Manuscript Circulation Research Articles

Melanie Bigold. Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter. Romanticism and Cultures of Print series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 312. $90.00 (cloth).

Melanie Bigold. Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter. Romanticism and Cultures of Print series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 312. $90.00 (cloth). - Volume 53 Issue 1

A Companion to fifteenth-century English poetry

This collection of seventeen original essays by leading authorities offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the significant authors and important aspects of fifteenth-century English poetry. The major poets of the century, John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, receive detailed analysis, alongside perhaps lesser-known authors: John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenham, Peter Idley, George Ashby and John Audelay. In addition, several essays examine genres and topics, including romance, popular, historical and scientific poetry, and translations from the classics. Other chapters investigate the crucial contexts for approaching poetry of this period: manuscript circulation, patronage and the influence of Chaucer.

MELANIE BIGOLD. Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter.

MELANIE BIGOLD. Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter.

Seventeenth-Century Scribal Culture and "A Dialogue between King James and King William"

Kelly shows how political poems were circulated in manuscript in the later seventeenth century, not unlike some of Milton’s own political sonnets, which had a limited manuscript circulation, and were not printed in some cases some until many years after his death. The author of the anonymously-circulated poem, “A Dialogue between King James and King William,” is Charles Blount (1654–1693), a radical Whig author who wrote mostly in prose. In the manuscript poem, Blount imagines a conversation between King James and King William after James fled to Ireland, when William rose to power in what is known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Chaucer Abroad, Chaucer at Home:

Chaucer Abroad, Chaucer at Home:

Renaissance Society of America Convention, April 2010 The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680

This essay introduces The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680, a cluster of papers presented at the Renaissance Society of America Convention in 2010. Like the longer essays presented in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), ed. Scott-Baumann and Harris, this cluster argues that early modern women’s puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. This introductory essay investigates the concepts of both intellectual culture and puritanism, and also argues that the vibrant role of women in puritan intellectual culture has been neglected. The essays which complete the cluster provide case studies which highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture and reveal an intellectualism characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence.

Events and Texts: The Prologues and Epilogues of the Arbury Plays

Co-editor of this volume, Amy Scott, offers a close reading of the prologues and epilogues that accompany the versions of the four plays contained in the miscellany Arbury Hall 414 (and provides these metadramatic pieces in an appendix) . Contributing to recent scholarship that argues for the rich significance of such framing texts in early modern plays, Scott identifies a playwright who is both familiar with the genre from having attended London performances and attuned to the propensities of a rural and household audience and the ‘events’ that may have found it assembled. Further, she argues that the author invites and expects members of the audience to offer supplementation and emendation to the works. She thus places them in the context of the courtesy of a particular household (most likely at Arbury Hall) and in that of manuscript circulation among a midland circle.

Not ‘me – but a supposed person’: Emily Dickinson’s Non-Referential Correspondence

This essay takes issue with the notion of Dickinson as the poet of privacy and argues that her conception of authorship involved a concentrated effort to break traditional conventions and assumptions regarding private communication and literary production.  The uniqueness of Dickinson's poetry stems from its cryptic, deceptive, and fierce simplicity, and she achieves the illusion of simplicity through a meticulous attention to diction.  Dickinson consciously works with the established notions of public and private during the nineteenth century, and uses the assumed simplicity of the distinction to develop a "new department" of prose and poetry that centers on manuscript construction and circulation.  Dickinson's manuscripts reveal a sustained commitment to breaking the generic conventions of lyric poetry and epistolary prose.  Readers since the nineteenth century have searched within Dickinson's correspondence for a static, autobiographical "I" in order to make the lyric "I" of her poetry more clear.  However, assuming a static "I" proves problematic in both genres.  Readers have sought an explanation of the poetry in Dickinson's biography, and they often turn to the letters as evidence, but a static voice in the correspondence proves to be an illusion.  In contrast to the spontaneous, natural, and emotional letters that proper nineteenth-century women were supposed to write, Dickinson makes private communication artful.  Dickinson's body of work represents a meticulous exploration into the power of un-occasional, non-referential prose and poetry.

