Literal Copy Research Articles

Vincent Ferrer’s Vision: Oral Traditions, Texts and Imagery

All stories vary depending on the channel through which they are presented. In the Late Middle Ages, the transmission of a single fact or event differed significantly according to the means of communication. Since at least 1408, Dominican preacher Saint Vincent Ferrer (c. 1350–1419) used to talk, in some sermons, about the vision experienced by a nameless friar who, being healed in extremis by Christ, preached the arrival of Antichrist afterward. In 1412, Ferrer wrote a letter addressed to pope Benedict XIII including the story of this ecstasy, though with some changes. In 1429, in the parish church of Santa Maria Assunta (frazione Stella, Macello, Piedmont) the earliest depiction of this legendary episode was made. Ferrer was explicitly identified for the first time as the unknown friar mentioned in his sermons from 1408. Extraordinarily, a picture of the friar’s figure appeared beside a literal copy of some passages from Ferrer’s letter to Benedict XIII, incorporated in the same frescoes. This rich documentation reveals the importance of interactions between sermons, texts and images in shaping the narrative of Vincent Ferrer’s vision and its later memory.

La transmisión formal e iconográfica de modelos en cuatro ejemplos del arte renacentista en León

The iconological method lies on the basic idea of iconographic type, understood as the inluence that a previous visual or textual model has over a concrete artistic work. The discovery of four different models in four works from the Renaissance art of León (an engraving of Marcantonio Raimondi for a possible relief of Hércules; a german engraving of G. Pencz for a triumph of Venus; different drawings by N. Rosex for a decorative panel, and another engraving, by H. B. Grien, as a model for a St. Sebastian) supports the thesis of a general influence exerted by the Italian and German art over Spanish art during the Renaissance, and allows to differentiate among various kinds of influences: the direct and literal copy of the model, the formal variation and the stylistical transformation of an artistic tradition. In the four examples, it is not possible to guarantee or to refuse (only from the formal analyis) if the original simbolic meanings of the models remain in the influenced images.

Letter from the Guest Editor

Letter from the Guest Editor

Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures

Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures Christa Holm Vogelius (bio) Sarah Piatt might seem a strange case study for originality and mimicry in nineteenth-century women’s verse, given her own strained relation to poetic convention. Her layered dialogue, distancing irony, and sharp, often cutting turns produce an effect askew of polished gentility. There are children here, but they are not innocent; there is romance, but it often ends badly; there are paintings and beautiful things, but the sense they leave us is more somber depth than reflective surface. Nonetheless, it is precisely Piatt’s engagement with and resistance to convention that make her poetry worth thinking about through these terms. This essay considers Piatt’s use of mirroring images and mimicry to test the boundaries between original and copy. This testing leads organically to Piatt’s ekphrastic verse, which as a detailed verbal description of a visual artwork is both in its basic function a literal copy and one that also deals very explicitly with the imitative function of images as behavioral models. If the nineteenth-century woman poet was on the one hand associated with a transparent, artless sentimentality and a seamless embodiment of her own verse, and on the other with imitation and a failure to truly originate, Piatt’s poems, particularly her ekphrases, [End Page 300] present an escape hatch from the traditional Poetess mode. These poems work within and unsettle a tradition in which, as Yopie Prins explains, the Poetess was a “detachable figure that exceeded the work of any actual woman poet,” “a repeatable trope, a personification performed by female poets.”1 Piatt’s poems engage sentimentality, but they do so through irony’s distancing lens, complicating the notion of poetic embodiment—by, in Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s terms, “mak[ing] evident the fragmented nature of lyric utterance … [and] lay[ing] bare the contradictory connection between embodiment and representation.”2 At the same time, the obvious attention to craft evident in Piatt’s poems denies the role of the Poetess as an astute mimic of form. What develops from this engagement and resistance are poems whose layering of voices elude a particular conceptual center and copies that perpetuate with no clear original, in a nineteenth century version of hyperreality that slips past the basic ethics of poetic embodiment. Piatt’s verse, in other words, may seem to us innovative in its anticipation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century modes of thought and writing, but it achieves this effect through its direct engagement with nineteenth-century Poetess tropes. The gift that Piatt gives us, then—and Paula Bernat Bennett through her—is the ability to see this mode as not (just) a harbinger of modernity or postmodernity, but as a state of mind that was already deeply embedded in nineteenth-century conventions, already a part of the way that writers and critics talked with and about this poetry. This essay begins by discussing the vocabulary of nineteenth-century editorial writing in relation to both feminist theory and our contemporary critical conversations. The second section frames Piatt’s verse of mirroring imagery in this context, while the final section, on Piatt’s ekphrases and ekphrastic theory, argues that this work is emblematic of her poetics as well as representative of the contradictory demands on the nineteenth-century woman writer. [End Page 301] i: the terms of criticism: origination, mirroring, and mimicry In the preface to the first edition of The Female Poets of America (1848), editor Rufus Griswold opens with an assertion that to his contemporary readers must have seemed a platitude: “It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men.”3 Women’s verse, particularly the genteel newspaper and periodical verse that Griswold strove to consolidate, had a lot to prove in these early years of nationalist literary collection. Anthologies like Griswold’s attempted to define, however unsystematically, what should count as American literature at a point when writers and editors were pushing back against European models. And “genuineness of literary ability” often hinged on tenuous and subjective terms like originality at a time when women’s writing was undeniably dominated by both...

