Latin Book Research Articles

Las Navas de Tolosa and Liber Alchorani: reflections on Iberian Christians and the Qur'an

Although archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada commissioned a translation of the Qur'an in conjunction the Las Navas campaign, the resulting text, Mark of Toledo's Liber Alchorani, had far less of an impact than the battle itself. Indeed, like Robert of Ketton's earlier Latin Qur'an, Mark's text scarcely circulated in Spain: intellectuals there showed virtually no interest in reading Islam's holy book in Latin until the fifteenth century. Iberia was – for most of the Middle Ages – at once the land where European intellectuals could most easily find scholars to translate the Qur'an into Latin, and the place where few were interested in reading it in translation.

Philologie – Wissenschaft der Sprachkontakte

Texts are the most reliable bases for investigating language contacts. The field of research for philology is the analysis and semantic processing of texts. The present study deals with the effects of Hungarian terminology on Croatian judiciary terminology in the 15th century based on the original Latin book of law and its contemporary Hungarian and Croatian translations. The corpus in this research contains words borrowed from Hungarian as well as calques and semantic loans created on the basis of Hungarian patterns. In addition, the study analyzes various attitudes behind certain phrases.

JURGIO PLATERIO BIBLIOTEKA – KNYGOS KULTŪROS IR MOKSLO PAMINKLAS

The object of this study was the personal library of Plater, a Lithuanian intellectual of the first half of the 19th century. The work on the article was inhibited by the lack of data from Jerzy Plater’s lifetime as the Plater family archive was destroyed by the Soviet Army which occupied Lithuania in 1940. The aim was achieved by analyzing dispersed published and unpublished historical sources and selecting the authentic data by comparing their reliability. The owner of the library was count Jerzy Plater (Jerzy Jan Wincenty Plater, Jerzy Jan Wincenty Plater-Broel z Broelu hrabia Plater, Georgius comes de Plater, Jurgis Plateris in Lithuanian; born 1810 in Klaipėda (Memel), died 1836 in Raseiniai, buried in Švėkšna) – a member of an influential aristocratic family in the Lithuanian–Polish Commonwealth. He was educated by domestic teachers in the manor, later in the Kražiai and Vilnius gymnasiums, and graduated from Vilnius University where he studied philology and liberal arts. At the University his scholarly interests were formed. Plater was one of the most important members of the gentry that participated in the Lituanistic movement of the first half of the 19th century. The main directions of scholarly work pursued by the Count were the Lithuanian language, history of Lithuania and his personal library. His works reflect the variety of methods applied by him: they included informal communication, targeted visits to the libraries that kept printed heritage collections, book analysis de visu, and archival research. The Count was one of the first authors to write his scholarly works in Lithuanian. Plater inherited the Gedminaičiai Manor from his parents and created a basis for his research there – a personal library and a small museum. To achieve his main aims, he built a Lituanistic collection which included not only publications, but also manuscripts, graphic art, technical drawings, paintings and museum objects. The collection comprised over 3000 items. The main acquisition sources were Vilnius and bookstores in the nearby Prussian towns Königsberg (Karaliaučius), Tilsit (Tilžė) and Klaipėda (Memel). There he acquired old Lituanistic and Old Prussian research works and serials. He sought for the possibilities to enrich his library through personal contacts with outstanding researchers, creative priests, and book culture representatives. The Count was aware of the advantages of collective research and invited a creative collaborator – the writer and philologist Simonas Tadas Stanevičius – to work with him. While working on this article, the author has identified 88 titles of the items that belonged to the library: 76 books, two volumes of a serial, one graphic design, and nine manuscripts. At present, they are scattered in Lithuania and abroad. The collected data provide a basis for describing the library structure in general by century, language and content. Five publications and manuscripts come from the 16th, seventeen from the 17th, 28 from the 18th, and 38 from the 19th century. As one could expect, most numerous is the collection of Polish books (19), but there were also 15 Latin books, 15 German, ten Lithuanian, and seven French books. The rest 12 books are printed in several languages: dictionaries of two or three languages and grammars of different languages, written in Latin or German with significant inclusions of linguistic examples from the target languages. These linguistic resources reflect the multilanguage environment of Plater, which included Lithuanian, Latvian, Greek, Latin, French, German, Polish and other big Slavic languages, such as Gud (Byelorussian), Russian, and Serbian. Thus, the linguistic composition of the library proves that its owner was well prepared for his investigations into historiography and linguistics. The fact of its existence proves also that the nation that lived under occupation was able to create its own possibilities for research, sense-making and future development. It is necessary to recreate this library as a virtual one. The further search for the library books or even their traces can be done only collectively. Plater deserves this effort because his library is worth of the status of a Lithuanian research and book culture monument.

