Unpublished Treatise Research Articles

From Worn-out to Web-Based: Better Student Portfolios

If too many of your students' dog-eared writing portfolios are ending up in the recycle bin, consider Ms. Diehm's solution to unleash student creativity and maybe even save a few trees. IT WAS June 8, and the last exam on the last day of the school year was almost over. Sweat beads dotted each brow, and even though a few students hadn't quite finished the exam's essay question, the fidgeting could no longer be suppressed. I called for pencils to be put down and began passing out the students' folders, officially called writing portfolios, for the school year. Some students, anxious to begin vacation, stuffed their portfolios into their backpacks, rezipped, and headed for the door. A few others, not quite so impatient, paged through the overstuffed folders, musing over writings from earlier in the year. In an effort to appease me, a couple of students offered up a modest plea: Do we HAVE to keep these? In response I launched into my unpublished treatise on The Importance of High School Writings to College Freshmen -- it was mostly ignored. A half dozen or so others pitched the folders aggressively into the wastebasket as they crossed the threshold out of my room. (Now, I suppose you could argue that the students would have kept their portfolios if I had moved the trash can away from the door. However, I'm convinced from the determination in their eyes that they would have held on to those folders only as far as the nearest place of disposal, possibly the hallway.) During the 1990s, writing portfolios were all the rage. English teachers liked them because students could edit, revise, and refer to earlier work and could actually see the improvement in their writing over time. Parents liked them because they could view their children's work at parent/teacher conferences. Administrators liked them because they could serve as a depository for the writing samples required for state-mandated tests. Even some colleges and universities sanctified them for a while, requiring students to submit writings as part of the admissions process (this was ultimately dropped by most schools -- too many applicants and too much to review). To tell the truth, portfolios were a pretty good idea, but ironically, the more effectively they were used, the more cumbersome and unusable they became. Just think about a school with 800 students. While 200 students take their portfolios with them at graduation, the other 600 folders must be sorted and given to the teachers who will have the returning students in their classes the next school year. The folders bulge, wear out, and fall apart, and many end up in the recycle bin as students prepare to walk out of school for the last time. I began the 2001-02 school year with paper portfolios as usual, but I dreaded the prospect of another year of piling and pitching. I can't say for sure how I came to my new idea. I do know it was partly because of my bubbling agitation over the old way, along with information and encouragement from our school's technology department. My idea was a unique, efficient, and creative method for students to archive their work: electronic portfolios -- Web-based collections of a student's work. To put my idea into practice, I created an electronic portfolio project that spanned five 90-minute class sessions (about one session every week or two). The first step was for students to create an opening page for their portfolios using the software of their choice. One of the advantages of electronic portfolios is that students can create them using any software program with which they are comfortable, whether that be MS Publisher, MS PowerPoint, MS Word, or any other program. I provided the students with specific requirements for the opening pages so that grading would be effective and meaningful and emphasized that their audience could include anyone from a parent to an employer to a college admissions counselor. I also reminded the students that their opening page makes an initial impression, much like meeting someone face-to-face for the first time. …

Une première édition des œuvres de Joseph Bryennios : les Traités adressés aux Crétois

Joseph Bryennios (ca. 1350-1431) had personally collected and edited the homilies he had delivered at Constantinople (ca. 1404-1422). This 'Constantinople Homiliary' is reproduced in the first two volumes of the edition by Boulgaris (Leipzig 1768). In this paper, the author shows that before the Constantinople Homiliary, Bryennios had in all likelyhood collected and edited a group of works related to Crete, where he had lived for twenty years (ca. 1382- 1402). These Treatises addressed to the Cretans are preserved in four manuscripts. The history and contents of the corpus are studied here. It comprises the works by Bryennios edited by Boulgaris in his third volume (Leipzig 1784), as well as other texts that have been published since then, but without being situated in the corpus (the Acts of the Council of Cyprus and the Discussion with an Ishmaelite); finally, three unpublished treatises also belong to that corpus.

Ficino's Approach to Astrology as Reflected in Book VII of his Letters

The twelve volumes of Marsilio Ficino's correspondence are rich in astrological references. Most celebrated among these is Letter 17 in Book VII which is addressed to Federico, Duke of Urbino, and whose express intention is to reconcile genuine astronomers and Christians. Ficino himself was a practising astrologer, and yet the arguments he advances in this letter are taken from his unpublished treatise Against the Judgement of Astrologers. This apparent contradiction - is Ficino a champion or a scourge of astronomia? - may be resolved if considered in the light of his over-arching Platonic cosmology.

