Writers of the period tell us so quite plainly. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, [End Page 397] he is "Dan Chaucer, Well of English, undefiled." For John Foxe, he is likewise an inspiration, a "right Wiclevian, or else was never any" (Cook, 123, 73). Chaucer's works were a model for Wyatt and Surrey, and a source for Shakespeare and Milton. They were proof that, even in a distant and darker age, an English writer could foot it with the greats—"kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace" (TC, V.1791–92). Filled with the same yearning—hoping he might "their high steps adore"—Spenser could defend the vernacular of his Virgilian Shepheardes Calender by pointing to Chaucer himself. Caroline Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Allusions is still a useful survey of this and similar literary evidence of Chaucer's early modern reputation. E. P. Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliography is a thorough record of manuscripts and printed books, which, circulating widely in the 200 or so years after his death, earned Chaucer that reputation. In recent decades, many critics—Kathleen Forni, Helen Cooper, Thomas A. Prendergast, Seth Lerer, Joseph Dane, Stephanie Trigg, and James Simpson among them—have framed our assessment of the mark that Chaucer made on early modern England in many different ways—from study of bibliographical ghosts and a canon of apocrypha to myth of congeniality and the revolution—to "scramble" to claim Chaucer's authority for a host of different causes (Cook citing Cooper, 200). Megan Cook's study is a welcome new landmark in this rather crowded landscape. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 picks up the story of the Chaucerian inheritance at the moment that that story becomes, as Cook's title suggests, an antiquarian and scholarly one. Her book describes the movement of the early moderns' Chaucer out of the hands of scribes such as John Shirley and early printers such as Caxton, De Worde, and Pynson (who was Richard, not Robert [18]) as he became not just a literary model, but a subject of antiquarian and scholarly interest. In the period 1532–1635 Chaucer's texts increasingly required explanation—full as they were of "hard words" (see Cook, Chapter 4)—but they also opened up all kinds of historical topics to contemporary view. These topics included the corruption of the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical establishment and the abuses rife among the regular orders (Chapter 3), and also the life, noble connections, family, and tomb of the poet himself (chapters 2 and 4). Chaucer became, in Cook's central argument, "an ideal figure with which to think through early modern [End Page 398] England's relationship to its medieval past" (20), a past worth celebrating, but from a useful distance. The result of this historical negotiation was, argues Cook, a "'secret history' of Chaucerian reading," and it here forms the basis for Cook's new account of the influence of England's old poet. Two words from Cook's title are particularly important to this account. One is the title "antiquary," which was first applied by Henry VIII to his subject John Leland, who was famous for laboriously journeying around England, taking stock of the libraries of religious houses on the eve of the Reformation. One result of these researches was Leland's De viris illustribus, a collection of biographies and bibliographies of England's great men: Chaucer was among them, his life story, as Cook shows, confected by Leland's bookish scraps, hearsay, and hopeful invention. As self-identifying English antiquaries increased...

Dante’s Convivio between Manuscript and Print

Dante’s Convivio between Manuscript and Print Beatrice Arduini When the first printed edition of Dante’s Convivio (Banquet) was published in 1490 in Florence, this unfinished poetic and philosophical treatise was the earliest of Dante’s minor works to appear in print after the editio princeps (first printed edition) of the Commedia by Johan Neumeister in Foligno (1472). Yet the manuscript tradition of the Convivio is unique among Dante’s works: the Convivio only began to circulate almost a century after the poet’s death in 1321. As a result, the textual history of the Convivio, and thus the very basis of the text itself, emerges as fragmentary and corrupted. As a text that its author never intended to publish, the Convivio challenges our understanding of editions and readership. Indeed, as Donald McKenzie notes, the field of bibliographic studies recognizes that new readers make new texts, and their meaning is a function of this new form.1 My study of the diffusion of Dante’s Convivio demonstrates how the material manifestations of a text shape its reception and the format it assumes in modern editions. In fifteenth-century manuscripts, for example, the Convivio appears either alone or coupled with other texts; however, in the 1490 editio princeps and in the three subsequent sixteenth-century publications, the work always appears by itself. The publication of a printed copy as a single text confers a canonical status on the Convivio, particularly because the treatise is the first of Dante’s minor works to be published in print. How was the Convivio transformed from a virtually unknown rough draft, abandoned by the poet by 1308, into one of Dante’s canonical texts by the late fifteenth century, a text whose circulation became associated with Dante’s Rime, or collection of poems? The answer, I argue, lies in the fragmentary and provisional condition of the treatise in the manuscript and early print traditions. While modern readers encounter Dante’s Convivio, like his Rime, in a format that suggests it is a finished work, the manuscript tradition shows otherwise. This work, which was abandoned by its author, then revived, edited, and copied by admirers a century later, eventually led to the construction [End Page 163] of a text that had not existed in the first place. It is the materiality of the manuscript transmission and the history of early printed editions that is responsible for the status of the Convivio as we know it today. Dante did not circulate the Convivio during his lifetime, and the four oldest manuscripts (Vatican City, BAV, Barb. lat. 4086; Florence, BNC, II III 47; Florence, BML, 90 sup. 134; and Florence, BML, Ashb. 842) date from circa 1330–40, at least a decade after the poet’s death in 1321.2 Most of the forty-five extant manuscripts of the treatise, all of which are Tuscan in origin, date from circa 1440–1482. Not only does the Convivio emerge in the manuscript tradition problematically late and significantly corrupted in relation to its archetype, but its unfinished condition has also led Dante scholars to hypothesize about the poet’s final intentions for the work. Boccaccio expressed in his Vita di Dante or Trattatello in laude di Dante Alighieri (Life of Dante) the belief that the treatise had been left unfinished because Dante died before its completion, even though the author had abandoned the project by 1307.3 It has been suggested that, with the election of Henry VII of Luxembourg as emperor in 1308, Dante redirected his attention to the struggle to bring about political reform in Italy, a conviction that finds expression in his Monarchia (1313) and in his political letters.4 Scholars have often treated the Convivio as a text that offers a precedent for the language, themes, and styles subsequently developed in the Commedia; a consideration of the chronology of Dante’s life and works, however, suggests that the poet abandoned the Convivio as a result of a new and profound vision that required the invention of a new and more sophisticated literary form in the Commedia.5 The unusually high number of errors identified in the manuscript tradition suggests that Dante did in fact leave...

