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Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. This case study-rich book demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet. Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s in...
In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period’s meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking her cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one. Karnes examines Bonaventure’s meditational works, the Meditationes vitae Christi, the Stimulis amoris, Piers Plowman, and Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, among others, and argues that the cognitive importance that imagination enjoyed in scholastic philosophy informed its importance in medieval meditations on the life of Christ. Emphasizing the cognitive significance of both imagination and the meditations that relied on it, she revises a long-standing association of imagination with the Middle Ages. In her account, imagination was not simply an object of suspicion but also a crucial intellectual, spiritual, and literary resource that exercised considerable authority.
"The book traces the early history of the self-help genre and the literary depiction of ambition in Victorian British fiction. Stories of hardworking characters who bring themselves out of rags to riches abound in the Victorian era. In chapters featuring the works of novelists, the author demonstrates that Victorian fiction dramatized ambition and problematized it as well"--
While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.
Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection Fly-Catchers, while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a Quarry, and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his Philosophical Miscellany. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship...
Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments—even when the metaphors have become untethered from the...
Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.
Anxieties about the fate of reading in the digital age reveal how deeply our views of the moral and intellectual benefits of reading are tied to print. These views take root in a conception of reading as an immersive activity, exemplified by the experience of "losing oneself in a book." Against the backdrop of digital distraction and fragmentation, such immersion leads readers to become more focused, collected, and empathetic. How did we come to see the printed book as especially suited to deliver this experience? Print-based reading practices have historically included a wide range of modes, not least the disjointed scanning we associate today with electronic text. In the context of religio...
Explains the methods and knowledge required to understand how, why, and for whom manuscripts were made in medieval Britain.
A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia “Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history.”—Kirkus Reviews For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era’s surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the leather rolls of ancient...