tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3759136767556863912024-02-19T08:00:11.541+01:00GerwardusUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-64347499389543702032012-01-31T07:25:00.006+01:002012-01-31T23:59:08.516+01:00Rochester (NY)’s Ninth-Century Saint<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQWTISVT1NNW3rLNnV9YWADC4ZcQHgYBBfCjuHI4ImRoeIhGiesEC2NoDMEn5ceivOuQiuLHUU40D7MTtlxWQzIBmxLzKMeD0ugcCli75hb2gNrlVJ7PNr3mCZ_rzwTqC8oo8692rxyqs/s1600/saint+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQWTISVT1NNW3rLNnV9YWADC4ZcQHgYBBfCjuHI4ImRoeIhGiesEC2NoDMEn5ceivOuQiuLHUU40D7MTtlxWQzIBmxLzKMeD0ugcCli75hb2gNrlVJ7PNr3mCZ_rzwTqC8oo8692rxyqs/s1600/saint+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQWTISVT1NNW3rLNnV9YWADC4ZcQHgYBBfCjuHI4ImRoeIhGiesEC2NoDMEn5ceivOuQiuLHUU40D7MTtlxWQzIBmxLzKMeD0ugcCli75hb2gNrlVJ7PNr3mCZ_rzwTqC8oo8692rxyqs/s400/saint+image.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester has a small but impressive collection, and one that, judging from the volume of visitors when I visited it in late 2011, is clearly held in affection by the town's citizens. Amongst the medieval holdings is - I believe - the museum’s single piece of early medieval art currently on public display: a roughly 10” x 10” painting of the head and upper torso of a saint, clearly detached at some point from a larger fresco. The present catalogue lists it as ‘Sicilian painting...on plaster', </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span>leaving any visitor with an interest in early medieval art wishing to know more, and wondering in what wider company Rochester's holy man was once counted, and where. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The current online catalogue - viewable </span><a href="http://magart.rochester.edu/Obj5126?sid=24592&x=495738"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> - takes the saint’s provenance no further back than the sale of Joseph Brummer’s collection by Parke-Bernet in New York on May 11-14, 1949. The actual entry in the Parke-Bernet sale catalogue is, however, at least a little more forthcoming: </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 331. Siculo-Byzantine Painted Fresco Panel <b> </b> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">IX Century</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Head and shoulders of a lightly bearded saint with brown hair and sky blue robe, outlined against <span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">an ochre and red halo. Frame. From the Cathedral of Messina. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span>Note</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">: An extract from a letter of Dr. Raimond von Marle to the former owner, dated May 21 1927, </span></span>reads as follows: “I like your fresco fragment very much; it certainly dates from the 9th century. As <span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">you </span></span>have my books you might compare it to fig. 51 of Vol. I, the fresco of Martino di Monti, Rome, of the year 844- 847, especially with the figure most to the right.”. Collection of Mrs. Caroline R. Hill. [It is not wholly clear, by the way, that this letter is addressed to her.]</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The buyers for the museum were the Herdle sisters, the daughters of George L. Hurdle the initial director of the Memorial Art Gallery. In 1922 he was succeeded by his 25 year old daughter, Gertrude, who became the youngest art museum director in the US at that time (perhaps ever?) who would oversee its fortunes until her retirement in 1962. According to Betsy Brayer, in a 1981 article on the Herdles in the University of Rochester’: ‘For the more important object of augmenting her on-the-job training, and for authenticating works of art up for consideration ... the youthful new director relied heavily on the noted art dealer and scholar Joseph Brummer.’ Tutor and trader both, Brummer was, in Brayer’s words ‘...a friend of the Gallery for many years before his sudden death in 1949 [</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">recte</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">: 1947] catapulted the last such notable and wide-ranging art collection onto the market.’</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Joseph Brummer (1883-1947) was one of three brothers with interests in art and antiquities. As a young man he studied with Rodin and Matisse before turning towards dealing. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Frères </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Brummer opened their first gallery in Paris in 1906. Through it they made numerous contacts with the contemporary art world, and with artists. Henri Rousseau painted Joseph’s much-reproduced portrait in 1909. He introduced Guillaume Apollinaire to art collecting, sold Robert Bliss of Dumbarton Oaks his first Olmec figure, and was instrumental in introducing the Parisian avant-garde, including Picasso, to the ‘tribal’ arts of the non-western world. Following the First World War the Brummers moved their business interests to New York, opening a gallery (‘Joseph Brummer, Ancient Art’) and expanded into both ancient and medieval art. They seem to have become rapidly established as taste brokers and suppliers of art and antiquities to major private collectors and established galleries all over the U.S., supplying, amongst others, the Walters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art with pieces for their collections, and playing a role in the assembly of the pieces for ‘The Cloisters’ prior to its opening in 1928. Joseph Brummer was also the dealer who supplied the Walters with the so-called ‘Abucasem’ (after Tawfic Abucasem, its early owner) or Hama collection of liturgical silver in 1929. This collection, by the way, is now thought by some to have been made for the church of Sant Sergios, Kaper Koraon southeast of Antioch, now in northern Syria and discovered in the same hoard that contained the so-called ‘Antioch Chalice’ now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Unfortunately establishing the origins of pieces from the Brummer collections has proven difficult. ‘‘The laconic records from Joseph and Ernest Brummer’s galleries’, writes Jill Meredith, ‘galleries do not always supply the names of the European dealers from whom the works were purchased, and rarely do they mention a site of origin.’ Meredith was writing of items sold not in 1949 but 1976, as part of the sale of Ernest Brummer’s collection, but the sentiment would seem to hold good for our saint and for the earlier collection. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The sale of Brummer’s collection was in three parts, each conducted over several days. The copy of the catalogue before me has ‘</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">950 -</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’ ( $950?) written in the left hand margin. <o:p></o:p></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rousseau’s portrait of Brummer himself, incidentally, would sell in 1993 for £2,971,500 ($4,421,592). More on Raimond von Marle's career as an art historian can be found </span><a href="http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/marler.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Adding further puzzlement is the fact that the Cathedral at Messina was built in the twelfth century. (Evidence of what went before is proving hard to track down ...). It was extensively rebuilt in the wake of the 1908 earthquake, and underwent comparable rebuilding after Allied bombing in 1943. Messina itself was under Byzantine control until it was </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">captured by Muslim armies already active elsewhere on the island in summer 842 - an episode in the longer narrative of expansion and conquest by forces from Aghlabid North Africa, sometimes working in tandem with groups from Umayyad Spain and, later, semi-independent groups in southern Italy. In certain respects (the bagging beneath the chestnut-brown gimlet eye, the lighter brown arc denoting the curve of the eyelid beneath the brow, the bow shaped mouth) there are - at least to a non-specialist - parallels with the frescoes from San Vincenzo Al Volturno, some 500 km or so north, as the crow (or sea gull) flies. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">On the Brummers and their medieval collections see </span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">W.R. Johnson, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">William and Henry Walters: the Reticent Collectors</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Baltimore, 1999), pp. 213-4; </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Jill Meredith, ‘Romancing the Stone: Resolving Som</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">e Provenance Mysteries of the Brummer Collection at Duke University’, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Gesta 33.1 </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(1994), pp. 38-46. For the Herdles, </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">B. Brayer, ‘The Herdles Go A-Hunting" </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rochester Review</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (1981), pp. 16-19, available </span><a href="https://www.lib.rochester.edu/IN/RBSCP/Databases/Attachments/Reviews/1981/43-3/1981_Spring.pdf"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #504338;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-49575866785480694272011-11-10T07:53:00.008+01:002011-11-15T17:58:21.162+01:00Patrick Wormald’s LRB Reviews<div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“My view of the world, that of a historian rather than a journalist, is that it is peopled by inadequates, not villains; people who misuse (much more often than abuse) power, precisely because they have no real clue what to do with it.” </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Patrick Wormald, in a letter to the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB,</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 18 no. 19 (October, 1996) in response to Paul Foot’s review, in the previous issue, of Mark Peel’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Land of Lost Content: The Biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Pentland, 1996).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The authors of the bibliography that comprises the first chapter of S. Baxter, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">et al</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">., </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Aldershot, 2009) make no claim to completeness: ‘...no pretence is made to itemize all of his reviews or occasional pieces of journalism.’ (S. Foot with S. Baxter, ‘The Writings of Patrick Wormald’, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Studies in Memory, </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">pp. 1-9, at 1 n.1.) As it stands the bibliography seems remarkably thorough, listing as it does all major publications and substantial reviews in academic journals and the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">TLS</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. Falling under the stated terms of exception - and consequently absent from the bibliography - is the sequence of 2000-4000 word essays published by Wormald in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">London Review of Books</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> from the early 1980s until shortly before his death in September 2004. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Opera minora</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> these may very well be when considered in the context of his work as a whole, they are nevertheless worth reading and worth recording, not least as parts of one scholar’s broader engagement with the past and the business of thinking and writing about the past. In addition to the expected reviews of scholarly works on the early and high Midde Ages in the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">we find Wormald on subjects and authors far from Anglo-Saxon England: Stonehenge and Saladin; John Fowles, John Michell, and Aubrey Burl: </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Mr Burl’s intellectual method is to take the archaeological evidence of ritual, where it sometimes seems that anything which is not entirely circular is a phallus and anything which is a mother-goddess...” <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Archaeologists at the centre as much as on the fringes came in for criticism, couched in a way that the editor of the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">English Historical Review</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> would have been unlikely to have waved through to the presses:</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“Hodges has a dozen ‘paradigms’, half a dozen ‘parameters’, and more ‘models’ than Cliveden in its early Sixties heyday.”<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Whilst still recognisably the same work as the author of articles such as ‘</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Lex scripta...</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">gens Anglorum</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’, ‘Bede, B</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">eowulf</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> and the Conversion’, these reviews are also often both broader in their range of reference and sharper in both tone and bite; at points far nearer to Hitchens (C.) than Maitland (F.). That said, these reviews contain no shortage of insights and epigrammatic judgments on the early medieval past and the methods of medievalists. Three examples: </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The history and historiography of Roman Britain abounds in paradoxes. The first and not the least of these is that one of the most obscure and geographically remote Roman provinces has attracted a literature that makes the history of Roman Greece or Syria seem peripheral by comparison.”</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“In a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Radio Times</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> interview announcing Magnusson’s series, Peter Sawyer compared references to the gruesome Viking ritual of the Blood-Eagle, whereby, in honour of Odinn, a man’s lungs were draped across his shoulders like an eagle’s folded wings, to stories of Uhlans bayonetting babies. The difference is that First War German newspapers did not exult in spiked infants, whereas it is Scandinavian sources who fully describe the Blood-Eagle. Magnusson confidently assures us that ‘there is not a scrap of historical evidence that it ever happened outside the fevered imagination of saga-writers,’ which is presumably why it is not even mentioned in the other books. But it depends what one means by scraps.”</span></span><br />