The Addition and Use of Running Titles in Manuscripts Containing Old English

As a feature of manuscript layout, running titles play an important part in restructuring and improving accessibility for English manuscripts at the turn of the eleventh to the twelfth century. The phenomenon seems to be related to the Worcester scriptorium. This article discusses the motivations and procedures used for adding the first running titles to books in English. The evidence shows that, despite the backdrop of Latin books, the development of this new peritextual feature was a learning process, as early running titles still mixed features of proper headings, subtitles or marginal comments, and show uneasy relations with tables of contents.

AN EIGHTH CENTURY ARABIC TREATISE ON THE COLOURING OF GLASS: KITĀB AL-DURRA AL-MAKNŪNA (THE BOOK OF THE HIDDEN PEARL) OF JĀBIR IBN ḤAYYĀN (c. 721–c. 815)

This paper examines the history of glass colouring. It reviews Kitāb al-Durra al-maknūna of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, which deals with the subject. The manuscript of this practical treatise was discovered recently. Part one of the paper deals with Jābir as a philosopher and chemist. The art of lustre-painting on glass originated in Syria during the Umayyad Caliphate in the eighth century and was soon practised in the neighbouring area. The paper reviews Arabic literature that deals with the colouring of glass until the 13th century, and with pre-Islamic and Latin books of recipes that deal with glass colouring. Recipes for cast coloured glass are very few and scant in non-Arabic literature, and lustre-painting on glass was not mentioned in any treatise outside Arabic, even in the works of Theophilus and Neri. The colouring of glass gemstones by colour diffusion is not mentioned also. The paper compares the recipes of Kitāb al-Durra with the results of modern analysis of existing Islamic stained glass objects. There is a close correspondence, and the main indispensable ingredients in both cases are silver and copper compounds. Part one ends with an account of lāzaward as cobalt oxide in glass colouring. Part two of the paper gives a representative selection of recipes from Kitāb al-Durra for the three methods of glass colouring.

Latin Books and the Eastern Orthodox Clerical Elite in Kiev, 1632-1780 by Liudmila V. Charipova (review)

