Textual Difficulties Research Articles

The Catholic and the imperial power over early Chinese translation of Western law

ABSTRACT Western law in Chinese translation emerged in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, when Chinese and Western legal traditions shared little in common in terms of jurisdiction and political philosophy. The present study attempts to reconstruct that historical experience by looking at both textual difficulties and political forces that put an end to this first intellectual engagement between China and the West. In particular, it examines the fragmentary translations of and introductions to Western law by the Jesuits and their Chinese converts, and the politics played out between the progressive and the conservative, and between Catholicism and the imperial power, with an aim to build a historical lesson in translation.

A Note on Aristotle’s De Anima Α 1, 403a10-16

In this paper I discuss passage 403a10-16 from Aristotle’s De Anima. In this passage Aristotle deals with whether the soul could be separate from the body and presents an analogy with geometrical entities. This passage is highly obscure and it presents many textual difficulties. The interpretation I offer resolves the textual problems without requiring emendations to the text as many commentators suggest.

Overcoming Blanking: Verbal and Visual Features of Prompting in Theatre Rehearsals

In theatre rehearsals, actors can occasionally be seen getting stuck in the play text, which is called blanking. To overcome such textual difficulties and continue with the given text, a prompter can verbalize the line in question, thus contributing to an actor’s word search by prompting. The paper focuses on interactional practices by which prompters and actors interactionally resolve blanking situations. This study’s data comprises a case collection of 67 prompting situations, which are taken from a 200-h video corpus of a rehearsal process at a professional theatre. These cases demonstrate how theatre professionals organize prompting situations and how they negotiate/sanction prompting actions such as when there was no blanking but a dramatic pause or when the dramatic performance is interrupted due to a missing prompt. In addition to the audiovisual recordings, eye tracking data of the person prompting is also used to describe the coordination of the visual resources in the context of multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis suggests that prompting and blanking persons interactively resolve blankings with the help of verbal and visual markers.

Virgil’s Hero, Turnus: Maffeo Vegio’s and Pier Candido Decembrio’s Supplements to the Aeneid (with a New Edition and Translation of Decembrio)

I examine a dialogue between the Renaissance Supplements to Virgil’s Aeneid by Pier Candido Decembrio and Maffeo Vegio. I argue that Decembrio’s short poem is not unfinished but instead provides the Iliadic ending to the Aeneid that Virgil withholds, namely a lament over Turnus’s body to match the lament over Hector at the end of Iliad 24. I then argue that Decembrio’s poem presents us with a dangerously unstable situation in Italy, dominated by commemorations of Turnus in such heroic terms that they threaten to displace Virgil’s hero Aeneas from primacy in his own story. Vegio’s response “corrects” this portrayal of Turnus in favour of a more orthodox Virgilian narrative in which Turnus is a tragically misguided enemy of Aeneas’s divine mission to Italy. I conclude with a new edition and translation of Decembrio’s Supplement, drawing on both of the extant manuscripts and addressing several textual difficulties.