<br />
And, finally:<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“A little over a century ago, the Battle of Hastings was the subject of a scholarly dispute of a virulence not seen again until the Storm over the Gentry or the Condition of England Question in the 1960s. One protagonist, the polymathic E.A. Freeman, echoed some famous words of Macaulay, celebrating the ‘cause for which Harold died on the field and Waltheof on the scaffold’ (Waltheof was the last survivor of the Old English aristocracy: he was executed for treason in 1076 after a rebellion which, according to the sources, was fomented by leading members of the Norman nobility). The other, the acid-penned J.H. Round, found the patronage denied to him by the academic circles that favoured his opponent by supplying the aristocracy with lineages going back to 1066. Soaring effortlessly above the mêlée, F.W. Maitland, a greater historian than either (or anyone then or since), asked to be updated on the progress of ‘</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">the</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> battle’ from his winter resort in the Canaries. We know more about what happened on the field of Hastings that October Saturday than about any battle anywhere since Ammianus Marcellinus chronicled the destruction of the East Roman army by the Goths nearly 700 years before. Yet the price paid for good sources at this stage of history is that they rarely agree.”</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The complete </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">archive is accessible on line to individual and institutional subscribers. However, a free seven day full access subscription is currently available <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/register/free">here</a>. </span></span>In addition to Wormald’s reviews those by Stuart Airlie (on Karl Leyser and Maurice Keen), Peter Godman (on Tolkien), Jinty Nelson, and Tom Shippey, amongst others, are all accessible. The articles from which the quotations above come, together with all other contributions, are listed below in order of appearance:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Year of the Viking." Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Vikings</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by James Graham-Campbell and D. Kidd, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Viking World</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, edited by James Graham-Campbell, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Northern World</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, edited by David Wilson, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Vikings!</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Magnus Magnusson, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Vikings</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Johannes Bronsted, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Viking Age Sculpture</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Richard Bailey and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Viking Age in Denmark</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Klaus Randsborg. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB, </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">2 no. 14 (1980) pp. 9-10. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Everlasting Stone." Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Enigma of Stonehenge</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by John Fowles and Barry Brukoff and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">British Cathedrals</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Paul Johnson, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">3 no. 9 (1981), pp. 20-21. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Romanitas." Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Roman Britain</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Peter Salway and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Roman Britain</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Malcolm Todd, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 3 no. 21 (1981), pp. 21-22. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“The New Archaeology." Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A Short History of Archaeology</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Glyn Daniel, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A Social History of Archaeology</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Kenneth Hudson and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rites of the Gods</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Aubrey Burl, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">4 no. 5 (1982): 5-6. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Hegemonies." Review of Dark Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade, AD 600-1000, </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">by Richard Hodges and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Londinium: London in the Roman Empire</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by John Morris, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, 4 no. 19 (1982), pp. 22-23.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Robin’s Hoods." Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Robin Hood</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by J. C. Holt, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation and Study of William of Malmesbury’s ‘De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie’</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by John Scott and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Megalithomania</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by John Michell, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, 5 no. 8 (1983), pp. 22-23. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Joseph Jobson." Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Saladin in his Time</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by P. H. Newby and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslems at War</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Ronald Finucane. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, 7 no. 7 (1985), p. 14. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Warrior Women." Review of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Women in Anglo-Saxon England and the Impact of 1066</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Christine Fell, Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, 8 no. 11 (1986), pp. 6-7. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“The West dishes it out." Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change 950-1350</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Robert Bartlett, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">16 no. 4 (1994), pp. 23-24. </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Did Harold really get it in the eye?" Review of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Battle of Hastings, 1066</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by M. K. Lawson, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Normans: The History of a Dynasty</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by David Crouch and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Domesday Book: A Complete Translation</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, edited by Ann Williams and G. H. Martin, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">LRB</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, 26 no. 11 (2004), pp. 30-32. </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-5448046972496726962011-10-11T00:36:00.007+02:002011-11-15T17:57:17.598+01:00Philip Grierson (1910-2006) Interviewed<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A single example might suffice to underline Grierson's inspired use of numismatic evidence dramatically to resolve a major historical controversy. This was that which raged over the historian Henri Pirenne's long-standing explanation of the survival of gold coinage in the west until the early 9th century and its replacement by silver for the next 500 years. For Pirenne, the disappearance of gold was the last act of the decline of Rome in the west, and its cause was the depredations of Islam. In 1960, Grierson published a recondite article on the monetary reforms of Caliph Abd al Malik and their financial consequences, which showed that they included a decisive shift in the relative value of silver and gold in the Islamic world, bringing about the flight of silver to the west and gold to the east. In doing so, he illuminated a major factor in the rise of monometallism that endured for five centuries in western Christendom.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Such work demanded a rare combination of skills involving mathematics, statistics, metallurgical analysis and an enviable range of languages and detailed historical knowledge. With such skills, Grierson could bring professional rigour to a world well supplied with enthusiastic amateurs, and an impressively wide range and perspective to a subject all too often studied on local lines. His scholarship gave rise, among much else, to the five volumes published by Dumbarton Oaks, and the 15 volumes planned for the Fitzwilliam Collection. These books justified his international reputation.' </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Neil McKendrick, obituary, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Guardian</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, 17th January, 2006. Full text </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jan/18/guardianobituaries.highereducation"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A brief 2005 video interview with Philip Grierson can be found online </span><a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3337685594026472685"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. (The full DVD version available from the Fitzwilliam itself.) </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Museum's own appreciation of him - well worth reading - is downloadable </span><a href="http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/coins/news/documents/PhilipGriersonProfile.pdf"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-70804674579864051602011-09-20T08:57:00.031+02:002011-11-10T02:55:50.834+01:00Sutton Hoo in 1951<div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFHz8BnEb7-LfIwEnbuVXhg9V_uLFwfrQi7UhhGetExQJdvvefk1pH8ctqEvlllf689mT-9QxO8Ftb1ZFppsqyv6y3y2XianobHCZSvPTX0cBKDyE5WPaGwbs0NeqhPJI0q_W3Ez6aR5k/s1600/auroch+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFHz8BnEb7-LfIwEnbuVXhg9V_uLFwfrQi7UhhGetExQJdvvefk1pH8ctqEvlllf689mT-9QxO8Ftb1ZFppsqyv6y3y2XianobHCZSvPTX0cBKDyE5WPaGwbs0NeqhPJI0q_W3Ez6aR5k/s400/auroch+2.jpg" width="268" /></a><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'In 1944, on its return to the British Museum from evacuation, the whole of Sutton Hoo, field records as well as excavated material, had gone into the Research Laboratory. The British Museum research Laboratory at that time was recognized as leading the world in the application of science and conservation techniques to antiquities. Here, under Harold Plenderleith, experiences craftsmen had been working on the Sutton Hoo material for more than a year before I came on the scene. They included Herbert Maryon FSA, retired metallurgist and sculptor, specially recruited by the trustees in November 1944 to deal full-time with the real headaches - notably the crushed shield, helmet and drinking horns. When I began work I was given the freedom of the laboratory, and spent many hours with the craftsmen in the workshops. I sat with Maryon while he took me through the material and with infectious enthusiasm, demonstrating what he was doing.’ Rupert Bruce-Mitford, ‘Early Thoughts on Sutton Hoo’ </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Saxon</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 10 (1989), available in full </span><a href="http://www.suttonhoo.org/Saxon/Saxon_pdf/Saxon10.pdf"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCu3m3HxJJunVmqkxrZZeOcvKXvrfIGdoU2cm8AOK8-RcEq8o3px0etKAHV96moChyphenhyphenYOvWSTYatb_Z_mPE2u0d2OblB_gTamho2NGtHeir7pAE6KdILMAJ7tMwuN5d7a3bkNej0s3Cus/s1600/Sutton+Hoo+%2526+ciggy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCu3m3HxJJunVmqkxrZZeOcvKXvrfIGdoU2cm8AOK8-RcEq8o3px0etKAHV96moChyphenhyphenYOvWSTYatb_Z_mPE2u0d2OblB_gTamho2NGtHeir7pAE6KdILMAJ7tMwuN5d7a3bkNej0s3Cus/s400/Sutton+Hoo+%2526+ciggy.jpg" width="177" /></a>Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo was excavated in the heat of high summer, 1939. The work was begun by Basil Brown, a local Suffolk archaeologist who had been digging on the site since the previous year, earning 30 shillings a week from Mrs. Pretty, the land's owner. Once the extent of his discoveries became clear Charles Phillips and a team from Cambridge and the British Museum bumped Brown from the dig. Barely out of the ground for six months the artefacts were put into storage for the war’s duration in the London Underground, where they spent the next five years resting safely in the tunnels between Holborn and Aldwych, having travelled from the BM to the Strand in boxes on a horse-cart, hidden beneath tarpaulins. According to some accounts, several of the items were wrapped in damp moss to preserve their condition - it fell to a British Museum employee to water the moss everyday to keep it moist - an act of loyal stewardship Raedwald might have approved of. (If true, Holborn Tube deserves a plaque in his honour...) <span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The objects were recovered in later 1944, before the war’s end but when the tide had decisively turned. As the passage above makes clear, a team of experienced conservators from the BM’s Department of British and Medieval Antiquities, together with selected specialists like Maryon, would subsequently work for several years under Rupert Bruce-Mitford’s direction. Bruce-Mitford, then Assistant Keeper under Thomas Kendrick, oversaw the first display of the find to the public in early 1946. The following year visitors could buy the first of many editions of his </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Sutton Hoo Ship-burial: a Provisional Guide</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. Those eager to consult Bruce-Mitford’s full, official report would have to wait another 36 years for the publication of the final volume of </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> in 1983. </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><span lang="EN-US">In 1951 <i>Life</i></span><span lang="EN-US"> magazine visited the British Museum. British royalty were prominent and popular in North America at the time: George VI’s failing health had meant that the Princess Elizabeth had taken his place on majors tours of both Canada and the US. In Washington DC she met with Harry Truman. Whether the glamour of live royalty, albeit a descendent of Cerdic, rubbed off on the (probably) Wuffing inhabitant of Mound I is an open question. Whatever the motive behind the coverage a four-page story, ‘King’s Tomb is Greatest Find in Archaeology of England’, ran in <i>Life</i></span><span lang="EN-US">’s 16th July issue, with 2 half-tone pictures and four colour plates. It is clear, however, that the photographer from <i>Life</i></span><span lang="EN-US">’s London bureau, Larry Burrows, had taken considerably more pictures than those selected for the brief piece. That several of these had been excluded may have been a cause for relief for the BM’s authorities, who might well have felt that the image of a British Research Laboratory technician, clad in brown warehouse coat with drooping, ash-heavy woodbine pondering the possibilities of a pair of scabbard bosses failed to send the image of the BM as a true world leader in conservation technology. (Our man in the warehouse coat is not, I believe, Harold Plenderleith, though Herbert Maryon is seen above, with the aurochs drinking horn, and Rupert Bruce-Mitford posed with various artefacts.)</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"></span>Whilst the pictures of the initial 1939 excavation and the ghostly boat imprint are well-known, as are other items such as the ubiquitous helmet, these mid-twentieth century images are far less familiar to students of Anglo-Saxon England in the age of Bede - hence their partial reproduction and the embedded links given below. To the twenty-first century eye some of these images appear undeniably - if mildly - comic; the representation of the British class system coded into some of the poses is reminiscent of the famous ‘Frost Report’ sketch featuring Cleese, Barker and Corbett (‘I am middle class...’). Beyond that, however, the overlay of historical moments, and the growing distance from today of the world of Bruce-Mitford and post-war, 1950s Britain, give these photographs a certain power, and a certain hauntological quality, to use a much overused term.<br />
<br />
A core selection of Burrow’s 1951 archived photographs can be seen, zoomed in on, and downloaded (with some restrictions for re-use) <a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?q=Sutton+hoo+source:life&prev=/images%3Fq%3DSutton%2Bhoo%2Bsource:life%26start%3D42%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN%26tbm%3Disch&imgurl=ff26f12aa864bdf6">here</a>. The brief published article can be read <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=nE4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA82&dq=Sutton%20hoo%20life%20magazine&pg=PA82#v=onepage&q&f=false">here</a>.<br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A further, far more sombre, stratum of history is present here, too. Larry Burrows was a London-born photographer who began working for </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Life</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> at the age of 16. He learnt his trade as a technician working with Robert Capa and would have been about 24 when he took these pictures. In 1962 he began covering the war in Vietnam, and continued to do so until his death. Several of his harrowing photographs became iconic, and can be viewed in an online </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">tribute to his work <a href="http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0302/lb_index.html">here</a>. Burrows was killed when the </span></span></span>helicopter he and several other photojournalists were travelling in was shot down over Laos in 1971. In 2008 the remains of the four were recovered and interred at the base of the Journalists Memorial in the <a href="http://www.newseum.org/scripts/Journalist/Detail.asp?PhotoID=556">'Newseum'</a>, a museum of news and journalism located in Washington D.C.<br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The (partial) reproduction of the two images above is done so in accordance with the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Life</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">/Google stated terms that they may be used for personal, non-commercial purposes.</span></span></div><span lang="EN-US"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-22790159713867918092011-08-31T01:46:00.018+02:002011-09-01T19:15:15.560+02:00Ludwig Traube, Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti (1898)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghM99bmtzvatG2bt4d5PsnZyvdiXx_goNUWjUEYcz6tIJYpg9aLbA5e6gogJ-bIvVRWlGmdKZZ7nl0jhj_TNZotBrRfh0PMChafLGQCD51i3b966BVI_QxtgCag4fvkLihMFArycjEFds/s320/Traube+Portrait+no+text.jpg" width="252" /></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; tab-stops: 454.5pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'The </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> are not to be discontinued. Traube utilized them for the ‘opuscula’ of his pupils. His teeming brain provided an inexhaustible supply of subjects which he had not time to work out himself and which he handed over to others. In his </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">O Roma Nobilis</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Munich, 1891) he had shown how great was the influence of Sedulius Scottus on ninth century learning and how many MSS. were written by Sedulius himself or his Irish companions. This line of investigation has been followed out by Dr. Hellmann in the first volume of the series, Sedulius Scottus. The next volume deals with a kindred theme, Johannes Scottus, by Dr. Rand (now at Harvard). Traube’s wonderful edition of the Rule of St. Benedict, the ideal for every editor of a Latin text, brought in its train the third volume, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der ältesten lateinischen Mönchsregeln</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, by Dr. Plenkers. Another fruitful suggestion of the master, that the records of sixteenth century Latin scholars would throw light on the original home of many extant (and lost) MSS of Latin classics, led to Lehmann's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Franciscus Modius</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, which is to be followed by other treatises of this kind by the same hand. The other volumes of the series which have appeared as yet are Dr. Becker's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Textgeschichte Liudprands von Cremona</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, Dr. Lowe's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Die ältesten Kalendarien aus Monte Cassino</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, Dr. Neff’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Die Gedichte des Paulus Diaconus</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. But there are almost as many more 'overflows' from Traube's flood of discovery which are outside this series. His detection of Lupus of Ferrieres as the corrector of the Berne MS. of Valerius Flaccus led to Schnetz's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ein Kritiker des Valerius Maximus im 9 Jahrhundert</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Neuburg a. D., 1901). His projected edition of Ammianus Marcellinus, after his discovery of the text- tradition, was handed over to Dr. Clark. A hint of his on the lessons to be learnt from a comparison of an uncial archetype, the Puteaneus of Livy, with its minuscule transcript in the Vatican, led indirectly to Prof. Shipley's useful booklet on </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Certain Sources of Corruption in Latin Manuscripts</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (New York, 1904). </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I mention only a few instances, out of many. Other books of the kind are still to be published - Dr. Lowe’s account of Beneventan script, Dr. B. A. Mueller’s of the ‘subscriptiones’ in Latin MSS. (the traces of ancient editions), etc., etc. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What a wonderful record for one who was an invalid for a great part of his life and who died in his forty-sixth year! As I stood some months ago outside his house at Munich I said to myself, 'How many paths have stretched out from this little garden, on this side and on that, into all quarters of the great world of learning!'' </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">W.M. Lindsay, reviewing Traube's posthumously published </span></span><span style="color: black;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen. Erster Band. Zur Paläographie und Handschriftenkunde, </span></i></span><span style="color: black;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Classical Quarterly</span></i></span><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 3.2 (1909), pp. 132-136</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> at 136.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; tab-stops: 454.5pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Traube was born in 1861 into prominent Jewish family in Berlin. His father (also Ludwig) was a doctor and pathologist. The younger Traube </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">suffered from agoraphobia as a young man. As a consequence he would often hold lectures and classes at home in his apartment. (In this he had been anticipated by Ludwig Snr., who himself had conducted some apparently path-breaking 'animal experiments' in his own Berlin apartment in the 1840s....). Traube's final </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">years were blighted by the l</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">eukemia that would eventually kill him. Before then, however, was a brilliant and highly productive career in terms both of research published and pupils taught. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Influenced by the example set by Delisle at the Ecole des Chartes Traube's own blend of palaeography, philology and historical insight was responsible for originating what was later to become known as the Munich school of palaeography. He received his doctorate in 1883 with a dissertation as Macrobius' sources. His Habilitation, on Carolingian poetry, followed in 1888 and would be published in the same year as </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Karolingische Dichtungen. Ædelwulf, Alchuine, Angilbert, Rhythmen. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">By 1897 Traube was a member of the central </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">directorate of the</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Monumenta Germaniae Historica. His extensive personal library would form a key component of the MGH's own collection in Munich. It was catalogued in 2008 - an act of institutional piety to a foundational figure - and the catalogue, all 833 pages of it, can be accessed as a PDF from the MGH's own site, </span><a href="http://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/etc/dokumente/traube.pdf"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; tab-stops: 454.5pt; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Anecdotal evidence hints at youthful arrogance. A teacher's query about his preparation just prior to an examination led Traube supposedly to respond that it was his professors, rather than he, who really needed to revise. He seems to have outgrown such (possibly apocryphal) arrogance. His students, a circle that included Paul Lehmann, E.A. Lowe, E.K. Rand, C.H. Beeson, and Siegmund Hellmann, to name but a few, revered him: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Sein Name hatte einen seltsam reinen Klang, und wo man ihn aussprach, löste er ein unbegrenztes Gefühl der Verehrung aus." ("His name had a strange, pure ring to it, and whenever someone spoke it, it triggered a boundless feeling of reverence.") The overall impression is of infectious intellectual energy. E.A. Lowe, for example, would recall '</span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">the feverish gusto with which Traube </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">devoured a newly arrived issue of the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Revue Benedictine</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. The notes that it spurred him to make and throw off would start settling on the floor like a light snowfall.' As several of the names suggest, Traube's influence spanned the Atlantic, and was an important factor in the formation of early twentieth-century U.S. scholarship in post-classical Latin. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; tab-stops: 454.5pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-CC7cGhn2BO7LBK93Dcsjqy7AyFb_WABqSNnjBQAOyhaN4Beobd_aSUBCAfZcSabnyawDy8tHf6U1d0Ta_TGn5rzQRaRZAzoGFEaJ7JNUyGWGUy1BomwTaTAuEAOAYkYvOW3mwu6nEVQ/s1600/Traube%252C+frontispiece.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-CC7cGhn2BO7LBK93Dcsjqy7AyFb_WABqSNnjBQAOyhaN4Beobd_aSUBCAfZcSabnyawDy8tHf6U1d0Ta_TGn5rzQRaRZAzoGFEaJ7JNUyGWGUy1BomwTaTAuEAOAYkYvOW3mwu6nEVQ/s320/Traube%252C+frontispiece.jpg" width="209" /></span></a><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Of his work on the Benedictine Rule his pupil, E.K. Rand, wrote: '</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Completely reversing the methods of his predecessors, Schmidt and Wölfflin, Traube showed that the older extant MSS of the Benedictine rule represented a late and interpolated edition</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> prepared, most probably by Simplicius the third abbot of Monte Cassino; certain younger MSS, on the other hand, descend almost immediately from the autograph of St. Benedict, of which a copy had been made by order of Charlemagne at the close of the eighth century. The best representative of this “normal text” </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">is Codex Sangallensis 914 ('A') copied directly and most carefully from </span></span>Charlemagne’s MS in 817 or soon after, for Reginbert of Reichenau.' [<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">E.K. Rand reviewing Traube’s pupil, Heribert Plenkers’ </span></span><i>Untersuchungen zur Uberlieferungsgeschichte der ältesten lateinischen Mönchsregeln. </i><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I.3 (Munich, 1906), <i>Classical Philology</i> 3 (1908), pp. 124-5.]</span></span><br />