The Daniel and Alice Ryan Collection

The Daniel and Alice Ryan Collection Joel J. Brattin Daniel Ryan has been collecting Dickens material for six decades. In May of 2018, Dan and his wife Alice decided to donate the bulk of that collection to Gordon Library, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), in the form of a bequest. This remarkable collection complements WPI’s existing Robert D. Fellman Dickens Collection and provides an invaluable resource for scholars and students. An exhibit including items from the Daniel and Alice Ryan Collection can be viewed at Gordon Library through September 2020. The Ryan Collection is rich in early printed materials such as first editions and original serial parts of Dickens’s works, as well as early printings in English and American newspapers. It is also rich in secondary materials: works of criticism, bibliography, and historical and cultural context. But two other elements are of particular interest: letters and documents, and works of art. Here, I shall give special attention to the letters, and offer a few remarks about the works of art. The collection includes ten letters written by Charles Dickens. The earliest letter, declining an invitation from A. W. Arnold, is undated, but Dickens wrote it from 48 Doughty Street, therefore sometime between 25 March 1837 and 12 December 1839. Unpublished in the Pilgrim Edition (apart from one sentence; Letters 7: 808), the letter reads thus: My Dear Sir I am prevented by another engagement from availing myself of your kind invitation. But if you should see fit to repeat it on some more auspicious occasion, I hope to be more fortunate. Accept my thanks for your kind recollection of me in the matter of the Free List. And believe me Very truly yours Charles Dickens A. W. Arnold Esquire There are two letters from the 1840s. The first, mentioned in Pilgrim (4: 61) but not published there, is addressed to G. Herbert Rodwell, who wrote [End Page 83] songs for Edward Stirling’s stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Dickens grants the music publisher D’Almaine & Co. his permission to reproduce one of John Leech’s illustrations, “Scrooge’s Third Visitor,” in the sheet music: Devonshire Terrace Saturday Second March 1844 Dear Sir I have been out of town, or I would have answered your letter before – Mr. D’Almaine is at perfect liberty to use the Lithograph for the purpose proposed. And pray thank that gentleman in my name for the handsome book he had so kindly sent me by your hands. Faithfully Yours, Charles Dickens G. Herbert Rodwell Esquire The next letter, wholly unpublished, is written to the playwright John B. Buckstone; undated, it is almost certainly from 7 April 1847. The letter is written and signed by Dickens, but also signed by Dickens’s friends, the artists Clarkson Stanfield and Daniel Maclise: My Dear Sir Stanfield, Maclise, and I are going to the Adelphi tonight to see your new piece. Have you got such a thing as a Box to bestow on us? If so, your petitioners will ever pray etc. As witness our hands Charles Dickens C. Stanfield Daniel Maclise J. B. Buckstone Esquire In a letter to Forster of 9 April 1847 Dickens writes “we got a box from Buckstone (Stanny, Mac, and I), and went to the Adelphi the night before last” (5: 55). The “new piece” was Buckstone’s The Flowers of the Forest: A Gypsy Story, which had opened 11 March 1847. A cache of 14 letters written by Dickens to Georgiana Morson, the governess of Urania Cottage, was discovered in 2001 among the belongings of Morson’s descendant, and were offered at auction. Dan Ryan was the only collector outside of Europe to acquire a letter from this cache at the time. This letter, dated 13 January 1854, treats financial matters and mentions Angela Burdett-Coutts; it is published in the Pilgrim Edition (12: 655). Another letter, dated 19 June 1857, has been paraphrased, but not yet published in full, in Pilgrim (12: 678). The letter is to William Hepworth [End Page 84] Dixon, and pertains to a charitable committee organized in memory of Douglas Jerrold, who died eleven days earlier: My dear Dixon I have adopted your...