The Circulation of English Verse in Manuscript after the Advent of Print in England

This article examines the circulation of manuscripts of contemporary English verse in the first half of the sixteenth century and considers their relationship to the emerging print culture during this period. It considers the factors that seem to have limited manuscript literary culture during this period and those that seem to have led to its reemergence during the second half of the sixteenth century.

Proverbial Shakespeare: The print and manuscript circulation of extracts from Love's Labour's Lost

Shakespeare's work has been described as proverbial in two main ways: his works both used existing proverbs and created new ones. This analysis combines these two approaches by focusing on a classical proverb that Shakespeare re-phrased and that continued to circulate in Shakespeare's phrasing. This particular proverb from Love's Labour's Lost, “Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits” (1.1.26–27), is found in multiple seventeenth-century print and manuscript sources. This paper traces the inter-related oral, print and manuscript transmission of the “fat paunches” proverb in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare's phrase was popularized by early print dramatic extracts. Manuscript compilers were not reading Shakespeare's play, but were instead reading treatises on physiognomy and guides to improve their speaking and writing skills. The “fat paunches” couplet from Love's Labour's Lost did not circulate in manuscript because of the popularity of the play, but rather because of the dramatic excerpting that led this couplet to become proverbial.

Rethinking Jonathan Swift

Rethinking Jonathan Swift Ashley Marshall Louise Barnett , Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Pp. xi, 225. $75.00. Dustin Griffin , Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Pp. xiv, 260. $95.00. Stephen Karian , Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Pp. x, 274. $85.00. Sean D. Moore , Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. xi, 268. $65.00. [End Page 405] Claude Rawson , ed., Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Pp. xiii, 297. $95.00. The collective virtue of these five books—each illuminating and useful in its own right—is that they are largely devoted to something other than interpretation of much-studied Swift works. They are not just yet more re-readings of A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels. These studies attempt to see Swift in relationship to particular sets of contexts—events, milieux, people—and they involve either mapping largely uncharted territories or revisiting familiar subjects in refreshingly new ways. Stephen Karian's Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript is clear evidence of new directions. Karian's welcome study is the first to pay serious attention to the complex origins and transmission of Swift's texts; its object is in part to demonstrate "how the material existence of his texts affected their circulation and reception" (4). The Dean, as Karian bluntly concludes, "cannot be identified simply as a print author" (98). Karian's opening chapter explores what he identifies as three phases in Swift's career in print; chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to describing the various ways in which Swift's manuscripts circulated, as well as the different reasons and audiences for nonprint transmission. The last three chapters—on the complicated print and manuscript circulation of On Poetry: A Rapsody, The Legion Club, and Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift—demonstrate the utility of Karian's approach. In chapter 4, he explains that On Poetry as printed in 1733 was significantly censored, seeks to identify the most authorial version of the poem, and describes the variants in manuscript copies. Chapter 5 convincingly demonstrates that Swift was solely responsible for minor textual revisions of and additions to The Legion Club, arguing that the later revisions were Swift's own attempt to qualify his satire. In chapter 6, Karian calls attention to the "material text" of Verses on the Death, to the gaps and blanks (filled in by modern editors) that invited contemporary readers to infer meaning for themselves. Swift's (or Faulkner's?) use of this "device of textual absence" leaves us with an "open" text, and the implications are sobering: "parts of this poem existed in either no authoritative form or in multiple authoritative forms" (198, 196). Along the way, Karian challenges the usual attitude toward print versus manuscript culture, the tendency to regard print as "authoritative, public, stable, variable, and author-centered," and manuscript as "ephemeral, private, variable, and reader-centered" (5). Karian's study is learned and meticulous, and no interpretation of particular Swift works or groups of works can afford to ignore the textual issues to which he calls attention. One could wish that the book were a bit less cautious. The care with which Karian handles a complicated set of materials is vital to the utility of the enterprise. But his findings have major implications for how we talk about Swift's output and his self-definition as an author, and I would have loved to see Karian exercising his critical imagination and exploring the kinds of conclusions we might draw about Swift-as-writer. What does Swift's decision not to supervise, even indirectly, the publication of Gulliver's Travels suggest? How many major writers do not try to ensure that future readers would have correct and authorized versions of their works? Swift represents a different kind of author from most of the canonical figures we study, and attempting to apply to him our usual concepts of "textual authority" and "literary reputation" somehow never...