reviews 129 This is also a somewhat frustratingbook: a dissertation which would have benefited from severe pruning, editing and checking. In the lengthy chapter on the Life, in particular, Isoaho strives too hard to make simple points complex, to seek analogies and precedents of dubious relevance, to knock down opponents (sometimes forwhat theydon't actually say), and on occasion to use trenchancy as a substitute for argument or self-criticism. For example, Isoaho insists that in order to understand the image ofAleksandr in the Life we have to understand hagiographic conventions and perceptions, but then blurs thedistinction between hagiography and eulogy (and indeed other forms ofmedieval writing) to an extentwhich compromises any genre-specific argu ment on hagiography as such. Too many statements are methodologically confused or confusing. Thus (p. 138): thewriter of theLifewas 'clearly famil iarwith the obligations that a true chivalric hero had to fulfil,because the narrative repeats the metaphors for honour in war that were well-known all over Europe': what exactly isbeing claimed here about thewriter's knowledge of European images of a 'true chivalric hero'? Is there any textual basis for such a major claim? 'Clearly' is not an argument. Or (p. 45) 'the significance of Prince Aleksandr as a second Hezekiah is of the utmost importance when viewing the contemporary events ofRussian history'.Why? Itmay be impor tant for interpreting a text, but how is that relevant to 'contemporary events^. Or (p. 129): 'the continuity of an old cult of ancestor worship [...] is obviously the key to understanding the tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church in neglecting official canonization.' There is nothing 'obvious', because the premise itself (ancestor worship) is only a speculative hypothesis. And in any case it ismisleading to label as 'neglect' the fact that in the earlyMiddle Ages local cults could emerge and flourishwithout a sense that sanctity had to be confirmed according to a centralized procedure and list. Then there are the straightforward lapses: 'the apocalyptic book of Sirak' (p. 307); a phantom scholar 'Koluchchi' forColucci (pp. 18, 81, bibliography and index!); an imaginary 'holy fatherAmphilotheus' (p. 124)who looks like a hybrid of Philotheus and Amphilochius (the latter being the saint who is actually mentioned in the source); Archbishop Evfemiy (p. 232); the allusion (p. 108) to staroslavianskii as 'the spoken Slavic language', whereas in the rele vant paragraphs in the book by Begunov (cited in the footnote) staroslavianskii means conventional written Church Slavonic, by contrast with the East Slav vernacular). My favourite is on p. 367, where stankovaia zhivopis' becomes 'paintings of the Stankov region' (check a dictionary; or a map). Such defects are unnecessary and distracting in what remains, at core, a helpful survey. Clare College,Cambridge Simon Franklin Charipova, Liudmila V. Latin Books and the Eastern OrthodoxClericalElite in Kiev, 1632-1780. Studies in Early Modern European History. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2006. x + 259 pp. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. ?50.00. The core of thisuseful book (chapters three to five) comprises a very detailed history of the library of the famous Kiev Mohyla College, laterAcademy, 130 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 from its founding in 1632 until 1780, when an accidental fire (the author emphasizes) seems to have destroyed most, but not all, of itsholdings. The book's first two chapters offer a rather disjointed history of 'Ruthenia' or Rus-Ukraine down to themid-seventeenth century, and a somewhat updated biography of PeterMohyla (1596-1646), the episcopal founder of both college and librarywho thus sought to revive the local 'crisis-stricken [Orthodox] church' (p. 45). Chapter six, the last, attempts to summarize the book's find ings and theirhistorical significance. In this chapter particularly, the author's reach, informed by a variety of big names in communication studies, discourse analysis, reader reception theory, book, print and library history (see also her Introduction), greatiy exceeds her grasp, meaning the very solid research carried out in the collections of theUkrainian National Library in Kiev. Perhaps realizing the disparity, she has added a brief, clearly stated Conclusion, one blessedly free of both endnotes and big names. Itmight well be read first. In those core chapters, theMohyla library's history is divided into three periods ? the...

Plinij starejši in njegovo Naravoslovje

Pliny the Elder is a unique phenomenon in the history of the literary transmission of antique texts. He is one of the rare authors whose popularity remained intact after the demise of Antiquity; even more, with his Naturalis Historia, which is the most extensive prose work of Roman Antiquity that has been preserved, he influenced views of the world in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Furthermore, until the beginning of Humanism and modern science he was one of the main authorities in the areas he included in his Naturalis Historia. He established technical terminology in a number of areas that was preserved until the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era. Naturalis Historia brings together two traditions of scholarly and encyclopedic literature: the Greek (Aristotle, Theophrastus, the Hippocratics, Hellenistic writers, etc.) and the Latin (Cato the Elder, Varus, Celsus, Vitruvius, Columella, Agrippa, etc.). It is often based on secondary or tertiary sources and, in some cases, on Pliny’s personal findings and experiences. The work is also linguistically unique, combining the influences of Classical Latin, Silver Latin, and rhetorical elements derived from Pliny’s education in rhetoric, as well as the influences of his contemporaries and predecessors that had tackled the same technical areas as Pliny. On the other hand, Pliny enhanced his Naturalis Historia with specialized vocabulary (especially in natural science and technical disciplines), Greek words, loanwords from other languages (Spanish, Iberian, Gaulish, German, etc.), paraphrases, a series of neologisms (many of them being hapax legomena), and rhetorical and poetic features. After having exerted great influence in the Middle Ages (on Solinus, Marbod, Symmachus, Ausonius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede, John of Salisbury, William of Conches, Vincent of Beauvais, Bartholomew of England, Saint Albert the Great, etc.), and the Renaissance and Humanism (on Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, Niccolò de’Niccoli, and others), Pliny experienced a decline during the Enlightenment and neo-Humanism. He was “rehabilitated” in the 20th century, and since the 1970s he has been the subject of intense research as a document of his period and of the knowledge within it. Because of numerous errors that were the result of its manuscript transmission, the text of Naturalis Historia has been a frequent subject of professional polemics (e.g., by Robert of Cricklade, Niccolò Leoniceno, Angelo Poliziano, Ermolao Barbaro, and others). The work has been preserved in an incredibly great number of copies; there are more than 200 manuscript copies, of which 130 are fully preserved. It was one of the first Latin books to be published in printed form (Venice, 1469). In Slovenia his oeuvre is extremely scarce; his works have not yet been translated into Slovenian, and he has never been dealt with by a Slovenian scholar. The only article about his works was published by Gustav Heigl in 1885 and 1886 in the newsletter of the Maribor Classical Gymnasium and, in 1912, a short excerpt on Apelles (Naturalis Historia 35, 79–97) was included in Janko Košan’s Latinska čitanka za četrti (in peti) gimnazijski razred (Latin Textbook for the Fourth (and Fifth) Year of Classical Gymnasium.