Love of Friendship and Love of Concupiscence

Love of Friendship and Love of Concupiscence Jordan Olver WE LOVE WINE and other lifeless things in a different way than we love our friends. We love our friends for their own sake, wishing good for them and being inherently pleased by their possession of it. We love wine and other such things as objects to be used, enjoyed, or possessed by someone we care about; we do not love them fundamentally as subjects for whom we wish some good but as goods we wish for some subject. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, drew attention to this difference and, through it, identified friendship as essentially a benevolent love, that is, one that wishes good for the loved one for the loved one’s own sake.1 In the thirteenth century, theologians looked back to Aristotle, and presumably to experience itself, and distinguished between two kinds of love: the kind of love one has toward wine they called concupiscence or love of [End Page 573] concupiscence; the kind one has toward a friend they called friendship or love of friendship. Thomas Aquinas received the distinction between love of friendship and love of concupiscence from his Scholastic predecessors, and in a sense from Aristotle as well. He used the terms love of friendship and love of concupiscence throughout his career, and the distinction associated with them eventually came to occupy a central role in his thought on love. Arguably, the distinction became so central that without it one cannot present his thought except in a vague manner, nor can one solve the primary problem associated with his doctrine of love, namely, how love of others for their own sake is possible.2 Scholars have often treated of the distinction between love of friendship and love of concupiscence. Most treatments, however, have been part of a broader inquiry; rarely has the distinction been the proper object of study. The effect has been that scholars have rarely considered the two loves as a controversial topic, one over which to argue.3 But differences in interpretation do exist, some being more obvious, others more subtle. These differences exist in turn because Thomas’s understanding of love of friendship and love of concupiscence is itself difficult to discern. Thomas presents the two loves in a variety of ways, and it is not clear how we are to reconcile these different accounts. Some dedicated studies, accordingly, are needed to [End Page 574] address the various textual difficulties and consider the diverse interpretations in the secondary literature. This study aims to provide such a treatment. With the help of the secondary literature, we will first set out the questions we will seek to answer in our inquiry. Then, to provide a firmer foundation for interpreting Thomas, we will survey his predecessors’ use of love of friendship and love of concupiscence. Afterward, we will examine Thomas’s own use of the terms throughout his career. Finally, we will return to the questions raised and draw conclusions about how we ought to understand the two loves and the distinction associated with them. I. Scholarly Treatment and Possible Interpretations Twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpreters of Thomas generally present love of friendship and love of concupiscence in one of four ways. Some divide the two loves as other-oriented and self-oriented: love of friendship is a disinterested love of others for their own sake while love of concupiscence is a love of something wished for oneself.4 Others divide the loves as being of persons and of things wished for persons: love of friendship is of a person, whether oneself or another, for that person’s own sake, while love of concupiscence is of some good wished for a person.5 Still others divide the loves similarly but [End Page 575] add that the loves are not distinct acts, but two aspects or tendencies found in every act of love: in each act, one tends with love of friendship to some subject for whom one wishes some good and with love of concupiscence to some good one wishes for that subject.6 Finally, some identify multiple senses of the two loves. Most notably, Guy Mansini...

