Nationale De France Research Articles

From Many Lives a Single Play: The Case of Saint Margaret and the Dragon

From Many Lives a Single Play:The Case of Saint Margaret and the Dragon Vicki L. Hamblin (bio) Antoine DuVerdier’s 1585 Bibliothèque includes the first modern reference to a mystery play dedicated to Saint Margaret of Antioch, with this notice: “La Vie de sainte MARGUERITE, Vierge & Martyre, fille de Théodosien, à quarante-quatre Personnages; imprimée à Paris, in-8˚, par Alain Lotrian” (The life of saint MARGARET, virgin and martyr, daughter of Theodosian, with 44 Roles; printed in Paris, in-8˚, by Alain Lotrian).1 Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps’s Recherches sur les théâtres en France also refers to the same edition.2 Unfortunately, the Lotrian volume appears to have gone missing after that citation because subsequent cataloguers either did not include it or could not find it. Fortunately, a nineteenth-century scholar, Aristide Joly, did locate such a text, the Vie de madame sainte Marguerite, vierge et martyre par personnages.3 It survives in a single printed copy in the Rare Books collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF Rés. YF 4690). It is not the Lotrian edition identified by DuVerdier, which is presumed to have been published in 1540, but a second edition without a frontispiece, publisher, or date.4 While this is the only known performance remnant that references Saint Margaret in French medieval theater, the Vie par personnages issues from a long hagiographic tradition in which the saint’s martyrdom was venerated and popularized in various formats. According to that tradition, Margaret is born to pagan parents but left with a nurse who raises her in the Christian faith. Watching sheep one day, she is observed by Olybrius, a pagan prefect who desires her. Brought before him, Margaret declares her faith in Jesus, refusing to adore pagan gods and to submit to Olybrius. [End Page 33] After being tortured, she is cast into prison, where a dragon swallows her. Margaret uses her cross to free herself only to face a black devil in the shape of a man. Belzebub wants to know how she has managed to kill his brother, the dragon Ruffon. Margaret grasps the devil, standing on his neck until he explains who he is and admits defeat. A dove descends from heaven to assure Margaret of her place there. With that assurance, Margaret continues to rebuke Olybrius despite being beaten bloody, burned, placed in a vat of boiling water, and hung by her hair. Finally, she is beheaded at Olybrius’s orders and her soul is carried to heaven by angels. An observer, a priest named Theotimus, vows to write her story. Margaret’s legend originated in ninth-century Greece, then traveled to Europe where Latin and vernacular versions ensured its subsequent success as her relics appeared in Italy, and churches were dedicated to her in Liège, Bath, and Montefiascone, among other sites. Saint Margaret would become one of the most iconic legends embraced by Catholic believers, despite the fact that medieval Church leaders and religious writers, including the Legenda aurea’s author Jacques de Voragine, doubted the veracity of the Saint Margaret legend, citing its apocryphal or fantastic elements.5 Ultimately, while Saint Margaret was venerated in liturgies, hagiographic literature, and iconography from the Middle Ages until the modern era, the Roman Catholic Church deleted Saint Margaret’s feast day from its calendars in 1969, citing the likelihood that she had probably never existed.6 The intention of the present study is to illustrate how the Vie par personnages conforms to and differs from hagiographic texts dedicated to Saint Margaret. Specifically, this analysis will underscore the fact that the performance remnant relied on authoritative texts structurally while contemporizing and humanizing its martyred heroine in support of a performance event for a fifteenth-century audience. The Mystery Play Tradition While the Vie par personnages is the only known copy of a French mystery play featuring Saint Margaret, it survives as part of a dynamic cultural phenomenon from late medieval France.7 Mystery plays were sponsored and performed by municipalities, guilds, and clerics in order to commemorate or restore communities, as Alan Knight has [End Page 34] so convincingly argued.8 Those communities hired poets...

