English Treatises Research Articles

A Little Treatise Against Fleshly Affections: Edited from London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C XVIII

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to introduce an anonymous late fifteenth-century treatise of religious guidance, A Little Treatise Against Fleshly Affections. Presently edited for the first time from London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C xviii, this short Middle English treatise was devised as a tool of diagnosis, prevention, and cure for individuals troubled by feelings of inordinate carnal love. Alongside the text itself and formal editorial considerations, the present edition offers a discussion of the treatise’s textual relationship with David of Augsburg’s De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione and its potential origin and relation to Syon Abbey, as well as its intended audiences.

Little Lewis and Latin Folk in Chaucer's Prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe

Little Lewis and Latin Folk in Chaucer's Prologue to the <i>Treatise on the Astrolabe</i>

The place of Edward Gresham's Astrostereon (1603) in the discussion on cosmology and the Bible in the early modern period.

This article situates Edward Gresham's Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), a little-known English astronomical treatise, in the context of the cosmo-theological debate on the reconciliation of heliocentrism with the Bible, triggered by the publication of Nicholas Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. Covering the period from the appearance of the 'First Account' of Copernican views presented in Georg Joachim Rheticus's Narratio Prima (1540) to the composition of Astrostereon in 1603, this paper places Edward Gresham's commentary and exegesis against the background of the views expressed by his countrymen and the thinkers associated with the Wittenberg University - such as Philipp Melanchthon, Caspar Peucer, and Christoph Rothmann. Comparing the ways in which they employed certain biblical passages - either in favour of or against the Earth's mobility - the paper emphasizes Gresham's ingenious reading of the Hebrew version of the problematic excerpts, and his expansion of the accommodation principle.

A New Edition and Lexical Study of a Middle English Treatise on Horses

A New Edition and Lexical Study of a Middle English Treatise on Horses

Sources and Resources John Bradmore and the Case of the Bitten Man: A Tantalising Link Between Three Medieval Surgical Manuscripts

Summary This article examines three English surgical treatises compiled between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. The earliest, a Middle English treatise dated 1392, appears to have been compiled by a surgeon practising in London (MS Wellcome 564). Near contemporary with this is a Latin treatise, Philomena, compiled by London surgeon John Bradmore in the first decade of the fifteenth century (BL MS Sloane 2272). The latest of the three, dated 1446, represents a translation/adaptation of Bradmore’s Philomena into Middle English (BL MS Harley 1736). All three treatises contain anecdotes of surgical cases, and just one of these anecdotes is common to all three manuscripts. Close analysis of this story is used to explore aspects of the practice and regulation of surgery in late medieval London, and also to examine the relationship of the three treatises and the implications this has for the sharing of texts and information among surgeons.

Household Knowledges in Late-Medieval England and France ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten

Reviewed by: Household Knowledges in Late-Medieval England and France ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten George Shuffelton Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten, eds. Household Knowledges in Late-Medieval England and France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii, 271. $120.00. As its title suggests, this essay collection sits at the intersection of several topics of recent interest. Since David Starkey's influential suggestion in 1981 that the later Middle Ages were the "age of the household," historians and literary critics have paid increasing attention to real, fictional, and figurative households of all kinds. More specifically, this volume's focus on the household as a site for "both the consumption and production of knowledge" seems traceable to recent decades' attention to the didactic and practical texts included in various miscellany manuscripts often classified as "household" books (3). Three of the ten essays [End Page 389] focus on particular miscellanies, and four others address practical texts (including conduct literature). But the contributors' interest in manuscript context remains subordinated to the overarching concept of the household as a space for working out social relations, and in that sense the volume has a coherent organizing principle. The contributors' methodologies and predilections vary slightly, but as one might expect, gender and marriage are recurring subjects. The introduction by Burger and Critten provides a useful overview of recent historical research on medieval households and nods to some of the more daring applications of this work by literary scholars such as D. Vance Smith, in Arts of Possession (2003). The first essay, by Burger, examines the different modes of knowledge in Le menagier de Paris, a text treated more extensively in his 2018 monograph Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages. Burger's essay here emphasizes the diversity of genres in Le menagier and the interplay between textual and experiential authority. Inevitably, the distinction breaks down, as when practical advice on removing stains is presented as experiential wisdom from the household servant "Dame Agnes," when in fact it derives from a text. Burger concludes that Le menagier de Paris "argues that the movement of knowledge within the bourgeois household can never be simply top-down" (36). Textual authority acquired from outside the household must be reinterpreted to conform to local conditions and informed by experiential knowledge from within. Burger suggests an analogy to the relations of husband and wife. The next essay, by Elliot Kendall, continues the consideration of gender and marriage with a reading of Caxton's Book of the Knight of the Tower. Kendall examines the internal tensions of the text's patriarchal agenda. For example, the text presents domestic violence as both entirely justified and simultaneously displaced, "separated from patriarchal will" (56). The completion of a woman's education is her recognition of her own incompetence, and the essay concludes by considering Margaret Paston's awareness of the "socially construed limits of her competence" (66). Two essays focus on particular kinds of technical or practical knowledge. The first of these, Nadine Kuipers's study of various Latin, Anglo-French, and Middle English treatises on agriculture, makes the point that texts purporting to be practical may not be practical at all, given the varieties of climate and some of their more fanciful recommendations. Some of The Craft of Graftyng's descriptions should come with the disclaimer "Don't try this at home," such as injecting trees with ferrous [End Page 390] oxide to turn fruit blue, or grafting together multiple species. Instead, such texts likely served other purposes, as entertainment, a source of nostalgia, and (in the case of bourgeois households) a form of social aspiration. Kuipers concludes with the argument that sixteenth-century readers actually did seek practical instruction from agricultural treatises, unlike their medieval predecessors. This claim seems plausible, but needs more evidence and exposition to be fully convincing. Michael Leahy's essay looks at medical texts, including John Arderne's De fistula in ano, John of Bourdeaux's Governayle of Health, and Henry Daniel's Treatise on Rosemary, and the way they "imagine the household as an environment typified by bodily integrity and perfect living" (180). Here...

Approaching a Rhetorical Performance of Late 18th Century Keyboard Music from the Methods of john Walker

Student Number 3105008 Supervisor(s) Anna Scott, Jed Wentz Title Approaching a Rhetorical Performance of Late 18th Century Keyboard Music from the Methods of john Walker Research Question How can we apply declamatory principles from late 18th century English treatises to historical performance of late 18th century solo keyboard music? Summary There is no doubt that the art of classical rhetoric played an important role in the conception and performance of music in the 18th century. In order to better understand how to perform rhetorically in an historically informed manner, an understanding of declamation as it was understood in the late 18th century is key. This thesis uses the written methods of English actor-turned-elocutionist, John Walker, as the basis to proposing a rhetorical approach to late 18th century solo keyboard repertoire. Linguistic concepts of sense, structure, style, and delivery (acting) are likened to analogous concepts in galant music and supported with statements from musical treatises and examples from musical works. Two main performance case studies are considered for comparison: the first linguistic, being Walker’s 1787 annotated version of Edward IV’s speech from William Shakespeare’s "Richard III"; and the second musical, being the Adagio movement of Joseph Haydn’s 1794 Keyboard Sonata Hob. XVI:52. It is hoped that this investigation will not only expand the horizons of the author’s solo performances, but will also provide interesting and useful tools for other musicians. Short Bio Anders Muskens began modern piano studies at the age of 4 in Edmonton, Canada. He graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto under the tutelage of Dr. Irina Konovalov. He now studies fortepiano and harpsichord at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague with Dr. Bart van Oort, Petra Somlai, and Fabio Bonizzoni. He received numerous awards including: 1st place at the Early Music Young Ensemble Competition at the London Exhibition of Early Music 2018 in a duo with soprano Tinka Pypker; and the „Hofkapelle Elbe-Elster“ prize at the „Gebrüder Graun Prize“ 2018 with his ensemble Das Neue Mannheimer Orchester.

David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl-Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, 220 pp.

David K. Coley (Associate Professor of English, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia) has produced an intriguing new book examining the four poems of the Pearl Manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. – Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – in the context of late-medieval English and European plague treatises, texts, and discourses. Coley considers the Black Plague as a cultural trauma, which deeply affected the poet, who, motivated either by subconscious post-traumatic feeling or conscious artistry, used the same language and exempla used in plague texts in key passages of his poems. Coley indicates that his goal in the book &lt;?page nr="470"?&gt;is “to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval literature” (5) and, more specifically, to examine:

Francis Thynne's Perfect Ambassadour and the Construction of Diplomatic Thought in Elizabethan England

Francis Thynne's Perfect Ambassadour, written in 1578, is the earliest surviving English treatise on the role of the ambassador. Thynne's conception of appropriate diplomatic activity was influenced by historical precedent. Thynne drew directly on ancient Greek and Roman authors; he also included information about classical and medieval diplomacy derived indirectly from more recent publications, such as Theodore Zwinger's Theatrum Vitae Humanae. After briefly outlining the content of the treatise, Tracey A. Sowerby assesses the significance of Thynne's method and explains what it tells us about the mediation of diplomatic knowledge. Sowerby then compares it to other early modern diplomatic treatises and Elizabethan ambassadors' understanding of their activities.