A Lettered Utopia: Printed Alphabets and the Material Republic of Letters

Several early editions of Thomas More's “Utopia,” first published in 1516, include the Utopian alphabet, as well as a quatrain of poetry in Utopian and its Latin transliteration. This essay traces the material conditions for the Utopian alphabet, exploring the intellectual contexts and epistemological questions that underlie its presence in these early editions and its absence in others. Reproduced by four early modern European printers via woodcut, metal type, or engraved plate, the alphabet in its materiality becomes a key component of “Utopia,” underscoring the intersection between print technology and an expansive humanism extending to ever wider intellectual and geographic horizons.

The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints ed. by Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson

The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints ed. by Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson

Malay and Bugis Manuscripts and Early Printed Books at the Library of Congress: An Update

Malay and Bugis Manuscripts and Early Printed Books at the Library of Congress: An Update

History of Illustration by Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove and Whitney Sherman

Reviewed by: History of Illustration by Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove and Whitney Sherman Daniel F. Yezbick (bio) Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove, and Whitney Sherman, editors, History of Illustration. Fairchild–Bloomsbury, 2018. 592 pp, $90, $245. History of Illustration provides a cornucopia of fresh, rich scholarship that will nourish myriad interests and appetites in comics studies. The text’s remarkable, egalitarian structure defies and destabilizes hierarchies of language, identity, discipline, and genre. Weighing in at a gargantuan 552 pages with over 900 exquisitely curated images, maps, charts, advertisements, and illuminations, History of Illustration pronounces itself an “inherently interdisciplinary” text dedicated to discovering illustration’s ongoing aims to “document, narrate, persuade, and ornament” human discourse (Doyle, et. al. xvii). Doyle, Grove, Sherman, and their international “meta-community” of contributors—dubbed The History of Illustration Project (HIP)—enlisted fifty-plus “volunteers, collectors, curators, educators,” scholars, and subject matter experts across multiple specializations to assemble a series of inherently global, post-canonical observations relating to dozens of interdependent fields and interests(xv). The complete text divides its pedagogical address across five broad historical units: I. Illustrative Traditions from Around the World II. Images as Knowledge, Ideas as Power III. The Advent of Mass Media IV. Diverging Paths in Twentieth Century American and European Illustration V. The Evolution of Illustration in an Electronic Age [End Page 367] The diverse chapters that comprise each unit also present their insights in theoretically ecumenical ways. Each incorporates several evocative theme boxes and breakout timelines to promote further consideration of key figures as divergent as Immanuel Kant and E. W. Kemble. Other sidebar discussions take on the politics of illustration including controversies revolving around postcolonial African maps or iconographic “Imbalances of Gender, Class, and Race” in children’s books (Sherman and Benham Yazdani 428). Even practices and innovations in science, medicine, and sociological inquiry like phrenology and the electron microscope earn edifying break-out commentaries which reflect on their influence over the shifting forms and fashions of technical, commercial, and creative visuality. Such contrasts exemplify History of Illustration’s greatest achievement: a seemingly infinite, playful, and penetrating curiosity for zesty variety, dialectical difference, and intercultural exchange. This intrepid spirit of needful revision, urgent rediscovery, and equalized representation becomes a defining theme in Unit I. Thus, epoch-sweeping chapters like Binita Desai’s “A Pluralistic View of Indian Images: Second Century BCE–1990s,” Sonja Kelley and Frances Woods’ “Chinese Illustration, 100 CE–1900,” and Bolaji Campbell’s “Illustration in African Context, Prehistory–Early 2002” provide informative, empowering, and often exhilarating contextualization of non-European themes and traditions across illustrated media. Of the many excellent, non-Western summaries in Unit II, Irvin Cemil Schick’s “Illustrative Traditions in the Muslim Context, 1200–1900 CE” is perhaps the most urgently needed and cross-culturally informative, though Daphne Lange Rosenzweig’s thoughtful treatment of Japanese print culture, 1600–1900, and Maya Stanfield-Mazzi’s “Illustration in Latin America, Pre-Cloumbian Era–1950” are both equally innovative in their portrayal of complex and compelling artistic traditions beyond the Anglocentric canon. Moving the project past the traditional boundaries of the Liberal Arts, Shelley Wall and David M. Mazierski each contribute rigorous surveys of gender ethics relating to medical and anatomical illustration, and Pamela Parmel’s “Six Centuries of Fashion Illustration, 1540–early 2000s” stands among the text’s most consistently enlightening historical treatments of visual art, human behavior, and commodity culture. Similarly, Wall and Mazierski’s survey of questions and problems relating to Natural History illustration, 1450–1900, provides a valuable tool for scholars and teachers working within the intersections of Art History and animal studies. The overall result is, quite simply, a potentially paradigm-shifting text applicable to interrelated disciplines from Information Science and the History of Medicine to fashion and textile studies, as well as Art History, Media Studies, Material and Visual Culture, and most certainly, the ongoing inquiry into comics and sequential narrative. History of Illustration also offers valuable opportunities for the expansion of comics studies, especially for the enhanced examination of early print and editorial cartoon culture, children’s and adult book illustration, periodical and poster design, and, of course, serial pamphlet comics, graphic novels, and other forms of hybridized multimodal...

