The Bodies of Italian Lyric

In 2011, under the direction of Lino Leonardi, the first part of a big project on the early vernacular Italian lyric was published as LirIO Corpus della lirica italiana delle origini su CD-ROM. 1. Dagli inizi al 1337 (Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo per la Fondazione Ezio Franchescini), in a series called Archivio Romanzo (as number 20), and Lirica europea (as number 4). It has the ISBN: 978-88-8450-415-9, and is on sale for €250. A short review will appear in the medieval studies journal Medium Ævum, but I thought it would be opportune to present the database in greater detail and discuss it in a slightly broader context. [The second part has just appeared, ‘Dagli inizi al 1400’, a cura di Lino Leonardi e di Alessio Decaria, Pär Larson, Giuseppe Marrani, Paolo Squillacioti, Archivio Romanzo, 25, ISBN: 978-88-8450-503-3. This includes everything that was in Part 1, and extends the inquiry to the year 1400. Can this means that a user must now buy a second part, which includes what s/he already has, to get from 1337 to 1400, and at a cost of €400? Surely this cannot be the case? — UPDATE: I have been informed that for those who have bought the first CD, SISMEL will reduce the cost of Vol. 2 by the cost of the first CD, meaning that for them, the second CD will cost €150]

Firstly, what is it? It is a database of the entire corpus of lyric poetry up to the year 1337, which the editors have considered is, with the death of Bindo Bonichi, the end of the ‘Dolce stil novo’. A work in prose, namely Dante’s Vita nova is included, given its influence. The idea is that it provides an extremely powerful tool for text searching, based on the best available editions. Indeed, as Leonardi says in the Preface:

L’obiettivo era — ed è — proporre di quella stagione fondativa una repertoriazione sistematica, opportuna e necessaria dopo le grandi edizioni portate a termine alla fine del secolo scorso, dal corpus duecentesco di Avalle alle rime di Dante di De Robertis. Una repertoriazione che consenta di mettere pienamente a frutto gli acquisti di tanti scavi in profondità, e di costituire nuovi strumenti e nuove fondamenta per la comprensione di un sistema letterario che è alle origini della cultura poetica europea moderna.

[The aim was, and is, to offer a systematic repertoire of that foundational period, now opportune and necessary after the completion in the last century of the great critical editions, from the thirteenth-century corpus by Avalle to Dante’s lyric poetry by De Robertis. A repertoire that allows us to make the most of what has been gained in many in-depth analyses, forming new tools and establishing new bases for the understanding of a literary system that is at the very origins of modern European poetry.]

So there’s a sense here that the philological endeavours of the last century have culminated, and indeed made possible, the building of these corpora. In other words, the better the quality of what goes in, the better the quality of what comes out, ‘allowing philologists to answer better the questions they have long been asking’ (in the words of Sheldon Pollock, ‘Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), 931-961, at p. 949 n45). An important publication preceding the appearance of LirIO is known by the acronym CLPIO, or Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini, edited by D’Arco Silvio Avalle (numbered 25 in the series ‘Documenti di Filologia’) and published by Ricciardi in 1992. It is a remarkable work, a corpus of Duecento poetry, a beautifully detailed linguistic analysis, much material on scribal practice, an incipitario, and various indices (prepared by Lino Leonardi), all comprising pp. CCLXX + 870, with the ISBN: 88-7817-900-0. It is monumental, and for me offers an interesting contrast, as an ‘end-user’, with using the CD-ROM of LirIO. I should say that I love how CLPIO is set on the page and how it has been finished. [I should also say that I have recently come into possession of my own copy, from the library of a distinguished and late-lamented palaeographer, and I’m already finding using it regularly a thoroughly thrilling experience.]

A feature of editorial activity in Italy over the past two decades (and more) has been the attention to electronic, searchable corpora, and there is no doubt that it is adding greatly to the control the reader and the specialist researcher has over the material, changing the kinds of questions it is now possible to ask, as well as improving the accuracy of the answers we get. Users of TLIO, the Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini, which is published under the auspices of ‘L’Opera del Vocabolario Italiano’ (OVI), an institute of the ‘Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche’ (CNR), and based at the Accademia della Crusca, in Florence, will immediately recognize the enormous value of such material. LirIO can also to be placed into a wider context of a massive editorial effort to digitize and index the corpus of Troubadour poetry. It must also be placed in the context of the series ‘Edizione nazionale I canzonieri della lirica italiana delle Origini’ published with SISMEL, of the utmost importance in the study of the early Italian lyric. In the words of Antonelli and Rea, in a research paper entitled Il lessico delle emozioni nella lirica europea medievale e un nuovo database (available here), it is no exaggeration to state ‘che un uso sistematico dei database ora completati consentirà di riproporre in termini nuovi l’intera storia della lirica romanza, sia dal punto di vista semantico e ideologico che formale, posta anche la ricchezza dei dati che accompagnano le vere e proprie concordanze (schemi metrici, bibliografia, sviluppo cronologico delle singole forme, grafici, ecc.)’. See here for a contribution by Lino Leonardi entitled ‘Varianti, apparato, testo. La prospettiva ipertestuale delle Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (CLPIO)’, which also provides valuable contextual material on LirIO.