Amalia D. Kessler. Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800–1877.

Amalia D. Kessler’s Inventing American Exceptionalism is a richly detailed history that examines legal adversarialism as a readily apparent but often taken for granted element of U.S. legal culture. Idealized as a mode of common-law legal procedure in which lawyers settle disputes for independent parties through the examination of oral testimony in public proceedings, adversarial legalism has come to be seen as intertwined with key elements of U.S. national identity such as competitive individualism and liberal anti-statism. Yet Kessler argues that the broad adoption of adversarial legalism was never foreordained. Inventing American Exceptionalism shows the development of the peculiar commitment toward adversarialism as other models of dispute settlement and adjudication lost credibility within particular social, political, and historical contexts. The story thus revolves less around adversarialism per se than it does around the great alternative to the common law: equity. Derived from civil law traditions, equity courts followed a “quasi-inquisitorial” approach to procedure in which court officials conducted fact-finding through written testimonies that were kept secret during the investigation. Equity also had recourse to unique remedies such as the injunction. Kessler examines the origins of equity in Roman law and the English treatise literature, but her primary focus is on the uptake of this approach in the New York Court of Chancery and on the later moments in which courts and tribunals experimented with equity proceedings, such as in conciliation courts in Florida and California or the Freedman’s Bureau Courts established during Reconstruction.

Henry Daniel, Medieval English Medicine, and Linguistic Innovation: A Lexicographic Study of Huntington MS HM 505

MS HM 505 in the Huntington Library contains the first known academic medical treatise in Middle English, Henry Daniel's Liber uricrisiarum. The manuscript includes more than a thousand English words that either predate, or are contemporary with, their earliest recorded occurrence according to the OED and MED. In this lexicographic study, Sarah Star lists the terms and argues that Henry Daniel occupies a crucial, but hitherto overlooked, place in the history of English medicine and the history of the English language.

Трактат Горация Уолпола «История современного вкуса в садоводстве» (1770) и рождение концепции национального садового стиля

The paper deals with the first English (and European) treatise on the progress and specific features of the landscape style, the book entitled The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (1770) by Horatio Walpole, which was translated into Russian by the author of this article. This text is linked with the writer’s own landscape project — the garden at Strawberry Hill, as well as with the evolving theory of the landscape style represented by the poetry of Alexander Pope and William Shenstone, and Observations on Modern Gardening by Thomas Whately. Walpole in his historical survey ties the origins of the landscape style to the primeval way of life close to nature, and opposes this style to the artificiality of the gardens of the Italian and Northern Baroque, as well as French Classicism. Walpole links the major novelties of the landscape system with the inventions by William Kent and urges his compatriots to keep the middle line, avoiding uniformity (represented by Lancelot Brown), as well as fantastic exaggerations offered by the Chinese scenes by William Chambers. In the version of 1827, James Dellaway, the editor, makes his notions on the tendencies spotted by Walpole and certifies the truth of the writer’s warnings. The paper summarizes the peculiarities of the Walpole’s method and the main points of his book, still instrumental for actual garden history.

The First Principles of Public Finance by Antonio de Viti de Marco: Is There Any Disparity between the Assessments of the Italian and the English Speaking Scholars?

At present, Antonio de Viti de Marco is internationally considered an interest-ing figure, similarly esteemed by Italian and English-speaking scholars, but there was disparity between them in the 1930s in assessments of First Principles of Public Finance. A recent paper suggests De Viti’s research on concrete problems such as tax incidence or public debt is clearly independent from his theoretical framework. Thus, one should consider the disparity in both the theoretical framework and the treatment of concrete topics. To investigate this disparity, material published in the 1930s regarding De Viti’s treatise in Italian and English are considered. Evidence indicates no significant discrepancy between Italian and English-speakers regarding the theoretical framework.

