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Of the Making of Books
A collection of essays on medieval manuscripts presented to the leading palaeographer, Malcolm Parkes. The essays look at authorship, textual theory, some biographies of medieval writers and the development of the manuscript.
Their Hands Before Our Eyes
Following on from his acclaimed study of punctuation, Pause and Effect, this new book by Malcolm Parkes makes an equally fundamental contribution to the history of handwriting. Its purpose is to focus on the writing of scribes from late antiquity to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and to identify those features which are a scribe's personal contribution to the techniques and art of handwriting. The text is illustrated with 69 plates, and accompanied by a glossary of technical terms, which in itself makes a significant contribution to the subject.
Pause and Effect
Over the centuries punctuation has become an essential component of written language. Its primary function is to resolve structural uncertainties in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic significance. The importance of the study of punctuation to a number of disciplines will be widely recognised as a result of the publication of this first definitive history. The first part of Pause and Effect identifies the graphic symbols and deals with their history. It covers the antecedents of the repertory of symbols, as well as the ways in which the repertory was refined and augmented with new symbols to meet changing requirements. The second part offers a short general account of the principal in...
Scribes, Scripts, and Readers
The study of writing and reading in the middle ages is not only of direct importance to the understanding of its culture but also fascinating in its own right. Scribes, Scripts and Readers brings together fifteen essays by M.B. Parkes, the author of English Cursive Book Hands, 1250-1500. Centred on England and her direct neighbours, they deal with scribes and schools of writing, scribal techniques, and wider questions of communication in written language, literacy and the availability of books. This is a book of interest not only to palaeographers but also to historians, linguists, literary scholars and librarians.
Chaucer's Early Modern Readers
The first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, this book focuses chiefly on fifteenth-century manuscripts and discusses how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed in an age of the poet's prominence in print. Each chapter argues that patterns in the material interventions made by readers in their manuscripts – correcting, completing, supplementing, and authorising – reflect conventions which circulated in print, and convey prevailing preoccupations about Chaucer in the period: the antiquity and accuracy of his words, the completeness of individual texts and of the canon, and the figure of the author himself. This unexpected and compelling evidence of the interactions between fifteenth-century manuscripts and their early modern analogues asserts print's role in sustaining manuscript culture and thus offers fresh scholarly perspectives to medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the book. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
The Woman Reader
This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women's reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstores of our time, exploring what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages. Jack traces a history marked by persistent efforts to prevent women from gaining literacy or reading what they wished. She also recounts the counter-efforts of those who have battled for girls' access to books and education. The book introduces frustrated female readers of many eras—Babylonian princesses who called for women's voices to be heard, rebellious nuns who...
Anthropocene Reading
Few terms have garnered more attention recently in the sciences, humanities, and public sphere than the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which a human “signature” appears in the lithostratigraphic record. Anthropocene Reading considers the implications of this concept for literary history and critical method. Entering into conversation with geologists and geographers, this volume reinterprets the cultural past in relation to the anthropogenic transformation of the Earth system while showcasing how literary analysis may help us conceptualize this geohistorical event. The contributors examine how a range of literary texts, from The Tempest to contemporary dystopian novels to the poetry ...
The Late Middle English Version of Constantinus Africanus’ Venerabilis Anatomia in London, Wellcome Library, MS 290 (ff. 1r-41v)
Constantinus Africanus (c. 1015–1087), likely born in modern Tunis or Sicily, was responsible for the translation of Arabic medical texts into Latin, which constituted a substantial contribution to contemporary knowledge in fields such as anatomy and surgery, among others. Consequently, he was an extremely influential and much-cited author, and his contributions were translated into other vernacular languages, including Middle English, during the Middle Ages, which led to the proliferation of different translations of the same treatise. This book is a semi-diplomatic edition of the late Middle English version of Constantinus Africanus’ Venerabilis Anatomia, which is housed in the Wellcome Library in London (MS Wellcome 290 (ff. 1r-41v)). This version is accompanied by an introduction, a physical description of the volume, a linguistic analysis of the text, and a glossary. As such, this book represents a primary source for research not only in historical linguistics, but also in other related fields, including the history of medicine.
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
In 1979 Elizabeth Eisenstein provided the first full-scale treatment of the fifteenth-century printing revolution in the West in her monumental two-volume work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. This abridged edition, after summarising the initial changes introduced by the establishment of printing shops, goes on to discuss how printing challenged traditional institutions and affected three major cultural movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the rise of modern science. Also included is a later essay which aims to demonstrate that the cumulative processes created by printing are likely to persist despite the recent development of new communications technologies.
Medieval Cologne
In Anglophone literature, historical questions about urban, socio-economic, political, religious, and cultural development have often been answered using Anglo-French, Anglo-Low Countries, and Anglo-Italian paradigms and sources. Medieval Germany has been largely overlooked, seen as a peripheral and irrelevant anomaly. Conversely, scholars from the German Rhineland have mostly remained within the traditions of civic public history and Landesgeschichte. As a result, they rarely engage with the historical questions raised in wider European discourses. This volume challenges these historiographical propensities by offering a fresh perspective on medieval urban Germany. It aims to integrate Cologne and the Rhineland more accurately and equitably into the wider histories of medieval Europe. The book engages with historical questions of wider relevance across both German and European medieval histories. It invites all scholars and students of medieval Europe to utilize Cologne as a key source for their research and writing.