WALTER MORRELL AND THE NEW DRAPERIES PROJECT, c. 1603–1631

This article explores the lengthy and convoluted history of a Jacobean project to set the idle poor to work making ‘new draperies’. Although the projector, Walter Morrell, convinced the Cecils, King James, and the privy council of the social and fiscal benefits of his scheme, he failed to persuade the Hertfordshire gentry. This case study in the formulation of crown economic policy, and in ‘Stuart paternalism’, draws upon Morrell's own detailed, unpublished treatise, as well as conventional political sources, and shows how the combination of ‘commonwealth’ rhetoric and progressive economic thinking could sway crown policy-making. It also demonstrates once again the limits of conciliar authority in early Stuart England. In the face of sustained provincial non-compliance, the privy council had neither the machinery nor the stomach to force the Hertfordshire elite to implement government policy and give meaningful support to a government-backed projector. And despite their inability to deal with growing rural unemployment, the Hertfordshire magistrates were unwilling to experiment with rural industry as a solution.

Musing with Kierkegaard: Heidegger's Besinnung

The article deals with the recently published Besinnung, a work dating from 1938–1939, one among the “unpublished treatises” in Part III of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. It follows the Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938), taking up the same themes as that work, such as the last God, the first and the other beginning, etc. But whereas the earlier work, especially the notion of the last God, relates more to Schelling, this one muses on Kierkegaard. The article sets Besinnung within the context of related works of the same period, not only the Beitrage but also Metaphysik und Nihilismus and Geschichte des Seyns. However, Besinnung also breaks new ground, finding a deeper ontological distinction between Seyn and Sein as the basis for the earlier “ontological difference” between being and beings. The work is part and parcel with Heidegger's destructuring of metaphysics, which he sees as really a freeing up of the beginning, as also the issue of onto-theology. Thus it is integral with Heidegger's program of getting God out of metaphysics and being out of theology. It is in virtue of the meaning he attaches to Seyn (Logos) in Da-sein that it is possible for him not only to retrieve the meaning of the other beginning, the en-owning (Er-eignis) of Da-sein, and with it the meaning of the first beginning (in the two senses the phrase has in this work), but also thereby to recover the forgotten meaning of being (Sein). The approach to Seyn, with Kierkegaard, is not through the thinking (Denken) that thinks being, which cannot really get beyond beings and/or the Supreme Being of metaphysics, but through a thinking, a musing, that thinks through to (Er-denkt) Seyn. The article concludes with some reflections on the significance of Heidegger as theo-logian.

Giovanni Battista Doni's Interpretation of the Greek Modal System

Humanists were generally poor historians of the ancient world. Their project of applying ancient learning and ideals to contemporary situations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often impeded a disinterested search for historical truth. Giovanni Battista Doni, like Franchino Gaffurio, Henricus Glareanus, Girolamo Mei, and Francisco de Salinas before him, gained his reputation as a promoter of ancient Greek tonal systems as a basis for modern musical composition. But, like these predecessors, Doni was also imbued with a passion for research and scholarship. In a book he drafted in the early 163os and left unfinished, the de' generi e de' modi della musica,' he indulged in pure scholarship before becoming embroiled in debates about reforming modern music. His published Compendio del de' generi e de' modi della musica (Rome, 1635) was not a true compendium of the unpublished treatise but a bowdlerization with an obvious reformist agenda that left the scholarly substance behind. Consequently we must go to the unpublished Trattato to understand Doni's view of the ancient Greek tonal

The Nuṣayrī Doctrine of ‘Alī’s Divinity and the Nuṣayrī Trinity According to an Unpublished Treatise from the 7th/13th Century

Le traite d'Al-Nashshābī atteste d'une atmosphere de polemique theologique tout au long du XIII e siecle parmi les Nusayrī. Les debats theologiques refletent la problematique inherente aux dogmes Nusayrī au sujet de la divinite d'Ali et de l'incarnation de la deite dans sa figure historique. Al-Nashshābī presente sa position orthodoxe: Ali est identique a l'aspect cache de la deite. Cette identification amene l'auteur a une conception tres abstraite, a un rejet de l'incarnation dans son sens fondamental. Il nie l'aspect humain d'Ali

Henry Bence Jones (1813–1873): On the influence of diet on urine composition: Including a previously unpublished treatise on the subject and a bibliography of his writings