Plinij starejši in njegovo Naravoslovje

Pliny the Elder is a unique phenomenon in the history of the literary transmission of antique texts. He is one of the rare authors whose popularity remained intact after the demise of Antiquity; even more, with his Naturalis Historia, which is the most extensive prose work of Roman Antiquity that has been preserved, he influenced views of the world in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Furthermore, until the beginning of Humanism and modern science he was one of the main authorities in the areas he included in his Naturalis Historia. He established technical terminology in a number of areas that was preserved until the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era. Naturalis Historia brings together two traditions of scholarly and encyclopedic literature: the Greek (Aristotle, Theophrastus, the Hippocratics, Hellenistic writers, etc.) and the Latin (Cato the Elder, Varus, Celsus, Vitruvius, Columella, Agrippa, etc.). It is often based on secondary or tertiary sources and, in some cases, on Pliny’s personal findings and experiences. The work is also linguistically unique, combining the influences of Classical Latin, Silver Latin, and rhetorical elements derived from Pliny’s education in rhetoric, as well as the influences of his contemporaries and predecessors that had tackled the same technical areas as Pliny. On the other hand, Pliny enhanced his Naturalis Historia with specialized vocabulary (especially in natural science and technical disciplines), Greek words, loanwords from other languages (Spanish, Iberian, Gaulish, German, etc.), paraphrases, a series of neologisms (many of them being hapax legomena), and rhetorical and poetic features. After having exerted great influence in the Middle Ages (on Solinus, Marbod, Symmachus, Ausonius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede, John of Salisbury, William of Conches, Vincent of Beauvais, Bartholomew of England, Saint Albert the Great, etc.), and the Renaissance and Humanism (on Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, Niccolo de’Niccoli, and others), Pliny experienced a decline during the Enlightenment and neo-Humanism. He was “rehabilitated” in the 20th century, and since the 1970s he has been the subject of intense research as a document of his period and of the knowledge within it. Because of numerous errors that were the result of its manuscript transmission, the text of Naturalis Historia has been a frequent subject of professional polemics (e.g., by Robert of Cricklade, Niccolo Leoniceno, Angelo Poliziano, Ermolao Barbaro, and others). The work has been preserved in an incredibly great number of copies; there are more than 200 manuscript copies, of which 130 are fully preserved. It was one of the first Latin books to be published in printed form (Venice, 1469). In Slovenia his oeuvre is extremely scarce; his works have not yet been translated into Slovenian, and he has never been dealt with by a Slovenian scholar. The only article about his works was published by Gustav Heigl in 1885 and 1886 in the newsletter of the Maribor Classical Gymnasium and, in 1912, a short excerpt on Apelles (Naturalis Historia 35, 79–97) was included in Janko Kosan’s Latinska citanka za cetrti (in peti) gimnazijski razred (Latin Textbook for the Fourth (and Fifth) Year of Classical Gymnasium.