Preface

Preface Audrey Brunetaux (bio) and Michael S. Koppisch (bio) Seeing Charlotte Delbo / Seeing the Shoah Following World War II, survivors of the Holocaust struggled to recount an experience that remained beyond the boundary of words. How could Auschwitz be described in a way that someone who had not known its horrors might conceivably find factual? How to “make us see” the dehumanization and the extermination that were integral to what has come to be known as the univers concentrationnaire? A participant in the French Resistance and a Nazi concentration camp survivor, Charlotte Delbo has, especially because of the publication of her three-volume Auschwitz et après, been recognized as a major writer of Holocaust literature. Her unique style combines poetry with prose and employs a wide range of literary tools to convey the traumatic experience of the atrocities that she and her fellow prisoners endured daily. In her writings, Delbo challenges her readers to see her, to see her experience, to see the dreadful and horrifying mechanisms by which the camp universe functions. She incorporates into her narrative powerful images of the camps calculated, as she puts it, to “nous faire voir”—“make us see”—what happened in them. Painful details of an individual victim’s experience are noted on the page. Delbo’s originality lies in the conflation of the visual and the written to represent in her texts the unspeakable. In her highly visual writing, words become the eye of a camera, projecting onto the page a monstrous reality. These “shots,” made visible by the author’s rhetorical techniques, unveil the physical and psychological dimensions of the tragedy that might well remain obscured in strictly historical or journalistic accounts of events. Delbo’s traumatic, nonlinear memory calls up mental images that force the reader to confront the Holocaust as it destroyed individual lives. Reading Delbo is like viewing a film created by words that at once leave a trace on the page and become a repository in which is stored the memory of the dead. In a way, Delbo’s text becomes a site of memory not limited by the stasis of a monument. Although Delbo’s trilogy and others of her works were published by the Editions de Minuit, Delbo was not until recently seen as the major literary figure that she has become. Ironically, it was only after the English translation of Auschwitz et après by Yale University Press in 1995 that her work garnered the attention that it deserves. It is, in fact, still studied and written about more in English than in French. However, in the past few years, Delbo has been more widely read and studied in France, where the centennial of her birth was [End Page 7] celebrated in 2013 by an important conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. There have thus far been but three collections of essays about Delbo’s work in French. The first, entitled Dossier Charlotte Delbo published in Témoigner entre histoire et mémoire: Revue pluridisciplinaire de la Fondation Auschwitz (2009) is a broad overview of Delbo’s style and literary engagement. More recently, David Caron and Sharon Marquart published Les Revenantes: Charlotte Delbo, la voix d’une communauté à jamais déportée (2011), essays that focus on the idea of community in Delbo’s writings. Another edited volume, Charlotte Delbo. Oeuvre et engagements (2014), included proceedings from the Charlotte Delbo Conference that took place in Paris in 2013 to celebrate the centennial of her birth. The English critic Nicole Thatcher has also written several monographs about Delbo—A Literary Analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s Concentration Camp Re-Presentation (1999) and Charlotte Delbo: Une Voix singulière (2003). Delbo’s work often figures centrally in studies related to French literature and the Shoah and has been the subject of scholarly pieces on trauma, poetry, drama, memory and literary representation. The author has become an important reference in Holocaust studies, and major critics in the field have written about Delbo’s poetic, minimalist and theatrical prose from innovative angles. For our project, we invited these scholars and others to contribute original pieces. Since no collection of its kind...

Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens, 1807–1914 éd. by Nicole Wild

Reviewed by: Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens, 1807–1914 éd. by Nicole Wild Evan Baker Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens, 1807– 1914. Nouv. éd. rev. By Nicole Wild. Préface de Joël-Marie Fauquet. Lyon: Symétrie, 2012. [526 p., ill., maps. ISBN 978-2-91437-348-7. i152,30] In 1902, Maurice Second noted in Théâtre des Boule vards 1789–1848 (Paris: Société française d’Im primerie et de Librairie, 1902) that from 1815 until 1830, the so-called “minor” Parisian theatres presented a staggering number of new works: 369 comedies, 280 melodramas, 200 opera-comiques, and 1,300 vaudevilles. The Opéra, the most important theatre of all, staged 1,455 performances of more than 400 operas (http://chronopera.free.fr [accessed 4 December 2015]). All of this data begets numerous questions: where, when, and in which theatres did these performances take place? What were the production capabilities of the theatres? Who were the directors and designers? Moreover, what regulations governed the number of theatres and genres performed? Many publications discuss individual theatres performing so many genres in nineteenth-century Paris—spoken theatre, opera, ballets, circuses, vaudevilles, its productions, stage design, social history, chronologies, and architecture of individual edifices. Little, however, has been published surveying all of the theatres of that time. The difficulties in investigating such a topic are immense. Documents lay dormant in numerous public and private archives; eyewitness and newspaper reports require cross-referencing; existing iconographic material sought out; and chronologies controlled. For many years, Nicole Wild was Conservateur en chef of the Bibliothèque et Musée de l’Opéra housed in the former Emperor’s Pavilion at the Palais Garnier, now a part of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Her book reaps the fruits of her long researches and vast knowledge of nineteenth-century Parisian theatres and its associated genres: opera houses, spoken plays, circuses, dance, shadow puppet theatre, prestidigitation, ad infinitum. Nineteenth-century stage design is another |specialty of hers, having authored two important catalogues of the collection of designs, prints, and drawings in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Décors et costumes du XIXe siècle. Vol 1. Opéra de Paris – Vol. 2. Théâtres et décorateurs (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1987, 1993). The Bibliothèque nationale made both volumes freely available online through Open Edition Books: http://books.openedition.org/editionsbnf/948 and http://books.openedition.org/editionsbnf/809 (accessed 4 December 2015). First published as Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au XIXe siècle: les théâtres et la musique (Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1989), and long out of print, Wild’s new ouvrage supersedes this edition with new and updated data through 1914 and, equally important, includes additional rare illustrative material including thirty colour plates; eighteen contemporary views of the auditoria by the French engraver Alexis Orgiazzi (fl. ca. 1800–1839), are provided as well. A historical overview opens the book with a brief, but important, examination of the regulations governing theatrical performances (including opera and dance) in Paris. Laws promulgated by Napoleon I in 1806 and 1807 dictated the closure of a number of “minor theaters.” Upon the Emperor’s final overthrow in 1815, most theatres promptly reopened, much to the delight of the public addicted not only to opera, dance, opéra-comiques, and classical theatre, but also to mélodrames, vaudevilles, diorama, and the circus as well. By 1835, more than twenty-five theatres were offering performances of all genres, ten within walking distance of one [End Page 52] another, particularly along the Boulevard du Temple. In 1864, Napoleon III eased regulations allowing the establishment of café-théâtre, but at the same time ordered all theatrical pieces and libretti to be submitted for approval by the government censors. The three regulations appear as facsimiles in the appendices. The overview continues with a discussion of the names of the edifices, after its geographic location (Le Peletier for the Opéra), a monument (Théâtre du Panthéon), or a quartier (Théâtre du Luxembourg). A brief discussion of methodologies and the source material found in the riches of the Bibliothèque et Musée...

