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 Medeolinuwok, Music, and Missionaries in Maine

Ann Morrison Spinney

in Music in American Religious Experience

This chapter examines the musical practices employed by Catholic missionaries among the Wabanaki peoples during the colonial period in what would become the northeastern United States and the ... More

This chapter examines the musical practices employed by Catholic missionaries among the Wabanaki peoples during the colonial period in what would become the northeastern United States and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Liturgy, ritual, and hymnody all contained musical styles and sacred genres that made it possible for priests to convert Native Americans, while at the same time Native Americans found ways to retain many distinguishing characteristics of their own religious experiences. The Thomas Kyrie Manuscript provides the central case study in the chapter. Hymn practices grew up around funeral practices. The chapter contributes substantially to understanding how sacred musical practices provided the basis for new practices of literacy and the transformation of Wabanaki society until the present.Less

Lord Byron, Manuscript Poet

Michelle Levy

in Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

Chapter 4 considers the most popular and commercially successful of the English Romantic poets, Lord Byron, to explicate his continuous and deep engagement with manuscript culture. It begins by ... More

Chapter 4 considers the most popular and commercially successful of the English Romantic poets, Lord Byron, to explicate his continuous and deep engagement with manuscript culture. It begins by offering a quantitative assessment of his use of print publication and manuscript dissemination. Throughout, from his earliest poetic efforts to his last, we find that Byron encountered difficulty in preparing his verse for print and relied on manuscript to circulate his poetry, particularly his short verse. The chapter considers his earliest four verse collections, and then studies the manuscript revisions to the poem that launched his fame – Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Both examples demonstrate Byron’s early struggle to transition from narrower to wider audiences without compromising his poetic candour. Afterwards, Byron avoided these time-consuming processes of rearrangement and revision by separating his writing into two categories: the handwritten short poems he entrusted to members of his coterie and the longer poems he wrote for the public. This chapter demonstrates Byron’s use of manuscript at all stages of his career, confounding the notion that he can be regarded exclusively as a print author and elucidating the sources of his discomfort with print.Less

Script’s Afterlives

Michelle Levy

in Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

Chapter 6 draws the consideration of Romantic literary manuscripts forward to the present moment, examining their shifting cultural status from the late eighteenth century onward, including their ... More

Chapter 6 draws the consideration of Romantic literary manuscripts forward to the present moment, examining their shifting cultural status from the late eighteenth century onward, including their preservation and dissemination in print and now in digital form. Significant changes to the treatment and valuation of literary manuscripts began in the late eighteenth century, as they began to be preserved and collected as never before. The attention to contemporary manuscripts arose from a growing scholarly and public interest in ancient scripts and manuscripts, and a new devotion to handwriting and to handwritten manuscripts. The second half of this chapter turns to critical treatments of the period’s manuscripts in its textual scholarship, to ask how the privileging of the textual has impacted our engagements with the period’s literary manuscripts. It investigates the major scholarly critical editions of the last five decades to understand how editorial practice has grappled with the period’s literary manuscripts and the literary culture in which they were embedded. It examines how recent digital editions of the period’s manuscripts have improved our access to and revived our interest in literary manuscripts as bearers of cultural meaning beyond the textual.Less

Epilogue Rashid al-Din at the Court of Shahrokh

Stefan Kamola

in Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jami' al-Tawarikh

A century after Rashid al-Din’s death, his works experienced a period of heightened interest at the court of the Timurid ruler Shahrokh (1405-1447). Shahrokh’s court librarian, Hafez-e Abru (d. 1430) ... More

A century after Rashid al-Din’s death, his works experienced a period of heightened interest at the court of the Timurid ruler Shahrokh (1405-1447). Shahrokh’s court librarian, Hafez-e Abru (d. 1430) was involved in collecting, preserving, and correcting early copies of Rashid al-Din’s Collected Histories (Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh), and he used Rashid al-Din’s collection as a model for his own historical writing. This epilogue traces the basic contours of Hafez-e Abru’s use of Rashid al-Din’s work and shows that, were it not for the world of Hafez-e Abru, our reception of the Collected Histories would look very different than it does.Less

The Angers Apocalypse Tapestry: A Fourteenth‐Century Walking Tour of the Book of Revelation