The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis Revisited

The Middle English treatise known as The Equatorie of the Planetis, the only known manuscript of which survives as Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 75.I, was first brought to public notice in 1952 (Price ...

Anxious Love and Disordered Urine:

Abstract This article presents an edition of the chapter on intense emotional states including lovesickness in Henry Daniel's Middle English treatise on the judgment of urines, the Liber uricrisiarum. The chapter reveals an idiosyncratic perspective on a medical counterpart to the malady of love that figures prominently in medieval literature and culture. Although the condition of amor hereos was frequently discussed in medieval Latin medical texts, it failed to generate interest in the equivalent vernacular English discourse. Among widely circulated English texts, only Chaucer's description of Arcite's malady in the Knight's Tale rivals Daniel's in its sophistication and use of technical language.

Mozart’s Grace by Scott G. Burnham (review)

Reviewed by: Mozart’s Grace by Scott G. Burnham Steven D. Mathews Mozart’s Grace. By Scott G. Burnham. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. [xi, 189 p. ISBN 9780691009100 (hardcover); ISBN 9781400845118 (e-book), $29.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. With Mozart’s Grace, Scott Burnham, the experienced Princeton scholar, shows musicians what the great composer can teach us—and perhaps what he has taught subsequent master German composers (e.g., Beethoven, Schubert, and Schoenberg)—about musical beauty, style, harmony, melody, time, and form. Burnham offers a stirring, erudite, and deeply poetic treatment of around fifty select passages as a culmination of some three decades of thought and discussion. Burnham invites musicians to join him on a quest to “apprehend [End Page 78] the quality of beauty in Mozart’s music” in what he calls “a personal attempt to describe what is striking about the sound of Mozart” (p. 4). He achieves this through several perceptive analytical vignettes loosely categorized according to the following: their qualities of “Beauty and Grace” (chapter 1); their multiple and various “Thresholds” (chapter 2); and their tendencies toward “Grace and Renewal” (chapter 3). While freely admitting his methodology is unsystematic, Burnham’s ultimate goals are, on one hand, “to support some of the reigning critical intuitions about Mozart’s music with fresh analytical evidence,” and on the other hand, “to develop a newly inflected view of our perennial susceptibility to his music” (p. 5). For a book of unexceptional length—less than two hundred total pages and with score examples on almost every page (as each selection Burnham discusses, with few exceptions, is reproduced from the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe)—the boundless amount of rich philosophical and analytical nuggets will undoubtedly fill the minds of faithful musicologists, music theorists, and performers for a long time. In the following review, I will first provide content descriptions and then close with comments concerning how it can best serve its potential audience. Chapter 1 is split into two subtopics, “Sonority” and “Line and Expressivity.” The central concept for Burnham in the former is to show how Mozart creates sound environments that project a kind of “animated stillness,” or “the rhythmic relation between pulsing accompaniment and slower moving melody” (p. 10). The examples presented in this part include excerpts from slow movements, such as the Adagio from the Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, and the “Soave sia il vento” trio from Così fan tutte, which set the tone for a significant majority of the book. In fact, what separates this Mozart book from most other significant studies (analytical or otherwise) is Burnham’s nearly exclusive focus on slow-tempo passages. Not only is this strategy ideal for close and descriptive analysis, but it also provides a practical way to elucidate abstract concepts (also involved at faster tempos) for the listener. In the second part of the first chapter, Burnham sets up an elegant comparison between visual and musical beauty by invoking William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, a late-eighteenth-century English treatise on visual art that discusses ideal levels of graceful linear curvature—the beautiful human form set in motion. Through an analysis of the soprano melody during mm. 38–46 of the “Christe eleison” from the Kyrie of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, K. 427, Burnham demonstrates how Hogarth’s “lines of beauty and grace” translate to the “gentle undulations” of Mozartean melodies (p. 21). Despite its great length, chapter 2 features stimulating readings of Mozartean passages—especially from his Requiem, K. 626, and Ave verum corpus, K. 618—that indeed rise to the level of thresholds. Burnham organizes these “liminal experiences” into four broad analytical subsections of aesthetics and style (p. 40). In “Summoning the Supernatural and the Sacred,” Burnham shows us how Mozart puts us at the threshold of death in the overture and first scene of Don Giovanni, where particular passages (e.g., the Commendatore’s murder) seem to temporarily suspend time through abrupt changes in mode and texture. In the overture, Mozart creates an “uncanny” feeling by combining chromatic harmonies with simple melodic diatonic scales (p. 45). This idea of “uncanny time” has been previously explored, however, and I only wish...