So it can be stated firmly that those interested in the origins of vernacular Italian literature, and specifically its lyric poetry, now live in an era of what we could term ‘Big Data’. The subject of Big Data in Medieval Studies has received some highly stimulating commentary recently over on Bruce Holsinger’s beautiful blog Burnable Books (with a series of contributions by Martin Foys, Timothy Stinson, Bruce Holsinger, Deborah McGrady, Stephen G. Nichols, Elaine Treharne, and Alexandra Gillespie). The kinds of questions they have posed are pressing and important.

I’m not a techie, so I cannot get into the nitty gritty of back-ends and what runs the database, or XML markup and the like. The software that runs the database is called Gatto (the Italian word for cat). The software is being continually updated, which you can see on the OVI website. It is the software that runs TLIO online, but on the CD-ROM it only runs on a Windows platform. I have to say that this was rather a problem for me, as a Mac user, and I was not going to, and would not, pay the cost of another operating system on my Mac, even if with BootCamp I can run a parallel environment. It means I can only intermittently use it when I have access to a PC. I do not understand why it cannot run on a Mac, but my advice to those responsible would be to address this with the greatest of urgency. There is a larger question of future-proofing this resource. The answer lies, perhaps, in something web-based rather than on CD-ROM, which would make updates and corrections easier, and avoid platform limitations (like TLIO, for example).

The look and feel of the database is quite retro, it almost feels DOS-like, though I’m sure it’s much more up-to-date than that. I’d go as far as to say that the interface is a little forbidding, perhaps even a little severe for my taste. The user has great control over the search terms, what material is searched, and the output format for the search. It is a resource that requires lots of curiosity, but not the curiosity of a browser, but rather that of someone on the hunt for something, something specific. It does not lend itself to leafing through, since there is nothing to look at without doing a search. It is not a book and is not designed to look like one. One can of course read individual poems, but the interface is very spartan and does not encourage reading for pleasure in the way I might take down Poeti del Duecento for a few hours on a Sunday, or the way I browse CLPIO. This is not the fault of anyone, and given the extraordinary power and scope of the resource, my comments sound like cavils.

The value of this resource is clear to anyone who uses it. The kind of sensitivity to the lexicon of the early Italian lyric that is essential for any detailed critical, literary, and philological study is now immeasurably facilitated. All such studies will now be indebted to this resource, and the editors are to be congratulated on a marvellous project.

It is an immensely exciting time to be working in this field.

I Want It, I Want It, I Want It, I Want It!

In 2005 appeared two volumes of the Enciclopedia fridericiana (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, Treccani), ed. by Girolamo Arnaldi, Ortensio Zecchino, Arnold Esch, Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Alberto Varvaro and Cosimo Damiano Fonseca. In 2008 a third volume was added, on the work of Frederick himself. It is a massive, gorgeous, vast project, produced in the wake of the the anniversary celebrations of his birth, in 1194. Compelling, complex, learned, Frederick was dubbed by a contemporary chronicler stupor mundi. Leafing through the pages of these three volumes makes for not a little stupor at its breath and its beauty.

I want this. What can I say? God I want this SO much. And now, an Italian bookseller has the three volumes on eBay for €1,500. That sounds a lot and I know what you're thinking: don’t be insane. Indeed. But I still want this! I really want this. I cannot, of course, allow myself to even consider it. But know this: when it sells, as I’m sure it will, I shall look back upon this very moment filled with regret. And it will not go away.

So if you have €1,500 and you like the Middle Ages, then you could do a lot worse than to acquire this. If, in addition to the money and a love of the Middle Ages, you have a huge and generous heart, why don’t you buy it for me! I know you won’t though. I know that.

I’d like to go and have a little cry now.

Like this:

Christian Materiality and Material Christians

This is an exciting year for Christian Materiality, as well as for Material Christians. Those interested in the former and who, in fact, are the latter can now acquire the new and excellent Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011). This, combined with the major exhibition at the British Museum, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (with a beautiful catalogue edited by Martina Bagnoli, Holgar A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann and James Robinson, British Museum Press, 2011), makes for lots to think about.

Anyone who knows Bynum’s work, especially her recent essays and lectures, will find the argument and material discussed in this book familiar. It is written in a highly readable style and is clearly intended for a very wide, non specialist, audience. As anyone knows who has tried to do such a thing, it is extremely difficult and requires enormous expertise and control. Caroline Bynum is gifted with all of these skills and the result is a marvellous exploration of one fascination aspect of medieval religious practice. The book is divided into four main chapters: 1. Visual Matter; 2. The Power of Objects; 3. Holy Pieces; and 4. Matter and Miracles. These are supplemented with fifty black-and-white illustrations and a richly documented store of notes at the end (though no bibliography).