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</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; tab-stops: 454.5pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ludwig Traube, </span><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=-1ZHAAAAYAAJ&dq=ludwig%20traube%20geschichte%20der%20regula&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Berlin, 1898).</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-40160437023825859472011-08-27T05:02:00.032+02:002011-08-30T05:59:05.789+02:00Robert Curzon, A Short Account of Some of the Most Celebrated Libraries of Italy (1854)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr_RaDIAFLYkEy-cSkEm9FOMM6wH0sqwwyBWWKutynQ-cfy-CkBqAtYoUZEOOA8xW-kl5f5YbqMUh_qiSTrrTMtQx5DBQW3fqvMZgp2-B5Z6_SXheDndXrUvcKIXhiDZ5ieOtrOeclsZM/s1600/Robert_Curzon_14th_Baron_of_Zouche_by_Richard_Beard_c1840s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr_RaDIAFLYkEy-cSkEm9FOMM6wH0sqwwyBWWKutynQ-cfy-CkBqAtYoUZEOOA8xW-kl5f5YbqMUh_qiSTrrTMtQx5DBQW3fqvMZgp2-B5Z6_SXheDndXrUvcKIXhiDZ5ieOtrOeclsZM/s320/Robert_Curzon_14th_Baron_of_Zouche_by_Richard_Beard_c1840s.jpg" width="220" /></span></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Robert Curzon was abnormally short, reaching five foot three inches at the age of sixteen. His physical undersize and his highly strung and intensely shy personality were a problem to his family, although they thought it was ‘nothing a good school with well-ventilated dormitories could not put right’. After a number of schools he ended up at Charterhouse ... and then after three years private tutoring went up to Christ Church, Oxford. He failed Responsions, and left without a degree in 1829 after four terms, because his Greek did not match his knowledge of Latin grammar, and because his tutor told him he was wasting his time.’ </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Robin Cormack, ‘Curzon’s Gentleman’s Book’, in R. Cormack and E. M. Jeffries, eds, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium through British Eyes</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, SPBS 7 (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 147-59, at 150.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">‘In 1833 he began those travels which have made his name renowned. Setting out with his close friend Walter Sneyd, Curzon travelled through Europe before visiting, with George Joseph Palmer, Egypt and the Holy Land in 1833–4, on a tour of research among the monastery libraries, gathering many valuable manuscripts. He returned to England in 1834, before setting out on a second tour in 1837–8, when he visited Mount Athos and bought five manuscripts from several monasteries there, before making further purchases in Egypt. His experiences are recorded in his </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Visit to the Monasteries in the Levant</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (1849). It immediately gained popularity, running to six editions by 1881.’ </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Stanley Lane-Poole, in. L. Stephens, ed., </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Dictionary of National Biography</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (London, 1889) 13, col. 354.</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbLvPiN1gRLlSoBNQ4pIpikmkBMbdWrlXEt54DkQck8hpw1wo2zHRqb5sNkqGSg7H-UO3T3iCpLIdtlE3niq_gTnnBvcjme9GTu63r1xZ0Y0JkbxbJCDS5RhbuFf5zHQySsYoAI7WyUqE/s1600/Curzon+on+la+cava.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbLvPiN1gRLlSoBNQ4pIpikmkBMbdWrlXEt54DkQck8hpw1wo2zHRqb5sNkqGSg7H-UO3T3iCpLIdtlE3niq_gTnnBvcjme9GTu63r1xZ0Y0JkbxbJCDS5RhbuFf5zHQySsYoAI7WyUqE/s320/Curzon+on+la+cava.jpg" width="200" /></span></a></div><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It is doubtful that Robert Curzon’s works are very much read these days outside academic circles dedicated to the study of Victorian travel literature, Orientalism, and the cultures of colonial collecting. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, however, Curzon’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Visit to the Monasteries in the Levant</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (1849), an account of his travels and acquisition of manuscripts in the eastern Mediterranean was a major best seller. Curzon followed his explorations in the Eastern Mediterranean with travels in Italy, with the same purpose in mind: the discovery of lost classical works. The resulting account was neither a best seller nor, strictly speaking, a book at all, but rather a long account published in the 1854 </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Miscellany of the Philobiblon Society</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. With hindsight Curzon’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Visit to...the Levant</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> might be seen as an early example of that narrow tradition of peculiarly English travel writing - a tradition in which Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin also stand - in which the road to Athos and Aleppo runs by way of Shepherd Market and Dover Street. By contrast, Curzon’s neglected </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Account of the Most Celebrated Libraries of Italy</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> stands to day as a rare - if slight - instance of an English contribution to the genre of the manuscript hunting humanist's travelogue that runs from Poggio and Niccoli through the travels of Mabillon and de Montfaucon to the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">sommerreisen</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> of Monumentists such as Bruno Krusch. Curzon's t</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">rip to Italy seems to have netted no new MSS, however, and little consequent opprobium. Published at a time when serious manuscript research and text editing was well under way at the MGH under Pertz's directorship, Curzon's entertaining account, with its ligatures and long s's, is knowingly and intentionally antiquarian. And all the more engaging for it ...</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Robert Curzon, </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=bYMRAAAAIAAJ&dq=Philobiblon%20Society&pg=RA1-PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span style="color: #000fed; text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A Short Account of Some of the Most Celebrated Libraries of Italy</span></span></a></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Bibliographical and Historical Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (1854). </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The 'curious' Lombard law collection that Curzon saw, by the way, is the famous </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Codex Legum Langobardorum</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, La Cava, Archivio della Badia della Santissima Trinita, 4. L. Mattei-Cerasoli, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Codices Cavenses I: Codices membranacei</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Cava, 1935), pp. 22-5; G.H. Pertz, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Archiv </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">5 (1824), 247-58. Images of the royal portraits in the MS as well as those of Odin and Freya can be found at various places on line. </span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7c58koZ8OsyHdhqOkNzuQ9E6JLestQEZKGnba0pZTjQvU-6-E5NsoVTterMkfdvkhi33ftTHq_O6t-kjyB4Z0BipLrPSIXaM4uup4q0bkJBLsAnSdy0IJ61t_QcOi77Q_aKcjTbgbuIU/s1600/Untitled+Image+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7c58koZ8OsyHdhqOkNzuQ9E6JLestQEZKGnba0pZTjQvU-6-E5NsoVTterMkfdvkhi33ftTHq_O6t-kjyB4Z0BipLrPSIXaM4uup4q0bkJBLsAnSdy0IJ61t_QcOi77Q_aKcjTbgbuIU/s640/Untitled+Image+2.jpg" width="640" /></span></a><br />
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</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-78660879603794369742011-07-27T21:59:00.008+02:002011-08-26T17:30:14.979+02:00Why Gerwardus?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A brief word on the nature of this blog and its name. Gerwardus (814 x 860?) was Louis the Pious’ </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">bibliothecarius palatii</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, and Einhard’s friend and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">dilectissimus frater </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(<i>Ep</i>. 52). It was Lupus who presented his dearest brother's biography of Charlemagne to Louis, prefacing it with some words of his own: ‘Know, prudent reader [Louis] magnificent Einhard wrote this </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">gesta </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">of great Charles’. A curator of the books of others and the presenter of others’ words, Gerwardus seems an appropriate figurehead and </span></span>patron scholar for a site intended to perform the same tasks in the twenty-first century. All the posts here are to resources in the public domain, works whose owners, curators and/or authors have chosen to make open access, or copyright-expired materials of continued interest and use. In short, all are freely and legally available online.<br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Gerwardus himself would eventually quit the imperial court for </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Gannita</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Ghent), perhaps around 840. There, Löwe suggested, to general scholarly agreement, he would write the earlier sections of the Xanten annals. He died in 860. Gerwardus' 27-volume library was left to the monastery of Lorsch. The titles, for those interested, can be accessed in <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=0CxzEHOWkIsC&dq=Becker%20catalogi%20bibliothecarum%20antiqui&pg=PA118#v=onepage&q&f=false">Becker's 1885 edition</a>. T</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">he <a href="http://www.bibliotheca-laureshamensis-digital.de/">library of Lorsch</a> is itself in the process of being made available online. Gerwardus came from a family with ties of patronage to the monastery: he had given land to it back in 814 when he was described as a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">clericus</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. It seems likely he had studied there before joining Louis’ court around 828, an appointment made possible, perhaps, through the offices of Lorsch’s well-connected abbot, Adalung. After death, Gerwardus would be remembered in Reichenau’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Liber confraternitatis</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">More on G.: P. Depreux, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Prosopographie de l'entourage de Louis le Pieux (781-840) </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Sigmaringen, 1997), pp. 214-5. R. McKitterick</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, The Carolingians and the written word</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 187-90, 251-2; J. Crick, 'An Anglo-Saxon fragment of Justinus's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://eric.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/3063/Anglo-Saxon%20fragment%20of%20Justinus's%20Epitome.pdf?sequence=1">Epitome</a></span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’, <i>ASE</i> 16 (1987), pp 181-196, freely available <a href="https://eric.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/3063/Anglo-Saxon%20fragment%20of%20Justinus's%20Epitome.pdf?sequence=1">online </a> via Exeter’s ‘Eric’ archive; H. Löwe, ‘Studien zu den </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Annales Xantenses’</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Deutsches Archiv</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 8 (1951), pp. 58-99. </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-1507352290326632722011-07-27T19:21:00.010+02:002011-09-01T19:13:28.281+02:00The Antiphonary of Charles the Bald (877)<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Also known as the Hofschule or Compiègne Antiphonary, was prepared for Charles the Bald in the latter years of his reign. The dedication of the octagonal chapel of St Mary, part of the royal palace at Compiègne, on 5th May 877 seems to have been the likely occasion for its preparation. Compiègne may also have been the site of the manuscript's production, and perhaps therefore also the home of the atelier known as the so-called ‘Hofschule Karls des Kahlen’. Originally an independent bound volume, Michael Huglo has made the case for this Antiphonary being brought together with an accompanying - but physically independent Gradual - to produce the composite codex known today as B</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">N lat. 17436</span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. This act of aggregation seemingly occurred in the late eighteenth century. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The manuscript holds an important place in the history of liturgical manuscripts: it is 'the sole witness to the official [i.e., Carolingian] character of the antiphonal', in the words of Eric Palazzo. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">No less elevated is its place in the study of on ninth-century </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">art, royal patronage and religious reactions to Viking attacks. Famously, </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">folio 24</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">r</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> contains the frequently-cited neumed prayer ‘</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Summa pia</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> ...’ with its request, ‘From the wild Norman people, deliver us ..’ (</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">de gente fera Normannica nos libera</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">). It should be noted that this is not contemporary with the main text, but was added at a later date (Note: this is a correction to my initial version of this post). T</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">his page can be examined in considerable detail </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8426787t/f53.item">here</a>. (Several translations and transcriptions are floating around online.) </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Antiphonary also contains a complete office for the reception of a king, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">De susceptione regum</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, which can be read </span><a href="http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8426787t/f192.item"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. For the text of this royal liturgy see </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">R.-J. Herbert, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">CAO</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, I, pp. 366-8. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">PL</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 78, cols. 827-8 offers an earlier, but perhaps more easily accessible, edition. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9E27mlbyitGMLYH_5OXr5P3IZnIXC4LVu9RJEC06_ensoYKRKugcvqW4nKQGTte9T6h6lLi_tQEB4FmjQR9Ovxk9FuHIdbJ5f_nSBKh0sbzcbWonI8ir1qhfsKeF8JnvkRDKJs7LyyV8/s1600/Reception+of+a+KIng+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9E27mlbyitGMLYH_5OXr5P3IZnIXC4LVu9RJEC06_ensoYKRKugcvqW4nKQGTte9T6h6lLi_tQEB4FmjQR9Ovxk9FuHIdbJ5f_nSBKh0sbzcbWonI8ir1qhfsKeF8JnvkRDKJs7LyyV8/s640/Reception+of+a+KIng+image.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Some recent studies on this manuscript: R. Jacobsson, ‘</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Antiphoner of Compiègne’ in M. Fassler and R. A. Baltzer, eds, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages. Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography. Written in Honor of Professor Ruth Steiner</span></i></span><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Oxford, 2000), pp. 147-179 (cited above); M. Huglo, ‘Observations codicologiques sur l'antiphonaire de Compiègne (Paris, B. N. lat. 17436)’, in P. Cahn et A.-K. Heimer, eds, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">De Musica et Cantu. Studien zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik und der Oper</span></i></span><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Hildesheim, 1993), pp. 117-129; I. Garipzanov, </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The symbolic language of authority in the Carolingian world (c. 751-877) </i>(Leiden, 2008), p. 93; </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A. Hughes, ‘The Monarch as the Object of Liturgical Veneration’, in A. Duggan, ed., </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">(London, 1993)</span></span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, pp. 375-424. </span></span>Online access to BN lat. 17436 and the image reproduced above both come via Gallica, bibliothèque numérique, the extraordinary open access project of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Reproduction here accords with the BN's requirements of fair non-profit use. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-31345587088597134092011-07-25T20:16:00.020+02:002011-10-18T17:35:07.408+02:00Al-Tartushi, A Cordoban Traveller in the Ottonian World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUfjjkoEJSFR94UvHatfXvaJDEvKAHt1ngZ7G2wiPELNTBjzsBRfuY-y4XlLailYbvbcqqqxnr6WLo6OpuEXn7gcwIquClJ57A6ZUxzXXvDzTrdwajekwQEdzCFX3hfxEaRBmDQuD3Lws/s1600/clipped+idrisi.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUfjjkoEJSFR94UvHatfXvaJDEvKAHt1ngZ7G2wiPELNTBjzsBRfuY-y4XlLailYbvbcqqqxnr6WLo6OpuEXn7gcwIquClJ57A6ZUxzXXvDzTrdwajekwQEdzCFX3hfxEaRBmDQuD3Lws/s640/clipped+idrisi.gif" width="640" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“It is extraordinary that one can find at Mainz, at the extreme end of the West, perfumes and spices that only take their birth in the deepest end of the East ...”. Born into the Jewish community of Tortosa (Turtush) sometime in the second quarter of the tenth century, Ibrahim ibn Ya`qûb (al-Tartushi) has left us a rare account of journey he undertook in 961-2 through parts of western and central Europe. His original text does not survive. Fragments of it - themselves interpolated at points - are embedded in later texts, specifically those of Abu `Ubayd al-Bakri al-Andalusi in the fifth/eleventh century and Abu Yahya Zakariya' ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini in the seventh/thirteenth century. Whilst the former copied al-Tartushi’s account of his time in Slavic territories, the latter reproduced the accounts of West and East Francia, Hedeby and other western European centres. (The interpolations are interesting in their own right: not least, al-Udhri’s detailed account of Icelandic - or perhaps Irish - whaling techniques.)</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Al-Tartushi’s ‘original’ work was probably a report drafted for the Umayyad caliph of Spain, al-</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ḥ</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">akam II (r. 961–976), following a visit to Germany as head of a delegation to Emperor Otto I. His interests in matters of trade and medicine have contributed to him being identified as both a merchant and a doctor. (Both are certainly plausible occupations for a tenth-century traveller, but his no less recurrent interest in buildings might lead to the conclusion on the evidence of the text that he might just as well have been a Cordoban builder or architect.. .) The chronology of his meetings with Otto I remains contested. Many things caught al-Tartushi’s interest: animal sacrifice, infanticide, the relative empowerment of the women at Hedeby - they could divorce at will. He approved of the habit of both sexes wearing indelible eye-makeup. An appreciation of Scandinavian singing, however, was beyond him. It was worse than dogs howling, he reported. (Historians and theorists of Scandinavian black metal, take note...). Trading networks were a recurrent source of fascination for al-Tartushi. In Prague he noted dirham in circulation that had been minted in Samarqand decades earlier, around 913. In Augsburg it was the odd system of establishing prices that piqued his interest. The type of goods in circulation and local crops, diet and novel creatures were noted. Of Francia ('Ifrandiya'), he observed: ‘the cold is very strong, and the climate harsh. Nevertheless the country is rich in cereals, fruits, crops, rivers ...’. Frankish armies were brave, though, and their soldiers' swords stronger than those available from India. (Our traveller seems to have been an inveterate comparative anthropologist.) Al-Tartushi was less impressed, however, by Frankish personal hygiene. Franks washed in old water once or twice a year; they wore their clothes until they fell apart (comments reminiscent both of Ibn Fadlan on the Rus and Liutprand on the Constantinopolitan court.) Al-Tartushi was told something of the miracles of St Martin and found Fulda particularly impressive: he described it as a large stone-built city possessed of the largest church he had seen. Forbidden to women, he explained, Fulda was populated only by churchmen. Fulda's liturgical furnishings caught his eye, too, including a reliquary (of Boniface?) "an idol ... representing the martyr, his face turned to the west”, crucifixes, and church plate. Even for someone from wealthy Umayyad Spain Fulda's riches - or perhaps more accurately its concentration of them - seemed remarkable. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The excerpts from al-Tartushi to be found in al-Bakri address Eastern Europe exclusively, and rely upon both first-hand experience and the reports of others: “On the West of the Rus there is a town of women. They possess land and slaves, and when one of them delivers a son they kill him. They ride horses, take the field in war in person, and possess courage and bravery. Says Ibn-Yaqub [al-Tartushi]: ‘The information about this town is true. I was told it by Huta (Otto), the king of the Romans'” A town of women, then, in contrast with Fulda, the holy city of men. (Female religious, incidentally, don't seem to be present in al-Tartushi's world view.) Al-Tartushi’s account harmonizes with Cosmas of Prague’s account of the Amazonian ‘city of girls’ called 'Devin' in Bohemia, part of his discussion of Prague’s foundation myth: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Chronica Boemarum</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, ed., B. Berthold, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Die Chronik der Böhmen des Cosmas von Prag</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, MGH SRG, n.s. II (Berlin, 1923) , </span><a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/bsb00000683/images/index.html?id=00000683&nativeno=10"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I.4</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. (For more on Cosmas' text, without, I think, reference to this earlier report of it, see P.J. Geary, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Women at the Beginning. Origin myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Princeton, 2006), pp. 39-40; H. Wolfram, ‘</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Origo gentis</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">RdGA</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 22 (2003), 174-8. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span>Coherent and genuinely cross-cultural studies of such cross-cultural travel in the early Middle Ages remain rare; largely, one imagines, because of the range of linguistic competency required for the work to be undertaken properly. No full English translation and commentary of Al-Tartushi currently exists. The works below, however, do allow scholars of the Latin West some mediated access to an invaluable 'outside' perspective on tenth-century Europe. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">French translation of the passages on West and East Francia, Hedeby and Ireland (</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">recte</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">: Iceland, surely): </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A. Miquel, A., </span><a href="http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/ahess_0395-2649_1966_num_21_5_421454"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> L'Europe occidentale dans la relation arabe d'Ibrahim b. Ya'qub (Xe siècle)</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Annales ESC</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 21(1966), pp. 1048-1064.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">German translation: George Jacob, '</span><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tuJEAAAAYAAJ&dq=Zwei%20arabische%20Reiseberichte%20ueber%20Deutschland%20aus%20der%20Zeit%20Kaisers%20Otto%20des%20Grossen%2C&pg=PA127#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Zwei arabische Reiseberichte über Deutschland aus der Zeit Kaisers Otto des Grossen</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">', </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Studien in den arabischen Geographen</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 4 (1892), pp. 127-49. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">English translation of the passages on the Slavs: S. Rapoport, '</span><a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/4202401"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">On the Early Slavs. The Narrative of Ibrahim-Ibn-Yakub</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">', </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Slavonic and East European Review, </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">8 (1929-1930), pp. 331-41, JSTOR required for full access. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Further (recent) studies: Ibr</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ā</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">h</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ī</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">mb.Ya</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ʿḳ</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ū</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">bal-Isr</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ā</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ʾ</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ī</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">l</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ī</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> al-</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ṭ</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ur</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ṭ</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ū</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">s</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">̲</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">h</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">̲</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ī</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Encylopedia of Islam</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, 2nd edition; N. Profantová, ‘Archeology and written sources on eighth- to tenth- century Bohemia', </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Early Medieval Europe</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 17 (2009), pp. 286–310; P. Charvat and J. Prosecky, eds, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub at-Turtushi: Christianity, Islam and Judaism meet in East-Central Europe, c.800-1300 A.D.