Eponyms have done much to perpetuate the fame and fortune of physicians. In the case of Henry Bence Jones 1 , the application of his name to the unique protein appearing in the urine of patients with multiple myeloma persists in the vocabulary of modern medicine but largely obscures the reality of the man and his contributions. In fact, other than contributing a single publication on the subject [15] in which he erroneously concluded that the protein was an oxide of albumin, Jones displayed no particular interest in the disease. Rather, he was a physician and chemist with perhaps the widest ranging knowledge of chemical pathology in England during the mid-nineteenth century and counted such eminent persons as T.H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, Hermann von Helmholtz and Michael Faraday amongst his friends and patients [57].

Going Mr. Stoddard's Way: William Williams on Church Privileges, 1693

ISCUSSION of the intellectual history of the Connecticut Valley before the Great Awakening has focused on two ministers: Northampton's Solomon Stoddard, whom Increase and Cotton Mather viewed as the virtual pontiff of that region, and Westfield's Edward Taylor, the belated metaphysical poet who, in sermons to his congregation, lengthy unpublished treatises, and private communications to Stoddard, challenged the progressive liberalization of requirements for church membership that the latter urged throughout his career.' Further, recent scholarship concludes that, for all Stoddard's influence in the valley, he had little success in persuading other clergymen to adopt his views on church discipline.2 But a lengthy, hitherto unnoticed manuscript by the Reverend William Williams, Stoddard's son-in-law and minister at Hatfield, Massachusetts, indicates that there was more intellectual ferment in the area than we have recognized and that, contrary to prevailing

Toward a Comprehensive Art of Written Discourse: Geoffrey of Vinsauf and the Ars Dictaminis

eoffrey of Vinsauf is famous as the premier exponent of the medieval art of poetry. His versified treatise, the Poetria nova, was a self-conscious attempt to update Horace's Art of Poetry, the Poetria vetus, by taUoring its precepts to the exigencies of the medieval schoolroom. The effort was a complete success, and the Poetria nova quickly became by far the most widely used textbook on the ars podriae, as evidenced by its preservation in nearly 200 manuscripts from all over Europe.' Less weU known is the fact that Geoffrey concerned himself with the composition of prose as well as verse. In fact, he wrote as many as three prose treatises deaUng at least partially with the composition of prose. Though none of these treatises achieved anything approaching the international popularity of the Poetria nova, they are valuable for indicating the full scope of Geoffrey's teaching. Moreover, one of them, the stUl unpublished treatise called the long Documentum, was sufficiently important to be imitated by two of Geoffrey's contemporaries and to rival the Poetria nova's popularity in the schools of fourteenthand fifteenth-century En-

Truth's Golden Harrow An Unpublished Alchemical Treatise of Robert Fludd in the Bodleian Library

Truth's Golden Harrow An Unpublished Alchemical Treatise of Robert Fludd in the Bodleian Library

An Unpublished Treatise on Medicine and Magic from the Age of Charlemagne

IN a medical manuscript of the Paris BibliothEque Nationale (Ms. lat. 9332) that was written at about 800, probably somewhere in the Loire Valley, there is a curious one-page treatise that has escaped the attention of historians, paleographers, mediaevalists, medical historians, and folk lorists.1 This neglect is understandable when one notes that the treatise is very brief and that it was inserted on a blank page toward the end of book i of Dioscorides' Materia Medica. The Epistula Vulturis comprises seventeen medical and magical recipes compounded from portions of vulture and other substances. About half of the recipes (numbers 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, and 16) bear such a close resemblance to passages in the Natural History of the first-century Roman, Pliny the Elder, that obviously they were derived from bis work. The wording of most of them, however, is closer to that of a sixth-century work by Sextus Placitus Papyriensis which was itself derived largely from Pliny. Therefore it seems certain that the material in question came originally from Pliny, but through the medium of Sextus' Book of Medicine from Animals, Cattle, Beasts, and Birds.2 Of the nine other recipes, one (number 11) is traceable to Sextus only; none of the rest appears in any of the extant Roman handbooks, and they were doubtless derived from the unwritten folk medicine and magic of the period. It is noteworthy that most of them are magical rather than medical in character (viz., numbers 3, 4, 10, 14, 15, 17). Interestingly enough, additional recipes of a similarly magical character appear in later manuscript versions of the Epistula. An eleventh-century version in a manuscript at Bonn (Universititsbibliothek 218, fol. 83) has four additional magical recipes; and a fifteenth-century version in a manuscript of Italian origin now at Montpellier (Ecole Medecine 277, fol. 81) has fourteen additional recipes, practically all of which are magical in character. The fact that the treatise is found in at least four other manuscripts ranging from the ninth to the twelfth century and from Switzerland, France, and England3 would seem to indicate that vulture lore was widely prevalent during the centuries after Charlemagne. The Latin text (Paris B. N., 9332, fol. 251v) reads as follows:4

