Textual Heritage Research Articles

Breathing Life into Rare Book Collections: The Digitization of the Taiga Skit Old Believers Library

AbstractThe number of information resources that are being developed on platforms of university libraries is growing like an avalanche. However, few of them are in great demand and an informative support for scientific research. This problem is especially urgent for the book collections of the Russian Old Believers stored in the libraries of Europe, Asia and America. The Old Believers book collections include manuscripts and printed books from the Middle Ages and author’s works and compilations by contemporary leaders of this religious movement written in the Church Slavonic language in the second half of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Placing digital copies of these rare books on the Internet without providing the information about the social and cultural condition of establishment of the Old Believers book collections (i) reduces the role of the libraries to the technical implementers of digitizing projects and (ii) contradicts the current approaches to the study of the textual heritage of the Old Believers – a denomination for which the reception of the Christian practices of reading and writing has become a means of adaptation to the macrosocial changes. The article reports on a study of the views of librarians, researchers and the Old Believers and demonstrates the concept of the “Taiga Skit Old Believers Library” digital resource, showing the unique book collection in the context of peasant colonization of Taiga Siberia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the features of this living religious community. Research is based on experience of a 30-year collaboration between the Research Library of Tomsk State University –Siberia’s oldest university library – and the humanists of Tomsk State University in the field of studying Old Believers family and community libraries, and carried out within the framework of the development program of its Special Collections Department.

Dīpaṃkara in the Tangut Context: An Inquiry into the Systematic Nature of Tibetan Buddhism In Xixia (Part 1)

This paper discusses the Tangut textual heritage relating to the subject matter of Tibetan Buddhism in Xixia in order to uncover the “systematic nature” of the Tibetan dimension of Tangut Buddhism. That is, in what follows I will try to recover rudiments of the systematic approach which the Tangut Buddhists probably used in dealing with a variety of Tibetan traditions which became available to them during the 12th century.

Computational authorship verification method attributes a new work to a major 2nd centuryAfrican author

We discuss a real‐world application of a recently proposed machine learning method for authorship verification. Authorship verification is considered an extremely difficult task in computational text classification, because it does not assume that the correct author of an anonymous text is included in the candidate authors available. To determine whether 2 documents have been written by the same author, the verification method discussed uses repeated feature subsampling and a pool of impostor authors. We use this technique to attribute a newly discoveredLatin text from antiquity (theCompendiosa expositio) toApuleius. ThisNorthAfrican writer was one of the most important authors of theRomanEmpire in the 2ndcentury and authored one of the world's first novels. This attribution has profound and wide‐reaching cultural value, because it has been over a century since a new text by a major author from antiquity was discovered. This research therefore illustrates the rapidly growing potential of computational methods for studying the global textual heritage.

Manuscript and Memory in Religious Communities in the Medieval Low Countries. An Introduction

The special issue ‘Manuscript and Memory in Religious Communities in the Medieval Low Countries’ aims at critically questioning how memorial practices, developed through and shaped by the medieval manuscript culture, contributed to strengthening religious communal life between the tenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The introductory article briefly examines the research traditions that have informed this collection of essays. On the one hand there is the tradition of memory studies, which since the late 1980s has become increasingly important in many humanities disciplines, particularly in medieval studies with its significant interest in the impact of the religiously-inspired memoria culture on medieval society. On the other hand, since the 1990s the same field of medieval studies has also been marked by the rise of material philology, which has not only fuelled many theoretical debates about the way in which our textual heritage should be understood and edited, but has also resulted in a renewed appreciation of the study of manuscripts themselves as meaningful bearers of medieval textual traditions. The introductory article subsequently explains how combining these two research traditions compels us to reconsider the role of manuscripts (cartularies, miscellanies, collections of sermons, etc.) and the deployment of genres (annals, charters, lives, necrologia, treatises, etc.) in the study of the culture of memoria in medieval religious communities.

Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change Impact on Construction Small Medium Enterprises (SME?s): Imbibing Indigenous Responses for Sustainability of SME?s

