The twenty-eight essays in this collection showcase cutting-edge research in manuscript studies, encompassing material from late antiquity to the Renaissance. The volume celebrates the exceptional contribution of John Lowden to the study of medieval books. The authors explore some of the themes and questions raised in John’s work, tackling issues of meaning, making, patronage, the book as an object, relationships between text and image, and the transmission of ideas. They combine John’s commitment to the close scrutiny of manuscripts with an interrogation of what the books meant in their own time and what they mean to us now.
The Protean Virgil argues that when we try to understand how and why different readers have responded differently to the same text over time, we should take into account the physical form in which they read the text as well as the text itself. Using Virgil's poetry as a case study in book history, the volume shows that a succession of material forms - manuscript, printed book, illustrated edition, and computer file - undermines the drive toward textual and interpretive stability. This stability is the traditional goal of classical scholarship, which seeks to recover what Virgil wrote and how he intended it to be understood. The manuscript form served to embed Virgil's poetry into Christian culture, which attempted to anchor the content into a compatible theological truth. Readers of early printed material proceeded differently, breaking Virgil's text into memorable moral and stylistic fragments, and collecting those fragments into commonplace books. Furthermore, early illustrated editions present a progression of re-envisionings in which Virgil's poetry was situated within a succession of receiving cultures. In each case, however, the material form helped to generate a method of reading Virgil which worked with this form but which failed to survive the transition to a new union of the textual and the physical. This form-induced instability reaches its climax with computerization, which allows the reader new power to edit the text and to challenge the traditional association of Virgil's poetry with elite culture.
Made in Rome around A.D. 400, the Vatican Vergil is the most famous and the most attractive illustrated book surviving from classical antiquity. David H. Wright introduces this masterpiece of late antique art and shows why it is such an impressive example of the new form of book, the codex, that replaced the traditional papyrus roll and permitted more elaborate illustrations. Here are thirty-two of the most interesting illustrations from the Vatican Vergil, reprinted in full color from the 1980 facsimile published in Graz, Austria, in collaboration with the Vatican Library. Facing each reproduction is the appropriate text from Vergil, in Latin and in English, together with explanatory comments. Wright discusses how the manuscript was made, describing the style of the capital script and of the illustrations as well as their sources in older classical traditions. He examines the Vatican Vergil as an example of the revival of classical culture in pagan circles in Rome at a time when Christian authority was systematically suppressing pagan religion. Finally, he surveys the "afterlife" of the codex, tracing how the work was studied and copied first in the Carolingian era and then in the Italian Renaissance. All the illustrations not reproduced in color are given at full size in black and white in a concluding list of the illustrations that have survived in this unique masterpiece. Made in Rome around A.D. 400, the Vatican Vergil is the most famous and the most attractive illustrated book surviving from classical antiquity. David H. Wright introduces this masterpiece of late antique art and shows why it is such an impressive example of the new form of book, the codex, that replaced the traditional papyrus roll and permitted more elaborate illustrations. Here are thirty-two of the most interesting illustrations from the Vatican Vergil, reprinted in full color from the 1980 facsimile published in Graz, Austria, in collaboration with the Vatican Library. Facing each reproduction is the appropriate text from Vergil, in Latin and in English, together with explanatory comments. Wright discusses how the manuscript was made, describing the style of the capital script and of the illustrations as well as their sources in older classical traditions. He examines the Vatican Vergil as an example of the revival of classical culture in pagan circles in Rome at a time when Christian authority was systematically suppressing pagan religion. Finally, he surveys the "afterlife" of the codex, tracing how the work was studied and copied first in the Carolingian era and then in the Italian Renaissance. All the illustrations not reproduced in color are given at full size in black and white in a concluding list of the illustrations that have survived in this unique masterpiece.
The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.
This is a book about Roman comedy, ancient theatre imagery, and seven medieval illustrated manuscripts of Terence’s six Latin comedies. These manuscript illustrations, made between 800 and 1200, enabled their medieval readers to view these comedies as “mirrors of life”.
"Tracing what the library has meant since its beginning, examining how its significance has shifted, and pondering its importance in the twenty-first century, significant contributors--including the librarian of the Congress and the former executive director of the HathiTrust--present a cultural history of the library"--Dust jacket flap.
Medieval art is wordy; inscriptions and poems, commentaries and chronicles accompany and adorn it. The Art of Words presents a series of detective stories by a renowned explorer of medieval philological evidence who here examines the thought and objects of the Venerable Bede and Theodulf of Orleans. What physical objects did Bede have in mind, for example, when writing about the paintings of his monastic churches? How did he conceive of the division of biblical books into chapters? Why was the famous Libri Carolini made for Charlemagne never published? Indeed what did it mean in the Middle Ages to publish something? Pursuing the story of Bede's calendar shows how Valentine's Day began with a reference to birds. To unravel the meaning of the image of Ezra in the Codex Amiatinus the author then demonstrates the importance of knowing the books that Bede knew and wrote. The final topic is the celebrated Apse mosaic of Germigny-des-Prés, how it was saved from destruction and how Theodulf's words explain what we see. Words matter and, in these studies Paul Meyvaert constantly delights the reader with careful excavations of that place in medieval art and thought where images and words connect and collide.
The role of the court in early medieval polities has long been recognised as an essential force in the running of the kingdom. The court was not only an organ of central government but a sociological community with its own ideology and culture, and a place where royal power was both displayed and negotiated. The studies within this volume reflect the diversity of modern court studies, considering the court as a social body and considering its educative and ideological activities. The contributors to this volume bring together historical, archaeological, art historical and literary approaches to the topic as they consider aspects of court life in England, Francia, Rome, and Byzantium from the eighth to the tenth centuries. The volume therefore looks at court life in the round, emphasizes and invites connections between early medieval courts, and opens new perspectives for the understanding of early medieval courts.
