In the middle years of the fourteenth century, the monk Henry de Kirkestede, librarian and later prior of Bury St Edmunds abbey, set about compiling a universal bibliography of writers and their works. His sources were extensive. First, the framework was provided by the Franciscan union catalogue compiled in Oxford around 1300 - The Registrum Anglie, volume two in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues series - which provided the form of entry, works of ninety-nine authors, and a record of copies in different locations. Henry augmented this with a systematic use of ancient bibliographers such as Jerome, and from references to authors and works he found in his own wide reading. His third source was the large library of Bury St Edmunds itself, one of the richest in the country. Books that Henry used survive there to this day, including his copy of the ancient bibliographers, as well as many books containing his notes reveal which him as an astute librarian with a bibliographical turn of mind.
This volumes offers a study of all known manuscripts and incunabular editions of four classical texts: Vitruvius' De architectura, Cato's De agri cultura, Varro's De re rustica, Porphyrio's Commentary on Horace, and Priscian's Periegesis. The total number of witnesses involved comes to over 200; many of the manuscripts were produced in France or Italy, but English, German, Polish, and Swiss manuscripts also feature. For each text, the genealogical affiliations of its manuscript copies are determined (in many cases for the first time), as is the manner in which each was dispersed throughout medieval Europe and transmitted from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the first printed editions. S. P. Oakley shows that clear and decisive results can be achieved by application of the so-called stemmatic method and establishes which manuscripts future editors should use in editing these texts. Manuscripts that are not needed by future editors are discussed as fully as those that are, and many localizations and derivations are established. The result is a detailed study that deepens knowledge of the transmission of classical Latin texts, especially in the Renaissance, of scribal practice, and of techniques that can be deployed in the genealogical study of manuscripts and incunables.
The record of each copyright registration listed in the Catalog includes a description of the work copyrighted and data relating to the copyright claim (the name of the copyright claimant as given in the application for registration, the copyright date, the copyright registration number, etc.).
The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook represent the best of current thinking in the study of Latin language and literature in the Middle Ages. The insights offered by the collective of authors not only illuminate the field of medieval Latin literature but shed new light on broader questions of literary history, cultural interaction, world literature, and language in history and society. The contributors to this volume--a collection of both senior scholars and gifted young thinkers--vividly illustrate the field's complexities on a wide range of topics through carefully chosen examples and challenges to settled answers of the past. At the same time, they suggest future possibilities for the necessarily provisional and open-ended work essential to the pursuit of medieval Latin studies. While advanced specialists will find much here to engage and at times to provoke them, this handbook successfully orients non-specialists and students to this thriving field of study. The overall approach of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature makes this volume an essential resource for students of the ancient world interested in the prolonged after-life of the classical period's cultural complexes, for medieval historians, for scholars of other medieval literary traditions, and for all those interested in delving more deeply into the fascinating more-than-millennium that forms the bridge between the ancient Mediterranean world and what we consider modernity.
The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This first volume, and fourth to appear in the series, covers the years c.800-1558, and surveys the reception and transformation of classical literary culture in England from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the Henrician era. Chapters on the classics in the medieval curriculum, the trivium and quadrivium, medieval libraries, and medieval mythography provide context for medieval reception. The reception of specific classical authors and traditions is represented in chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, the matter of Troy, Boethius, moral philosophy, historiography, biblical epics, English learning in the twelfth century, and the role of antiquity in medieval alliterative poetry. The medieval section includes coverage of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, while the part of the volume dedicated to the later period explores early English humanism, humanist education, and libraries in the Henrician era, and includes chapters that focus on the classicism of Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey.