De nuevo sobre el manuscrito 274 BNC. La recepción del derecho romano en el Virreinato de nueva Granada [Colombia] (SAECC. XVII - XVIII)

In 2007 the author published a book on the reception of Roman Law in the Virreinato de Nueva Granada (Colombia), based upon Ms 274 of the National Library of Colombia (BNC) [1773 →]. The Ms 274 BNC develops in Latin and with question – answer methodology the two first books of Justinian’s Instituta. Ms 274 was used as first-year Jurisprudence handbook, in the study plan organized by the enlightened reform of the University of 1774 undertaken by the state attorney and “protector de indios” Antonio Moreno y Escandon. In 2015, the author found the book Ius civile abbreviatum (2nd reviewed impression., Barcinone, 1781) authored by Antonio Jugla y Font, in the Library of European Common Law of the University of Murcia. As the Ms 274 BNC is a literal copy of the first edition, the author compares both texts, the printed version and the manuscript copy.

EN 1992. Problemas en su aplicación y posibilidades de mejora

The Eurocodes, which are now the only valid structural code now in force in the majority of European countries, including France, Germany and the UK, and the idea, already under implementation, that the part dealing with structural design of the future Spanish Structural Code will be a literal copy of the Eurocodes, makes it evident that the Spanish engineering community must make an effort to obtain adequate training in the application of the Eurocodes and direct its energy at improving future versions of the Eurocodes, not at producing new national standards. In this paper some problems that have been detected in professional practice when applying Eurocode 2 to structural projects are described, as well as proposing some improvements to the current text. These suggestions for improvement have been transmitted through AENOR to Sub-Committee 2 of Technical Committee TC-250 of CEN. CEN (European Committee for Standardisation), is the European company charged, under mandate by the European Commission, with the review of the Eurocodes aimed at producing a new, easier-to-use and broader generation for the year 2020.

Picture Perception in Infants: Generalization From Two-Dimensional to Three-Dimensional Displays.

Two experiments investigated 9-month-old infants' abilities to recognize the correspondence between an actual three-dimensional (3D) object and its two-dimensional (2D) representation, looking specifically at representations that did not literally depict the actual object: schematic line drawings. In Experiment 1, infants habituated to a line drawing of either a doll or a sheep and were then tested with the actual objects themselves. Infants habituated to the sheep drawing recovered to the unfamiliar but not the familiar object, showing a novelty preference. Infants habituated to the doll drawing, however, recovered to both familiar and unfamiliar objects, failing to show any preference between the two. In Experiment 2, infants habituated to the 3D objects and were then tested with the 2D line drawings. In this case, both groups of infants showed a preference only for the novel displays. Together these findings demonstrate that 9-month-old infants recognize the correspondence between 3D objects and their 2D representations, even when these representations are not literal copies of the objects themselves.

Four Artists' Studios

Four Artists' Studios Ronald Paulson (bio) Over the past year, 2008–2009, there have been four significant exhibitions in New York—James Ensor at MoMA and Francis Bacon, Georgio Morandi, and Pierre Bonnard at the Metropolitan Museum. What the four painters—admittedly very disparate, Anglo-Belgian and Anglo-Irish, Italian and French—share is a hermetic studio, out of which they seldom ventured for inspiration. They used the materials they found or collected inside their studios—not the contingent, un-selected world outside—as the subject of their art. Ensor's studio (1880s–1949) was the attic of the building in Ostend in which he and his family—English father, Belgian mother—lived; underneath the living quarters was their antique shop. Extracted from the shop, cluttering the studio, were Carnival masks, human skulls, stuffed fish, seashells, old books, prints piled up on chairs, china, cups, pots, and worn-out rugs littering the floor. The walls were covered with Ensor's paintings of the same. All of this served as subject matter for the larger part of Ensor's oeuvre (he liked to paint and have himself photographed in his studio, "my favorite room"). He painted the occasional landscape and cityscape, the latter seen from his windows, but his reputation is based on the contents of his studio. Ensor inaugurated his career with huge graphite drawings (the equivalent of conventional history paintings) of religious subjects, primarily the sufferings of Christ, leading up to the eight-by-fourteen foot painting, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (Getty Museum, not in the show). The Entry has Christ surrounded by Carnival masks dredged from the antique shop, which update the equally distorted faces of Christ Mocked and Ecce Homo paintings by his Flemish forebears Bosch and Brueghel. Ensor's aim, reacting to his rejection by the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, was to parody and correct those official "Joyous Entry" paintings, scenes of heroes or victors or monarchs, Charles V and others, entering Brussels in triumph. With this painting he attempted to modernize Flemish art and, at the same time, bring Christ into collision with contemporary Belgium. But, closer to the ethos of his attic studio, at the center of the crowd he has replaced Christ's face with his own. Throughout his career he identified himself with such iconic figures, garnered from the objects in his studio, whether masks, pictures of Christ, or human skulls. From then on, keeping this huge canvas on one wall of his studio, he painted relatively small canvases, many of which he displayed on the [End Page 122] other walls. He reduced the huge history paintings to the modest still life and made the masks and costumes essential objects arranged on a table. These are not literal copies of masks (like those the Tiepolos painted in their Venetian Carnival scenes) but variations in which—grotesquely, in the original sense of that word—mask and human, animal and vegetable, meld. But they continue to tell the story of Christ Mocked in place of the mocking faces with Carnival masks. A middle face, sometimes unmasked, sometimes yet another mask, is mocked by masks on either side. Mostly this is Ensor the artist, in the position of Christ; or he is only a skull, balanced precariously atop a contemporary suit of clothes (or, in Ensor in 1964, merely an outstretched skeleton). Or Ensor gives himself the hat of a Rubens self-portrait, drawing attention to their similar beards, to stand out, as the beautiful face of Jesus stood out, amid the grotesque heads of the Bosch and Brueghel mockers. Or he shows himself, or a friend, playing Pierrot, alluding to his eighteenth-century countryman Watteau's painting of Pierrot surrounded by the other commedia dell'arte players in an Ecce Homo composition (Washington, National Gallery). Ensor mixes the conventions of commedia and Carnival, both in place of the moribund iconography of religion. Ensor tells us how all those objects in the antique shop terrified him as a child; he recalls the "strange stuffed animals and terrible savage weapons." His inner, or studio, plot is the infantile one of paranoia, which he renders sometimes with a rich...

PIERRE MENARD, AUTOR DEL QUIJOTE: BIOGRAFÍA DE UN LECTOR

In this story, Borges, long before Barthes, proclaims the death of the author, author is dead and the reader takes his place, This is possible through an irreverent of Don Quijote as practised by Borges, a reading based on theft and betrayal. Menard, when effecting a total citation of Cervantes' text, steals word by word, betraying likewise the notion of author and original. What Menard does is to write his own reading of the Quijote, which, although becoming a literal copy, is radically distinct in meaning, because it is always read from a cultural tradition that is often constructed. result is that there are as many Quijotes as readers of it. As supplements, the ideas of Pierre Menard as Cervantes' predecessor are explored, and the superiority of the reader over the author. The most difficult literary career is trhat of the reader, writes Macedonio Fernandez, secret source of all that is affirmed here.

Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere

In January 1863, The Trial of Effie Deans; Or, The Heart of Midlothian opened at the Westminster Theatre in London's West End and became an immediate critical success and box-office hit. Written by Dion Boucicault, the premier "sensation playwright" of the "sensational" 1860s, Effie Deans was an adaptation of Walter Scott's novel and featured several "sensation scenes," including a representation of Effie's trial that captivated audiences and reviewers with its air of authenticity. "Mr. Boucicault has aimed at a literal copy of a judicial proceeding so close to the legal practice," noted the Illustrated London News (ILN), "that the spectator feels as if present at an actual trial." 1 Sensation dramas like Effie Deans were all the rage in 1860s London, attracting vast crowds that marveled at tumbling waterfalls, speeding trains, and burning ships. What most astonished audiences, though, was neither the sheer showiness of such stage effects nor the increasingly sophisticated technology that made them possible. Instead, playgoers were amazed because sensation scenes seemed so real; they grew excited because they could feel as if they were really there. And they saw themselves as united in that response, a throng of individuals brought together by their shared excitement.

SHIPS ON ROMAN COINS

Summary More than 250 Roman coin types bear ships as their principal motif. These depictions cannot be assumed to be literal copies of Roman vessels. Their consistency and accuracy within each type and period must be tested to validate their use as historical documents. This having been done, a comparatively detailed picture of the form and development of Roman ships can be constructed from numismatic evidence. The closely datable nature of the evidence allows a more accurate assessment of the evolution of Roman vessels than is possible using any other data, and suggests that significant alterations need to be made to the accepted chronology of changes in Roman craft. Such alterations also have consequences for our understanding of the changing role of the Roman navy.

Alerting Signals and Detection in a Sensory Network

Detection theories are based on the proposition that nature designs our sense organs to recover signals from external noise. Not much credence is given to the idea that an essential part of the noise arises internally in conveying information to the brain or that the detected event may be an alert signal rather than a literal copy of the stimulus. Transmission is portrayed here as a birth-and-death process. New events are created and existing events are lost as messages pass from the sense organ to a central decision-making area. Messages are either alert signals or actual "images" of the stimulus formed by branching chains. In both cases, a telltale multiplicative noise appears at the output. We develop: (1) a branching-chain transmission mechanism, (2) its output counting distribution, (3) characteristic properties of branching-chain noise, and (4) examples of the effects of such noise on the discriminability of pure-tone signals.

Inigo Jones, Italian Art, and the Practice of Drawing

Inigo Jones, architect to Charles I and connoisseur of Italian painting, annotated Vasari's Lives and copied Italian figurative prints. His annotations to Vasari's advice on good disegno are connected with his attempt late in life to improve his skill as a draftsman. Although Jones followed the methods demonstrated in drawing manuals, he did not always make literal copies, and he added meaning to some of his drawings of heads—for example, two sketches that he identified as Socrates and Alcibiades, examined in detail here.

The effect of modality on long-term recognition memory

Two experiments examined the effects of visual and auditory modes of input on long-term memory. In Experiment 1, 40 subjects learned a 40-word list presented in a blocked or random fashion. In the blocked conditions learners were presented half the nouns in one modality followed by the remaining 20 words in the other modality (See-Hear or Hear-See). Subjects in random conditions also received half the list in each modality, but the presentation was random (Mixed or Mixed Reverse). Following a 6-min delay, subjects completed an 80-item visual recognition test. Analysis of these data showed significantly ( p < .05) greater recognition of words presented visually than those presented auditorily. Experiment 2 was designed to test the hypothesis that learners may visualize a “literal copy” of the stimulus item by controlling for the extent to which the recognition measure offered a visual cue. Two groups of 40 subjects were examined using the same procedure used in Experiment 1, with the exception that one group received a visual recognition test while the other was tested auditorily. These data showed that the lack of a visual cue hindered the recognition of visually presented words, while it had little effect on stimuli presented auditorily. The results of these experiments were interpreted as support for the hypothesis that physical characteristics of a stimulus may persist in memory well beyond immediate memory intervals. Subjects were seen to make modality-specific decisions by testing long-term memory for the presence or absence of a visual memory trace.

The Cruck-Built Barn of Frocester Court Farm, Gloucestershire, England

Structural analysis, supported by radiocarbon and tree-ring measurements, discloses that the timbered roof of the great Tithe Barn of Frocester, in Gloucestershire, England, does not date-as formerly believed-from the time of John de Gamages, abbot of the Monastery of St. Peter's in Gloucester (1284-1306), but is a postmedieval reconstruction of the original roof that perished in a fire early in the 16th century. On the other hand, the masonry walls from which this roof rises are those of the original structure. In medieval cruck construction the roof-supporting trusses were fully assembled on the ground (or in the case of "raised" crucks as in Frocester, on temporary platforms erected for that purpose) and from there reared into vertical position with the aid of pullies and ropes. The walls from which these trusses rose were brought to their full height only after this was done. The analysis of the roof of Frocester tells us a lot about the difficulties postmedieval builders encountered in this type of construction when facing the task of inserting the timbers of a new roof individually from above into an already completed system of walls. Although erected in a wholly unmedieval manner, the postmedieval roof of Frocester, however, may in design and general appearance be a literal copy of the original roof. In medieval England the cruck-truss found its densest distribution in territories settled primarily by Celtic peoples (west and Midlands). Its elegant curvilinearity was of special attraction to the Celtic mind. In the Lowlands with their overwhelming Anglo-Saxon and Norman population, the great aisled barns and halls of the Middle Ages were built in straight timbers in the traditional form of their continental homelands.

Brain and Behavior

Cognitive neuroscience is a new interdisciplinary approach to an understanding of mind-brain relations that combines cognitive psychology and neurological sciences. These two fields of study seek answers to many of the same questions and have methodological and conceptual contributions to offer one another. Further envisioned is the possibility of going beyond the of mutual contributions towards developing a unified, interdisciplinary science of human nature. The physiological basis for the storage of information in the nervous system-or the formation of memory-is an important problem that requires an interdisciplinary effort. One theoretical framework of cognitive psychology, the consolidation model for memory, states that information storage involves a sequential process, which begins with a short-term sensory store. The shortest of memory stores is the sensory register and is called the iconic store. Here sensory items are perceived and subsequent attention to material in this iconic store may lead to literal copy of the input and transfer to short-term store. Information can be maintained for only a second or two; and if it is not transferred to short-term stores, there is much information loss. Short-term memory, the next stage of processing, has a time duration measured in minutes and seems to have capacity limitations as well. Transfer of shortterm information to long-term stores may be accomplished through rehearsal, and long-term memory may last a lifetime. The transitions from one store to the next probably require neurochemical processes. Recent developments of this consolidation model suggest that shortterm memory may be the active state of long-term memory (Posner 1977). In this more unitary view of memory processes, any stimulus can have multiple representations including visual, tactile, phonemic, or semantic systems. Minimizing the distinction between short-term and long-term stores, this hypothesis emphasizes the existence of levels of human memory where depth of processing may play an important role. In this theoretical framework, preliminary analysis includes physical features as edges, angles, brightness, hue, pitch, and loudness. Later stages consist of recognizing patterns and matching these against stored patterns. A word, for example, is immediately processed phonemically and morphemically, only to trigger further semantic associations based on the subjects' experiences. This enrichment and elaboration of the word allow the subject to extract meaning, and of course, this depth of processing approach is not restricted to verbal material. A recent clinical experience with an elderly patient illustrates the disruption of the ability to choose and maintain an appropriate memory level. This man had great difficulties organizing the trivialities of his daily life. Formerly automatic events, such as putting on both shoes and tying them, or finding his way to his office, had become insurmountable chores. Forgetting the time and often his exact location, he frequently wandered to distant corners of the hospital. When confronted with the apparent aimlessness of his direction, he responded with a gruffness and indignation that befitted his former brilliance. Throughout his long life he had been the creator of a number of powerful scientific theories. His philosophical treatises had also gained him worldwide recognition; yet, at moments he could not remember the time of year and had only a vague glimmer of intuition regarding the reasons for his hospitalization. To the ordinary medical examiner he appeared hopelessly demented, but further analysis revealed several tantalizing possibilities. By establishing contexts with linguistic cues he verbally reconstructed past episodes about his life. For example, the mere mention of a former colleague prompted an emotive and accurate

Effects of imagining speakers’ voices on the retention of words presented visually

Subjects were introduced to one male and one female voice by a tape recording with instructions to attend to characteristics of the voices. Then 18 pairs of words were presented visually on slides. The subject's task during each 10-sec interslide interval was to repeat silently the pair of words over and over again in the male voice, in the female voice, or in the subject's own voice. A surprise recognition test for the words indicated that the words were more likely to be recognized if they were spoken in the same Voice at test as was used to repeat them during presentation. Recognition of the words repeated in the subject's own voice was not affected by the sex of the speaker at test. In Experiment 2, different speakers were used at test than those used by the subjects to repeat the words. The interaction between the sex of voice used at encoding and at test was again significant, but recognition was generally lower than in Experiment 1. It was concluded that it is not necessary to assume that subjects have literal copies of spoken words in memory but speaker's voice does form an integral part of the verbal memory code and its influence is specific to a given speaker as well as to a given class of speakers (male or female).

Are there long-term literal copies of visually presented words?

Evidence for the hypothesis that the appearance of visually presented words is stored in "literal copy" form is critically evaluated and shown to be inconclusive. An experiment in which students were required to retain information about zero, one, or two visual properties of words is reported. A strong version of the literal-copy hypothesis predicts that retention of both case and color should be equally good under instructions to remember one of these attributes and instructions to remember both. However, the results were inconsistent with predictions from this hypothesis. A model that assumes that each visual attribute is stored independently in abstract propositional form provided a good quantitative fit to the data.

Are there long-term literal copies of visually presented words?

Are there long-term literal copies of visually presented words?

Trade-off between memory for verbal items and their visual attributes.

Instructions to attend to the case and color in which words were presented led to improved retention of these visual attributes but depressed recognition performance. This trade-off between item and attribute memory occurred at three presentation rates (1.5, 5.5, and 10.5 sec/item), suggesting that visual attributes of verbal stimuli are rarely stored unless subjects expect that knowledge of physical form will be useful later. Visual attributes of high-imagery words were retained better than visual attributes of low imagery words by subjects instructed to attend to case and color, but not by subjects asked only to attend to word meaning. Implications of these findings for the hypothesis that visually presented verbal stimuli are stored as literal copies are discussed.