Other Writings/Traditions

Other Writings/Traditions Christopher T. Begg, Thomas Hieke, William J. Urbrock, and J. Edward Owens Christopher T. Begg Catholic University of America Thomas Hieke Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz William J. Urbrock University of Wisconsin Oshkosh J. Edward Owens OSST, University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio TX 1618. [1 Samuel 4 according to Josephus, Ant. 5.355–362] Michael Avioz, "1 Samuel 4 in Josephus' Antiquities 5.355–362," JNSL 47 (1, 2021) 1-17. My paper explores Josephus's exegetical skills in elucidating the biblical text, taking his retelling of 1 Samuel 4 in Ant. 5.355–362 as a test case. The historian's retelling of the Samuel text which recounts the fall of the Elides and the destruction of the Shiloh sanctuary is twice as long as the former passage. While acknowledging Josephus's apologetical tendencies in his Antiquities, my article seeks to demonstrate that his hermeneutical concerns in his retelling of the above biblical account is equally significant. I begin by analyzing the biblical passage and its textual difficulties and gaps, and then proceed to examine Josephus's additions, omissions, and changes, as well as the question of his textual Vorlage for the 1 Samuel 4 passage. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] Google Scholar 1619. [Levitical Temple Singers in Rabbinic Sources] Hallel Baitner, "Levitical Singers in Rabbinic Sources: Echoes of an Ancient Dispute," JSJ 52 (2, 2021) 228-56. The Hebrew Bible reflects ambiguity concerning the historical existence of the Levites as a group distinguished from the priesthood. Postexilic and late Second Temple sources also present a variety of voices concerning the extent to which Levites participated [End Page 580] in the temple's worship. My article argues that, while rabbinic sources appear to present a straightforward, retrospective description of the Levites as a group of temple-singers who were clearly subordinate to the priests and responsible for temple singing, a closer reading reveals differences of opinion about the group and its activity. Disagreements concerning the exact place in the temple in which the Levites used to sing reflect significantly different views concerning the status of the Levites in the temple and the importance of their singing. This rabbinic dispute echoes similar late Second Temple period controversies, and sources from the two periods may shed reciprocal light on each other. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] Google Scholar 1620. [Reimaging of Angels, Watchers, and Giants in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] Kelley Coblentz Bautch and Jonathan Kaplan (eds.), "Introduction," Hen 41 (2, 2019) 181-87. As guest editors of a thematic issue of Henoch devoted to early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic reconceptualizations of earlier traditions about "angels, watchers, and giants," B. and K. provide an introduction to the topic that surveys previous scholarly work on the subject as well as the essays featured in this issue. Their essay concludes with a bibliography of relevant studies. For abstracts of those articles of particular interest to OTA readers, see ##1621, 1663.—C.T.B. Google Scholar 1621. [Demons in Josephus] Carson M. Bay, "Demons in Flavius Josephus," Hen 41 (2, 2019) 204-25 [see #1620]. Demons, as they appear in Josephus's corpus, help situate Josephus, qua firstcentury Roman-Jewish author, between a Hellenistic culture informed by classical antiquity and a Jewish culture informed by Jewish Scripture and tradition. Whether as individual beings or as some impersonal force, the daemonic in Josephus's writings aligns far more with the daemons of the Classical and Hellenistic Greek milieu than it does with Jewish literature from the Hebrew Bible to the NT. However, Josephus's daemons do reflect the influence of Jewish tradition as well. Thus, daemons allow Josephus's writings to be seen as the product of intercultural influence and exchange. My essay seeks to demonstrate this claim by providing a sequential and comprehensive assessment of Josephus's treatment of daemons and the daemonic throughout his corpus and then by offering a comparative survey of related literature earlier than or contemporary with Josephus. This survey shows where Josephus's daemons are both different from and similar to ancient Hellenistic and Jewish traditions in their...

A Chinese Named Entity Recognition Model of Maintenance Records for Power Primary Equipment Based on Progressive Multitype Feature Fusion

Presently, the State Grid Corporation of China has accumulated a large amount of maintenance records for power primary equipment. Unfortunately, most of these records are unstructured data which lead to difficultly analyze and utilize them. The emergence of natural language processing technology and deep learning methods provide a solution for unstructured text data. This paper proposes a progressive multitype feature fusion model to recognize Chinese named entity of unstructured maintenance records for power primary equipment. Firstly, the textual characteristics and word separation difficulties of maintenance records are analyzed, then 7 main entity categories of power technical terms from unstructured maintenance records are chosen, and 3452 maintenance records are labeled by these categories, which is so called EPE‐MR training dataset. Secondly, the standard test reports, standard maintenance, and fault analysis reports for three types of power primary equipment (namely, main transformer, circuit breaker, and isolating switch) are employed as corpus to train character embedding in order to obtain certain words representation ability of maintenance records. After that, progressive multilevel radicals feature extraction module is designed to get detailed and fine semantic information in a hierarchical manner. Further, radicals feature representation and character embedding are concatenated and sent to BiLSTM module to extract contextual information in order to improve Chinese entity recognition ability. Moreover, CRF is introduced to handle the dependencies among prediction labels and to output the optimal prediction sequence, which can easily obtain structured data of maintenance records. Finally, comparative experiments on public MSRA dataset, China People’s Daily corpus, and EPE‐MR dataset are implemented, respectively, which show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Il sacrificio degli stupidi (Qo 4,17 [9,2

Qo 4,17 mentions the “sacrifice of fools”, within a controversial passageagainst worship (Qo 4,17-5,6). Qohelet, in a verse not devoid of textual difficulties,does not criticize the sacrificial cult as such, but relativizes it; at the same time heattacks the human pretension to manipulate God: this is the behavior of the ‘fools’who, the Qohelet ironically notes, “do not even know they are acting badly”. Tothe “sacrifice of fools” the Qohelet contrasts the attitude of listening and, in 5.6,that of “fearing God”, that is, the recognition of one’s dependence on Him.