Le silence des livres. Manuscrits philosophiques et circulation des idées à l’époque byzantine moyenne

Thanks to the experimental nature of the conference where this research was originally discussed, the article offers a quick survey of the production, circulation and reception of manuscripts with philosophical texts in the Byzantine world, under a new methodology. In the first part, some of the most important manuscripts of philosophical texts are ‘stratigraphically’ analized: in this way, historiographical totem as the so-called «premier humanisme byzantin» or the «macedonian Renaissance» are discussed and revised. In the second part, I examine literary evidences about the circulation of philosophical works in the different periods of Byzantine history, prudently trying to connect them with the quantitative datas which can be inferred from databases as the Mertens-Pack 3 and Pinakes.

PARADIGM, INTERTEXT, OR RESIDUAL ALLEGORY: GUILLAUME DE DEGUILEVILLE AND THE GAWAIN-POET

In the context of a general revival of interest in allegorical and didactic literature, the last few years have seen a surge of attention to the works of Guillaume de Deguileville, author of a seminal pilgrimage trilogy that played a crucial role in the evolution of medieval and early modern literature and consciousness.1 Our sense of Deguileville 's impact on specifically English literature from those periods, first discussed in some detail by Rosemond Tuve in Allegorical Imagery, is being sharpened by recent research, and it is within this context that I propose the present discussion of Deguileville's influence on one of the 'canonical' English authors, the Gawain-poet.2 The possibility of a direct influence has not, so far as I am aware, been presented before, and I will therefore take some time to contextualize the connection I am proposing. My reasons for establishing the connection in the first place differ, I hope, from those driving the older type of 'source-hunting' studies so prominent in Gawain scholarship, and stem from my belief that the benefits of linking Deguileville with the English poet may be twofold. Firsdy, the connection helps to illuminate the pattern of reception, dissemination, and influence of Deguileville's works in late fourteenth-century England and in a wider European context; secondly, a study of the connection can yield some precious information concerning the Gawain-poet's poetic method and in particular his use of, and dialogue with, earlier texts.Before going on to discuss the details of the relationship between the two poets and their works, a broader context needs to be established, dealing with matters of circulation, reception, and the question of thematic and poetic affinity. A direct influence of Deguileville's Pelerinage de vie humaine on the Gawain-poet remains hard to establish with any definitive certainty. Written by the Cistercian monk Guillaume de Deguileville (or 'Digulleville') in two versions generally referred to as Vie 1 and Vie 2, from 13 3 1 and 1355 respectively, the work is part of a pilgrimage trilogy, widely read (around ninety manuscripts including one or more of the three Pelerinages, seventy-seven of them with a version of Vie), translated, and later adapted into prose and printed.3 The problems with tracing Deguileville's 'influence' on the Gawain-poet are the following: firsdy, as critics often observe, Deguileville constructs his allegory using the most universally familiar and successful Christian imagery,4 and intertextual relationships to any supposedly 'derivative' texts are accordingly difficult to demonstrate. Secondly, there is the problem of the Gawain-poet's 'art', and his tendency to appropriate and transform material in a highly personal and original manner.5 Thirdly, there is the evidence - or lack thereof - concerning the possible circulation of manuscripts of Deguile ville 's Vie in England at the time.To sum up the evidence on this last point, it has to be admitted that there is no firm indication available concerning the circulation of the trilogy in fourteenth-century England. Circumstantial evidence, however, is more encouraging. Deguileville seems to have suddenly become a widely read and translated author in the early fifteenth century in England and elsewhere. This fits within the wider history of the reception and adaptation of his trilogy on the Continent, where it was widely reworked, adapted, translated, and later printed, rapidly becoming a canonical work refashioned to serve as a reference work, a kind of vernacular summa in narrative form, circulating among a lay, often aristocratic readership.6 In fifteenth-century England Vie was translated at least twice, once in the first quarter of the century as The Pilgrimage of the LyJe of the Manhode, in prose (six manuscripts),7 and then in 1426 by Lydgate in verse (three manuscripts + one fragment).8 A third translation by Skelton is now lost, but its existence is generally accepted on the evidence of Skelton's own claims in the Garland of Laurel, lines 1219- 22. …