Digital curation for cultural and intellectual assets : a Taiwan perspective

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)INTRODUCTIONDigital information on the Internet is massively increasing and having significant impacts on people in many areas, such as education, recreation, research and culture. The generated information is not as safe and eternal as people may think. The long term survival of information is at risk because of many factors such as technology obsolescence and technology fragility (Harvey, 2010); therefore, it is essential to preserve, manage and use information.Digital curation can be defined broadly as the appraisal, digitization, management, preservation and use of, as well as value addition to assets for short-term and long-term use (Wikipedia 2016a). According to the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), digital curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to research data throughout its lifecycle (Digital Curation Centre, 2008). The range of research data is quite broad, including government information, scientific data, and cultural and intellectual assets.Over the past two decades, due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies, there has been a rapid growth of digitization projects around the world aiming at preserving important cultural and intellectual assets. Through digitization and dissemination over the Internet, cultural and intellectual assets can be more readily available to the public.This article shares the experience of the National Central Library, Taiwan, in curation, specifically in two collaborative projects. The first project seeks international cooperation for digitizing Chinese rare books; the second project collaborates with government agencies and libraries in Taiwan for digitizing Chinese books published in the twentieth century, especially during the period of 1911-1949.INTERNATIONAL DIGITALIZATION PROJECT OF RARE BOOKSSince 2002, the Taiwan National Central Library (NCL) has been digitizing important collection resources as part of the government's National Digital Archives Program, which were later renamed Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program (n.d.). The types of digitized publications include rare books, local government documents, and periodicals and newspapers. Other content includes rubbings of stone inscriptions in Taiwan, news programs, genealogies and thesis papers (National Central Library, 2012).As the national library of Taiwan, the NCL owns a rich and important collection of Chinese and Taiwanese documents. As many Chinese rare books are scattered around the world, it is desirable to collect these books together and provide a comprehensive online resource to support Chinese studies. To that end, the NCL initiated the International Digitalization Project of Rare Books in 2005 for digitizing Chinese rare books owned by overseas institutions. On the one hand, NCL can strengthen its Chinese collection through the collaborative digitization; on the other, the collaboration partners can produce quality archives of their Chinese rare books by leveraging NCL's rich experience in digitizing Chinese rare books.NCL investigated the collections of many national libraries, academic libraries and cultural institutions around the world, and invited those which owned abundant and distinctive ancient Chinese books to participate in the project. The partner institutions include the U.S Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. By 2015, 3,226 titles and a total of 1,852,100 images had been digitized. Table 1 lists the collaborative partners and the number of books digitized by each partner.NCL started the collaboration with the Asian Division of the Library of Congress in 2005, and until 2012, the project had completed 2,025 titles, comprising 1,032,401 images. …

Collectionner la musique: Érudits collectionneurs [Collecting Music: Erudite Collectors] ed. by Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, Valérie De Wispelaere (review)

INSTRUMENTS, ORCHESTRAS Collectionner la musique: Erudits collectionneurs [Collecting Music: Collectors]. Edited by Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, and Valerie De Wispelaere. (Collectionner la musique, vol. 3.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. [580 p. ISBN 9782503553276. i 100.] Illustrations, index.This book is the third volume in a series of proceedings from three successive conferences dedicated to the practice of collecting in the field of music. All three of these conferences took place at the Royaumont Foundation in France, an institution that holds the rich of musical autographs formerly belonging to the late pianist Francois Lang (1908-44). The first volume (Collectionner la musique: Histoires d'une passion, ed. Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, Jean Duron, and Dinko Fabris [Turnhout: Brepols, 2010]), concentrated on the figure of the erudite collector of musical materials in Europe from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The second volume, Collectionner la musique: au coeur de l'interpretation, ed. Denis Herlin, Catherine Massip, and Jean Duron [Turnhout: Brepols, 2012]), focused on performers who were also collectors, and whose collecting impulse was often an outgrowth of their historical approach to music. The third volume, like the first, is again dedicated to erudite musical collectors from the sixteenth century to the present. The eighteen articles that comprise the third volume are divided, somewhat artificially, into three parts: Assembling and Constructing Knowledge (p. 27; all translations are my own), Erudition and Society (p. 257), and Erudite Collectors: Portraits (p. 359).Although the majority of the collections described in this volume are composed of books and music scores (both autographs and early editions), some collections also include musical autographs such as composers' letters, and one article is devoted to collections of musical instruments. All articles are in French, including those by English authors on decidedly non-French topics, such as Graham Sadler's study of Charles Burney's music library.Many of the contributors to the volume share a similar methodology. The author begins with lists or catalogs of works that once made up a music library, a library that may or may not still exist. The author then proceeds to draw various conclusions from these lists in order to shed light on the collector and his possible motives. The analyses of the composition of these collections, however, are necessarily based on a certain amount of guesswork. The absence of instrumental works, for example, may indicate that the collector in question was not himself a practicing musician. But does the appearance of a book or a score in a necessarily mean that it was read, studied or used for a performance? Contributors to this volume are sensitive to this question to varying degrees.In her opening essay, Catherine Massip presents a wide survey of musical collectors, attempting to determine the moment when erudition and the necessary gathering of research materials are transformed into an actual passion for collecting. She does this by analyzing the correspondence of several collectors, for example that between nineteenth-century music publisher Aristide Farrenc (1794-1865) and the collector and music historian Gaetano Gaspari (1807-s81). Massip's considerable experience as head of the music department of the Bibliotheque nationale de France over many years is evident, as she retraces the history of collections that have enriched that library from the nineteenth century to the present, placing an emphasis on the dynamism and synergy between private and public collections. Indeed, many articles in the volume retrace the history of private collections that ended up in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, often by way of the library of the Paris Conservatoire, which merged its collections with the larger intuition in 1935. Massip ends her essay by underscoring the role of the individual collector's judgment, reminding the reader that the word collection is derived from the verb colligere, to choose. …