Bemerkungen zurEktheosis Arsinoesdes Kallimachos: Gattung, Struktur und Inhalt

AbstractThis article aims to present an overall interpretation of a poem by Callimachus that centres on the dead Ptolemaic queen Arsinoe II. Firstly the position of theEktheosis Arsinoesin Callimachus’ œuvre, the genre to which it belongs and its structure will be investigated. This leads to the analysis of the highly allusive character of the work (above all to Hesiod, Ibycus, Simonides and Pindar as well as to hymnic poetry). In addition, realia (the historical background) and textual difficulties arising from the fragmentary transmisson will also be treated. The appendix discusses a hitherto unnoticed testimony to the poem’s reception in the Roman epicist Ennius.

THEMISTIUS AGAINST PORPHYRY (?) ON ‘WHY WE DO NOT REMEMBER’

AbstractThis article sheds new light on Themistius’ argument in what is philosophically the most original (and historically the most influential) section of his extant work, namely On Aristotle's On the Soul 100.16–109.3: here, Themistius offers a systematic interpretation of Aristotle's ‘agent’ intellect and its ‘potential’ and ‘passive’ counterparts. A solution to two textual difficulties at 101.36–102.2 is proposed, supported by the Arabic translation. This allows us to see that Themistius engages at length with a Platonizing reading of the enigmatic final lines of De anima III.5, where Aristotle explains ‘why we do not remember’ (without specifying when and what). This Platonizing reading (probably inspired by Aristotle's early dialogue Eudemus) can be safely identified with the one developed in a fragmentary text extant only in Arabic under the title Porphyry's treatise On the soul. While Themistius rejects this reading, he turns out to be heavily influenced by the author's interpretation of the ‘agent’, ‘potential’ and ‘passive’ intellect. These findings offer us a new glimpse into Themistius’ philosophical programme: he is searching for an alternative to both the austere (and, by Themistius’ lights, distorted) Aristotelianism of Alexander of Aphrodisias and the all too Platonizing reading of Aristotle adopted by thinkers such as Porphyry.

A critical discourse analysis of cases of ELF reformulation of European and Italian legal texts on migration

The present chapter focuses on a parallel corpus of legal texts from the EU and the recently issued Italian legal text dealing with Migration, the so called “Decreto Sicurezza bis” (“Safety Decree”), of June 2019, and it aims to point out the textual difficulties arising from the interpretation of such legal documents. This is all the more true if we think of the technical limitations and practical difficulties that reading a legal text may pose to a layperson using English as a lingua franca (ELF). Unlike previous studies dealing with the same topic of Immigration (Provenzano 2008), here the focus is on a small corpus from the EU and an Italian text, with the aim of defining cultural similarities at the level of text production. Furthermore, the texts are also relevant to the receivers and, yet, they are often likely to cause unintelligibility. Hence, both the EU texts and the Italian one are here submitted to a process of reformulation, as preliminary to the translation stage, in order to make them more accessible to international receivers (Widdowson 1984).

ARS ADEO LATET ARTE SVA: WHAT IS ART'S ART?

Textual difficulties as well as problems of content are sometimes prone to being overlooked in famous passages, because their very familiarity tends to stifle reflection on their actual meaning. orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano (Juv. 10.356) escaped detection as an interpolation until 1970. In di, coeptis (nam uos mutastis et illa) | aspirate meis (Ov. Met. 1.2–3), the reading illas has held its place against the correct illa until 1976.