Association of Colony-Forming Units With Coronary Artery and Abdominal Aortic Calcification

Background—Certain bone marrow-derived cell populations, termed endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), have been reported to possess angiogenic activity. Experimental data suggest that depletion of these angiogenic cell populations may promote atherogenesis, but limited data are available regarding their relation to subclinical atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease in humans. Correspondence: Thomas J. Wang, MD, Cardiology Division, GRB-800, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114; Phone (617) 724-6158; Fax (617) 726-4105; tjwang@partners.org. *Authors provided equal contribution Conflicts of Interest / Disclosures None. NIH Public Access Author Manuscript Circulation. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 September 21. Published in final edited form as: Circulation. 2010 September 21; 122(12): 1176–1182. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.931279. N IH PA Athor M anscript N IH PA Athor M anscript N IH PA Athor M anscript Methods and Results—We studied 889 participants of the Framingham Heart Study who were free of clinically apparent cardiovascular disease (mean age, 65 years; 55% women). Participants underwent EPC phenotyping using an early outgrowth colony forming unit (CFU) assay and cell surface markers. Participants also underwent non-contrast multidetector computed tomography to assess the presence of subclinical atherosclerosis, as reflected by burden of coronary artery calcification (CAC) and abdominal aortic calcification (AAC). In this study sample, we examined the association of EPC-related phenotypes with both CAC and AAC. Across decreasing tertiles of CFU, there was a progressive increase in median CAC and AAC scores. In multivariable analyses adjusting for traditional cardiovascular risk factors, each standard deviation increase in CFU was associated with an approximately 16% decrease in CAC (P=0.02) and 17% decrease in AAC (P=0.03). In contrast, neither CD34+/KDR+ nor CD34+ variation were associated with significant differences in coronary or aortic calcification. Conclusion—In this large, community-based sample of men and women, lower CFU number was associated with a higher burden of subclinical atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries and aorta. Decreased angiogenic potential could contribute to the development of atherosclerosis in humans.

Paroles et silences

The aim of this paper is to present English literary works of the12th and 13th centuries. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was long considered a radical break in British history. Today stress is often laid on greater historical continuity – thus relativising the impact of the Conquest. Many historians, in particular, emphasise the re-emergence of a feeling of national unity as early as the mid-12th century. One can wonder whether one of the effects of the Conquest was to reduce English writers to absolute silence, and the answer is “no”. Of course a very large number of texts were written in Latin (though the Englishness of the chronicles is already striking) or in French. So what were the main features of Early Middle English literary works? These include a small manuscript circulation, the use of regional dialects, the copying of Anglo-Saxon prose works, the carrying on of the Anglo-Saxon homiletic and religious tradition in the West Midlands, and intense patriotism (for example Layamon’s Brut). Things changed with the years 1250-1350, when new types of literature began circulating. Though the religious literature characteristic of the previous period continued, codexes such as the Auchinleck Ms. or British Library Ms. Harley 2253 testify to the existence and high quality of secular romances and lyrics. And even though the influence of French language and culture remained strong, the triumph of English over French was on its way. At the beginning of the 14th century a new English nation had definitely come into existence.

