Manuscript Culture Research Articles

The Sahidic Tripartite Isaiah: Origins and Transmission within the Coptic Manuscript Culture

Abstract This study shows that the book of Isaiah was sometimes divided by Coptic scribes into three parts, each of them being copied individually into a separate manuscript. By surveying the available evidence, the author argues that this practice originated in the 4th century CE and was in use until the 8th century CE. The origins and eventual disappearance of tripartite Isaiah must be connected with the transformations that affected Coptic codices and scribal traditions from late antiquity to the medieval period.

Introduction to the special issue: The Jewish Bookshop of the World : Aspects of Print and Manuscript Culture in Early Modern Amsterdam To the memory of Shlomo Berger (1953-2015)

Introduction to the special issue: The Jewish Bookshop of the World : Aspects of Print and Manuscript Culture in Early Modern Amsterdam To the memory of Shlomo Berger (1953-2015)

Michelle Levy. Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

<scp>Michelle Levy</scp>. <i>Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain</i>

Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early Modern Organization of Knowledge. By Angus Vine

Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early Modern Organization of Knowledge. By Angus Vine

Les livres français dans la Norvège médiévale : connexions culturelles, religieuses et sociales

This article discusses the ecclesiastical, cultural, and political connections between Norway and France during the High Middle Ages (c. 1150-1320) and the traces left by these connections in surviving manuscript material, most of which is fragmentary. The establishment of Nidaros Archdiocese in 1152/1153 and the subsequent need for educated clerics, the emergence of universities and mendicant orders, and Norway’s integration into European networks of royal and ecclesiastical powers were the main processes facilitating the import and circulation of French-made texts and manuscripts. A selection of case studies, from decorated psalters to law books, illustrates the variety and importance of these Franco- Norwegian relations, as well as their impact on manuscript culture in medieval Norway.

Записи в купеческих приходно-расходных книгах: к вопросу о развитии автобиографического жанра в рукописной культуре XVIII — начала XIX вв.

Статья посвящена одной из разновидностей ранних памятников автобиографического жанра – приходно-расходным книгам, содержащим в своем составе автобиографические заметки. В период Раннего нового времени в России отмечено активное развитие рукописной книжности, что в свою очередь обусловило возникновение и дальнейшее развитие светских жанров: мемуаров, автобиографических записей и дневников. В XVII в. зачатки светских жанров могли возникнуть только в среде немногочисленно интеллектуальной и правящей элиты Русского государства. В XVIII столетии наблюдается дальнейшая демократизация рукописной культуры. Ранние произведения автобиографического жанра, созданные в городской среде, зачастую представляли собой не отдельные сочинения, а небольшие по объёму тексты, находящиеся в составе других памятников (к примеру, фамильных летописцев и хронографов) или записи на полях и чистых листах рукописей. Примерами таких памятников являются купеческие хозяйственные книги XVIII – начала XIX вв. – «Книга записи капитала» О. Д. Белянкина и записная книжка Колеговых. В статье рассмотрены общие и отличные черты автобиографических записей в тексте обоих памятников: время их появления, содержание и формуляр, сюжетное разнообразие. Анализ изучаемых купеческих приходно-расходных книг позволяет понять, как в рамках традиционной русской рукописной книги зародился и развивался автобиографический жанр – явление литературы нового времени.

Recent publications on Indonesian manuscripts

The fascinating yet still underexplored world of manuscripts hailing from Southeast Asia, including the nation-state of Indonesia, has received some impetus in recent years, thanks to the new appreciation for this written heritage by state and non-state actors both within and without the country. Traditionally perceived as a dry (and hardly scientific or ‘intellectual’) subject that was the preserve of a small circle of specialist librarians, codicology (and Asian codicology in particular) has become a vibrant discipline, with several teams of scholars and projects worldwide focusing on manuscripts as objects, as well as on ‘manuscript cultures’. These projects and approaches duly recognise the role of manuscripts (and not onlytexts) as prime carriers of cultural and civilisational values across time and space, as well as their relevance for the culture and identity of contemporary societies. This essay reviews some recent publications on Indonesian manuscripts catering to researchers as well as the wider public.