Exeter Book Riddle 95: ‘The Sun’, a New Solution

Abstract Elusive and fraught with textual difficulties, Riddle 95, the ‘last’ of the Old English verse riddles preserved in the tenth-century Exeter Book, has long baffled modern readers as one of a handful of thorny items in the collection that have so far defied solution. ‘Book’ is the answer that has found most acceptance with critics in the past, yet the speaking subject of Riddle 95 is unlike anything described in those items of the collection that actually deal with writing and the tools of the monastic scriptorium. Rather, the linguistic and thematic parallels between Riddle 95 on the one hand, and the cosmological riddles and poems in the Exeter Book on the other, strongly suggest that the subject of Riddle 95 is the sun, a frequent topic of early medieval enigmatography. The poem obliquely relates how the rising sun installs itself in the sky to shed its welcome light upon the earth before it sets and vanishes from sight, completing its daily orbit along unknown paths. The main clues helping to secure the solution ‘sun’ are based upon what was known in Anglo-Saxon England about the solar course and the planetary motions, especially from the astronomical writings of Isidore of Seville and Bede. Further evidence is provided by several analogues in the Anglo-Latin riddle tradition, including the Enigmata of Aldhelm and his followers.

Philippians

Mark Keown’s two-volume commentary on Philippians is a carefully researched and comprehensive analysis of this Pauline letter. Keown has provided a close reading of the text, while also engaging the historical possibilities that the text suggests. He brings into this analysis ancient sources to support his historical reconstructions as well as ancient and contemporary interpreters of Philippians to illuminate text and context. Keown demonstrates thorough knowledge of the range of perspectives on key questions but is not overly derivative. While holding traditional views on a number of issues, including the integrity of the letter, its Roman provenance, and the divine identity of Christ in the hymn of ch. 2, Keown also proposes new possibilities for text and setting in his more than 1,100 pages of commentary.Two significant examples relate to (1) Paul’s ambiguous references to choosing life or death (1:20–25) and (2) locating the central occasion of the letter in the conflict between Euodia and Syntyche (4:2–3). Keown argues for the possibility that Paul’s deliberations in 1:20–25 arise because he is considering escape from his Roman imprisonment to return to the churches he has founded (p. 1:12). For Keown, this resolves various textual difficulties, including the agency Paul affirms over his life-threatening situation (1:22), his absolute confidence that he will leave prison alive (1:25; cf. 2:24), the presence in Rome of supporters to assist him (1:14–18), and his reference to keeping his decision a secret (with ginōskō as “I do not make known”; 1:22).Another distinctive is Keown’s understanding that the conflict between Euodia and Syntyche explains more of the letter’s paraenesis than 4:2–3 and 2:2–4. For Keown, they are “the two people at the heart of the Philippian problem” (p. 2:305). He understands their conflict potentially to account for or at least influence 1:14–18a (“false motivations in mission”); 2:14 (“quarreling and grumbling”); 2:1–11, 19–30 (Christ, Timothy, and Epaphroditus as exemplars), and the theme of joy (possibly “a degree of sorrow in the community over this issue”) (pp. 2:314–15). While I suggest that some of these connections border on mirror reading, Keown’s ability to reconstruct the possibilities of the historical setting impressed me. In general, he demonstrates a keen ability to imagine the potential realities that occasioned the letter. And, in his commentary on 4:1–9, I valued Keown’s careful case for the prominence of female leadership in the Philippian church (e.g., pp. 2:311–313).The commentary proceeds across eight major sections of Philippians (1:1–11, 12–26; 1:27–2:18; 2:19–30; 3:1–21; 4:1–9, 10–20, 21–23), with the following areas addressed in each section: “Introduction” (extended summary, including literary contextual observations), translation, textual notes, commentary (extensive verse-by-verse analysis), conclusion (short passage summation), biblical theology comments (canonical reflections, with some extensions to the contemporary church), application and devotional implications (thematic application to the church today), and selected bibliography.Keown consistently addresses the Philippian tendency to mimic the Roman penchant for power and status. The gospel as expressed in Philippians exposes false ideas of power, encouraging instead the honoring of others over self. This attention to social issues includes a sensitivity to the social nature of mission: “social justice is embedded in authentic mission” (p. 2:67). This emphasis was especially refreshing in a commentary from an expressly evangelical perspective. I was also impressed with the moments when the author indicated that he had changed his mind on an issue that he had previously argued in print. This kind of scholarly humility befits a letter that highlights humility as a crucial Christian virtue (2:3–4).Being appreciative of Keown’s work in large measure, I register a minor critique. He routinely provides extensive lexical analyses (a page or more), with the commentary reading at these points something like a lexicon. While these lexical discussions include much helpful content, the frequent reference in these to etymology could imply, inappropriately, that etymology is typically relevant to the current meaning of a word (e.g., pp. 2:39, 131: ekklēsia does not mean those who are “called out”). And while not a critique limited to this particular commentary, I wish for a moratorium on “literal” used in relation to word meanings (e.g., pp. 1:63; 2:134, 161), with its implication that a word has a basic (English) meaning from which other meanings or translations arise.In summary, I am grateful for the contribution that Keown has made to Philippians scholarship, not only from an evangelical perspective but from a scholar who has clearly devoted himself to this important NT letter. His commentary is impressive, and this interpretive offering to the academy and the church promises to be significant.