Natasha O'Hear

in Contrasting Images of the Book of Revelation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art: A Case Study in Visual Exegesis

Chapter 2 presents and analyses the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry (c. l373–80) (hereafter Angers) as a large‐scale example of medieval visual exegesis of the Book of Revelation. The motivation of the ... More

Chapter 2 presents and analyses the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry (c. l373–80) (hereafter Angers) as a large‐scale example of medieval visual exegesis of the Book of Revelation. The motivation of the tapestry's patron. Louis I of Anjou, in commissioning this huge tapestry is discussed as are its possible contemporary uses and parallel tapestries. Its iconographical influences and particularly the influence of the Burckhardt‐Wildt Apocalypse manuscript are also considered. The exegetical innovations of the tapestry with regard to its handling of the source‐text, and in particular its extensive visual focus on the John figure make up the second half of the chapter. The scale of the tapestry and the physicality of the viewing experience remain a focus throughout.Less

Da capo

Helen Barr

in Transporting Chaucer

Chapter Seven discusses the composition of the cover image in relation to temporal circularity, mirror images and the phenomenology of left/right apprehension.

‘Oh my simplicity’: Revising Childhood in Milton's Ludlow Maske

Blaine Greteman

in Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-1642

This essay uses Milton's extensive manuscript and print revisions of A Maske to demonstrate that his poetry was radicalizing before it was radical. A Maske exists within a network of collaborative ... More

This essay uses Milton's extensive manuscript and print revisions of A Maske to demonstrate that his poetry was radicalizing before it was radical. A Maske exists within a network of collaborative relationships at the same time that its author constructs an image of himself as a singular, inspired author—not autonomous because inspired by God, nor dependent on the assistance and approval of others. This is key to Milton's ethical proof, the struggle for a singular voice within a larger framework. In the revisions to A Maske we see that struggle play out.Less

Introduction

Michelle Levy

in Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

The Introduction draws upon recent work in the fields of book history, literary and media studies, textual scholarship and digital humanities, to advance the fundamental thesis of early modern ... More

The Introduction draws upon recent work in the fields of book history, literary and media studies, textual scholarship and digital humanities, to advance the fundamental thesis of early modern scholars – that manuscript production and circulation continued long after the advent of print. It also supports the consensus of media historians – that newer media (such as print) did not overtake and subsume older media forms (such as manuscript). Repudiating a ‘decline and rise’ or ‘succession’ model of technological change, this book instead posits a model characterized by media interaction and exchange. Taking Romantic-era literary manuscript culture and its inevitable entanglement with print as its central subject, the subsequent six chapters examine the literary manuscripts and writing practices of several central Romantic authors, and the shifting set of cultural and political conditions they faced. In doing so, this study presents a new account of literary Romanticism, one that recalibrates accounts of individual authors’ works, careers and practices; reconstructs networks of authors, editors, publishers and readers; and reconfigures concepts of privacy, sociability and publicity. It also addresses how the expanding print culture of the late eighteenth century impacted both the practices and the values ascribed to manuscript culture.Less

Anna Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print

Michelle Levy

in Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

Chapter 3 takes the long view of Anna Barbauld’s career as a dynamic example of the interactions between media, gender, and genre over nearly seven decades, from the 1760s, when she began composing ... More

Chapter 3 takes the long view of Anna Barbauld’s career as a dynamic example of the interactions between media, gender, and genre over nearly seven decades, from the 1760s, when she began composing verse, to the mid-1820s, when she died and a significant quantity of her unpublished writing came to light. Barbauld’s considerable fame as a poet rested on the social verse she published in the 1770s – poems she had written a decade earlier for her domestic circle and which she reluctantly published. For reasons we only imperfectly understand, she never printed another collection of her poems, even after the enormous success of her 1773 volume, reviews of which compared her to both Milton and Shakespeare, and even though she continued to write poetry for the next five decades of her life. She did strategically print some of her poems in magazines, whereas others she circulated in manuscript. This chapter points to the sociable and political nature of many of Barbauld’s poems, as well as to the satiric vein that runs throughout, to understand her reluctance to publish poetry and her willingness to publish in other genres, from political and religious tracts to educational and children’s books.Less

Jane Austen’s Fiction in Manuscript

Michelle Levy

in Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

Chapter 5 examines the novelist’s scribal practices through a study of her surviving manuscripts. It deconstructs the separation that has been assumed between her early fiction in manuscript and her ... More

Chapter 5 examines the novelist’s scribal practices through a study of her surviving manuscripts. It deconstructs the separation that has been assumed between her early fiction in manuscript and her later novels in print, demonstrating how elements of and impulses from the early writing survive into print. Austen presents a provocative case of a canonical and beloved novelist whose fiction manuscripts languished en route to print, as she laboured to conform to the demands of the print novel. The nature of Austen’s confrontation with print can be discerned by examining her later manuscripts – those written near the end of her life and at the height of her career in print. These manuscripts reveal the continued pleasure she took in her confidential manuscript writing and infer the challenges she faced in transitioning her fiction into print. A common thread running through this chapter and the previous two case-study chapters is the extensive accommodations made by authors to make their writing publishable. Nevertheless, by bringing into print culture some of the confidentiality more easily expressed by them in manuscript, these authors challenged the rigid conceptions of print propriety under which they wrote.Less

Gentry Romances: The Manuscript Evidence

Michael Johnston

in Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England

This chapter examines the provenance and production of manuscripts containing gentry romances, arguing that both the intended and actual audience of these texts was the same: late medieval England’s ... More

This chapter examines the provenance and production of manuscripts containing gentry romances, arguing that both the intended and actual audience of these texts was the same: late medieval England’s minor landowners. The author identifies two bodies of evidence signaling that non-commercial scribes produced these collections of romances—almost always working in the vicinity of their gentry owners, quite often in their households. First, the confluence of scribal dialect and provenance demonstrates that the scribes of the romances hailed from the immediate vicinity of the romances’ earliest owners, suggesting that the gentry commissioned such books from scribes who lived and worked near them. Second, the irregular and ad-hoc nature of these manuscripts similarly indicates that non-commercial scribes were responsible for their production.Less

Conclusion: The After-life of the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Collection

Konrad Hirschler

in A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi

This conclusion argues that the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hadi book collection survived so well because it was marginal to scholarly practices in the following centuries. Few of its books made their way to the new ... More

This conclusion argues that the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hadi book collection survived so well because it was marginal to scholarly practices in the following centuries. Few of its books made their way to the new scholarly centre, Istanbul, and manuscript traders of the nineteenth century only bought a small number of its manuscripts.Less

An Overview of Methodist Discourse Culture, 1738–1791

Andrew O. Winckles

in Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: 'Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader'

This chapter introduces and provides and overview of the unique discourse structures, like the class meeting, that Methodism pioneered. Specifically, it traces the development of Methodist discourse ... More

This chapter introduces and provides and overview of the unique discourse structures, like the class meeting, that Methodism pioneered. Specifically, it traces the development of Methodist discourse from the wild and raucous beginning of the movement in 1738 until the death of John Wesley in 1791, after which the fundamental character of Methodism and its discourse structures changed. The emphasis in this chapter is especially on how early Methodists combined oral, manuscript, and print mediation practices to create a diverse, diffuse, and fundamentally unstable and uncontrollable discourse culture which had impacts on literary developments like the rise of the novel and the literature of sensibility. In particular it argues that early Methodism should be read in terms of what William Warner calls a “media event,” which made possible new means and protocols of mediation within a space of contestation and debate over what Methodism was and how dangerous its effects could be.Less

The Secret Textual History of Pamela, Methodist

Andrew O. Winckles

in Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: 'Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader'

Chapter Three explores how the manuscript practices of early Methodism, and particularly the writing and circulation of familiar and spiritual letters can be mapped onto the discourse culture that ... More

Chapter Three explores how the manuscript practices of early Methodism, and particularly the writing and circulation of familiar and spiritual letters can be mapped onto the discourse culture that brought about the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and the media storm it engendered. In particular, it focuses on a collection of letters that were sent to Charles Wesley by female converts during the early years of the revival. Analysis of the form, content, and circulation of these types of spiritual letters helps make clear some of the links between the discourse of evangelicalism and the discourse of the early novel, most notably in the shared textual histories and similar protocols of mediation that define early works in each field.Less