The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: The Manuscript Culture of Late Medieval England

The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose <i>Brut</i> Chronicle: The Manuscript Culture of Late Medieval England

The Allographic Use of Hebrew and Arabic in the Samaritan Manuscript Culture

Abstract In the 10th/11th century, Arabic became both the vernacular and literary language of the Samaritan community, along with the two languages of the liturgy: Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic; Samaritan Neo Hebrew was also employed at this time mainly for the composition of religious poems. Together with the introduction of the Arabic language, the Samaritans started to use the Arabic script, along with the Samaritan Hebrew formal and cursive scripts. In comparison with the use of the Arabic script, the Samaritan Hebrew script served mostly for more sacred texts or was employed in order to mark certain textual passages with a higher degree of sacredness. Allography of Arabic in Samaritan Hebrew letters is attested in Samaritan manuscripts since the beginning of the 13th century, although it was introduced most probably at an earlier date. This allography is employed mainly for the Arabic translation of the Samaritan Torah, for the Arabic translations of prayers, and for Samaritan Hebrew or Samaritan Aramaic quotes in Arabic texts. The replacement of Arabic by Modern Israeli Hebrew as the primary vernacular among the Samaritans living in the State of Israel led to a revival of Samaritan Hebrew allography for Arabic texts in the 20th century, mainly in festival poems in Arabic language, which are performed at certain occasions, although not all congregants are still familiar with the Arabic language and script. A close analysis demonstrates that Samaritan Hebrew allography of Arabic is the result of an intense contact between two scribal cultures, both of which were well established amongst the Samaritans. The allographic use of the Samaritan Hebrew script for writing Arabic texts originally did not aim to make these texts more accessible to Samaritan readers, but rather was employed to mark Arabic texts as belonging to the realm of the sacred.

Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire ed. by Susanna Fein

Reviewed by: Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire ed. by Susanna Fein Daron Burrows susanna fein, ed., Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire. Manuscript Culture in the British Isles Vol. 9. York: York Medieval Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 310. isbn: 9781903153901. £60. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is a commonplace book generally thought, on the basis of manuscript-internal evidence, to have been copied by Richard de Grimhill II in Worcestershire in the years 1281–83. As a voluminous trilingual anthology preserving a heterogeneous mix of prose and verse texts, its importance to our understanding of the Anglo-Norman, English, and Latin literary culture of medieval Britain has long been recognized, and the impetus provided by the EETS printing of a black-and-white facsimile of the manuscript (ed. Tschann and Parkes, 1996) and, more recently, by the full-color publication on Digital Bodleian has inspired this worthy collection of essays seeking to build upon the earlier work on the manuscript by Stengel, Miller, Meier-Ewert, Corrie, and others. [End Page 124] Delbert Russell argues that the copy of Wace's Miracles de seint Nicholas, with its combination of the terrestrial and the celestial, forms a bridge between the unequivocally pious and the sometimes shockingly secular material transmitted in the manuscript; he also offers a stimulating orthographical analysis which contributes significantly to the study of the copyist's scripta. Maureen Boulton relates the opening six items of the manuscript, a variety of pastoralia, to the enthusiastic promotion by English bishops, such as Cantilupe of Worcester, of the canons of Lateran IV, convincingly identifying minor modifications which ensure that the doctrinal material is entirely consonant with the cura animarum in the late thirteenth century, and demonstrating that these concerns are reflected in various of the explicitly religious Anglo-Norman texts which appear later in the manuscript. Sheri Smith discusses the organization and significance of the thirty-one prayers in the manuscript, appearing in six clusters organized in various ways by language and theme; an important conclusion drawn is that Anglo-Norman features as the principal language of prayer, with English a later addition. Marjorie Harrington explains the practical emphasis of the first section of the manuscript, as it moves from pastoralia for the soul to medical recipes for the body, and thence to texts including charms, experimenta, and prognosticatory material. Jennifer Jahner concentrates specifically on the experimenta—a combination of practical tips, chemical experiments, and party tricks—as a possible metaphor for the project of the manuscript itself, an exercise of trial and error as the scribe attempts to craft a new form of book. David Raybin argues that the French version of Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis, as the longest text in the manuscript, occupies a pivotal position in introducing a series of literary texts; separate appendices provide a concordance of the French and Latin narratives, and editions with translations of the tales seen as analogues to The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Marilyn Corrie exposes the wealth of misogynistic material present in the manuscript, hypothesizing that the Digby compiler's choices in this regard may have reflected his own predilections. Neil Cartlidge focuses on the numerous texts across the manuscript featuring an antagonistic relationship between men and women, concluding that 'the shared insistence on the inevitability of gendered antagonism is in the service of a determined playfulness, with gendered experiences and gendered perspectives being mined, in effect, as a source of sociability' (p. 161). Susanna Fein summarizes the Middle English content of the manuscript, drawing attention to the patterns of organization and providing an inventory of texts cross-referenced with other manuscript copies, as well as editions with translations of The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Jenni Nuttall considers the use of paratextual features to highlight verse structures, with particular attention to the scribe's distinctive use of tie-lines. J.D. Sargan offers a detailed analysis of the numerous forms of colored initial 'A' found in the manuscript, comparing the scribe's experimentation with attested types to a jazz musician improvizing on the basis of learned structures. John Hines and Melissa Julian-Jones...