Of Ships and Fools: Death and Mirrors in La Lozana andaluza

This paper is a comparative analysis of the visual images in two early print versions of Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools and Francisco Delicado's Retrato de la Lozana andaluza. I begin with a visual comparison of the title pages of the Ship of Fools and Retrato de la Lozana andaluza. Through this comparison, I highlight the importance of mirrors and reflected images in each text. In particular, I argue how the imperfection of mirrors inverts and distorts images, and how these reflections and distortions are used as a literary device by the authors of both works. This leads to a final analysis of death imagery as a reference to the fate of the immortal soul, focusing on the reflected image of a memento mori on the title page of Retrato de la Lozana andaluza. Delicado borrows the mechanism of inversion from the Ship of Fools in order to create a variegated text that defies a single interpretation by engaging with and parodying the didactic literature of the time.

Rankraštinio Lietuvių kalbos žodyno autorystės klausimas: nauji faktai, paaiškėję atliekant teismo rašysenos ekspertizę

The archival document Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language (shelfmark IV A 11) is kept at the Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books of the Czech National Museum Library. This handwritten lexicographic relic is dated to the first half of the 19th century and contains 1701 entries. This article focuses on the matter of authorship of this relic following previous research studies, in which F. L. Čelakovský was suggested as the likely author of the Dictionary. The article presents new findings revealed from a Czech professional handwriting analysis. The evidence discussed in the article is based on the assumption that F. L. Čelakovský is the author of the handwritten Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language.

Historiography and Propaganda in the Royal Court of King Matthias: Hungarian Book Culture at the End of the Middle Ages and Beyond

On the basis of the Chronica Hungarorum of Johannes de Thurocz, the Epitome rerum Hungaricarum of Pietro Ransano, and the Rerum Ungaricarum decades of Antonio Bonfini that were compiled within ten years, between 1488 and 1498, my paper forms a multi-dimensional image of the late 15th-century political and cultural situation in the royal court of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary (1458–1490). The three chronicles have come down to us in a number of books: manuscripts, incunabula and early prints alike, and many of them contain lengthy cycles of images. My paper investigates the agency of these books with a special emphasis on their illustrations. Through a study of the traditions they followed and the messages their illustrations conveyed, the primary question my paper seeks to answer is whether the cultural and political polarity of the royal court inherent in the texts of the chronicles is also present in the format, style and iconography of the illustrated books that contain them. The comparison of the early copies of the three chronicles shows that the cultural and political diversity of the royal court had an impact on the books that were made and/or used within its walls. Taking into consideration their circulation and reception as well, my paper discusses the role they played in royal propaganda, and the impact they had on the European image of Hungary and the Hungarians.

Which Hugo? This One! Hugo de Hervorst

AbstractOne of the riddles of the history of late medieval philosophy is the identity of a certain Hugo who is frequently quoted in manuscripts as well as in early prints. This article offers solutions to the relevant problems, identifying the work to which these quotations refer. One of the manuscripts presents the author’s name as “Hugo de Reyss,” Reyss being identified with Rees in North-Rhine/Westphalia. A passage in that work links the author to the University of Paris. Among the Hugos documented at the University of Paris at the relevant time, Hugo de Hervorst is the most promising candidate. Hugo of Hervorst and his family had close relations to Rees. In sum, a chain of arguments leads to the identification of Hugo de Reyss as Hugo de Hervorst, whose academic and ecclesiastical careers can thus be outlined. Documented for the first time in 1372, he died in 1399.