Unrecorded Middle English Lexical Items in the Fifteenth-Century Treatise, Medicines for Horses: A Preliminary Study

THE composite equine treatise printed as Propretees & medicynes of hors by Wynkyn de Worde in c. 1497–98,1 and again in c. 1502,2 is a work that survives in a variety of recensions in eleven fifteenth-century manuscripts, as listed in George Keiser’s catalogue of ‘Works of Science and Information’ under the title Medicines for Horses.3 The significance of this work at a time when horses were indispensable for the economy in general, as well as for most forms of travel, for cartage and for warfare, cannot be overerestimated; nor can its importance for our understanding of medieval veterinary practices, and how these differed from medical theories and remedies for humans. As Keiser observes: Recently, the astonishing number of English treatises on human medicine has been receiving serious attention, and justly so. Nevertheless, while far fewer books on equine medicine are extant, their production is a phenomenon that deserves greater notice than it has so far received. That the horse was an integral part of life for persons of the middle and upper classes of the later Middle Ages is surely an idea too obvious to require defense.4

The Little Known Mineral and Chemical History of Iron and A History of Brass by an Eighteenth-Century Technologist, William Lewis (1708–1781)

Sometime during the 1920s, Cardiff Public Libraries (later to become Cardiff Central Library) acquired a six-volume handwritten manuscript collection entitled Mineral & Chemical History of Iron. The author of the manuscripts is named as William Lewis. Now uniformly bound in half-leather and cloth boards, this impressive holding provides, in more than a thousand hand-written pages, an early attempt to produce a full-scale treatise in English on the history of iron. This note traces the route by which the collection reached Cardiff, and also presents evidence for the existence of a hitherto unknown work on the history of brass by the same author.

Voices of Jewish Converts to Christianity in late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

This paper seeks to highlight the content and context of the conversion narratives written by Jews converting to Christianity in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It will be demonstrated that a non-Pauline pattern of conversion writing emerges. The content of these conversion treatises will be contextualized by looking at a whole range of English treatises concerning Jewish conversion, in particular those containing voices of “hermeneutical” Jewish converts. It will be argued that the period under scrutiny evinced a waning of the barriers surrounding Jewish conversion.

Tradition and Innovation in Later Medieval English Manuscripts (review)

Tradition and Innovation in Later Medieval English Manuscripts. By Kathleen L. Scott. (London: The British Library. 2007. Pp. xiv, 194. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-712-34936-0.) This volume examines five little-studied English manuscripts of the later medieval period that contain rare or enigmatic decoration and iconography. Scott uses these examples to argue that although fifteenth-century manuscript illumination has often been derided as derivative and dull, these specific manuscripts not only contain strikingly inventive pictorial elements but also raise intriguing questions about the broader contours of English book production and the function of illustrations in late-medieval manuscripts. The first chapter concerns Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 156, an English modelbook for a work known as the Postilla litteralis super totam Bibliam, a widely used literal exegesis of the Bible composed by Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349). Although this manuscript does not include the full text of the commentary, which typically ran from three to five volumes, it contains illustrations intended to accompany the text, including images that depict practical information about the Bible such as diagrams, plans, and illustrations of the Temple of Solomon, the Table of Shewbread, the Brazen Sea, the Altar of the Holocaust, and so on. She posits that the Bodleian manuscript was a kind of archetypal exemplar or modelbook that provided copyists with a repertoire of imagery for use in the numerous other copies of the work produced during the period.The second chapter considers All Souls Library, Oxford, MS 10, the only surviving copy of an illustrated French Bible written in England. The origins of this manuscript are especially mysterious, as the text was written in French at a time when Wycliffite Bibles were readily available, but produced in an English illuminating shop by a prolific and well-known artist who seems to have moved in the highest circles of noble book-commissioning patrons. Although the manuscript contains many of the standard features of English book art, some of its iconography was clearly influenced by French models; moreover, it prominently features miniatures of readers and books. Scott unravels some of the potential implications of this evidence for ownership and, intriguingly, proposes that the book may have been commissioned by a French patron in forced residence in England such as Charles d'Orleans. Scott then focuses on British Library, Stowe MS 39, the only surviving English manuscript of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, a Middle English treatise of spiritual guidance that employs architectural motifs to depict aspects of interiority. …