The European Book in the Twelfth Century ed. by Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thompson

Reviewed by: The European Book in the Twelfth Century ed. by Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thompson Joanna Fronska Keywords Twelfth century, book production, paleography, codicology, Manuscript Studies Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thompson, eds. The European Book in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 434 pp. + 44 b/w illustrations, 1 table. $120 ISBN: 978-110-71-3698-4. The European Book in the Twelfth Century is a collaborative venture. A team of manuscript scholars, mostly leading experts in their respective fields, give a comprehensive overview of the production, use, and typology of manuscripts in the long twelfth century. Their main focus is on materiality. The twelfth-century book is approached as an object, but an object with cultural, religious, and intellectual implications. A common thread of the contributions shows how the way in which the text is inscribed on the page, its articulation, paratext, format, and even a morphological relation to its predecessor within the textual tradition, reveal its intended use. Why the twelfth century? Since the publication of Charles H. Haskins's The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Harvard University Press, 1st ed. 1927), this age of renewal, revival, and reform has continued to fascinate and inspire. Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thomson followed the footsteps of Robert L. Benson, who in 1977, in homage to Haskins, gathered a collection of essais de synthèse on the intellectual and cultural shifts and developments during the period (Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, Oxford, 1982). While Benson envisaged a broader synthesis, these two editors have focused instead on manuscript culture alone, aiming to expand the scope of their project beyond the strictly defined "Renaissance of letters." It was not only the emergence, rediscovery, and translation of new texts, but also the [End Page 203] dramatic increase in production of books and their new codicological features that justified their choice. However, despite the more inclusive title, they largely maintained the geography of the "twelfth-century Renaissance." The manuscripts analyzed mostly represent northern France, England, and the German Empire, with an excursus toward northern Italy, limited almost exclusively to the production of law books. Yet, the twelfth century is the first period in European medieval book history that, thanks to existing artifacts and documentary sources, allows us to study manuscript production and the dissemination of texts across the entire Latin West, from Scandinavia and Poland to Spain and Portugal. The authors' choice makes it evident that studying peripheries with their scarce and often fragmentary material is by far less exciting. The book is divided into three sections. The first one, "Book Production," encompasses all aspects of the fabrication of manuscripts, including the preparation of parchment, the choice of format and layout, and the typology of bindings (Kwakkel and Thompson). Then it tackles the evolving script of twelfth-century codices, focusing primarily on the transition between Caroline minuscule and the somewhat organic emergence of Gothic script (Kwakkel). It continues with two complementary chapters on decoration (Martin Kauffmann) and organization of the scriptoria (Thomson) in the period when the work of a scribe and an artist often mingle and nearly all pictorial elements are part of the text and its proactive layout. The second part, "Readers and Their Books," focuses on users and their engagement with manuscripts. Constance J. Mews talks about books collected by individual scholars, stresses the importance of scholarly networks, and gives insight into the acquisition of knowledge by analyzing the contemporary "text criticism" or exegesis. Teresa Webber gives an excellent overview of the ways the books were stored, classified, and accessed in religious houses. Finally, Jenny Weston and Mariken Teeuwen present the reading and annotation practices of twelfth-century readers. The third and longest section, "Types of Books," is centered on texts, the ways they were inscribed in codices, and the typology of manuscripts in which they were transmitted. In other words, the essays it gathers trace the [End Page 204] history of texts through a codicological lens. In his seminal work, Haskins listed among the key aspects of the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century: "the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman...