A textual analysis of the Egyptian EFL freshmen's performance in FL writing composition

The current study discussed the performance of Egyptian EFL freshmen in writing FL composition in terms of the five criteria describe in Jacobs' (1981) practical approach to test ESL composition. These criteria are content and ideas, organization, choice of word, language use, and formality and objectivity. Prior to data collection, an EFL academic writing course was taught to the targeted population. It spanned twenty eight weeks. For the purpose of data collect, a five-criterion checklist was created based on Jacobs' (1981) composition testing approach. Data were analyzed based on the distribution of frequency and percentage to identify the textual difficulties of the Egyptian EFL freshmen's performance in freshmen had various trouble spots in writing FL composition according to the above-mentioned five criteria. The study provided teaching implications to improve the Egyptian EFL freshmen's performance in writing FL composition

Hilary of Poitiers on the inter-Trinitarian Relation of the Son and the Holy Spirit

Given the authority accorded to Hilary of Poitiers by ecumenical councils of the 1st millennium, it is of interest to determine his teaching about the disputed question of the eternal relation of the Son and the Holy Spirit. The question is complex, partly because it is one that Hilary in most cases touches upon only indirectly, when arguing for the divinity of the Son, and partly because the meaning of the relevant passages, even on the level of Latin syntax, is often hard to determine, and a matter of disagreement between different translators or editors. Y. Congar and A. E. Siecienski, in their surveys of the discussions of the inter-trinitarian relations of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the patristic age do not examine all these textual difficulties, nor do they discuss the Opus Historicum, which contains a highly relevant passage on this subject. The present article attempts to throw light on the question by examining the key texts and suggesting answers to the problems of translation and interpretation that they present. It concludes that Hilary’s position is substantially identical to that which would later be agreed by the Greek and Latin churches at the council of Florence, and enshrined in the decree Laetentur caeli.

Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith

Reviewed by: Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith Neil Cartlidge Walter Map and the Matter of Britain By Joshua Byron Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Few writers in the Middle Ages, or indeed in any period, have enjoyed a more complex, enduring, and incongruous literary afterlife than Walter Map (d. 1209/1210). Within decades of his death, Map was being credited with the composition of several parts of the monumental French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle--making him, in effect, a founding father of the Arthurian tradition. At the same time, medieval manuscripts so frequently associate him with various Latin satirical poems within what is now generally known as "Goliardism" that he effectively functions as a legendary father of this tradition too. (When Thomas Wright edited much of this material in 1841, he chose to entitle this volume Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes.) At the end of the eighteenth century Map's reputation still exerted such a hold on Welsh imaginations that the bardic antiquarian Iolo Morganwg (aka Edward Williams, 1747–1826) was moved to create spurious Welsh-language writing in his name. These days it is generally agreed that all of the literary work that can genuinely be attributed to Walter survives only in a single medieval manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851), where it is rubricated "de Nugis curialium" ("Courtiers' Trifles"). It was under this title that Walter's work was edited in a pioneering edition by Montague Rhodes James in 1914 (followed by a translation in 1923); and James's edition/translation was subsequently reissued (with revisions by R. A. B. Mynors and Christopher Brooke) in a Clarendon Texts volume first published in 1983. Ironically, there is one part of the De nugis curialium (and only one part) that did circulate widely in the Middle Ages, but in most cases without ascription to Map. This is the Dissuasio Valerii, an extravagant polemic against marriage, which survives in dozens of medieval copies (and which was the first work by an Englishman to be printed). The Dissuasio even makes an appearance in the Canterbury Tales (where it is cited as "Valerie")—which means that Walter Map is also one of the relatively few English writers whose work Geoffrey Chaucer can definitely be shown to have read. [End Page 145] Walter Map can thus be described as a figure who is central to several different literary histories of the Middle Ages. He was also a colorful and charismatic personality in his own right, as De nugis curialium amply demonstrates. Yet there have been remarkably few scholarly attempts at a rounded assessment of his work both in relation to his original cultural contexts and his subsequent literary reputation(s). From this point of view, Joshua Byron Smith's Walter Map and the Matter of Britain is something of a landmark. To my knowledge, it is the first published monograph in English exclusively devoted to a study of Walter Map. Fortunately, it is also a lively, wide-ranging and original book, distinguished by an impressively energetic reluctance to allow any received assumptions to pass unscrutinized. It makes a number of substantive suggestions in relation both to the interpretation of De nugis curialium in detail (including some interesting possible solutions to some of the specific textual difficulties posed by the one surviving manuscript) and to its placing in a wider socio-intellectual context—foregrounding in particular the networks centred on St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, and on the tradition of Welsh-Latin saints' lives represented by London, BL MS Cotton Vespasian A.xiv. It also makes some compelling arguments about Map's attitudes to (and knowledge of) Wales; about what Smith calls "Britonicization" (i.e., the setting of stories in an "ancient British past"); and about the nature of the authority that Map came to exert within the tradition of Arthurian romance. Overall, this is an important book, and engagement with it will be essential for all future work on Map. All that being said, there are some problems with the way its claims are presented. For example, Smith uses his introduction to suggest that "this book makes two larger arguments concerning the literary...

Textual comprehension difficulties. Metacognitive strategies for the educational intervention

Textual comprehension difficulties are one of the main factors responsible for failure at school, which presents strong correlations with the Learning Disorders. Their high incidence in the school population imposes the research of effective educational interventions for the answer to educational needs of students with comprehension deficits. In this paper the most effective metacognitive strategies are presented and their implications for the educational intervention are discussed. Difficolta di comprensione testuale. Strategie metacognitive per l’intervento educativo Le difficolta di comprensione del testo rappresentano uno dei principali fattori responsabili dell’insuccesso scolastico, e presentano forti correlazioni con i Disturbi dell’Apprendimento. La loro elevata diffusione nella popolazione scolastica impone la ricerca di interventi efficaci per rispondere alle esigenze educative degli allievi con deficit di comprensione. In questo articolo sono presentate le strategie metacognitive piu efficaci e vengono discusse le loro implicazioni per l’intervento educativo.

The Narrative Structure of the Finnsburh Episode in Beowulf

The Finnsburh Episode inBeowulfis a story within a story, the re-enactment of a lay sung by Hroðgar’s minstrel in Heorot. It concerns events seemingly of the mid-fifth century, beyond living memory for the imagined listeners. For them, the story could have been kept alive only as oral tradition, and must have been so for centuries by the timeBeowulfwas composed. Accordingly, scholars have been apt to treat the Episode as a report of a lay or lays, and in some respects archaic. The view that it is summary or otherwise defective has been encouraged by its textual difficulties, and until recently its internal structure has been little regarded by mainstream commentaries. The present analysis shows the Episode to be internally coherent, an intricately wrought composition in Biblical style; its form and implicit values are those of a culture which can reflect on Finnsburh and Heorot, but is not condemned to relive their experience. The Episode is theBeowulf-poet’s making throughout, and here (as not for the first time) it is held to be integral to the form and meaning ofBeowulf.