Antoine Forqueray, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, Michel Forqueray, Nicolas-Gilles Forqueray ed. by Mary Cyr, and: Antoine Forqueray, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, Michel Forqueray, Nicolas-Gilles Forqueray. ed. by Mary Cyr

Antoine Forqueray, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, Michel Forqueray, Nicolas-Gilles Forqueray. The Works. Edited by Mary Cyr. Part One. New York: The Broude Trust, 2012. [Acknowledgements, p. vii; table of contents, p. ix-xi; list of illustrations, p. xii; introd., p. xv-lxxix; editorial policies, p. lxxxi-lxxxv; score, p. 2-129. ISBN 0-8450-7250-1. $300 (inclusive of both volumes).]Antoine Forqueray, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, Michel Forqueray, NicolasGilles Forqueray. The Works. Edited by Mary Cyr. Part Two. New York: The Broude Trust, 2012. [Table of contents, p. vii-ix; list of illustrations, p. x; score, p. 2-119; crit. apparatus, p. 123-69; appendices, p. 173-219; bibliog., p. 223-35. ISBN 0-8450-7250-1. $300 (inclusive of both volumes).]Of the many influential musical dynasties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Forquerays hold the unique honor of simultaneously embodying the pinnacle of virtuosic achievement on their instrument, the viola da gamba, while also witnessing the transition from that instrument's artistic height to its fall into obsolescence within only two generations. The family's two most famous members, Antoine Forqueray (1672-1745) and his son Jean-Baptiste (1699-1782), were both celebrated from childhood as virtuoso viol players, and both went on to hold positions as musicians in the Chambre du roy. Antoine was a younger contemporary of Marin Marais, his colleague and rival, and the Italianate characteristics of his playing have often been contrasted against the utterly French sensibilities of Marais. Jean-Baptiste enjoyed a successful career as a performer, teacher, and composer, during a period when the viol had begun to decline in popularity as the cello overtook it; he was among the musicians who premiered Telemann's Paris Quartets, and was highly regarded by Johann Joachim Quantz and Michel Blavet. Jean-Baptiste also obtained a royal privilege to publish his father's and his own pieces for viol, regarded by modern viol players as some of the most technically and harmonically challenging works in the instrument's period repertoire.This complete-works edition, published by Broude and edited by Mary Cyr, marks the first modern publication in score format of the Forquerays' thirty-two Pieces de violes avec la basse continue (originally published in one volume in 1747), which have previously been republished only in facsimile editions by Minkoff (1976), Performers' Facsimiles (1985), and J. M. Fuzeau (1995), though a few excerpted movements have found their way into modern performing editions as arrangements for orchestra or solo cello. In addition to the five published suites of pieces for solo viol with basso continuo, the first volume of the set also comprises Antoine Forqueray's pieces for three viols, and various solo instrumental works that exist only in manuscript sources. This latter group includes interesting variant versions of several works from manuscript sources in the Bibliotheque nationale de France and the Library of Congress, as well as two lute transcriptions by Robert de Visee (presented in facsimile and modern scores) from manuscripts in the Bibliotheque municipale in Besancon. Volume 2 in the complete-works edition contains primarily works not for viol: the harpsichord transcriptions of the five suites of viol pieces also originally published in 1747 by Jean-Baptiste Forqueray; and six vocal airs attributed to a lesser-known relative, Forcroy le Neveu.The critical commentary that opens the first volume provides a detailed and comprehensive history of the Forqueray family of musicians, from Antoine's father Michel to the youngest nephew Nicolas-Gilles. Although interest in performing the Forquerays' music was revived by members of the Dolmetsch family in the early years of the historically-informed performance movement, the landscape of scholarship relating to the Forquerays remains sparse. Only two historical monographs have been published since the start of the twentieth century: Louis Forqueray's Musiciens d'autrefois: Les Forquerays et leur descendants (Paris: L. …

Reading Medieval Manuscripts Then, Now, and Somewhere in Between: Verbal and Visual Mise en Abyme in Huntington Library MS HM 60 and Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 875

This article examines two particular manuscripts-San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60 and Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS francais 875-with the aim of revealing how the interaction between verbal and visual representations of the book, the act of writing, and the act of reading coexist and interact on the codices’ folios. In the text, Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s ca. 1497 translation of Ovid’s Heroides, the protagonists write letters to absent lovers, frequently commanding their imagined readers to activate their sense of touch in interpreting their letters’ meaning. In the accompanying miniatures, illuminator Robinet Testard’s visual interpretations of these same letters call the reader’s attention to their fictional and actual physical existences. Through the technique of mise en abyme employed systematically in both their texts and illuminations, HM 60 and Paris fr. 875 verbally and visually portray the letters as physical objects on which Ovid’s heroines write. In so doing, the codic...