Angus Vine, Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early Modern Organization of Knowledge

Angus Vine, Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early Modern Organization of Knowledge

The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia by Simone Pinet

Reviewed by: The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia by Simone Pinet Mary Jane Kelley KEYWORDS Mester de Clerecía, Libro de Alexandre, Libro De Apolonio, Libro De Fernán González, Cartography, Translation, Economics, Maps, Medieval Spain, Rhetoric, Medieval Literature simone pinet. The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia. U of Toronto P, 2016, 191 pp. Each of the three components in the subtitle of Simone Pinet’s new book on the Spanish mester de clerecía corresponds to one of three interrelated chapters that together define the task of the cleric. Pinet reads outward from the text to the scriptorium library to the medieval Iberian world in order to identify the intellectual, economic, and political contexts that shaped the Libro de Alexandre, Libro de Fernán González, and Libro de Apolonio. The result is a remarkably fresh conception of clerical narrative fiction from thirteenth-century Spain. The book opens with an intriguing thirty pages of manuscript images including medieval maps and other organizing diagrams, such as horseshoe arches and rotae. As they progress through the book, readers learn to interpret these drawings through a newly acquired literacy in which Pinet schools us. One measure of the book’s success is the satisfying familiarity with which we approach the images our second time through. The same can be said for the introduction, in which Pinet suggestively anticipates showing “how cartography served as a source . . . for the rhetorical invention of fiction” in chapter 1 (8), how the Tower of Babel provides “a point of entry . . . to the political potential in the figure of the cleric as translator” in chapter 2 (11), and how “contemporary practices and linguistic registers belonging to the sphere of economics are translated into a rhetoric that can negotiate increasingly complicated courtly politics” in chapter 3 (12). All of this becomes clear in the pages that follow. Chapter 1, “The Cleric’s Compass,” argues that the medieval discipline of cartography informs various scenes in the Libro de Alexandre, in which the poet maps with words. Readers of Pinet’s Archipelagoes (2011) will recognize and once again appreciate her ability to synthesize cartography with other medieval disciplines and bring it all to bear in insightful textual analysis in a specific literary context. In order to make her point through a detailed reading of the Alexandre in the second half of the chapter, Pinet first offers a history of mapping and its function in manuscript culture. A chronological study of maps appearing in manuscripts from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries reveals an evolution of function from [End Page 131] simple illustration of the three divisions of the world in T/O maps to a highly rhetorical language in mappamundi that parallels learned prose in its use of tropes such as abbreviatio, amplificatio, and digressio. When Alexander lands in Asia, the poet launches into a cartographic digression based in part on Gautier de Chȃtillon’s Alexandreis, but, Pinet suggests, an additional source for the material of unknown origin may have been an actual map, whose graphic components would have triggered associations in the clerical poet’s memory and inspired him to supplement further his source text. Later in the poem, in the ekphrasis on Alexander’s shield, the poet includes a detailed description of a mappamundi that both reviews and anticipates themes and action in his story. Based on that passage, Pinet builds an eloquent reflection on the interplay of visual and verbal representation, as well as the role of the artist/cartographer/author and the interpreter/observer/reader, both within the text and without. Map-making and authorship of narrative fiction are parallel endeavors, especially in the context of thirteenth-century Spain. Chapter 2 turns to translation as another way to describe clerical authorship and which, similar to mapping, involves more than meets the uninitiated, twenty-first-century reader’s eye. The chapter title, “Bricks and Mortar,” refers to the rhetorical materials that clerical authors had at their disposal for constructing, or translating, texts in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The first half of this, the most challenging of the book’s...

