Interpreting MS Digby 86

Interpreting MS Digby 86 PDF Author: Susanna Fein
Publisher: Manuscript Culture in the Brit
ISBN: 9781903153901
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A range of approaches (literary, historical, art-historical, codicological) to this mysterious but hugely significant manuscript. Extravagantly heterogeneous in its contents, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is an utterly singular production. On its last folio, the scribe signs off with a self-portrait - a cartoonishly-drawn male head wearing a close-fitted hood - and an inscription: "scripsi librum in anno et iii mensibus" (I wrote the book in a year and three months). His fifteen months' labour resulted in one of the most important miscellanies to survive from medieval England: a trilingual marvel of a compilation, with quirky combinations of content that range from religion, to science, to literature of a decidedly secular cast. It holds medical recipes, charms, prayers, prognostications, magic tricks, pious doctrine, a liturgical calendar, religious songs, lively debates, poetry on love and death, proverbs, fables, fabliaux, scurrilous games, and gender-based diatribes. That Digby is from the thirteenth century adds to its appeal, for English literary remnants from before 1300 are all too rare. Scholars on both sides of the vernacular divide, French and English, are deeply intrigued by it. Many of its texts are found nowhere else: for example, the French Arthurian Lay of the Horn, the English fabliau Dame Sirith and the beast fable Fox and Wolf, and the French Strife between Two Ladies (a candid debate on feminine politics). The interpretationsoffered in this volume of its contents, presentation, and ownership, show that there is much to discover in Digby's lively record of the social and spiritual pastimes of a book-owning gentry family. SUSANNA FEIN is Professor of English at Kent State University. CONTRIBUTORS: Maureen Boulton, Neil Cartlidge, Marilyn Corrie, Susanna Fein, Marjorie Harrington, John Hines, Jennifer Jahner, Melissa Julian-Jones, Jenni Nuttall, David Raybin, Delbert Russell, J.D. Sargan, Sheri Smith

Interpreting MS Digby 86

Interpreting MS Digby 86 PDF Author: Susanna Fein
Publisher: Manuscript Culture in the Brit
ISBN: 9781903153901
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
A range of approaches (literary, historical, art-historical, codicological) to this mysterious but hugely significant manuscript. Extravagantly heterogeneous in its contents, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is an utterly singular production. On its last folio, the scribe signs off with a self-portrait - a cartoonishly-drawn male head wearing a close-fitted hood - and an inscription: "scripsi librum in anno et iii mensibus" (I wrote the book in a year and three months). His fifteen months' labour resulted in one of the most important miscellanies to survive from medieval England: a trilingual marvel of a compilation, with quirky combinations of content that range from religion, to science, to literature of a decidedly secular cast. It holds medical recipes, charms, prayers, prognostications, magic tricks, pious doctrine, a liturgical calendar, religious songs, lively debates, poetry on love and death, proverbs, fables, fabliaux, scurrilous games, and gender-based diatribes. That Digby is from the thirteenth century adds to its appeal, for English literary remnants from before 1300 are all too rare. Scholars on both sides of the vernacular divide, French and English, are deeply intrigued by it. Many of its texts are found nowhere else: for example, the French Arthurian Lay of the Horn, the English fabliau Dame Sirith and the beast fable Fox and Wolf, and the French Strife between Two Ladies (a candid debate on feminine politics). The interpretationsoffered in this volume of its contents, presentation, and ownership, show that there is much to discover in Digby's lively record of the social and spiritual pastimes of a book-owning gentry family. SUSANNA FEIN is Professor of English at Kent State University. CONTRIBUTORS: Maureen Boulton, Neil Cartlidge, Marilyn Corrie, Susanna Fein, Marjorie Harrington, John Hines, Jennifer Jahner, Melissa Julian-Jones, Jenni Nuttall, David Raybin, Delbert Russell, J.D. Sargan, Sheri Smith