Songs of Sundrie Natures (1589) (review)

Reviewed by: Songs of Sundrie Natures (1589) Kerry McCarthy William Byrd. Songs of Sundrie Natures (1589). Edited by David Mateer. London: Stainer & Bell, c2004. (The Byrd Edition, 13.) [Gen. pref. (Philip Brett), p. v.; pref., p. vi–xvi; editorial notes, p. xvii–xviii; texts, p. xix–xxxi; notes on the poems, p. xxxii–xxxiii; facsims., p. xxxiv–xxxvii; score, p. 1–270; extant copies, p. 271–72; index of first lines, p. 273–74. ISMN M-2202-2044-9; ISBN 0-85249-375-4; pub. no. B375. £69.] This volume, the twentieth and last to appear in the new Byrd Edition, completes one of the most ambitious single-composer editorial projects in recent history. William Byrd himself produced the 1589 Songs of Sundrie Natures during an unusually fruitful publishing drive of four full-length compilations in as many years: Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs (London: Thomas East, 1588); Latin books 1–2 of the Latin Cantiones sacrae (London: East, 1589, 1591); a large manuscript anthology of keyboard music (My Ladye Nevells Booke, 1591); and two printed settings for four and six voices of "This Sweet and Merry Month of May" (for Thomas Watson's First Sett of Italian Madrigalls Englished [London: East, 1590]), which more or less single-handedly launched the Elizabethan madrigal craze. This second songbook may be compared to Byrd's second book of Cantiones sacrae: as its name suggests, it is a more eclectic and less unified volume than its predecessor. The music varies widely in scoring, style, and mood. Byrd explains in his preface to the reader (reproduced on p. xxxvii) that he is "desirous to delight thee with varietie, whereof (in my opinion) no Science is more plentifully adorned then Musicke," and he offers the book as a musical smorgasbord "to serve for all companies and voyces." The composer's note ad lectorem, as so often, is a glimpse of personal warmth after the slightly tense flattery of the dedication proper. Here he signs himself "The most affectionate freend to all that love or learne Musick"; he seems far removed from the stubborn, isolated, even bitter figure revealed by some documentary sources. The author of these thirty-four songs was a musician in the prime of life, well aware of his own talent and of the public esteem ("good passage and utterance") in which it was held. Byrd's 1589 songbook offers a number of well-known pieces as well as some less familiar delights. The curious reader may wish to start with the seven penitential psalms that open the collection. These psalms have been described as "severe," "Netherlandish," or otherwise uncongenial (p. xiii), but eloquent little gems such as "Lord Hear My Prayer" (no. 5) or "Attend Mine Humble Prayer"(no. 7) are worth exploring alongside Byrd's better-known three-voice music. In his Latin liturgical works, Byrd went on to achieve great effect with the slenderest of musical forces: recall the Candlemas antiphon "Adorna thalamumtuum," the hymn "Ave maris stella" (both from the Gradualia, book 1 [London: East, 1605]), or, most memorably, the three-part Mass (ca. 1593–94). It is not hard to see hints of that later style in these unassuming songs. They are far from the simple psalm settings consumed avidly in Elizabethan England; they are equally far from the elaborate penitential motets Byrd luxuriated in during the 1570s and 1580s. We can see him here forging a language for small-scale domestic sacred music that would serve him well in his later work for the Roman rite. In a paper read at the International William Byrd Conference held at Duke [End Page 1049] University in November 2005, Peter Bassano recently suggested that a puzzling line in the psalm "Lord in Thy Wrath"(no. 3)—"give teares, give grace, give penitence, unto my sinfull sexe"—points clearly to a female poet, perhaps the musician and published author Emilia Bassano, sometime lover of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, to whom Songs of Sundrie Natures is dedicated. His hypothesis may also encourage us to revisit the three-voice song "Susanna Fair" (no. 8), which has had to wait for David Mateer's editorial work to get a fair hearing in modern print in...

Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amour by Hélisenne de Crenne, Jean-Philippe Beaulieu

i io8 Reviews and for the humanistic learning of the Renaissance, and it can now be studied both as awork in its own right and as part of the cultural life of its time. UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL GLYN S. BURGESS Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procedent d'amour. By HELISENNE DECRENNE. Ed. by JEAN-PHILIPPEBEAULIEU. (La Cite des Dames) Saint-Etienne: Publications de l'Universitede Saint-Etienne. 2005. 38I pp. Eio. ISBN 2-86272-368-I. The firstwork ofMarguerite Briet, known asHelisenne de Crenne, was themoralizing prose narrative Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procedent d'amour, and it is,with good reason, recognized as one of themost significant texts of the early French Renaissance. Published first in I538 (Paris: Denis Janot) and frequently re-edited up to I560, it is awork on which critical attention has, quite rightly, focused over the last few decades as it is highly significant to an understanding of the narrative genre's development. The present edition appears in a recently established (and highly promising) collec tion directed by Eliane Viennot with the aim of facilitating access to important texts by women of the ancien regime. It complements very well the highly scholarly one by Christine de Buzon (Paris: Champion, I997), which reproduces the first edition of I538. This latest edition provides us with the I543 version (Paris: C. Langelier), which purports to have been revised by the author. The complementarity between the two modern editions, the one for the specialist and the one for the non-specialist, is usefully pointed up by Beaulieu in his introduction, where he directs us to the Buzon edition formore ample notes and discussion of the text. Gratifyingly, the modest price of the book and the fact that it is clearly aimed at non-specialists do not reflect a compromise on academic standards by Beaulieu, a noted scholar of de Crenne: he edited Epistres Familieres et invectives de ma dame Helisenne (Montreal: Presses de l'Universite de Montreal, 1995), and the first col lective volume of articles on her, Helisenne de Crenne: V'ecriture et ses doubles (Paris: Champion, 2004). The detailed notes, critical apparatus, and modern punctuation and orthography make it an ideal edition for non-specialists, particularly undergraduates. In this latter respect particularly, this edition will usefully serve to redress a frequent imbalance ensuing from the absence hitherto of such an edition: undergraduates of French Renaissance programmes are usually acquainted with Marguerite de Navarre but not with de Crenne. TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN SARAH ALYN STACEY Dialogues sacres/Dialogi sacri (premier livre). By SEBASTIEN CASTELLION. Ed. by DAVID AMHERDT and YVES GIRAUD. (Textes Litteraires Francais, 571) Geneva: Droz. 2004. 264 pp. SwF 42. ISBN 2-600-00930-2. Castellion ( 5 I5-63, also Castalio and Chateillon) is best known as an early advocate of religious toleration and freedom of conscience (De haereticis an sint persequendi, I554, and Conseil a la France desolee, I562). A Reformer, but opponent of Calvin, and Professor of Greek at Basel, he also aroused controversy with his translations of the Bible into Latin and French. The Dialogues sacres represent a less polemi cal aspect of his career and a familiar genre of humanist pedagogy. Although the second edition of I545, four books in Latin, became the standard text republished well into the eighteenth century, the editors have opted to reproduce the first book ...

The Rhineland Pietists' Sacralization of Oral Torah

Scholars of medieval Hebrew codicology have noted that Sefer Haoidim (hereafter SH) devotes extraordinary attention to book as material object.1 SH Parma (SHP) includes a subheading entitled 'inyan oefarim, i.e., the subject of books,2 but there are hundreds of passages outside that section that refer to stages of book production, to scribes, copyists, and manufacturers, and to implements used in pricking, ruling, inking, erasing, binding, covering, and fastening books. SHs nar ratives discuss book as commodity, describing which bound manu scripts are best suited to rental market and conditions under which a purloined book may be ransomed for more than its fair price (SHP 868; 603; 1748). They also illuminate densely intertwined econ omies and societies of medieval Christians and Jews: Christians pledged Latin books when they borrowed from Jewish moneylenders, and Jews left Hebrew books as collateral when they procured loans from Chris