Western Europe in the Ottoman World: Media, Mediation, and Intermediaries

Western Europe in the Ottoman World:Media, Mediation, and Intermediaries Humberto Garcia (bio) Alexander Bevilacqua The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 2018 xv + 340 pages; ISBN: 9780674975927 John-Paul A. Ghobrial The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull oxford: oxford university press, 2013 xvi + 192 pages; ISBN: 9780199672417 Daniel O'Quinn Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815 philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2019 468 pages; ISBN: 9780812250602 as one of the most powerful, expansive, and resilient empires in history, the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1300–1922) has attracted considerable attention among scholars who have elaborated on Donald Quataert's insight into the "truly intimate way the Ottomans became part and parcel of everyday European life."1 From coffee and coffeehouses to tulips, percussion instruments, and smallpox inoculation, [End Page 199] this empire's material exports helped make Europe European. After all, the House of Osman, hailing from Islamic and Turkic Anatolia, considered itself the heir of Rûm, comprising the former Roman and Byzantine territories.2 And for centuries, this dynasty was intricately bound to its western neighbors through trade, diplomacy, and war. The three monographs reviewed here shed further light on these complex linkages by considering how various textual, oral, and pictorial media fostered cross-cultural communication and knowledge making in the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. Although examining different cultural artifacts and grounded in different historical archives, Alexander Bevilacqua, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, and Daniel O'Quinn offer complementary accounts for why the culture of news, the advent of Arabic-Islamic studies, book history, and the visual arts cannot be adequately understood from within a Eurocentric or orientalist paradigm. Movable-type print technologies, primarily printed books, have long been seen as the main vehicles by which people in Britain and Europe received information about the Ottomans and formulated knowledge about them. In particular, travel literature, the Oriental tale, and plays have been privileged in explanations of how this multiethnic Islamic polity came to be known alternately as Christendom's scourge, a friendly trading partner, or an object of envy.3 The ways in which knowledge was disseminated west depended on the travelers, diplomats, merchants, renegades (Christian converts to Islam), and dragomans (official interpreters) whom scholars have treated as the chief intercultural brokers—the polyglot go-betweens who regularly transacted with or worked for Ottoman authorities.4 But connecting this east–west informational nexus primarily to print and focusing almost exclusively on official [End Page 200] and semiofficial actors has had the unintended effect of devaluing other media and intermediaries. In The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull, Ghobrial brings this neglected mediation to the fore. His monograph makes visible the oral, epistolary, and scribal communications from Istanbul that collectively informed early modern news in such capitals as London and Paris. Rumors circulating in or about the Sublime Porte and relayed through various Ottoman subjects, including priests, doctors, scribes, servants, and harem women, were integral to European news genres and newspapers in the late seventeenth century. In The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment, Bevilacqua describes how this information flow nurtured the formation of Arabic-Islamic scholarship, creating a community of European scholars who shared a humanistic investment in, and even a kinship with, Muslim peoples, empires, and histories despite their own Christian biases against this religion and its founder, Prophet Muhammad. Although Bevilacqua's aim is to center the underexamined Catholic contribution to this republic, he also shows the extent to which European publications on Islamic topics relied on oral and manuscript culture in Istanbul and the Ottoman bookdealers, scholars, and translators who made this ambitious academic enterprise feasible. Extending this intellectual transmission to British, French, and Dutch visual and performative mediums, O'Quinn's Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815 makes a cogent case for how the eighteenth-century discourses of orientalism and philhellenism were coproduced by European painters, draftsmen, engravers, book illustrators, and writers in Ottoman lands and with the assistance of Ottoman guides, interpreters, soldiers, and artists. The rigorous...

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray Amy Sopcak-Joseph (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Print culture, Print production, Book history, Cultural history The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860. Edited by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 712. Cloth, $135.00). [End Page 763] A volume with the name “Oxford History” imprinted on it often evokes a specific vision: a weighty tome with hundreds of pages between its boards and a title embossed in neat gold lettering on the wide spine. The book likely sits on the shelf of a personal or university library. This staid vision is the opposite of the kinds of reading matter, and implied readers, that US Popular Print Culture to 1860 takes as its subject in its forty chapters. The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture is a nine-volume series; Volume 5 is the third to see publication. In it, editors Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray offer up an interdisciplinary set of forty-one contributors from history and literature departments as well as schools of communication and library and information sciences. The result is a collection that not only contextualizes a diverse array of popular texts but also expands the boundaries of what forms constituted “popular print” to begin with. The entire Oxford series centers on the question, “What kind of reading was ‘popular reading’?” (61). The editors of Volume 5 intend to upend any quick and easy answer that their own readers might have in mind. Zboray and Zboray charge that the field of book history in the United States, with which these essays are in conversation, is “too top-down, value-laden, object-centered, supply-sided, processual, and restrictive for a history of popular print culture” (5). While Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin might have sold more copies than any book except the Bible, the Zborays’s volume moves away from privileging bestsellers and even the book form itself. US Popular Print Culture to 1860 strives instead to take cues from early American readers and embraces a capacious definition of “popular print.” In this telling, any kind of text that readers often engaged with falls under the scope. This includes imprints that were produced cheaply and inexpensively for wide distribution. These chapters, however, are attentive to how “alternative literacies” contributed to popular reading (61). Early Americans read letters and wampum belts, copied lines into commonplace books that they circulated among friends, attended lyceum lectures by well-known authors, and viewed commercialized pictures. The editorial decision to focus on the intersection of “popular” print with these oral and manuscript cultures distinguishes this volume from another epic undertaking on the subject, the multi-volume A History of the Book in America series produced in the 2000s by the American Antiquarian Society and published by the University of North Carolina Press. This volume is divided into four parts that are carefully crafted to avoid conveying a progressive narrative or imbuing certain genres with [End Page 764] significance over others. The editors stress that the four parts emphasize “stratification” and that much of the content introduced in early chapters “remains valid throughout ensuing chapters” (10). Within Parts II through IV, chapters appear in alphabetical order to avoid the appearance of ranking each subject’s importance. Such organization drives home two primary goals of the volume. First, Zboray and Zboray take issue with the argument that the history of print in the British North American colonies and the early republic could be characterized by a shift from “scarcity to abundance” (7).1 Second, they demonstrate significant continuities in the production, distribution, and usage of popular print amid technological, economic, and cultural changes. Parts I and II provide a baseline understanding of the production and distribution of texts as well as the genres familiar to early Americans. Part I, “Foundations,” includes synthetic overviews of staple topics of book history: print and book production, authorship, literacy and education, and the circulation of print from the colonial period through 1860...

