Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812998936
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 458
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Book Description
"The story of literature in sixteen acts, from Alexander the Great and the Iliad to ebooks and Harry Potter, this engaging book brings together remarkable people and surprising events to show how writing shaped cultures, religions, and the history of the world"--
Author: Henry Bainton
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
A thought-provoking look at the Angevin aristocracy's literary practices and historical record Coming upon the text of a document such as a charter or a letter inserted into the fabric of a medieval chronicle and quoted in full or at length, modern readers might well assume that the chronicler is simply doing what good historians have always done—that is, citing his source as evidence. Such documentary insertions are not ubiquitous in medieval historiography, however, and are in fact particularly characteristic of the history-writing produced by the Angevins in England and Northern France in the later twelfth century. In History and the Written Word, Henry Bainton puts these documentary gestures center stage in an attempt to understand what the chroniclers were doing historiographically, socially, and culturally when they transcribed a document into a work of history. Where earlier scholars who have looked at the phenomenon have explained this increased use of documents by considering the growing bureaucratic state and an increasing historiographical concern for documentary evidence, Bainton seeks to resituate these histories, together with their authors and users, within literate but sub-state networks of political power. Proposing a new category he designates "literate lordship" to describe the form of power with which documentary history-writing was especially concerned, he shows how important the vernacular was in recording the social lives of these literate lords and how they found it a particularly appropriate medium through which to record their roles in history. Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.
Author: Alfred Burns
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
This book examines how developments in the technology of writing and literacy stimulated changes in Western civilization from its beginnings to the present. The study suggests that a few rather short periods between long static intervals generated significant cultural and cognitive innovations which still dominate «modern» civilization. Concentrating on these milestone eras - the first urban civilization in the Near East, the Greek and Roman periods, and the Renaissance - the author finds a consistent association of advances in the technique of writing and literacy with intense intellectual creativity.
Author: Steven Roger Fischer
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861895887
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the internet, A History of Writing offers an investigation into the origin and development of writing throughout the world. Illustrated with numerous examples, this book offers a global overview in a format that everyone can follow. Steven Roger Fischer also reveals his own discoveries made since the early 1980s, making it a useful reference for students and specialists as well as a delightful read for lovers of the written word everywhere.
Author: William Albert Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521448208
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The concept of 'scripture' as written religious text is re-examined, considering orally distributed sacred writings.
Author: Rosamond McKitterick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521315654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Functional analysis of the written word in eight and ninth century Carolingian European society demonstrates that literacy was not confined to a clerical elite, but dispersed in lay society and used administratively as well.
Author: Sandra Hindman
Publisher: Ithaca : Cornell University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
How did the earliest printers go about their work? What factors accounted for economic success or failure? How did artists collaborate with printers? Who made up the audience for new books? Were printed books read differently from manuscript books? This collection addresses such key questions relating to the development of the book in the West during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Sandra Hindman brings together ten new essays representing a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including art, history, literature, history, theater, and analytic bibliography. Individual essays consider various aspects of the social and historical contexts of the early printed book in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and England. Rather than focusing on either the uneasy continuity or the fundamental discontinuity between scribal culture and print culture, as previous scholarship has tended to do, Printing the Written Word sheds light on the social function of the early printed book while presenting a detailed picture of its production and reception. -- Book cover.
Author: Pamela H. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226818241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
"This book focuses on how literate artisans began to write about their discoveries starting around 1400: in other words, it explores the origins of technical writing. Artisans and artists began to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs and recipe books rather than simply pass along their knowledge in the workshop. And they tried to articulate what the new knowledge meant. The popularity of these texts coincided with the founding of a "new philosophy" that sought to investigate nature in a new way. Smith shows how this moment began in the unceasing trials of the craft workshop, and ended in the experimentation of the natural scientific laboratory. These epistemological developments have continued to the present day and still inform how we think about scientific knowledge"--
Author: Domenic Leo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004250832
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
The "Vows of the Peacock" - written in 1312 and dedicated to Thibaut de Bar, bishop of Liège - recounts how Alexander the Great comes to the aid of a family of aristocrats threatened by Indians. The poem remained popular throughout the fourteenth century and was soon followed by two sequels. Twenty-six illuminated manuscripts constitute part of a catalogue and concordance of all Peacock manuscripts. One of the most provocative, (PML, MS G24), has twenty-two miniatures which illustrate chivalry and courtly love, as epitomized in the text. An unusually high number of scurrilous marginalia, however, surround them. An interdisciplinary exploration of iconography, reception, image-text-marginalia dynamics, and context reveals their ultimate polysemy as scatological comedians and serious harbingers of sin.
Author: Konrad Hirschler
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748654216
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Winner of the 2012 BRISMES book prize. How the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria. Medieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, Konrad Hirschler explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture.The uses of the written word grew significantly in Egypt and Syria between the 11th and the 15th centuries, and more groups within society started to participate in individual and communal reading acts. New audiences in reading sessions, school curricula, increasing numbers of endowed libraries and the appearance of popular written literature all bear witness to the profound transformation of cultural practices and their social contexts.