Purpose: India has a rich tradition of cultural practices and a textual heritage that dates back to several hundreds of years. The intellectual achievements of Indian thought are found across several fields of study in ancient Indian texts ranging from the Vedas and the Upanishads to a whole range of scriptural, philosophical, scientific, technical and artistic sources, which advocates environmentalism. However as the globalization took roots in India in late 80's and to withstand the competition face from global markets Indian Small Medium Enterprises ignored the environmental safety and as results of this pollution is now crossing critical limits in metro cities. Delhi experienced a number of Extreme Weather Events (EWEs) during recent years and a significant number of businesses were affected including the construction sector, which is a major employment driver, being the second largest employer in the country, next only to agriculture. However, little research work has been undertaken on how construction industry is at the risk due to the EWEs. The paper profoundly aims at exploring various such EMEs and their impact on the construction businesses. And finally suggests the ways through which it could be tackled. Research design/methodology/approach: A mix and match research design was adopted to elicit information from construction industry, involving a questionnaire survey and interviews to obtain responses from construction practitioners. Mean was used to establish the average scores for analysis and conclusion. Direct and Indirect impacts from extreme weather events on logistics, people premises, process, markets and finance are discussed in detail Findings/conclusions: Direct and indirect impacts from climate change include damage to products and tools from higher temperatures and increased rainfall, with consequent delays and increased costs to projects. The predominance of outdoor workers in this sector leaves its employees at higher risk from increased direct-heat stress, mostly dehydration all leading to severe effect on people.

Reorienting the Past: Performances of Hindu Textual Heritage in Contemporary India

Reorienting the Past: Performances of Hindu Textual Heritage in Contemporary India

The Donegal Hock

November–December 2013 • 33 I finally realized how much we have shortchanged ourselves when it comes to electronic reading one day not too long ago when an announcement arrived in my in-box. It wasn’t another press release touting the e-book’s so-called “rise.” Such a meteoric ascent could only inevitably be followed by a subsequent fall. As Schiller said of Albrecht von Wallenstein, one of the great generals of the Thirty Years War: “No one could stand where he fell.” The announcement concerned instead the creation of the German Digital Library, one of a host of new national endeavors to create digital libraries as counterparts to the paper-based kind, including the recently established Digital Public Library of America. These are highly significant ventures. They are revolutionizing our textual heritage in no uncertain terms. More people will have access to more texts, fulfilling the library’s historic mission as an information conduit. But “access” is still understood too narrowly. The German Digital Library is in fact a library of PDFs—really other libraries’ PDFs (it aggregates German libraries’ book scans). The German Digital Library interface presents you with an image of a book that is presented by the Bavarian State Library’s image of a book, underneath of which is presumably a book. We have layers of visual representations of books piled on top of one another—image libraries, but not text libraries. Texts aren’t static pictures. They are things that you can do things with, like Augustine who played Virgilian lots with the letters of Paul as part of his conversion to Christianity or the medieval intellectual, Ramon Llull, who devised a spinning wheel to answer all the truths about the universe drawn from scripture. There are more and more books in the world every day, and yet we can do increasingly less with them. We need to reverse this trend. Google Books made us think in terms of everything: digitizing every book ever, even though hundreds of thousands of books don’t exist anymore. This is too imprecise to tell us anything except in the most general terms, a point that also holds true for the error-laden texts that exist beneath the image scans. What we need now are well-curated selections of texts according to both broad and creatively imagined categories. The contemporary literature collection, the history of memoir collection, the collection of books about left-handed detectives. Like books, these collections will cost a not-inconsiderable sum of money to create, preserve, and distribute. But unlike e-books, they will allow for a great deal of personalization. Data is the new marginalia. There is a tremendous commercial, social, and creative value lying around in all that data. Yes, data. The raw material, the clay, the molecules and atoms of texts. Words aren’t everything. But they are too important to bury in a pretty picture. McGill University The Donegal Hock James McManus Our dad carves rare slices of rump roast, lays down his new cordless knife, takes a drag of Old Gold. He centers the goblet and picks up the platter, and it’s like we’re all hearing this drum roll. So no slices slide off the end, he tilts it just enough to let roast-blood trickle down into glass etched with crisscrossing diamonds. The Donegal hock, our mom calls it, but hock as in big fancy wine glass, not as in hock up a loogie. “Our Jimmy’s eleven?” says Gramma, even though she just frosted “11” on top of my cake. “Oh, good Heavens!” She passes the hock by the stem, like a cup of translucent red juice is too sacred for a woman to handle. Holding it up to the light makes the glass look encrusted with rubies. “Hoc est calyx sanguinis mei,” I joke. “Hic est enim,” she tells me. “Not hoc.” The blood’s gone lukewarm, so I knock it back past my tongue. “Mysterium, uh, um, fidei?” James McManus is the author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and fact, including Cowboys Full and Positively Fifth Street. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Honest Ulsterman, Paris Review, The Atlantic, and twice...

MORE THAN JUST ‘NUMPANG NAMPANG’

The singing and interpretation of religious and literary texts (makidung) has historically been a male dominated activity in Bali. In the last decade, however, since makidung programmes on radio and television have become popular, the participation of women in makidung activity has been substantial, with the number of female participants surpassing that of men. In this article, which forms part of a broader wide-ranging study of contemporary textual singing practices in Bali, we present some preliminary findings on the participation and motivation of women in textual singing programmes in the broadcast media. Women take part in on-air textual singing for a variety of personal, religious and social reasons. We show that, in spite of some elements of ‘self-promotion’ (numpang nampang) as participants seek to build their reputations as skilful practitioners, the participation and motivation of women in on-air interactive textual singing has been instrumental in fostering strong interest in Bali's textual heritage.