Textual Magic

Textual Magic PDF Author: Katherine Storm Hindley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226825345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
An expansive consideration of charms as a deeply integrated aspect of the English Middle Ages. Katherine Storm Hindley explores words at their most powerful: words that people expected would physically change the world. Medieval Europeans often resorted to the use of spoken or written charms to ensure health or fend off danger. Hindley draws on an unprecedented archive of more than a thousand such charms from medieval England—more than twice the number gathered, transcribed, and edited in previous studies and including many texts still unknown to specialists on this topic. Focusing on charms from 1100 to 1350 CE as well as previously unstudied texts in Latin, French, and English, Hindley addresses important questions of how people thought about language, belief, and power. She describes seven hundred years of dynamic, shifting cultural landscapes, where multiple languages, alphabets, and modes of transmission gained and lost their protective and healing power. Where previous scholarship has bemoaned a lack of continuity in the English charms, Hindley finds surprising links between languages and eras, all without losing sight of the extraordinary variety of the medieval charm tradition: a continuous, deeply rooted part of the English Middle Ages.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts PDF Author: Orietta Da Rold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107102464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Explains the methods and knowledge required to understand how, why, and for whom manuscripts were made in medieval Britain.

Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500 PDF Author: Daniel Sawyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599593
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. While much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weights of books in medieval bindings to relationships between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small-and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript sheds fresh light on poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their works were read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems, in a pattern of mutual influence.

The Practice and Politics of Reading, 650-1500

The Practice and Politics of Reading, 650-1500 PDF Author: Daniel G. Donoghue
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846411
Category : Books and reading
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
A new look at how reading was practised and represented in England from the seventh century to the beginnings of the print era, finding many kinships between reading cultures across the medieval longue durée.

Middle English Texts in Transition

Middle English Texts in Transition PDF Author: Simon Horobin
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1903153530
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Chaucer, Gower and Langland -- Lyrics and romances -- Devotional writings -- Owners and users of medieval books -- A tribute to Professor Takamiya

Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England

Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Michael Johnston
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501516485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Susanna Fein’s long and distinguished scholarly career has helped to redefine how we understand the role of scribes and manuscripts from late medieval England. She has carried out groundbreaking research on seminal manuscripts (e.g., Harley 2253, the Thornton Manuscripts, John Audley’s autograph manuscript, and the Auchinleck Manuscript). She has written extensively on the more complex and challenging metrical forms the period produced. And she has edited foundational primary texts and collections of essays. A wide range of scholars have been influenced by Fein’s work, many of whom present original research—much of it following trails first laid down by Fein—in this volume.

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft PDF Author: Daniel Wakelin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316062120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England

The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England PDF Author: Phillipa Hardman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
The first full-length examination of the medieval Charlemagne tradition in the literature and culture of medieval England, from the Chanson de Roland to Caxton. The Matter of France, the legendary history of Charlemagne, had a central but now largely unrecognised place in the multilingual culture of medieval England. From the early claim in the Chanson de Roland that Charlemagne held England as his personal domain, to the later proliferation of Middle English romances of Charlemagne, the materials are woven into the insular political and cultural imagination. However, unlike the wide range of continental French romances, the insular tradition concentrates on stories of a few heroic characters: Roland, Fierabras, Otinel. Why did writers and audiences in England turn again and again to these narratives, rewriting and reinterpreting them for more than two hundred years? This book offers the first full-length, in-depth study of the tradition as manifested in literature and culture. It investigates the currency and impact of the Matter of France with equal attention to English and French-language texts, setting each individual manuscript or early printed text in its contemporary cultural and political context. The narratives are revealed to be extraordinarily adaptable, using the iconic opposition between Carolingian and Saracen heroes to reflect concerns with national politics, religious identity, the future of Christendom, chivalry and ethics, and monarchy and treason. PHILLIPA HARDMAN is Readerin Medieval English Literature (retired) at the University of Reading; MARIANNE AILES is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol.

'Black But Human'

'Black But Human' PDF Author: Carmen Fracchia
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198881063
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'Black but Human' is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves. The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers, and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón, and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings, and sketches for costume books.