Sébastien de Brossard ed. by Jean Duron

BROSSARD'S DRAMATIC WORKS Sebastien de Brossard. L'oeuvre dramatique: Typhon & les Geants [SdB.67] ; Intermedes [SdB.68] ; Concert sur l'Alceste de Lully [SdB.264]. Edition de Jean Duron. (Patrimoine musical francais. Monumentales, III, 7.) Versailles: Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 2015. [Table of contents, p. iii-iv; introd. Fre., Eng., p. v-lxiii; texts and translations, p. lxvi-lxxxvi; facsims., p. lxxxviii-ci; score, p. 1-175; crit. commentary Fre., p. 177-81. Paperback. ISMN 979-0-707034-65-1; pub. no. CMBV 065. euro120.]Sebastien de Brossard (1655-1730), a crucial figure of the late French baroque period belonging to the generation between Lully and Rameau, has received much musicological attention within the last thirty years. Known primarily through his Dictionnaire de musique (1703), a pioneering work of its kind France, Brossard gained a reputation throughout his life as a music theorist and music collector. There is little evidence that his own music was much performed during his lifetime, a few exceptions notwithstanding. This situation changed the last two decades of the twentieth century, when the performance of Brossard's music experienced a renaissance France, thanks to the renewed interest his compositions resulting from the groundbreaking scholarly work by Jean Duron, Yolande de Brossard, and Catherine Cessac. While these scholars have all greatly contributed toward Brossard's thrust into the scholarly limelight through catalogs, biographies, editions, and articles, much of the merit of editing Brossard's oeuvre goes to Jean Duron. Duron's expertise as editor of both Brossard's music and of his theoretical writings has yielded a wealth of publications, which include a thematic catalog (Jean Duron, L'oeuvre de Sebastien de Brossard (1655-1730): Catalogue thematique, Domaine musicologique II, Publications du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, CMBV-a 1 [Versailles: Editions du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles; Paris: Klincksieck, 1995]) and four of the eight volumes that comprise the collected edition of Brossard's works, published by the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles over the last twenty years. The volume under review-edited by Duron-features Brossard's dramatic works, and completes the series devoted to the composer.One of the chief issues facing Duron with this volume was the paucity of Brossard's dramatic works. The most important source of Brossard's own music-his personal collection he bequeathed to the Royal Library, carefully detailed his own Catalogue des livres de musique theorique et pratique (see La collection Sebastien de Brossard, 1655-1730: Catalogue (Departement de la musique, Res. Vm.8 20), ed. Yolande de Brossard [Paris: Bibliotheque nationale de France, 1994], hereinafter, Catalogue; the original document is available at http://gallica.bnf.fr /ark:/12148/btv1b550059643)-does not contain all of his works, and this makes the task of gauging the composer's operatic output particularly difficult. Duron surmises, in the area of dramatic music, it is probable that the three works edited here represent only a part of his production (p. xxxix [page references are to Buford Norman's English translation of Duron's introduction]). The three works question include the dramatic divertissement Typhon et les Geants (Typhoeus and the Giants, 1691), the Concert sur l'Alceste de Lully (Concert based on Lully's Alceste, 1691-95), and a collection of thirteen pieces, both instrumental and vocal-eight of which are by Brossard-entitled Intermedes (ca. 1699). In his introduction (p. xxxix-xlii), Duron also details the historical background to the opera Pyrame et Thisbe, composed by Brossard for the 1685 festivities at Reuil, organized by the 2d Duke of Richelieu for Louis XIV, which is unfortunately lost. The opera was probably never performed because the Reuil festivities were cancelled on account of the king's more pressing project-the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. …

The fifteenth-century Catalan translation of the French "Danse macabre": A critical edition and English translation, from manuscript Miscel·lània 26, Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Barcelona

The present article focuses on ff. cxlr-cviiir of the manuscript Miscel?lania 26, Arxiu de la Corona d’Arago, Barcelona, which contain the only extant version of the fifteenth-century Catalan translation of the French Danse macabre. The article contains a philological study of this section of the manuscript, with particular attention to the relationship between the Catalan version of the Danse macabre and its French sources: this study serves as an introduction to a new critical edition of the Catalan translation proposed in the second part of the article. The critical text consists of a parallel edition of the Catalan version and manuscript lat. 14904, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris (MS BnF lat. 14904), which proves to be the witness of the French poem closest to the lost exemplar used by the Catalan translator. Both editions aim at finding a balance between readability and a conservative approach which preserves the historical character of the manuscripts. The critical text is preceded by editorial criteria and accompanied by a literal translation into modern English and editorial notes.