The Jacob Cycle in <em>Angels in America</em>: Re-Performing Scripture Queerly

As theater is an art form that many times juxtaposes texts with the performing body, one of its main contributions to Jewish culture could be in its “corporeal reading” of Jewish textual heritage. Tony Kushner’s celebrated play Angels in America proposes such a reading of Jewish texts—mainly the biblical Jacob cycle and the Jewish tradition regarding angels—as a queer re-performance that emphasizes bodily aspects such as desire, sexuality, and disease. Analyzing the play alongside Jewish classical texts from the midrashic and exegetic traditions, this paper suggests that the re-performance of Jewish texts as queer repertoire in Angels in America raises questions about the politics of the body in contemporary culture while at the same time opening up new horizons within textual tradition itself, exploring new meanings within these texts—as well as the efficacy of their performance.

Prose mesurée in the Lakes tour and guide: quoting and recalibrating English blank verse

In this paper I consider Wordsworth’s blank verse and Lake District tours and guides in the context of debates about meter. Neo‐classical critiques had cast blank verse as a visual trick of the typographical page: as prose posing as verse by appearing in lines. In this paper I argue that the transformed textual conditions made possible by an expanded print culture contributed to the Romantic revaluation of the blank‐verse measure and the valorization of its lyric form. In effect, blank verse’s visual aspects were naturalized and nationalized. I isolate a particular kind of Romantic‐era page on which blank verses frequently appeared, that of the tour and guidebook, exploring the effects of this print format on the verse. Tours and guidebooks celebrated visual features of specifically English landscapes and quoted national poets to do so. In works published between 1774 and 1835, Gilpin, Hutchinson, Housman, and Wordsworth supplemented landscapes plotted in prose with extracts from Paradise Lost, Night Thoughts, The Seasons, Mason’s English Garden, and, in Wordsworth’s case, his own unpublished manuscripts. The guides cast blank‐verse excerpts both as agents of affective finish and visual coherence and as national textual heritage that illuminated Britain’s native forms and contours. Wordsworth’s Guide through the District of the Lakes formalized blank‐verse lyric by making salient its more minute graphic lines of emphasis and aligning these with nature’s marks in land and sky.

Muslim Women's Studies

Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of Aisha hint Abi Bakr.By D. A. Spellberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 243 pp.Qur'an and Woman. By Amina Wadud-Muhsin. Kuala Lumpur: FajarBakti, 1992, 118 pp.Denise Spellberg's survey of the legacy of 'A'ishah and AminaWadud-Muhsin's exegesis of the Qur'anic exposition of gender are foraysin the field of Muslim women's studies. Both works study the place ofMuslim women in the textual heritage of the community, but their pointsof departure are different. Spellberg proposes that 'A'ishah's legacy, aproduct of exclusively male writings in texts from the classical Islamiccenturies, is a reflection of Muslim men's interpretations of early Islamichistory and their opinions about the proper place of women in their owntime. Such interpretations, Spellberg shows, are charged with the politicaltensions of their contemporary societies. Yet 'A'ishah 's "legacy alonedefied idealization as completely as it denied comfortable categorization"by the Muslim men whose texts represent and construct her, Spellbergasserts (p. 190).Wadud-Muhsin acknowledges the way in which another copiousIslamic scholarship emerged, motivated by the need to understand theQur'anic utterances about women. Her focus is not, however, on thoseinterpretive texts of men that form an authoritative tradition explaining themeaning of the Qur'an. Wadud-Muhsin argues that the question ofwoman in the Qur'an must be reconnected directly to the primary text.She proposes approaching the Qur'anic text without the assumptions aboutgender of the classical interpreters, whose work constitutes the Islamic traditionof exegesis, but also without the assumptions that undergird contemporaryfeminist readings of the Qur'an. She offers a herrneneuticalmethod for understanding the place and meaning of gender in the Qur'an,based on the consistencies of the Qur'an itself: its contexts, language, andthe worldview of its texts as a whole. The effect of this, Wadud-Muhsinsuggests, would be to transcend the gender biases of narrower readingmethods and arrive at a fuller appreciation of the text's guidance for menand women.Both works began as dissertations, Spellberg's in history, WadudMuhsin'sin religious studies. Each brings to Muslim women's studies anode of questions about the process of textual interpretation. The ...

Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century Dennis Trout Carolinne White . Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 274. $54.95. The desire for companionship may be a universal human trait, but "friendship" itself, like sexual behavior, is culturally constructed and historically conditioned. [End Page 234] Contemporary Western society, Carolinne White immediately reminds her readers, does not share the Greco-Roman preoccupation with the ethics and rules of friendship. Indeed, the upper levels of a steeply stratified late Roman society were laced through with networks of philia or amicitia that served an astonishing range of theological and ecclesiastical, as well as political and emotional ends; and late Roman men and women inherited a body of literature and philosophy saturated with allusions to or discussions of friendship's protocols. But while Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century acknowledges friendship's pervasion of the late antique mentality, its author relies largely upon the evidence preserved in explicit pronouncements, much to the exclusion of social praxis. Although White avows an interest in the "personal lives" and social relations of her subjects, she has in fact produced a study whose foremost aim is "to consider friendship primarily from a theoretical point of view rather than from the perspective of biography, social history, or politics . . ." (pp. 1-2). Three introductory chapters and a brief conclusion frame eight chapters (4-11) devoted to several fourth-century Christian authors and to monasticism. Chapter 1 locates the topic of fourth-century Christian friendship broadly within such contemporary developments as the post-Constantinian triumph of Christianity, the conversion of the aristocracy, and the growth of the ascetic movement. Chapters 2 and 3 establish the community of earlier texts and ideas that influenced fourth-century thought. The former chapter "aims at pointing out the main developments and continuities" (p. 13) in classical theories of friendship and catalogues a vast array of Greek and Roman sentiments from Homer through Plotinus and Iamblichus. Decidedly nonhistoricist, this account nonetheless confirms the rich variety of literary, philosophical, and popular pronouncements transmitted to later periods from earlier antiquity. Similarly, chapter 3 surveys the (scant) Biblical evidence relevant to the subject, with particular attention to passages frequently cited by fourth-century writers (e.g., John 15.12-15; Acts 2.44-45) Chapter 3 also unveils a fundamental concern and direction of this study. The ideals of reciprocity, equality, partiality, and merit characteristic of traditionally conceived philia or amicitia could jar harshly with the inclusive, nonjudgmental attitudes demanded by altruistic neighborly love and Christian agape. Although the impact of this potential conflict upon earlier Christian social relations remains unclear, White's forecasting of the dilemma's solution adumbrates a primary theme of the book: "the Church Fathers . . . appreciated that philia could enrich the Christian view of love. . . . the best in Classical friendship was transformed and found a secure purpose in Christianity" (p. 56). Chapters 4-11 (except chapter 10 on monasticism) pursue this theme through the lives and writings of Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom and Olympias, Synesius, Ambrose, Jerome, Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine. Brief biographical sketches precede the consideration of texts or passages deemed representative of personal views and attitudes. Organization of the study around individuals yields repetition, but highlights the contrasts that, in the author's view, illustrate the classical and Christian dialectic: Synesius, Ambrose, and Jerome, for example, who "remained dominated by pagan thought on the subject," only superficially accommodated their ideas to a Christian context; Augustine and Basil, however, "transformed [End Page 235] their knowledge of the Classical views of friendship . . . to work out an orthodox theological framework for their ideas" (p. 111). Such analysis only partially satisfies; the insistent dependence upon voiced claims and textual heritage facilitates arguably monolithic categories. Moreover, not all the subjects of these chapters, as the author admits, cared equally to articulate a coherent theory of Christian friendship. Perhaps not surprisingly, Synesius is elusive and at Milan Ambrose produced a Christian De Officiis, while it was Augustine who wrote the Confessions. Indeed, White's preference for a philosophical perspective and explicit ancient statements may explain why the chapter on Augustine is the most engaging of a book initially provoked...

Genre theory and family resemblance—revisited

In the following discussion I will examine the application of Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance to genre theory. Despite its popularity among literary theorists, there is sometimes a discrepancy between the loose concept of family resemblance, at least in its negative-radical version, and the practical assumptions made about genres. In order to overcome the inadequacies of existing applications of the concept, I will propose two ways in which Wittgenstein's concept can be fruitfully applied to genre theory. First, by using certain working hypotheses in cognitive psychology, based on the concept of family resemblance, I will argue that literary genres are perceived as structured categories, with a ‘hard core’ consisting of prototypical members. These prototypical members are characterized by the fact that they bear a relatively high degree of resemblance to each other. Second, by focusing on the analogy between the internal structure of literary genres and that of families one can establish a ‘genealogical’ line of literary genres, i.e., the series of writers who have participated in shaping, reshaping and transmitting the textual heritage established by the ‘founding father’ of the genre, including the dialectical relationship of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ in genre history.