‘To wound an oak’: the Poetics of Tree-felling at Nun Appleton

But I, retiring from the flood,Take sanctuary in the wood;And, while it lasts, my self embarkIn this yet green, yet growing ark1Andrew Marvell's poem, 'Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax', which searchingly explores the civilised retirement from public life of the Commander-in-Chief of Parliamentarian forces from 1645 to 1650, Sir Thomas, 'Lord General' Fairfax (1612-71), has, like Marvell (1621-78) himself, received a considerable measure of critical attention in recent years. Unsurprisingly, considering the poem features no fewer than eighteen stanzas on Nun Appleton's wood, a good deal of this attention, by scholars such as Chris Fitter, Diane McColley, Nigel Smith and James Turner, has focused on its environmental concerns,2 which include the felling of oak trees on Fairfax's idyllic Yorkshire estate, memorably effected by woodpeckers figuring the New Model Army: 'Who could have thought the tallest oak / Should fall by such a feeble stroke!'. Marvell, though, was not the only man to pen verses on Nun Appleton in the seventeenth century. As well as a modest offering from Lord Fairfax himself, 'Upon the New-built House att Apleton',3 there is another poem from this period concerned not only with this identical Yorkshire retreat but also, intriguingly, with the same theme of oak-felling. This poem is 'The Vocal Oak', subtitled 'Upon Cutting Down the Woods at Nun-Appleton',4 by Brian Fairfax (1633-1711), Thomas's cousin. Published in 1849,5 the poem has not been entirely ignored by literary critics. Turner quotes eight lines from it, arguing that Fairfax conveys the countryside as 'an object of capital investment and conspicuous consumption', and both Fitter and Smith make brief reference to it, if solely in relation to Marvell.6 Nonetheless, 'The Vocal Oak' has hitherto failed to receive the sustained critical examination which its literary, ecological and political moment merits. Written in 1679, the year following Marvell's death, Fairfax's poem provides a vivid illustration of seventeenth-century poetically framed attitudes to the exploitation of the countryside in general, and to deforestation in particular.7 In addition to its treatment of tree-felling as an intrinsically significant and wholly deleterious environmental event, the poem also demonstrates the richly symbolic uses to which responses to such activity could be put, in a Restoration era when the posthumous reputation of Lord Fairfax, for whom Brian had acted as private secretary from 1661, was being placed under growing strain. Though in many ways a strikingly individual piece, rooted in both the personal and political preoccupations of its day, 'The Vocal Oak' also betrays revealing parallels with Marvell's earlier poem, shedding new light on the manuscript circulation and contemporary popularity of a work which, like most of Marvell's poetry, was published posthumously in 1681.8 The poem does not rival Marvell's in ecological, any more than in literary, importance; rather, it operates as a satellite, orbiting around and in some ways dependent on it, yet at the same time exhibiting its own singular characteristics. This article, then, provides the first detailed analysis of 'The Vocal Oak', a close reading in which contemporary configurations of politics, environment and intertextuality are triangulated.Given the plethora of modern studies on seventeenth-century protoenvironmentalism, the wider context of a poem concerned, at least on one level, with deforestation needs little explanation. More than most other ecological anxieties, deforestation had been, and was still, a hotly-debated issue at the time of the poem's composition. Michael Williams gives the early modern British timber crisis an instructively European and Far Eastern context, suggesting that only Rome at its peak and northern China in the twelfth century match the scale of the problem experienced in Britain from the late sixteenth century onwards. Ken Hiltner has shown that early modern England experienced a host of environmental crises, including air pollution, acid rain, endangered species, wetland loss and, not least, deforestation. …

The Social Masochism of Shakespeare's Sonnets

This essay argues that the little evidence we have concerning Shakespeare's sonnets in manuscript circulation suggests that many of the poems—particularly those most charged with bawdy innuendo—are more socially coded than is often thought. While scholars of early modern manuscript culture have focused on Shakespeare's "young man" sonnets, which clearly express a hierarchical patron-writer relationship, evidence suggests that the "dark lady" poems were among those written for a gentlemanly audience. Read in this context, these sonnets' use of linguistic ambiguity and imagery of feminization presents a socially innovative persona: a figure whose charm is self-abjection.

Becoming Bluestockings: Contextualising Hannah More's ‘The Bas Bleu’

AbstractHannah More's poem ‘The Bas Bleu’ was the first account of the Bluestockings to be published from within the Bluestocking circle itself. It remained the most significant defence of Bluestocking ideals for many decades thereafter, years in which satirical depictions of the Bluestockings would predominate. This essay locates More's poem in the contexts of its original composition (1783), manuscript circulation and eventual publication (1786). The poem's transformation from a manuscript to a published poem exemplifies its particular significance as a public statement in which the Bluestockings attained prominence and celebrity.

From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology by Göran Blix

works, this collective volume is comprised of fourteen articles, written by some of the leading authorities on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, each of whom offers a unique point of entry into the patriarch of Ferney’s life and work. After a concise introduction by the work’s editor, Nicholas Cronk, Geoffrey Turnovsky examines how a young man named François-Marie Arouet transformed himself into the renowned “Voltaire.” Cronk continues this reflection on authorial identity by examining the question through the prism of Voltaire’s relations with the publishing industry of his time. In chapter three, David Beeson and Cronk look at eighteenth-century definitions of the “philosophe” and analyze the ways in which Voltaire corresponded to and differed from this figure. Miguel Benítez examines Voltaire’s familiarity with the circulation of clandestine manuscripts and the role they played in his writings. John Leigh shows how England, one of the many places where Voltaire lived in exile, influenced his ideas on topics ranging from politics to poetry. In his contribution, Russell Goulbourne analyzes Voltaire’s theatrical works as well as the notion of “theatricality” that lay behind the many roles he played in his own life. In “Voltaire as Story-Teller,” Gianni Iotti examines what he sees as the “parasitical” nature of Voltaire’s language. Philip Stewart offers a fine and pedagogically useful reading of what today is Voltaire’s best-known work, Candide. Catherine Volpilhac-Auger analyzes the revolution Voltaire carried out in historiography, while Christiane Mervaud makes a compelling case for viewing his correspondence as “his masterpiece.” Olivier Ferret retraces the pamphlets and ensuing polemics that marked Voltaire’s life. In a similar vein, John Renwick, in “Voltaire and the Politics of Toleration,” demonstrates how Voltaire’s core belief of accepting difference manifested itself in his public involvement in several eighteenth-century causes célèbres. Graham Gargett explores Voltaire’s knowledge and various interpretations of the Bible. And Daniel Brewer closes the volume with an investigation of what he calls the “Voltaire effect,” or the strategic recuperation, often for political reasons, of Voltaire by subsequent generations. What emerges from The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire is thus a dynamic portrait of a writer who, during his lifetime, donned many “masks.” Indeed, the motif of the mask runs throughout the volume, tying together the articles and highlighting the rich and variegated career of France’s first truly great intellectual. In this volume, Nicholas Cronk has succeeded in assembling a wide array of articles which pull away Voltaire’s various masks in order to reveal important facets of a life lived in letters. In sum, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire is a most useful work that will help students and teachers alike gain a better understanding of the man who compelled subsequent generations to refer to the eighteenth century as le siècle de Voltaire. Duquesne University (PA) Shane Agin BLIX, GÖRAN. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology. Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8122-4136-5. Pp. 310. $59.95. Focusing on French novelists, essayists, archeologists, and painters of the “long” nineteenth century (1789–1914), Göran Blix explores the counterphobic uses of real and virtual recreations of the distant past during a century of sudden, Reviews 161 violent, frequent political change. After the fall of the monarchy and the temporary eclipse of the Catholic Church, he explains, belief in the predictive power of historical precedents, and faith in a personal immortality, declined considerably. The collective constructs of “racial,” national, and human identity emerged as palliatives for existential insecurity. Modeled on paleontology and criminology, archeology developed during the final decades of the nineteenth century as a seemingly magical science that offered hope of reconstituting a vanished past. The total destruction of ancient Pompeii (near Naples) and its inhabitants in 79 AD, and its successful excavation nearly eighteen hundred years later (extensive from 1811 on), became the prime example of a triumphant recovery of an apparently lost past, of snatching constancy from the jaws of change. Many previous books have treated the problematic of cultural memory in nineteenth-century France, but Blix surpasses them through the wide range of...