</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Proceedings of the international colloquy 25-29 april 1994 (Prague, 1996); P. Engels, ‘Der Reisebericht des Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub (961/966)’, in A. Von Euw and P. Schreiner, eds, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Kaiserin Theophanu. Begegnung des Ostens und Westens um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends. Gedenkschrift des Kölner Schnütgen-Museums zum 1000. Todesjahr der Kaiserin</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Cologne, 1991), pp. 413-422; F. Sezgin with M. Amawi, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Studies on Ibr</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ā</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">h</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ī</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">m ibn Ya</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ʿ</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">q</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ū</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">b (2nd half 10th century) and on his account of Eastern Europe</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science. Islamic Geography 159 (Frankfurt-am -Main, 1994).</span></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-59554447201176133192011-07-12T23:05:00.012+02:002011-10-18T17:37:54.674+02:00Widsith<div style="text-align: justify;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">‘Widsith spoke, unlocked his wordhoard ...’. </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Travel and knowledge </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">come together in a very different way from that found in Masudi’s work in the Anglo-Saxon poem known as </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Widsith</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (‘wide-traveller’). </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Widsith</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> is simultaneously travelogue, ethnographic catalogue, and an argument for the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">scop</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’s importance to society. ‘Widsith’ himself, and some of the groups ‘he’ mentions, are evident fictions, and quite scholarly ones at that. An early date for the poem was once more widely accepted than it is now. Relatively r</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ecently John Niles (</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Brepols, </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">2007</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">) has made a strong case for it being seen as a product of a tenth-century cultural context, a reading that also serves to move its date of composition nearer the date of the manuscript in which it survives, the </span><a href="http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/exeter.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Exeter Book</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. Coincidentally, this also serves to </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">render the poem contemporary with Masudi’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Meadows<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, the subject of the previous post. </span></span></i></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">For all the excellent recent work on the poem, R.W. Chamber’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Widsith, a Study in Old English Heroic Legend</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Cambridge, 1912) remains the starting point. Of it, C.J. Sisson writes, in his </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">PBA</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> obituary of Chambers</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">: “His first published book under his own name was his well-known and fundamental study of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Widsith</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, which appeared in 1912. Chamber’s text and commentary ... and his treatment in this volume of old Germanic heroic poetry and saga in general, established his reputation at once, and gave new life to Anglo-Saxon studies in England... .” ‘Raymond Wilson Chambers, 1874-1942’, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Proceedings of the British Academy</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 30 (1944). </span></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">R.W. Chambers, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/widsithstudyinol00chamuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Widsith, a Study in Old English Heroic Legend</span></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Cambridge, 1912)</span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-37237255200918153912011-07-12T20:35:00.012+02:002011-10-18T17:40:16.525+02:00Al -Masudi, The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems<div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"The other major work on the history of the Abbasids was Masudi’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Meadows of Gold</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. This is a general history of the Islamic world covering much the same ground as Tabari’s History, but it is many ways more polished and literary production. It combines historical narrative with engaging stories about court life and culture. In a way, its more literary style makes it less vivid than the cruder verbatim narratives that Tabari gives us and, on occasion, Masudi's narratives seem to reflect the perceptions of his own time rather than those of the earlier Abbasid period. But Masudi is still a great read.” Hugh Kennedy, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: the Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (New York, 2006), p. xxii.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Unlike his contemporary Tabari, Masudi hasn’t been particularly well served by Anglophone translations. As a consequence he’s less well known, let alone less read, by those whose primary interests lie in the Latin West. Born in Baghdad around 280/893 Masudi also studied there, and seems to have been well connected with many members of the city’s literary elite. ‘</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It would be tedious’, wrote Charles Pellat in his </span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">entry for Masudi in the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Encyclopedia of Islam</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (second edition), ‘</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">to list the personalities with whom he associated in the course of his career’. Like several other Islamic historians travel for Masudi was as important as static study. (Such scholarly - rather than strictly devotional or professionally opportunistic - travel seems strikingly absent from the practices of his Latin contemporaries.) Masudi travels included visits to Persia, India, Armenia, and Egypt, where he died in Fustat in 345/956. This knowledge of place and past gained by first-hand experience and 'local knowledge’ was balanced by extensive reading, including translations from Greek, Latin, and Pahlavi. He published his first ‘edition’ of the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma'adin al-jawhar</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, to use its standard English title) in 332/943, revising it in 336/947, and 345/956.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The range of Masudi’s knowledge - past and contemporary - was vast. (So, too, it would seem, was his appetite for its increase.) He wrote in an informed way about the change of titulature during the reign of Nicephoras I (802-11), and had a powerful interest in people and polities beyond the Islamic world, including the Franks and the Lombards. In the case of the former Masudi included a (wildly) compressed list of Frankish rulers, moving from Clovis to Charlemagne in eight generations of an apparently single family (!). He knew something of the civil wars that followed Charlemagne’s death, and the threat they posed to political stability, as well as Odo’s struggles with the Vikings at the ninth-century’s close. As he wrote - perhaps in Fustat - Masudi knew also that the Franks’ current ruler was </span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Louis IV (r. 920 - 954). </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Masudi’s knowledge of the Frankish past rested upon a list of rulers he had read in Fustat in a book originally intended for al-Hakam, Caliph of Cordoba (349/961-365/976 ), and written in 328/939 by Godmar, Bishop of Gerona (943-951/2). To quote Bernard Lewis: ‘The interest of the passage however, does not lie in the actual list of names, teeming as it does with corruptions, errors, and omissions. Its importance lies in its mere existence’. (Lewis, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Muslim Discovery</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, p. 142). </span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Remarkably, at the same time he could also r</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ecount something of the ‘</span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Huáng Cháo Revolution’ </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">of the 870s that was to be instrumental in the eventual collapse of Tang authority. (Masudi’s information on Chinese politics seems to have come from reports conveyed by Arab merchants.) His </span>achievements put the works of contemporary Latin historians such as Richer and Regino into perspective.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglEjXuGDj8JWot_5X-AdMjEtS8I66TCVQoc56EyFUjILJnlN-Ce58JorZTzNkGdo49V5ZAdO0F9-yo0oWWMa96PCrGkm6jmiKyAQ_iJ55IrvqZVw8H58SRm1Kkk3G9_Wy34ER4-s0m4YE/s1600/5938374-M.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglEjXuGDj8JWot_5X-AdMjEtS8I66TCVQoc56EyFUjILJnlN-Ce58JorZTzNkGdo49V5ZAdO0F9-yo0oWWMa96PCrGkm6jmiKyAQ_iJ55IrvqZVw8H58SRm1Kkk3G9_Wy34ER4-s0m4YE/s320/5938374-M.jpg" width="183" /></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">First published in 1283 the first English translation was begun by the Austrian scholar Aloys Sprenger’s in 1841. Only one volume was published. A full French translation was produced between 1861 and 1877 by Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille. This was revised in 1913-30, and again, by Pellat (1966-74, text; 1962 - 71, translation). Masudi’s sections on the Abbasids was retranslated by </span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> and published as The</span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Meadows of Gold, The Abbasids</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, (London and New York, 1989). Finally, in 2007 Penguin issued </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">From the Meadows of Gold</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> in the series </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Great Journeys, </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">a compact paperback compendium of Masudi’s ‘travel writing’. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A. Sprenger’s </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/historicalencycl00masrich"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (London, 1841)</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">C. Barbier De Meynard and Pavet de Courteille’s </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Prairies d'or </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Paris London, 1861-77), </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">volumes </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor01masduoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">1</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor02masuuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">2</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor03masuuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">3</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor04masuuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">4</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor05masuuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">5</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor06masuuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">6</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor07masuuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">7</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor08masuuoft"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">8</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/lesprairiesdor09masuuoft">9</a>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Further discussion: C. Pellat, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Encylopedia of Islam </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(2nd ed.), VII, p. 784, col. 1 (used here); A. Shboul, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Al-Mas</span></i><span style="font: normal normal normal 10.5px/normal Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ʿū</span></span></i></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">d</span></i><span style="font: normal normal normal 10.5px/normal Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ī </span></span></i></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">and his world. A. Muslim Humanist and his Interest in Non-Muslims (</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">London 1979). (Shboul's chapter on the Byzantines, incidentally, is available online at <i>De Re Militari</i>'s website </span><a href="http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/articles/masudi.