Politics in the Marketplace: The Popular Activism and Cultural Representation of the Dames des Halles during the French Revolution

A Versailles, a Versailles. Le 5 octobre 1789, gravure anonyme Bibliotheque nationale de France, 1789 Three months after French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, Parisian market women, called the Dames des Halles, led thousands of women in a march to Versailles. After demanding bread from the king, petitioning the National Assembly, and rallying thousands of National Guards, the Dames triumphantly returned to Paris with bread and the king himself. On this and many other occasions, the ma...

Chanter sur le livre à la Renaissance: Les traités de contrepoint de Vicente Lusitano ed. by Philippe Canguilhem (review)

PORTUGAL Chanter sur le livre a la Renaissance: Les traites de contrepoint de Vicente Lusitano. Edited by Philippe Canguilhem. (Collection Epitome musical.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. [410 p. ISBN 9782503550404. i 80.] Music examples, illustrations, facs , companion Web site, appendices, bibliography, index.The practice of improvised polyphony during the Renaissance has long seemed out of reach to musicologists and performers. Vicente Lusitano, a Portuguese musician born around 1520, is most often recognized as a participant in a celebrated debate with Nicola Vicentino in 1551. Less widely known is that Lusitano is also the author of not one, but two of the most detailed music theory treatises on the practice of improvised polyphony. This volume aims to promote awareness of Lusitano's treatises by making them more widely available and by presenting extensive research on his life and works.The book opens with an essay by Philippe Canguilhem that situates Lusitano's writings within the context of major developments in Renaissance contrapuntal theory. Particular attention is paid to Lusitano's indebtedness to earlier Iberian writings, most notably Matheo de Aranda's Tractado de canto mensurable y contrapunto (Lisbon, 1535). Canguilhem's thorough introduction to Lusitano's writings explains the important concepts of contrapunto suelto, contrapunto concertado, and abilidades. A fascinating discussion of the relationship between counterpoint and composition (pp. 21-23) introduces notions of orality and literacy to the scholarship on the historical meaning of these terms. For Canguilhem, the significance of Lusitano's writings is that they show how central improvised counterpoint was to everyday musical life during the Renaissance. The chapter includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary sources concerning the practice of chanter sur le livre up to the year 1800.An essay by Giordano Mastrocola marks a new height in biographical research on Lusitano. The wide-ranging chapter examines key elements of Lusitano's personal identity: Portuguese nationality, racial and ethnic difference (his father was probably an African slave), cosmopolitanism in Rome, and, toward the end of his life, heterodoxy across Europe. Mastrocola rightly laments the knee-jerk scholarly association of Lusitano with Vicentino. In addition to an extended discussion of their debate (pp. 58-78)-the clearest yet in the secondary literature-the chapter presents intriguing findings that will enable future scholarship to transcend the limiting view of Lusitano merely as Vicentino's nemesis. Among these promising areas of research are his social and geographical mobility, conversion to Protestantism, and later transalpine career (possibly under a different name). Mastrocola's contextualization of Lusitano within overlapping aristocratic networks in Portugal, Italy, and Germany is very useful in this regard.The remainder of the volume consists of critical editions and French translations of excerpts from two treatises by Lusitano. The first, Del arte de contrapunto (ca. 1550), is from a larger manuscript treatise preserved in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, shelf mark Espagnol 219. Although the Spanish-language manuscript is anonymous, the editors follow Robert M. Stevenson in attributing its authorship to Lusitano, and take a further step in asserting its status as an autograph (pp. 119-20). A short linguistic analysis by Marie-Francoise Deodat-Kessedjian establishes the influence of Portuguese and Latin on the Spanish orthography in the manuscript; this contributes additional security to the manuscript's attribution to Lusitano. Clearly, the manuscript was a work in progress. The editors preserve the flavor of its development by indicating additions, cancellations, and marginalia where they occur.Lusitano's Del arte de contrapunto is a systematic discussion of ways to improvise counterpoint against a given voice. The first chapter proceeds logically in the manner of species counterpoint, considering in turn one, two, four, and three notes against one note of a cantus firmus. …

ISAAC VOSSIUS, CATULLUS AND THE CODEX THUANEUS

For Bernd Niebling and his colleagues at the Lesesaal Altes Buch of the Universitätsbibliothek MünchenWhile the earliest complete manuscripts of Catullus to survive today were written in the fourteenth century, it is well known that poem 62 already appears in an anthology from the ninth century, the Codex Thuaneus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Parisinus lat. 8071). However, the Thuaneus may once have contained one more poem of Catullus. In his commentary on the poet, which appeared in 1684 but had been written decades earlier, the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius makes the following comment on the last two lines of poem 11:Praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est] Vetustissimum exemplar Thuanæum in quo hoc Catulli carmen variorum epigrammatis subjungitur, legitfractus, nontactus. Et hoc probo, nisi malisstratus, nam in quibusdam libristractuslegebatur.It is surprising to find a reference to a lost part of such a well-known manuscript in a source from the seventeenth century. One may well ask whether Vossius really read this poem in the Codex Thuaneus. Could he have seen this manuscript? Can he be relied on to report its contents truthfully? And could a part of the volume have been lost since the seventeenth century? I will argue that the answer to all these questions is yes, and that it is very likely that the Thuaneus once contained Catullus 11 as well as 62. I will set out the consequences of this for our understanding of Catullus' manuscript tradition. Next, I will discuss another ancient manuscript of Catullus that Vossius claims to have read, namely his ‘vetus liber Mediolanensis’. The article will close with an appendix on the history of the Thuaneus before it was studied by Vossius.