THE TRANSMISSION OF BOETHIUS' "DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIAE" IN THE CAROLINGIAN AGE

The question of the transmission of Boethius' De consolatione Pbilosopbiae (V. 5 2 4) has given rise to more than one fascinating - but not always irrefutable - theory. There is nonetheless something of a consensus among Boethian scholars, who regard Alcuin (735-804) as the providential figure who rescued the famous prosimetrum from oblivion, and brought it to the attention of the Carolingian world.1 According to this hypothesis, Alcuin discovered in Italy one rare sixthcentury codex of the Consolatio, which he then brought to France. Copies were then made and circulated from one end of Charlemagne's empire to the other, from Tours to St Gall.2 Some scholars, however, have argued that Alcuin was not the first Anglo-Saxon to have known the Consolatio: Aldhelm (V.630,- 709), Bede (f.672- 735), and Tatwine (d. 734) are amongst those believed to have been familiar with the text before Alcuin was even born. In that case, at least one Consolatio manuscript must have existed in England, and Alcuin would have had no need to discover in Italy a text that had been long known in his home country.But is there any evidence that the Consolatio was known in Britain before 800, or even before 900? Is there any evidence that Alcuin played a part in the 'rediscovery' of the Consolation In the following pages, I would like to reassess the evidence and the existing theories, in an attempt to suggest that a centre of learning like Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, better known as Fleury, appears to be more closely involved in the transmission and exegesis of the Boethian masterpiece than any centre connected with Alcuin (York, Saint-Martin of Tours, or the court school of Charlemagne). In the light of what we know about the circulation of Consolatio manuscripts, it is perhaps easier to demonstrate that Boethius' prosimetrum reached England through Carolingian Francia, rather than the other way round.It is legitimate to believe that if anyone knew the Consolatio Philosophiae in Anglo-Saxon England before the time of Alcuin, the Venerable Bede did, for his learning far exceeds that of any other Anglo-Saxon scholar before or after him.3 In his Books Known to Anglo-Latin Writers from Alâhelm to Alcuin, J. D. A. Ogilvy suggested that Bede was familiar with the Consolatio? but he abandoned this opinion in later publications,5 and acquiesced that Bede did not know any of Boethius' works.6Nonetheless, this view was challenged by Fabio Troncarelli, author of invaluable studies about the circulation of Boethian manuscripts. In his Tradizioni perdute, Troncarelli puts up an entire scaffolding of arguments, trying to prove that the Consolatio was known in seventh- and eighth-century England, and that it started circulating in Europe due to the activity of insular scholars on the Continent.7 The second point is easier to disprove, and can thus be addressed first. The Italian palaeographer believes that most authors who knew the Consolatio in the ninth century were of insular origin, or belonged to abbeys of insular foundation.8 He quotes the names of Alcuin, the 'editorial patron' of the text, of Waldramus of St Gall, of Saxo, the author of the Annales de gestis Caroli Magni, and of Paschasius Radbertus, Sedulius Scotus, and John Scotus. Nonetheless, in addition to these, one may quote Theodulf and Jonas of Orleans, Modoinus of Auxerre, Walafrid Strabo, Lupus of Ferneres, Remigius of Auxerre, and many others who are not in the least of insular descent. Moreover, one must be reminded that all the insular scholars mentioned by Troncarelli were working on the Continent, and that in all likelihood they became acquainted with the Consolatio in the provinces where they were engaged in teaching and writing. Consequently, all one can say is that Carolingian scholars of Irish and British descent, among others, knew the Consolatio in the ninth century, and on the Continent.9Troncarelli's main demonstration is based on a comparison of passages from the Consolatio to riddles by Tatwine and Aldhelm, and to Bede's De die iudicii. …