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. Ann Christys, </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Christians in Al-Andalus, 711-1000</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Richmond, 2002), addresses Masudi's source for the Frankish kings at pp. 140-2. </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-81652502080861415962011-07-09T07:32:00.007+02:002011-08-26T17:48:16.680+02:00Ekaica: Archiving Ernst Kantorowicz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh71Qs6ujrkhmvWBd7ppTMlBUKFEGnig-0zcPhCTAPmKAPzoSpdTO3vE09I9YszETSDjWXyRAxLwazeQP8aU0e9LamcFpK4-oOTxw4GZBN-jEqmsZQmpmsaZT36C0d3uZHKnKTqK2nI-nY/s1600/lozenge+EK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh71Qs6ujrkhmvWBd7ppTMlBUKFEGnig-0zcPhCTAPmKAPzoSpdTO3vE09I9YszETSDjWXyRAxLwazeQP8aU0e9LamcFpK4-oOTxw4GZBN-jEqmsZQmpmsaZT36C0d3uZHKnKTqK2nI-nY/s400/lozenge+EK.jpg" width="178" /></a><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz died on the 8th September 1963 at his home at 22, Alexander Street, Princeton, New Jersey. His work continues to be influential within the fields of medieval and Byzantine intellectual history, political thought, and imagery. In recent years it - or more properly an influential part of it, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The King’s Two Bodies</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> - has steadily entered the scholarly canons of less immediately ‘medieval’ or pre-modern fields. The last few years in particular have seen his models of medieval and early modern thinking about royal power discussed by students of literature, critical theory and political philosophy; ‘Kantorowicz’ the thinker has been brought into sustained conversation with Foucault, Schmitt, and Benjamin, amongst others. The influential studies of Alain Boureau and, particularly, Giorgio Agamben (</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Homo Sacer</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">State of Exception</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">) have been crucial to this process, and the increase in the number of scholars across the disciplines engaging with Kantorowicz’s published work. Quite what Kantorowicz the meticulous and nuanced scholar might have made of the instrumentalized (and over-simplifed) 'Kantorowicz’ encountered in some of this recent work is a question to ponder, perhaps, not least in the context of the notion of the ‘king’s two bodies’ itself.</span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Leslie Mitchell’s recent biography of Bowra shed some additional light on Kantorowicz the man and his close friendship with its subject </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Maurice Bowra: A Life</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Oxford, 2010). An even more robustly concrete Ernst Kantorowicz can be seen in the ‘Ekaica’ Professor Ralph Giesey, his friend and former pupil, has generously made available on his </span><a href="http://www.regiesey.com/Ekaica/ekaica-home.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">personal website</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Kantorowicz’s papers are held at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The Kantorowicz Collection includes letters, draft chapters and reviews, personal documentation, materials on the Berkeley loyalty-oath controversy, unpublished lectures and papers, including ‘Charles the Bald and the <i>Natales</i> of the King’, ‘Synthronos’, ‘<i>Roma</i> and the Coal’, and several other pieces listed in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Dumbarton Oaks Papers</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 17 (1963), p. 118 as ‘abandoned’ at uncorrected proof stage after Kantorowicz’s death. The Leo Baeck Institute has digitized virtually all the Collection (photographs are, however, largely excluded). It, too, can now freely be viewed online, </span><a href="http://digifindingaids.cjh.org/?pID=256596"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. Do note, however, that the Institute has set some firm and wholly understandable restrictions: ‘Lectures are not to be published, but can be quoted.’ </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-88670733812518710482011-07-09T05:26:00.009+02:002011-08-30T06:39:19.480+02:00H.M. Chadwick, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“To be taught by and to get to know well Hector Munro Chadwick was one of the most wonderful experiences in my life. He was the greatest scholar I have ever met, and one of the most remarkable characters. The stories about him are legion and, surprisingly, true. ... Somehow we became scholarly friends, how I do not know, except that in university life (and Oxbridge often does it to perfection) that is beyond all thinking, planning and money, it is the meeting of minds and particularly the easy meeting of the established scholar and the uncertain questing young non-scholar. ... His main teaching was based extensively on non-archaeological sources: we read Tacitus and Bede, Procopius and St. Germanus, the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Mabinogion</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> and the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Flattyjarbök</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. He showed us that we were not just archaeologists but general students of antiquity and ancient history. He himself was primarily a linguist and an historical and linguistic scholar; he mildly expected us to read everything from Greek and German and Gothic, from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Beowulf</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> to Cyndellan ... once a week when I was resident in Cambridge I went out to see him after Hall, and we talked about everything. There would always be an enormous pot of tea. I can see myself, in my mind’s eye, sitting with two dogs around me asking some fairly reasonable question. ‘Oh, don’t you know? Don’t you know?’ the old man would say, jumping up from his chair and finding a book from his shelves and explaining a passage in some Latin author or Old Norse Saga.” Glyn Daniel, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Some Small Harvest. The Memoirs of Glyn Daniel</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (London, 1986), pp. 82-5, heavily abridged. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“In fact, a general feature of the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ecclesiastical History</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> is that it is rarely illuminating on the preoccupations of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy; and this is one reason why Sir Frank Stenton’s book is curiously light on the status and culture of the early English nobility (and has little to say of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Beowulf</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">), whereas Hector Munro Chadwick, whose ear was attuned to the rhythms and themes of vernacular poetry, possessed an insight into the political and cultural history of the early Germanic peoples that has never properly been followed up.” Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy’, in S. Baxter, ed, </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Times of Bede: Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Oxford, 2006), 30 -105, </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">at 69. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Chadwick was truly learned.” James Campbell, ‘The Impact of the Sutton Hoo Discovery on the Study of Anglo-Saxon History’, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Anglo-Saxon State</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (London, 2000), pp. 55-84, at 56. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Born at Thornhill Lees, Yorkshire, in 1870 Chadwick went up to Cambridge in 1889. He never left. A lectureship in Scandinavian was created for him in 1909, and in 1913 he followed Skeat as the Elrington and Bosworth chair of Anglo-Saxon. from which he stepped down in 1941. He became an FBA in 1925. He died in January 1947. Further biographical information: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">DNB </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">entry (W. Telfer, rev. J.D. Haigh); J.M. De Navarro, ‘Hector Munro Chadwick, 1870-1947’, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Proceedings of the British Academy</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 33 (1947), 307-30. A. Frantzen, ‘By the Numbers: Anglo-Saxon Scholarship at the Century’s End’, in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, eds, E. Treharne and P. Pulsiano (Oxford, 2001), pp, 472-95, at 478-80. Glyn Daniel’s autobiography - a finely printed volume by Thames and Hudson, a publisher that Daniel worked closely with for many years - is a rich source of material on Cambridge from the 1930s onwards, and its archaeological and Anglo-Saxonist circles (de Navarro, T.C. Lethbridge, Chadwick). </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">More from and about HMC in future posts, but here is his masterpiece: </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">H.M. Chadwick, </span><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tWcIAQAAMAAJ&dq=hector%20chadwick&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions</i></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Cambridge, 1905). </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-78082294635815202102011-07-08T19:53:00.038+02:002011-07-09T07:51:02.355+02:00Kuypers, The Book of Cerne<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIY6SeRVzVrwBP95IAab6tdpJdVlmIlt3HgrsOts4a8RMPehdfp0_7hGdbEUVpvoWzrEC5si32b1Zfk3y4KXUgh1FQ_yeVARnDJsURRw1b2zHoMGnPmXlVgpNVCvsYfVe3A93mVJdYwx4/s1600/header+boC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIY6SeRVzVrwBP95IAab6tdpJdVlmIlt3HgrsOts4a8RMPehdfp0_7hGdbEUVpvoWzrEC5si32b1Zfk3y4KXUgh1FQ_yeVARnDJsURRw1b2zHoMGnPmXlVgpNVCvsYfVe3A93mVJdYwx4/s400/header+boC.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Edited by Dom. A.B. Kuypers in 1902 the so-called Book of Cerne (Cambridge, UL Ll. 1.10) is one of a small number of surviving Anglo-Saxon ninth-century prayer books. Produced in Mercia (818 x 830?), perhaps at Lichfield. An acrostic poem spells out </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Aedeluald episcopus</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> on fol. 21<i>r</i>, probably a reference to Æthelwald, Archbishop of of Lichfield, whose </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">PASE </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">entry can be read </span><a href="http://www.pase.ac.uk/jsp/DisplayPerson.jsp?personKey=3675"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, though other possible candidates have been suggested. The Book comprises private prayers of various types (though with a strong Irish element, as many have noted), several hymns, passion narratives, an abridged psalter and an early 'Harrowing of Hell'. The link to Cerne Abbas is, incidentally, later than the ninth-century material. Kuypers was the main editor, but Edmund Bishop was the author of the substantial liturgical commentary at the volume's end. A further appendix presents material from B.L. Royal 2.A.xx, the so-called </span><a href="http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8821&CollID=16&NStart=20120"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Royal Prayer Book</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. Michelle Brown's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Book of Cerne. P</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">rayer, Patronage, and Power in Ninth-century England</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (London, 1996) is the indispensible guide, and di</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">scusses this edition and Bishop and Kuypers' analyses at p. 20. B. Raw,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> `</span><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Alfredian</span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Piety: the Book of. Nunnaminster', in J.L. Nelson, J. Roberts, M. Godden,eds, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Alfred the Wise. Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on her Sixty-fifth Birthday</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 145-53. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A.B. Kuypers, with E. Bishop, <i><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/prayerbookofaede00aethuoft">The Prayer Book of Aedeluald the Bishop</a> </i>(Cambridge, 1902). </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-50819750278468094172011-07-07T20:58:00.009+02:002011-07-07T21:43:55.441+02:00Joseph Wright, Grammar of the Gothic Language<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYvoQneXjAbPmoAZlsUIP2PSS-qLPCLYErH_V37rzOPfK_zh8CzRzDDsZZbgjm8KyU52lXeMlEb-7WMHVYCfisNR3hPzhagZlSLszc8pJ22kPAAqc2k420iWPqaeU8QPnvUcm6g5i1eoc/s1600/JosephWright.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYvoQneXjAbPmoAZlsUIP2PSS-qLPCLYErH_V37rzOPfK_zh8CzRzDDsZZbgjm8KyU52lXeMlEb-7WMHVYCfisNR3hPzhagZlSLszc8pJ22kPAAqc2k420iWPqaeU8QPnvUcm6g5i1eoc/s1600/JosephWright.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"I had returned ...to Oxford, and now disliked undergraduates and all their ways, and had begun really to know dons. Years before I had rejected as disgusting cynicism by an old vulgarian the words of warning given me by old Joseph Wright, 'What do you take Oxford for, lad?' 'A university, a place of learning.' 'Nay, lad, it's a factory! And what's it making? I'll tell you. It's making </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">fees. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Get that in your head, and you'll begin to understand what goes on.'" </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to Michael Tolkien, 1st November 1963, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, edited by H. Carpenter with C. Tolkien (Boston, 1981), no. 250, pp. 336-341, at 336. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Joseph Wright knew more than a little about factories. Born in 1855 in Idle (near Bradford) he was the son of a cloth weaver and sometime quarryman. He began work at six, in charge of a donkey cart at the Woodend quarry. By seven he was a bobbin doffer in Titus Salt's mill in the Aire valley, leaving the spinning sheds to attend Salt's school, part-time. He taught himself to read at fifteen, and would go on to study French, German and Latin at a local night school and maths at Bradford's mechanics' institute. He would, eventually, earn a PhD at Heidelberg (1882) and arrive in Oxford in 1888 as a lecturer for the Association for the Higher Education of Women. He became Professor of Comparative Philology in 1901, succeeding Max Müller. Wright was a product of the heroic age of working class (self) education, mechanics' institutes, the </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Northern Star</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> and 'knowledge Chartism', brilliantly explored in the early chapters of Jonathan Rose's </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Yale, 2001). Tolkien credited Wright's earlier </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Primer of the Gothic Language</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> with awakening his interest in germanic philology even before he went up to Oxford in 1911 (</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Letters</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, no. 272, pp. 356-8, at 357.) There, wrote Tolkien, he 'sat at the feet of old Joe in person. He proved a good friend and adviser' (</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Letters</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> no. 307, pp. 396-7, at 397). A passion for philology underpinned and informed Tolkien's reactions to industrial England. The same passion fuelled his mentor's escape from it. </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">On Joseph Wright: </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">DNB</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> entry (upon which I draw here); E.M. Wright, </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Life of Joseph Wright</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (1932), 2 volumes; C.H. Firth, 'Joseph Wright, 1855-1930',</span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> Proceedings of the British Academy</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> 18 (1932). On Tolkien and Wright: H. Carpenter, </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Tolkien. A Biography </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(London, 1977), pp. 63-4. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">J. Wright, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"><i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=PjlcAAAAMAAJ&dq=grammar%20of%20the%20gothic%20language&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Grammar of the Gothic Language</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Oxford, 1910). </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-50050716476939470792011-07-07T06:00:00.016+02:002011-08-30T06:34:09.511+02:00Henri Pirenne, Sedulius de Liège<div style="text-align: justify;">"l'ultima monografia affidabile su Sedulio è quella del 1882 di Henri Pirenne." <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Michael Lapidge, 'L'Irlanda e gli Irlandesi nell'alto medioevo', </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">L'Irlanda e gli Irlandesi nell'alto medioevo. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Atti del convegno: Spoleto, 16-21 aprile 2009, Settimane di studio della Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 2010), pp. 1-32, at 30. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A work of scholarship informed at least in part by civic pride - its subject, the Irish <i>pereginus</i> Sedulius Scottus, and its locally-born author were both scholarly sons of Liège - Pirenne's 70-page work was written in the course of his studies with Godefroid Kurth. It seems to have been the result of a rare moment when the interests of student and teacher overlapped. Born in 1862, Pirenne was only nineteen when it was published. Shortly after Professor Collard of the University of Louvain reviewed the work in the 'bibliographie philologique' section of Louvain's own </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Revue des sciences et des lettres</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> I.1 (1882). He was stirred: "M. Henri Pirenne a fait u<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">n beau travail qui l'honore autant que son maître. Nous espérons bien qu'il n'en restera pas là: il est encore tant de pages de notre histoire nationale qui ont besoin d'être éclaircies! Que les élèves studieux de nos Universités y mettent la main, guides par les sages conseils d'habiles et infatigables professeurs!" Pirenne would, of course, do much of the work Collard called for himself, </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">not least in his seven volume </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Histoire de Belgique <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">(1899-1932)</span>. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">A wry and knowing review can be found in the </span><span class="Apple-style-span">Dublin Review</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> for 1883 <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=I3Ql97rbytwC&dq=Pirenne%20Dublin%20Review&pg=PA199#v=onepage&q&f=false">here</a>. (</span></span></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It is anonymous and too early to be by Mario Esposito ...). </span></span></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">For Pirenne, Kurth and Sedulius: B.D. Lyon, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Henri Pirenne: a biographical and intellectual study </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Ghent, 1974), pp. 34-6, 40-6. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">H. Pirenne, </span><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8GBFAAAAYAAJ&dq=Memoires%20%20couronnes%20Sedulius%20de%20Li%C3%A8ge&pg=RA2-PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Sedulius de Liège</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; line-height: 15px;"><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Mémoires couronnés</span></em><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> publiés par </span></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; line-height: 15px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">l'Académie royale de Belgique </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">33.4 (1882), pp. 3-73.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-40524393367934768032011-07-07T04:52:00.001+02:002011-07-07T04:55:36.477+02:00Traube: O Roma Nobilis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb0B3XdsRB1bstxCmqjKsMeHdOCHjKWJcTR1p45-YkT6lozy4uZhEsxYTQniUzlgzJkIlZNUniuhEyg7JK_4p3tLkfudtQoMph9Rk8lBXI5IPWFw3aUWP7Fq5YsE9vxreyIcChM3yFPHQ/s1600/Ludwig_Traube.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb0B3XdsRB1bstxCmqjKsMeHdOCHjKWJcTR1p45-YkT6lozy4uZhEsxYTQniUzlgzJkIlZNUniuhEyg7JK_4p3tLkfudtQoMph9Rk8lBXI5IPWFw3aUWP7Fq5YsE9vxreyIcChM3yFPHQ/s320/Ludwig_Traube.JPG" width="269" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Men work best for a high purpose; and Traube's second and greater, service to palaeography was to give it such a purpose. Bred on classical philology, he embarked, soon after graduation, on a long association with the <i>Monumenta Germaniae Historica, </i>for which he edited vol. III of<i> Poetae latini aevi Carolini</i> between 1886 - his twenty-fifth year- and 1896. His main task in the University of Munich, from 1888 onwards, was to teach Latin philology, and he was eventually promoted, in 1904, to a new chair of Medieval Latin. At Munich he taught palaeography from the beginning ... but he had come to it from the study of literature, and for him palaeography was an integral part of his own particular brand of philology. What distinguished him from all other good editors of his own day, and from all too many since, was a lively historical sense which caused him to see successive stages in the transmission of a text in human terms, not just as the groundwork for an edition, but as evidence for the cultural history of the centres through which that text had been transmitted."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Julian Brown, 'Latin Palaeography since Traube', The Inaugural Address, Chair of Palaeography in the University of London, delivered at King's College on 22nd November 1962. Originally published in the <i>Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society</i> 3 (1963), reprinted in J. Bately, M.P. Brown and J. Roberts, eds, <i>A Palaeographer's View. The Selected Writings of Julian Brown</i> (London, 1993), pp. 17-38, here 22-3. </span></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Traube more than once expressed to me his admiration for Henry Bradshaw's gift of what he called 'sympathy with MSS.' Certainly Traube himself had this gift in a marked degree. Both of them had that loving admiration of the 'written page' to which Austin Dobson's lines give expression: 'Not as ours the books of yore, / Rows of type and nothing more.' And Traube had, like Bradshaw, the power of communicating his enthusiasm to others."</div><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: justify;">W.M. Lindsay, Obituary for Traube, <i>Classical Review </i>21 (1907), pp. 188-9. </div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ludwig Traube's </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=VrVBAQAAIAAJ&dq=ludwig%20traube&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false">O Roma nobilis</a>. </i>Philologische Untersuchungen aus dem Mittelalter, 19.2 (Munich, 1891). </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-375913676755686391.post-27997226835494136432011-07-06T21:46:00.022+02:002011-09-29T19:35:18.932+02:00Hrabanus Maurus, De virtutibus et vitiis (c. 834)<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Hrabanus Maurus' work on the virtues and vices, written at the request of Louis the Pious, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">c</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. 834. A curiously neglected text, considering the importance of Hrabanus and the sustained scholarly interest in Carolingian works of political and moral advice. Written in the wak<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">e of Hrabanus' evidently well-received </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">opusculum </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">on the duties of fathers and sons (amongst other topics) sent to the newly restored Louis (</span><span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Ep</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. 15, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">MGH Epist.</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, V, pp. 403-415</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">) this work on the virtues and vices can - </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">and perhaps should - be read in concert with the shorter earlier work. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Despite the title Hrabanus' tract moves well beyond the conventional </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Tugendkatalog</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> into something more idiosyncratic and substantial, and perhaps more timely, too. The only full edition of the work is that of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">the Viennese humanist Wolfgang Lazius (</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ob</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. 1565), physician by appointment to Ferdinand I, historian and pioneering cartographer. The polymathic Lazius is perhaps best known as the subject of Arcimboldo's frequently reproduced caricature-by-codex, 'The Librarian' of 1562. </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(The author of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">De laudibus</span></i></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, incidentally, might well have approved of Lazius' tombstone, viewable on line, albeit in a poor reproduction, </span><a href="http://www.aeiou.at/aeiou.encyclop.l/l310000.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">.) It is oddly fitting that a man who made pictures with his poetry should be edited by another whose likeness was captured in a painting of books. </span></span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">W. Lazius, </span></span></i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=pTsngvEAn64C&dq=lazius%20fragmenta&pg=PA190#v=onepage&q&f=false"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Fragmenta quaedam Caroli magni Imp. Rom. aliorumque incerti nominis de veteris Ecclesiae ritibus ac ceremoniis</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Antwerp, 1560)</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The text runs from 190 to 306. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Discussion: C. Booker, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Past Convictions. The Penance of Louis the Pious, and the Decline of the Carolingians</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Philadelphia, 2009), pp. 171-2; 236-7, 379; E. Sears, ‘Louis the Pious as </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Miles Christi</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">. The Dedicatory Image in Hrabanus Maurus’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis</span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">’, in P. Godman and R. Collins, eds, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814-840) </span></i></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Oxford, 1990), pp. 605-28, esp. 622-3. For Lazius the cartographer of Austria see W. Goffart, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Historical Atlases. The First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> (Chicago, 2003), pp. 26, 45 n. 52, with references. </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0