Glossae ad ALCHORAN LATINUM Roberti Ketenensis translatoris, fortasse a Petro Pictauiense redactae: An Edition of the Glosses to the Latin Qurʾān in bnf ms Arsenal 1162

Robert of Ketton completed his translation of the Qurʾān in Latin in 1143 at the behest of Peter the Venerable. This translation, the first into any Western language, was highly influential on later encounters with the Qurʾān by Western Christians, being published in 1543 and used extensively in polemical writing on Islam and by future translators of the Qurʾān. The oldest manuscript of Ketton’s Qurʾān, Bibliothèque National de France, ms. Arsenal 1162, contains numerous Latin glosses to the text, both polemical and philological, only some of which have been properly studied. This article offers the first full edition of the Latin glosses to Ketton’s Latin Qurʾān in ms. Arsenal 1162, facilitating the further study of the history of Latin Qurʾāns and of Christian–Muslim relations in the Middle Ages.

Mirrored images: the Passion and the First Crusade in a fourteenth-century Parisian illuminated manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 352)

This lavish mid-fourteenth-century Parisian illuminated manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 352) combines a description of the Holy Land with an abridged version of the history and continuations of William of Tyre in Old French known as the Eracles. It is both visually familiar to scholars and under-studied. Several of its Gothic panel miniatures, especially folio 62r, the conquest of Jerusalem, have been published more than once, yet the manuscript's illumination programme as a whole has not been assessed since Jaroslav Folda's 1968 doctoral dissertation. Analysis of folio 62r in the context of both the full illumination programme and the manuscript's historical setting reveals that MS fr. 352 speaks to the desire of mid-fourteenth-century French nobility to see the chivalric present mirrored by the crusading past, the new Western ‘holy land’ of Paris mirrored by the true locus sanctus of Jerusalem, and the Passion mirrored by the First Crusade.

Imagens que advem. Por uma antropologia da imagem fotográfica em A câmara clara

The more than thirty years since the French publication of The camera lucida , this article seeks to make a foray considered this last work in the Roland Barthes’life, one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, from the preparatory notes for writing this book, found at “Grand Fichier ” Barthes currently deposited in the Bibliotheque National de France (BNF), notably the “pochette ” entitled “Photo”. These notes, its clear that Barthes, in addition to the semiotician who was also proves to be an anthropologist of the images you are looking for another look at the world of images that draw from the status of mere surface superficialities. Keywords: Image, photography, Roland Barthes

Le Her and Other Problems in Probability Discussed by Bernoulli, Montmort and Waldegrave

Part V of the second edition of Pierre R\'{e}mond de Montmort's Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard published in 1713 contains correspondence on probability problems between Montmort and Nicolaus Bernoulli. This correspondence begins in 1710. The last published letter, dated November 15, 1713, is from Montmort to Nicolaus Bernoulli. There is some discussion of the strategy of play in the card game Le Her and a bit of news that Montmort's friend Waldegrave in Paris was going to take care of the printing of the book. From earlier correspondence between Bernoulli and Montmort, it is apparent that Waldegrave had also analyzed Le Her and had come up with a mixed strategy as a solution. He had also suggested working on the "problem of the pool," or what is often called Waldegrave's problem. The Universit\"{a}tsbibliothek Basel contains an additional forty-two letters between Bernoulli and Montmort written after 1713, as well as two letters between Bernoulli and Waldegrave. The letters are all in French, and here we provide translations of key passages. The trio continued to discuss probability problems, particularly Le Her which was still under discussion when the Essay d'analyse went to print. We describe the probability content of this body of correspondence and put it in its historical context. We also provide a proper identification of Waldegrave based on manuscripts in the Archives nationales de France in Paris.

Towards the New Library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art

The Library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) is a relatively recent creation (2003). After years of renovation work, debates and consideration, it will soon be moving to the historic reading room of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, “The salle Labrouste”, thereby realizing the dream of a great library of art.