De vormgeving van de vroege Friese geschiedschrijving

AbstractBegun in 1568, the revolt of the Netherlands against the Spanish stimulated every Dutch province to strive to attain the greatest possible autonomy and independence from the dominant province of Holland. One of the arguments forwarded for pursuing this independent course was how ancient a region was (laudatio ex vetustate). Incidentally, it was Holland with its Batavian myth that had a strong suit in hand in this matter. To counter this, historiographers were appointed to confirm their region's age. In this capacity, the States of Friesland designated Suffridus Petrus (1527-1597), Bernardus Furmerius (1542-1616) and Pierius Winsemius (1586-1644) consecutively. Relying on traditional accounts, which they believed were ancient, Petrus and Furmerius established a line of legendary Frisian monarchs, beginning with Friso - banished from India - who was said to be a descendant of Noah's son Sem. The results of their scholarly research were published in small-scale, unillustrated books in Latin. Not officially commissioned as a historiographer, around 1597 Martinus Hamconius (c. 1550-1620), wrote an acrostic on the name of Suffridus Petrus, which comprised an ekphrasis with an animated description of the legendary Frisians. In 1606 he also devised a table (fig. i) in which all the characters who played a role in the illustrious history of Friesland are described in Latin. This cast of characters was published again in 1617, this time in Dutch (fig. 2). A lost copy of this edition featured illustrations (fig. 3), which were reused in an edition of Hamconius' Frisia (1620) (figs. 17, 20, 21). The tableau of 1617 includes several old Frisian traditional costumes (fig. 10). All the prints were made by Pieter Feddes of Harlingen. A second set of illustrations of the Frisian princes was etched by Simon Wynhoutsz. Frisius around 1617. These prints, known only from Pierius Winsemius' Chronique of 1622 (figs. 15, 18, 19), originally constituted a consecutive series (fig. 13), doubtless intended to illustrate Hamconius' treatise and probably made for his publisher Jan Lamrinck, who (according to the author's hypothesis) could not use it and thus cut down the plates and included them in Winsemius' Chronique, which he also published. A third, incomplete series of illustrations (fig. 14), again by Pieter Feddes, was likewise made to illustrate Hamconius' series, but may have been rejected and likewise used in the Chronique. Some details in four of the figures in both series (figs. 15-23) seem to point to the iconographic tradition of the free Frisian countryman.

Beyond the Stars

Beyond the Stars

The Oldest Lists of Latin Books

The Oldest Lists of Latin Books

Latin Books and the Orthodox Church in Ruthenia: Two Catalogues of Books Purchased by Peter Mohyla in 1632 and 1633

Latin Books and the Orthodox Church in Ruthenia: Two Catalogues of Books Purchased by Peter Mohyla in 1632 and 1633

PETER MOHYLA'S TRANSLATION OF THE IMITATION OF CHRIST

The article is dedicated to one of the least known early works of Peter Mohyla, Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev (1633–46). Known as a great church and educational reformer and ‘Westernizer’, he made a major contribution to the cultural development in Ruthenia, then a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Muscovy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The work has survived in a single manuscript copy which could have been made from a printed edition that was suppressed or destroyed soon after its publication. The author has established, for the first time, that the work in question is not an original piece, but a rendition of the fifteenth-century Catholic devotional treatise The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis into contemporary literary Ukrainian. First-hand evidence is presented to support this claim. Mohyla brought many significant changes to the original text using it as a vehicle to convey his own views formed under the influence of the Catholic Reformation, Jesuit education, and Latin books. Conclusions are drawn about the way he applied Western sources to rid the Orthodox Church from obscurity and self-imposed isolation from the European Christian civilization.

:Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250-1600

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus 2. How to Write a Latin Book on Surgery: Organizing Principles and Authorial Devices in Guglielmo da Saliceto and Dino del Garbo 3. Avicenna and the Teaching of Practical Medicine 4. Two Models of Medical Culture, Pietro d'Abano and Taddeo Alderotti 5. The libri morales in the Faculty of Arts and Medicine at bologna: Bartolomeo da Varginana and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics 6. The Music of Pulse 7. Medical Scholasticism and the Historian 8. The Physician's Task: Medical Reputations in Humanist Collective Biographies 9. Renaissance Critiques of Medicine, Physiology, and Anatomy 10. Renaissance Readers and Avicenna's Organization of Medical Knowledge 11. 'Remarkable' Diseases, 'Remarkable' Cures, and personal Experience in Renaissance Medical Texts 12. Vesalius and the Reading of Galen's Teleology 13. Vesalius and Human Diversity in De humani corporis fabrica 14. Giovanni Argenterio: Medical Innovation, Princely Patronage and Academic Controversy 15. Signs and Evidence: Autopsy and Sanctity in Late sixteenth-Century Italy Index