Hudson's strait and the oblique Meridian

In his illuminating and penetrating study of The Pseudo-Labrador and the Oblique Meridian, published in the second issue of Imago Mundi, H. Winter has afforded us the clue to what at first sight appears the inexplicably confused and faulty cartography of the northern and north-western shore-lines of the Atlantic Ocean during the sixteenth century. He proves conclusively that the oblique meridian placed by Reinel on his map of i5o4/5 is inserted to indicate the direction of the geographical meridian on that part of the map. The magnetic variation postulated is 224 ( two points ) to the west, and that this was the accepted figure for Cape Race on the New Land coast we know from the writings of Jean Alfonce and from the unpublished treatise on the Variation Compass which John Rotz (Ross) of Dieppe composed for Henry VIII in I542('). The present day variation at Cape Race (see fig. i) is about 280 W., but apart from the secular variation, the difference may be due to the error up to 30 likely to be present in the i6th century figure. That the figure used by the French fishermen on the Banks goes back to the voyages of the Corte Reals is made clear by H. Winter's paper, but the present writer must join issue with him when he remarks (p. 66): Why Pedro Reinel did not follow the course which to us seems simpler, of changing the position of the area in question on the map itself, remained a mystery. To have done so would have rendered the chart worthless to the seaman, to whom a sea-chart was a compass-chart, and its rhumb-lines compass-rhumrbs. Using a common compass the ship-master laid his course by the ruled lines on the map (as explained e.g. in Rotz' Boke of Ydrography), while it was with the common compass that he took his bearings on approaching the shore. What would he have made of this chart had it shown a coast trending along the N.W. rhumb where his compass showed one trending due north ? He had no isogonic chart, and even had he possessed so rare an instrument as a variation compass, to make the necessary frequent observations and calculations was beyond him. A point which needs constant emphasis is the disparity between the theoretical teachings of such men as Reinel, Faleiro, Nunez and Rotz on the one hand, and the practices and beliefs of the practical seamen on the other. How could the latter, who worked entirely by rule of thumb, be expected to grasp or disentangle the three-fold errors of the marine chart ? The chart was made and used on the assumption that the compass pointed to the geographical north (in despite of the variation); that lines pointing north were parallel (in despite of the convergence of the meridians); and that the course between two points a and b lay along the straight rhumb-line or compass-bearing a-b (in despite of the fact that a great circle is not a line of constant bearing). Many pilots of standing flatly refused to believe in the ' north-easting and north-westing of the needle ' as the variation was termed, and ascribed discrepancies to faulty ' touching,' i.e. magnetizing, of the needle with the lodestone. Others considered that the behaviour of a compass depended upon the meridian in which it was ' touched,' and for this they had some warrant, since (as H. Winter recognises) it was the practice of early compass-makers to attach the card to the needle in such a way as to allow for the variation at the place where the instrument was made. Since during the sixteenth century the European variation was everywhere east, this naturally exaggerated the faultiness of the compass in American waters where it was everywhere west. William Bourne's warning to pilots in his Navigating Manual of I573(2) 'not to meddle with the mending of the compass, or 'Whettynge of the side of the needle to make it stand due north,' is evidence of blundering attempts to put matters right, and the more skilful masters seem to have set their compasses for the particular voyage in hand. We read, for example(3), that Henry Hudson did so in i6io: He came to the Isles of Orkney and here he set the north-end of the needle and the north-end of the fly all one. Sufficient has been said to make clear that in the then state of nautical practice, the traditional method.

Documents. A Hitherto Unpublished Treatise against the Italian Manicheans

Previous articleNext article FreeDocuments. A Hitherto Unpublished Treatise against the Italian ManicheansC. ConybeareC. Conybeare Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 3, Number 4Oct., 1899 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/477204 Views: 120Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The American Journal of Theology (1897-1920), which is continued by The Journal of Religion (1921-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.