Vernacular Manuscript Culture, 1000–1500 ed. by Erik Kwakkel

Reviewed by: Vernacular Manuscript Culture, 1000–1500ed. by Erik Kwakkel Hannah Morcos Keywords Manuscript Studies, paleography, codicology, vernacular languages, medieval Erik Kwakkel, ed. Vernacular Manuscript Culture, 1000–1500. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Book Culture 4Leiden: Leiden University Press/University of Chicago Press, 2018. 278 pp. + 21 color plates, 25 black and white illustrations. $45. ISBN: 978-908-72-8302-5. C urated by the dynamicErik Kwakkel, this wide-ranging collection of essays on vernacular manuscript production belongs to a series that "aims to discuss material features of manuscripts in relation to the cultural context of their production" (11). Featuring contributions by eminent scholars as well as early career researchers, the chapters focus primarily on the vernaculars of northern Europe, but also include traditions less familiar to the mainstream of manuscript studies, namely Frisian and Icelandic book production. Moreover, the textual contents comprise material often at the peripheries of literary studies, such as prayers and legal texts. Together this contributes to a broader and more nuanced presentation of book production across Europe. The collection begins with Kathryn A. Lowe's intricate study of the copies of Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralisassociated with the cathedral church of Worcester. By placing the philological and paleographical evidence in historical context, Lowe provides new insights into the reading and copying of this important patristic text in Latin and Old English. In particular, she demonstrates the important role of Wales for its transmission in Latin, [End Page 214]offering further evidence of the strength of Latinity in Wales during the ninth-century Viking raids. Lowe's principal focus is Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 431, a Latin copy of the text started in the early eleventh century and completed (and corrected) in the early twelfth century. Among the additions to the manuscript page are thirteenth-century annotations by the so-called Tremulous Hand of Worcester, who referred to it while working through two tenth-century Old English copies of the text. Lowe demonstrates how the exemplar of Hunter 431 was probably Welsh, containing a system of abbreviations unfamiliar to the original scribes. Lowe thus reveals how even at Worcester (a "bastion of learning") they "had to look elsewhere in order to acquire copies of key patristic texts in their original language" (44). In the subsequent chapter, Nigel F. Palmer provides a magisterial overview of manuscripts and fragments containing Middle High German prayers copied between 1150 and 1250. Palmer distinguishes this corpus from the later vernacular prayer books that "assert themselves as a major component of German literature" (54). He traces the beginnings back to the insular tradition epitomized by Anselm of Canterbury, who played a key role "in the emergence of the 'prayer book'" (55) and whose Latin prayers were circulated and translated in German-speaking lands. In the twelfth-and thirteenth-century manuscripts under investigation, Palmer discovers a small "network" (70) of widely circulating German-language prayers often added to existing Latin collections. He traces evidence of female ownership and identifies a context of close interaction between wealthy families and the monasteries where the books were copied and illuminated. The chapter includes a useful inventory of the thirteen manuscripts in the corpus (73–85), as well as numerous figures and four-color plates. Through this important contribution, Palmer lays the groundwork for more extensive investigations of the corpus, while demonstrating its significance for our understanding of early medieval German literary culture. The third chapter jumps forward to consider rubrics in the manuscripts of Jean Froissart's Chroniques. Godfried Croenen challenges the assumption that rubrication was a standard feature of late medieval manuscripts and calls for "a better understanding of the precise dynamics, chronology, and geography" of their "generalized" presence in books (105). Beginning with [End Page 215]a useful survey of the medieval and modern (scholarly) uses of the term "rubric," he goes on to explore differences in practice across France. Croenen argues that Froissart did not compose the rubrics found in the manuscripts of his historical works. The impetus to introduce them is linked to Parisian modes of book production. Croenen compellingly articulates how rubrics became a conventional feature of Parisian vernacular manuscripts from the thirteenth century onward...