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library (review)

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library. Edited by R. M. Thomson with a Contribution on the Bindings by Michael Gullick. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Rochester, New York: Boydell & Brewer, Inc. 2001. Pp. xlviii, 256; 50 plates. $170.00.) It is still not widely known that the cathedral church at Worcester houses one of the best-preserved book-collections to have survived from medieval England. There are few churches, colleges, or schools of medieval origin whose early libraries are more complete-amongst the cathedrals, only Durham has more pre-Reformation books-and none which displays the same remarkable degree of continuity, retaining books or fragments of books dating from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries in the same room (above the south aisle of the nave) which has stood for over six hundred years. The majority of the medieval books now in the collection were those copied, compiled, or otherwise acquired by the monks of the Benedictine priory that served the cathedral until 1540. But there is also an important group of manuscripts that came to the collection from other medieval institutions nearby, notably the Cistercian abbey at Bordesley and the mendicant convents at Chester, Hereford, Shrewsbury, and Worcester. The collection as a whole cannot be distinguished for the antiquity, beauty, or rarity of its books. But it does reveal the whole variety of texts-homilies and meditations, academic textbooks, Latin literature, preaching aids and sermons-which shaped the intellectual culture of religious communities across the Middle Ages. The wealth of the Worcester library has long been obscured by the inadequate and incompetent early catalogue produced by two canons of the cathedral in 1906. For this new catalogue, which follows his previous work on the Hereford and Lincoln manuscripts, R. M. Thomson has begun again from scratch, taking from his predecessors only the old shelf-mark system which classified the codices according to size, F (Folio) and Q (Quarto). Thomson's descriptions are exemplary, giving thorough but concise summaries of the physical structure and textual contents of each codex, together with details, where applicable, of the decorative and scribal work involved in their compilation. He pays particular attention to the medieval and later history of the books, and in many cases provides important new insights into their institutional or personal provenance. In a brief introduction, Thomson traces the origins and expansion of the collection, and drawing on the evidence of Worcester manuscripts held elsewhere as well as at the cathedral, he also examines the role of the monastic community in the production of books. A short essay by Michael Gullick serves to underline the importance of the bindings, of which almost half are medieval, including one pre-Conquest example (Q.5), ten locally made in a Romanesque style, and several identified as the work of Worcester monks. There are more Anglo-Saxon books surviving from Worcester than from England's other Benedictine houses, although many of them are now in other libraries. There are six Latin books still at the cathedral including copies of Eusebius, Gregory, and Smaragdus and a selection of unusual and early grammatical treatises (in MS Q.5). Also in this group is the eleventh-century sacramentary (MS F.173) that was made for Winchester Old Minster and several fragments of lost books, including leaves from a seventh-century copy of Jerome's commentary on Matthew, and those thought to be from the great bible given to Worcester by Offa of Mercia in c. …

The First Latin Book of Common Prayer: English Reformation in a Continental Perspective

The Ordinatio ecclesiae (1551) of Alexander Alesius is a little-known Latin translation of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Alesius had been resident in England in the 1530s and had kept in touch with his English friends when he returned to the continent, becoming professor of theology at Leipzig. The Ordinatio ecclesiae is, in many ways, a baffling document since it is not a rigid translation of Cranmer's rite. Instead, it contains passages which are both more Roman and more evangelical than the English liturgy. Following a detailed comparison of the English and Latin versions, the author attempts to place the Ordinatio ecclesiae in the context of Reformation politics on the continent during the years between the ‘Augsburg Interim’ and the resumption of the Council of Trent. He finds that the Latin Prayer book was intended to publicize Cranmer's reform measures as an example of a territorial Reformation in order to add a substantial voice to the chorus of evangelical churches calling for a free General Council. The conservative nature of the first Book of Common Prayer seemed ideally suited to further dialogue between evangelicals and reform-minded Catholics, but also to appealing for reconciliation and unity among Lutheran theologians in Saxony who had become divided on the issue of the Interim.

A Staff training program in Kyushu University Library : report on Seminar of Early Printed Latin Books

A Staff training program in Kyushu University Library : report on Seminar of Early Printed Latin Books