The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet

Anna Zayaruznaya. The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Pp. 234 + appendices. Broadly speaking, Zayaruznaya's The Monstrous New Art is about text-music relations in the ars nova motet with a focus on the period spanning 1315 to 1370. Zayaruznaya demonstrates with aplomb that late medieval motet composers were far more sensitive to the texts they were setting than has previously been realized, responding to their matiere (or subject matter) in myriad subtle ways. Her focus is, specifically, on texts concerning fragmentation and disjunction--themes especially frequent in representations of the monstrous, but also present in works on the Trinity (three in one), the stratified body politic, and the two-faced courtly lady. The book's introduction situates the analysis it precedes within ars nova scholarship. It also justifies its focus on monsters, which are characterized, in Zayaruznaya's reading, primarily by a lack of unity. Zayaruznaya rightly notes that her findings--even as they focus on the monstrous--point towards broader aesthetic strategies in ars nova composition and, consequently, that her methodology might productively be applied to other repertoires. Chapter 1, Songs Alive, sets out to show that songs were not infrequently imagined as having bodies. Medieval theorists' zoomorphization and anthropomorphization ranged from the passing reference, such as the Summa musice's description of the cauda as a kind of tail, to full-blown metaphorical identification (e.g. Dante). Sometimes, Zayaruznaya shows, songs are treated as creatures that can both talk and travel. Such a conceit is common in the envois and tornadas of the grand chant. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Je voi/Fauvel in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS. fr. 146 version of the Roman de Fauvel. Zayaruznaya convincingly reads this piece as a kind of monstrous birth of an embodied song. The final section of the chapter preemptively responds to the objection that medieval composers would not have conceived of their works as works, let alone works with shapes (instead, the argument goes, they would have conceived of them as sounding events). In response, Zayaruznaya proposes a creature concept of composition (p. 66). While not exclusively about ars nova motets, the chapter's analyses set up what is to follow in that they show the creative interrelations of songs and sundry creatures. The main strength of this chapter lies in its demonstration of the commonality--corporeality--underlying many theorists' discussion of song, envois, and pieces such as Machaut's famous Ma fin est mon commencement and Tout par compas, whose shapes are explicitly thematized. The second chapter, How (not) to Write a Motet: The Exemplary In virtute/Decens, turns to Phillipe de Vitry's motet and its depiction of the monster evoked in Horace's Ars poetica via tale a and hocket. …

Les Manuscrits médiévaux, témoins de lectures

Catherine Croizy-Naquet, Laurence Harf-Lancner, and Michelle Szkilnik, eds. Manuscrits medievaux, temoins de lectures. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2015. Pp. 258. As its title suggests, this collection of essays asks what manuscript evidence can tell us about how medieval texts were read. Whether in annotations commemorating an individual act of reading or in conventions of illumination, formatting and glossing seen across large manuscript corpora, medieval manuscript books frequently bear signs of readers' engagement with the texts they contain, beginning with the scribes and artists responsible for giving form to the texts they read and reproduce. While many of the essays are narrowly focused in their subject matter, the collection as a whole contributes in important ways to manuscript studies by applying detailed codicological research to larger questions of authorship and readership, building upon several decades of work in reader response criticism and material philology, taking special inspiration from scholars such as Sylvia Huot, whose important work on Romance of the Rose manuscripts is held up as a model in Michelle Szkilnik's preface and cited by at least two other authors in the collection. Defining their corpus as manuscripts in French and Latin from the ninth to fifteenth centuries, the eleven essays contained in the collection, along with a preface by Michelle Szkilnik, offer a range of approaches to the question based on different kinds of manuscript evidence, including library records, interventions and annotations by translators, scribes and other readers, authors' reflections on their own readings as well as those of their imagined or ideal readers, and the readings performed visually by artists. The book is divided into four sections, organized into four spaces or contexts in which reading occurs: Le lecteur dans sa bibliotheque (The Reader in his Library), Le lecteur dans le scriptorium (The Reader in the Scriptorium), Le lecteur dans le cabinet de l'auteur (The Reader in the Author's Study), Le lecteur dans l'atelier de l'enlumineur (The Reader in the Illuminator's Workshop). The first section, Le lecteur dans sa bibliotheque, is comprised of two chapters, each of which uses codicological and other documentary evidence to assess the social or political function of a particular kind of library and the ways in which readers may have used and interacted with books in libraries. The first chapter, by Gilbert Fournier, is titled Lecteurs etrangers et lectures etrangeres au college de Sorbonne au XVesiecle (Foreign Readers and Foreign Readings at Sorbonne College in the Fifteenth Century). Fournier first outlines borrowing practices at the Sorbonne, which allowed community members not affiliated with the Sorbonne to take out books as long as a fellow (boursier) at the college accompanied them and vouched for them. Fournier makes a convincing case for the borrowing habits of Parliament member Simon de Plumetot (1371-1443), whose personal library, he argues, contained an unmistakable copy (Paris, BnF MS lat. 14644) of a miscellany in the Sorbonne's collection (Paris, BnF MS lat. 15690). Based on the contents of the collection, especially some treatises by Richard Fitzralph, Fournier speculates about how these readings might have informed political debates of the period even as English influence was expressly repudiated. The chapter makes notable contributions to our understanding of medieval lending libraries as well as to larger debates surrounding the impact of texts and readings on the political reality of fifteenth-century France. In the second chapter of the section, author Marie-Helene Tesniere of the Bibliotheque nationale de France asks a simple question as expressed in her title: Les manuscrits de la Librairie de Charles V ont-ils ete lus ? L'enseignement des tables (Were the Manuscripts of Charles V's Library Read? What the Tables of Contents can Teach Us). …

What Lacan Owes to Lévi-Strauss

The importance of Claude Lévi-Strauss for Jacques Lacan’s structuralist return to Freud has been acknowledged in the literature but only in an abstract way. This essay examines the specific form of the debt, apparent in two talks given by Lacan during a three-year span. An examination of those talks and of Lacan’s relationship to Lévi-Strauss when they were presented leads to the conclusion that Lacan developed his own theory of repetition on the basis of his encounter with Lévi-Strauss’ ideas on myth. The essay draws upon the Claude Lévi-Strauss collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where archival documentation points to a link between Lacan’s application of structuralism and Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth.