Hidden Harmonies Research Articles

Hidden Harmonies: Manuscript and Print on the North Atlantic Fringe, 1500–1900 ed. by Matthew James Driscoll and Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil

Reviewed by: Hidden Harmonies: Manuscript and Print on the North Atlantic Fringe, 1500–1900 ed. by Matthew James Driscoll and Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil Aileen Douglas Matthew James Driscoll and Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil, eds. Hidden Harmonies: Manuscript and Print on the North Atlantic Fringe, 1500–1900. Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana 54. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2021. xv + 510 pp. + 65 color plates, 5 halftones, 1 map. €61. ISBN: 978-87-63546881. Introducing Hidden Harmonies, the editors invite the reader to apprehend late manuscript culture in Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands as "a homogenous cultural bloc whose constituents responded to influences from the European 'centre' in similar ways" (ix). The collection of thirteen essays begins with a wide-ranging consideration by Jürg Glauser of the persistence of the "simultaneity of media," of script and print, into the nineteenth century on the "Atlantic fringe." Deirdre Nic Mhathúna follows with a meticulous account of the scribal transmission of the works of the seventeenth-century Irish poet Piaras Feiritéar, whose poems did not appear in print in Irish until 1903. Moving north and west, Gu∂rún Ingólfsdóttir describes the manuscript miscellany of the Icelandic housewife, Gu∂rún Jónsdóttir (1741–96). Significantly, while Gu∂rún owned the manuscript—a medley of devotional materials, useful knowledge, folklore, and songs—it was not in her hand. The essay argues that strong links to folklore, as well [End Page 172] as the absence of devotional materials already printed, distinguish popular manuscripts such as that of Gu∂rún from those of elite women. With Katarzyna Anna Kapitan's essay, the volume moves to consider what she terms "print-based manuscripts" (82). Her fascinating account in "Manuscripts Derived from Printed Editions in the Transmission History of Hrómundar Saga Greipssonar" begins by asking whether the use of a printed text as source led to more conservative scribal copies, and she finds that this is "only partially true," with factors such as the purpose of the copy and place of the copyist (within or outside Iceland) being more influential. Copying from printed sources also features in Liam Mac Mathúna's vivid account of two manuscripts by the Irish scribe Tadhg Ó Neachtain (1671–1752). Mac Mathúna's main emphasis, however, is on the elements of individuality in the manuscripts: the recorded dialogue between Tadhg and his father Séan in National Library of Ireland MS G 198, which allows the warm relationship between the two to emerge, and Tadhg's recording of "major contemporary domestic events" in British Library Egerton MS 198 (139). Margrét Eggertsdóttir's contribution to the volume provides both a useful overview of the genres of seventeenth-century Icelandic poetry and discusses the dissemination, into the nineteenth century, of one of its most famous works, the Hymns of the Passion (Passíusálmar) of Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–74), a clergymember with an eventful early life. Hallgrímur's hymns were first printed in 1666, but the author also made five copies of his hymns that he dedicated and sent to recipients "whom he trusted to judge his work fairly and spread the word" (159). The prodigious life's work of the Icelandic scribe Magnús í Tjaldanesi (1835–1921) is the focus of the contribution of M. J. Driscoll, one of the volume's coeditors. Extant manuscripts by Magnús comprise about twenty-eight thousand pages, more than eight million words, and Driscoll estimates that this is only a fraction of what the scribe produced. Notably, Magnús dedicated himself to "highly popular prose genres—fornaldarsögur, riddarasögur, translations of German Volksbücher," rather than the more usual poetry (189). An unusual feature of his work is that each of the volumes in his collection of sagas, twenty in all, comprises exactly eight hundred pages. Although he adopted certain features of print culture, including prefaces, pagination, and running titles, Magnús appears not to have aspired to print. He did, however, take steps to preserve his work. Driscoll [End Page 173] recounts how, in 1909, Magnús made his one and only trip to Reykjavik to see...

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Hidden harmony: Converging interests in the development of prison reform

The “agonistic perspective” on criminal justice posits that tensions are ubiquitous in the field irrespective of time, place, and the given paradigm. While the study of conflict and contestation is important, it is equally necessary to study harmony and shared interests. In the present article, we explore a period in the history of European penal reform that was marked by such a convergence of interests, and which would in Poland wed institutional reactions to crime with pedagogy, rather than the field of law as seen in many other nations. Macro-level shifts following the First World War allowed for the convergence of three broad “currents” of the day: national penal reform; the field of pedagogy; and the self-ascribed social mission of the Polish intelligentsia. By taking seriously practical collaboration and ideological harmony we are also reminded that the (penal) systems of the West (particularly the USA and the UK) are not obvious, automatic, or necessary.

Some hidden harmonies between new and old geometric loci

Some hidden harmonies between new and old geometric loci

Hidden harmonies: the lives and times of the Pythagorean theorem

Hidden harmonies: the lives and times of the Pythagorean theorem

Transposing World Harmony: Donne's Creation Poetics in the Context of a Medieval Tradition

Transposing World HarmonyDonne's Creation Poetics in the Context of a Medieval Tradition Sarah Powrie Cosmology and poetry share a long history of mutual association. Each celebrates the mystery of the creative process, whether this be natural generation or artistic creation, and each summons the power of myth to probe and conceal the mystery behind the mythographic veil. In his Glosses on Timaeus, the twelfth-century commentator William of Conches explains how the order of nature's operations is secretly signified in the mythical god Pan. The name "Pan" signifies "all" as William notes, and just as the etymology of the god's name reveals that he signifies "all things" in the universe, so too the imaginary tableau of Pan making music on his pipes represents the perfect proportions ordering the heavenly spheres. William interprets Pan's desire for the nymph Syringa as representing nature's desire for concord and harmony among the elements. Pan/Nature desires Syringa/Concord in part for her beauty and in part for the fecundity that her beauty promises. Pan's pipes celebrate the tempered harmony that sustains and perpetuates life within the universe. Without concord, William notes, disorder and discord among the elements would arise, and the world would certainly dissolve.1 William's glosses reveal how closely aesthetics and cosmology can inform each other. His perfectly proportioned world system both reflects the medieval preference for order and proportion and demonstrates the period's appropriation of Neoplatonic natural theory. The cosmological system described in the Neoplatonic sources of the late ancient [End Page 212] period presented a carefully crafted cosmos with humanity featuring as an integral part of that system. The medieval period learned of this cosmology from Calcidius's translation of and commentary on Plato's Timaeus, which introduced the micro-macrocosm analogy and articulated the structural affinities linking the human figure and the world. Augustine's De Genesi ad Litteram baptized the mathematical architecture of the Neoplatonic cosmos by reaffirming that "God made everything in measure, number and weight" within the six days of biblical creation.2 In his De Institutione Musica, Boethius described the world order in musical terms. The orderly motions of the planetary rotations, of seasonal changes, and of the four elements together expressed a common musica mundana. A similar harmony united the soul and body in the microcosm. Like the Timaeus, Boethius's tract illustrates a symmetry between human and cosmos that reaffirms a purposefully crafted, coherent world system. The impact of the Copernican hypothesis on these mythologies of nature has been of perennial interest to early modern scholars. The rupturing of the Ptolemaic cosmology and the religious turmoil of the Reformation both signaled that the medieval universe, with an astral system centered upon the earth and a religious society centered upon Rome, was already becoming a historical artifact. The Copernican thesis threatened the Timaean universe of structural affinities. If the world system is heliocentric, as Copernicus claimed, then humanity is peripheral, perhaps even irrelevant, to the larger universe. If the world system is made of undifferentiated infinite space, then divine immanence is extracted from creation and jettisoned into outer space, leaving a vacuum of infinite regress. Yet, even while the new science called all into doubt, early modern thinkers continued to speculate about hidden harmonies and symbolic patterns within the architecture of the universe. Johannes Kepler never waned in his admiration of the Timaeus, and when his own observations of the heavens contradicted the Pythagorean proportions, he simply redesigned the harmonies to accord with those observations.3 Sharing Kepler's interest in Neoplatonic cosmology, Robert [End Page 213] Fludd devised a complex network of correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm in a four-volume encyclopedia, Utriusque cosmi historia.4 Using diagrams of the human figure and the Ptolemaic universe, he mapped parallels between the soul's powers and the celestial spheres. Thus, the Neoplatonic cosmos and its celestial harmonies were not silenced by the new science but rather transposed to accord with early modern fascinations. The scholarship investigating the early modern response to Neoplatonic cosmology has stressed either its continuity with late ancient and medieval sources or its singularity in rejecting and demythologizing this tradition.5 In...

Current trends in bioinformatics : Hidden harmony with acoustical research

Current trends in bioinformatics : Hidden harmony with acoustical research

Hidden Harmonies of Henry Moore's Sculpture 'Vertebrae'

Hidden Harmonies of Henry Moore's Sculpture 'Vertebrae'

Psalms 1–8: Some Hidden Harmonies

Psalms 1–8: Some Hidden Harmonies