Women’s Household Drama: ‘Love’s Victorie’, A Pastorall’, and ‘The Concealed Fansyes’ by Mary Wroth, et al

MLR, .,   continuing ability to excite the reader’s mind just as he had in previous generations. We find, for example, that Juno turned back and to the Hours her rich-maned horse resigned, Who them t’immortal mangers bound; the chariot they inclined Beneath the crystal walls of heav’n and they in golden thrones Consorted other deities, replete with passions. (. –, p. ) Elsewhere, such rich poetic evocations of Olympian scenes may be starkly contrasted with the incisive accounts of hostilities beneath the walls of Troy: Idomeneus his stern dart at Erymas addressed, As, like to Acamas, he fled; it cut the sundry bones Beneath his brain, betwixt his neck and foreparts, and so runs, Shaking his teeth out, through his mouth, his eyes all drowned in blood; So through his nostrils and his mouth, that now dart-open stood, He breathed his spirit. (. –, p. ) Miola’s edition at last makes available the riches of this enormously influential translation for early modern Britain in a highly accessible and affordable publication . It constitutes an invaluable companion to the earlier publication in the series of Chapman’s Odyssey. B U/I. R. C. L., M 3 A H Women’s Household Drama: ‘Love’s Victorie’, ‘A Pastorall’, and ‘e Concealed Fansyes’. By M W, J C, and E B. Ed. by M S and S M. (e Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: e Toronto Series, ) Toronto: Iter Press. . xvi+  pp. $.. ISBN ––––. is volume is a welcome addition to the growing number of scholarly editions dedicated to early modern women’s dramatic writing. Since the publication of Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, ), edited by myself and S. P. Cerasano, there have been a further eleven editions published . ese range from anthologies, such as, Diane Purkiss’s ree Tragedies by Renaissance Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ) to single-text publications, such as Elizabeth Cary’s e Tragedy of Mariam (London: Arden, ), edited by Ramona Wray. Another variable is the editorial choice of whether to retain original spellings and remain as close to the original text or manuscript as possible, or to modernize the language in order to make the play more accessible for teaching and performance. e edition reviewed here is an original-spelling anthology. e text is divided into three parts: the General Introduction, jointly written by Marta Straznicky and Sara Mueller; Wroth’s Love’s Victorie, edited by Straznicky; and Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s A Pastorall and e Concealed Fancies,  Reviews edited by Mueller. e first section provides a comprehensive and scholarly introduction to the significance of household theatre and manuscript culture to early modern women writers. Straznicky’s Introduction to Love’s Victorie is similarly erudite , with an in-depth analysis of the Huntington manuscript, the version used for this edition. e Textual Notes reproduce unedited variants between the Huntington and Penshurst manuscripts, thereby allowing readers to access the conclusion to Act . Straznicky’s Introduction also includes some detailed close reading, for instance of the political references in Venus’s speeches, and an up-to-date history of editions and performance. e text itself is carefully edited, with the notes providing details of how Wroth made changes to the manuscript versions of the play. As such, this edition of Love’s Victorie will prove invaluable for researchers, especially those with no direct access to the originals. Mueller’s Introduction to A Pastorall and e Concealed Fancies provides a similarly thorough analysis of the Beinecke and Bodleian manuscripts. In particular, she highlights the ‘significant differences between the manuscripts’ (p. ). e two dramas are subsequently allotted separate introductions; the masque’s introduction looks at biographical details and the impact of the English Civil War, while the play’s explores the possibilities of intended performance. e final section of the Introduction looks at the aerlives of the texts, detailing editions and modern performances. e masque and play are based on the Bodleian manuscript. Like Straznicky, Mueller provides careful annotation with notes that make the differences between the two manuscript versions clear. However, the notes here are more extensive and wide-ranging. For example, Mueller points out that ‘Bracken’ may allude ‘to Elizabeth Brackley...

