John Argyropoulos was one of the leading Greek scholars that drove the undercurrent of Renaissance in 15th century Italy. He translated Greek philosophical and theological works into Latin, as well as produced rhetorical and theological works of his own. He was in Italy as attendee at the Council of Florence during 1439–1444, and returned to Italy subsequent to the Fall of Constantinople, teaching in Florence in 1456–1470 and in Rome in 1471–1487. Attached here are his various correspondence, most of which is with the Dukes of Florence and Milan.
The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective. The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.
The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers includes both academic and non-academic philosophers, and a large number of female and minority thinkers whose work has been neglected. It includes those intellectuals involved in the development of psychology, pedagogy, sociology, anthropology, education, theology, political science, and several other fields, before these disciplines came to be considered distinct from philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Each entry contains a short biography of the writer, an exposition and analysis of his or her doctrines and ideas, a bibliography of writings, and suggestions for further reading. While all the major post-Civil War philosophers are present, the most valuable feature of this dictionary is its coverage of a huge range of less well-known writers, including hundreds of presently obscure thinkers. In many cases, the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers offers the first scholarly treatment of the life and work of certain writers. This book will be an indispensable reference work for scholars working on almost any aspect of modern American thought.
The epigraphy of 1st-millennium-BCE Italy has been studied for many years, but these studies have largely concentrated on the languages encoded in the inscriptions and their semantic meanings. This book takes a more holistic approach that looks not only at content, but also the archaeological contexts of the inscriptions and the materiality of their 'supports': the artefacts and monuments on which the inscriptions occur. The first writing in Italy was not a local invention, but was introduced by the Phoenicians and Greeks in the 9th–8th centuries BCE. It was taken up by number of indigenous communities over the subsequent centuries to write their own languages, before these were eventually submerged by the spread of Latin. In a series of theoretical, methodological and interpretative essays, Ruth Whitehouse explores what can be learned about how writing was used by these communities and what it meant to them. The bodies of data considered relate to Venetic and Raetic (the northeast), Lepontic (the northwest), Messapic (the southeast) and Etruscan (west central Italy, extending also into Campania in the south and the Po plain in the north). While not a comprehensive survey, there are enough different groups to allow a comparative approach to be adopted. Analysis of the datasets is able to reveal the similarities and differences between them, as well as identify features that were widespread in 1st-millennium-BCE Italy and others that were more idiosyncratic and specific to particular cultural groups. Placing materiality at the centre of study allows a reconsideration of the roles writing played in the lives of the individuals and groups who occupied Italy in the 1st millennium BCE.
In ancient Mesopotamia, men training to be scribes copied model letters in order to practice writing and familiarize themselves with epistolary forms and expressions. Similarly, model contracts were used to teach them how to draw up agreements for the transactions typical of everyday economic life. This volume makes available a trove of previously unknown tablets and fragments, now housed in the Shøyen Collection, that were produced in the training of scribes in Old Babylonian schools. Following on Old Babylonian Texts in the Schøyen Collection, Part One: Selected Letters, this volume publishes the contents of sixty-five tablets bearing Akkadian letters used to train scribes and twenty-six prisms and tablets carrying Sumerian legal texts copied in the same context. Each text is presented in transliterated form and in translation, with appropriate commentary and annotations and, at the end of the book, photographs of the cuneiform. The material is made easily navigable by a catalogue, bibliography, and indexes. This collection of previously unknown documents expands the extant corpus of educational texts, making an essential contribution to the study of the ancient world.
Focusing on the ways written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush examines the social effects of an “epistolary revolution” in sixteenth-century Korea and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women using vernacular Korean script, who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. The physical peculiarities of new letter forms such as spiral letters, the cooptation of letters for purposes other than communication, and the rise of diverse political epistolary genres combined to form a revolution in letter writing that challenged traditional values and institutions. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies.