The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne ed. by Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette

Reviewed by: The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne ed. by Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette E. Amanda McVitty Fenster, Thelma, and Carolyn P. Collette, eds, The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. 360; 6 b/w, 1 line illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844594. This book is a Festschrift for Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, whose prolific scholarship on the French written, read, and spoken in medieval England has fostered much-needed interdisciplinary research into Britain’s plurilingual past. Its publication is a welcome intellectual and political intervention at a moment when Brexit has seen fervent claims advanced about England’s essential difference from Europe, and created a climate in which speaking English has become problematically entangled with the idea of being ‘English’. Felicity Riddy’s ‘Foreword’ notes that [End Page 208] as an Australian, Wogan-Browne ‘sees England with an outsider’s clarity: part of a small island that is closer to France than Tasmania is to mainland Australia; always mongrel and multicultural but caught up in a monoglot version of its own past’ (p. xiv). Approaching the French of England from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the contributors complicate and destabilize simplistic narratives about language and identity by providing rich explorations of Francophony and multilingualism across a breadth of literary, social, political, and commercial contexts and practices. Despite the diversity of subject matter, literary and archival sources, and methods represented—from close reading of a single literary text to data-driven analysis of government records spanning years—the volume is given a pleasing coherence through its underlying connections to the major thematic strands of Wogan-Browne’s work. Most of the contributions focus on texts and contexts c. 1100 to c. 1500, with chapters by Paul Cohen and Delbert Russell considering afterlives of the French of medieval England in early modern and nineteenth-century scholarship. Thomas O’Donnell, Emma Campbell, and Monika Otter engage with practices of translation, glossing, and translational ethics. Working across French, Latin, and English in scientific, literary, and musical manuscripts, the authors challenge the construction of linguistic hierarchies by emphasizing the co-presence of languages and their flexible uses in multilingual communities. Chapters by Fiona Somerset, Serge Lusignan, and Richard Ingham examine the cultural and political weight carried by French vocabularies and registers deployed within, respectively, political complaint poems; cross-border communications from the Anglo-Scottish Wars of 1295–1314; and the Early South English Legendary. Theoretically sophisticated studies by Christopher Baswell and Thelma Fenster extend upon Wogan-Browne’s pioneering work on women’s textual communities. Fenster offers a fascinating, if disturbing, account of the dissemination of anti-Jewish myths and stereotypes through French texts commissioned by aristocratic English laywomen and intended for the instruction of children. Baswell deftly integrates considerations of space, gender, and disability networks to develop a stimulating and original reading of the Lives of three women saints in the Campsey manuscript. Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and R. F. Yeager address questions of audience and illuminate intricate interactions between French and English languages in medieval literary texts, whether a chanson de geste that turns out to be ‘a Plantagenet celebration of Charlemagne’ (p. 100); the canonical Piers Plowman; or John Gower’s under-studied French poems. Turning from manuscript cultures to social contexts, W. Mark Ormrod and Maryanne Kowaleski draw on the considerable data of the ‘England’s Immigrants, 1350–1550’ project to investigate language acquisition and use amongst French-speaking immigrants to England at either end of the Hundred Years’ War. These chapters present invaluable empirical evidence for ‘daily linguistic encounters’ (p. 194) and for how people understood and experienced national and regional identities. Robert M. Stein’s posthumous [End Page 209] contribution, in the form of a short but dense conference paper, contemplates the ways territory and sovereignty were imagined in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman chronicles and poetry, with ‘important consequences for the whole course of the historiography of state formation or nation building’ (p. 273). Finally, Robert W. Hanning’s ‘Afterword’ brings the book to a satisfying conclusion, drawing together its diverse threads to highlight broader...

The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose ‘Brut’ Chronicle: The Manuscript Culture of Medieval England by Julia Marvin

The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose ‘Brut’ Chronicle: The Manuscript Culture of Medieval England by Julia Marvin

Editorial Introduction

Editorial| January 01 2020 Editorial Introduction Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel Southern California Emily A. Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published on visual culture in early modern South America and coedited Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches (Getty Publications, 2015). Engel is the founding associate editor of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2020) 2 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.210001 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Emily A. Engel; Editorial Introduction. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 January 2020; 2 (1): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.210001 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search If the prescription for art history in the twenty-first century is to investigate and cultivate transcultural connections across the global cultural sphere, the essays presented in this issue of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture exemplify the disciplinary possibilities this approach can enable. LALVC strives to be an inclusionary space that provides a venue for scholarly dialogue across disciplinary and national boundaries in a format that is accessible, dynamic, and engaging to students, artists, scholars, activists, professionals, and researchers. The essays and Dialogues that open volume 2 of LALVC represent the range of the field of art history focused on Latin American and Latinx subjects today. This diverse scholarship is grounded in professional academic research, shaped by critical methodologies, and infused with the spirit of transdisciplinary collaboration. In this issue, a sociologist, a literary critic/historian, art historians, museum curators, and advanced graduate students from Oaxaca, England, Buenos Aires, Brazil, and... You do not currently have access to this content.