In her introduction, Bynum discusses how she is interested in exploring ‘one of the central contradictions of the later Middle Ages: the increasing prominence of holy matter in a religion also characterized by a need for human agency on the part of the faithful, a turn to interiority on the part of spiritual writers and reform-minded church leaders, and an upsurge of voluntarism, negative theology, and mysticism’ (p. 18). She talks a lot about the thingness of holy matter and how those critical views suggesting that these objects always pointed beyond themselves fails to do sufficient justice to just how thingy they are, how they call attention to themselves as things. She also discusses what she means by materiality, emphasizing its plasticity and tactility, developing these around ideas of fragmentation, parts, and wholes. She seeks to clarify what she means by the ‘body’, ‘materiality and agency’ and ‘material culture’, terms used with an historical perspective and in contrast to their current, popular use in cultural studies. (There’s a very enjoyable impatience in her attitude to how her own work has becomes subsumed into some of these new trendy topics).

The very schematic table of contents is richly suggestive of what the reader will find inside:
Introduction, Nicholas of Cusa and the Hosts of Andechs; The Periodization of Holy Matter; Materiliaty; Beyond “the Body”; Matter as Paradox. Visual Matter, Image Theory; The Materiality of Images: Two Theoretical Considerations; The Materiality of Images: Examples; Viewer Response; Materiality as Self-Referential; Material Iconography; The Material in the Visionary; Living Images; The Cross; Conclusion. The Power of Objects, Two Caveats; Definitions and Examples: Bodily Relics and Contact Relics, Dauerwunder, Sacramentals and Prodigies; The Theology of Holy Matter: Relics, Sacramentals and Dauerwunder; Dissident and Heretical Critiques; The Example of Johannes Bremer; Holy Matter in Social Context; The Case of Wilsnack; Conclusion. Holy Pieces, Parts, Wholes, and Triumph over Decay; Theologians and the Problems of Putrefaction; The Contradiction: Fragmentation as Opportunity; A Comparison with Jewish Practice; The Iconography of Parts and Wholes: The Example of the Side Wound; Concomitance as Theory and Habit of Mind; Conclusion. Matter and Miracles, Three Examples; Elite and Popular: Again a Caveat; Theories of Miracle as a Way of Accessing Assumptions about Matter; The Historiography of Matter; Conceptions of Matter and Change; Change as Threat and Opportunity: A Reprise; Reducing Change to Appearance; Explaining Miracles by Limiting Change; Using Physiological Theories to Contain Miracles; Matter as Dynamic Substratum; Holy Matter as Triumph over Matter; The Materiality of Creation. Conclusion, Reinterpreting the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries; Jews, Muslims, and Christians; Theories, Medieval and Modern; Again the Paradox.

Listen to Caroline Bynum talk about miracles at Stanford

‘Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe’ is a major exhibition at the British Museum, running from 23 June — 9 October 2011. It had previously been mounted at The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Walters Art Museum. Bringing together a range of material from all over Europe, it successfully demonstrates the diversity, the quality and the beauty of many of these objects. Highlights include the wonderful Reliquary of the Holy Thorn, about 1390–97, France, commissioned by Jean, Duc de Berry (watch Dora Thornton talk about it here); the Reliquary head of St Eustace, about 1200, Basle, Switzerland; the wonderful material relating to St Cuthbert and St Thomas Becket. I was thrilled to see the gorgeous reliquary now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see here).

Dating to around 1173–1180, it is in silver, with niello and gemstone, and measures just 2¼ × 2¾ × 1¾ in. (5.7 × 7 × 3.4 cm)—that is, very small, especially given the exquisite detail. Since Thomas was martyred in 1170, it is a very early example of a reliquary associated with him. The sides display a brief narrative of Thomas’s martyrdom, four knights assaulting him, one extending a sword towards his neck, which was bowed as in prayer when he was killed. An angel on the lid makes a sign of blessing over the event. On the other side (not shown above), Thomas’s body lies in state, while an angel carries a small child—the saint’s soul—to heaven. The top of the casket is set with a piece of red glass (supposed to be a ruby) and it seems likely that the casket contained a blood relic. Bynum illustrates this piece in Christian Materiality, fig. 15, p. 72, says of it on pp. 70–1: ‘the reliquary of Thomas Becket’s blood, the blood itself (which is presumably a few rusty, dried flakes) is hidden in a casket, not displayed, but a large jewel has been constructed on the top by backing rock crystal with red foil to evoke the redness of blood. The stuff of the jewel is palpable and shouts out living redness, but it plays visually with its own physicality; it is neither the blood in the container nor the ruby it appears to be’. See too the catalogue entry by Barbara Drake Boehm, no. 97, p. 186, for a circumspect analysis of the inscription, partially damaged, and what might have been contained in this reliquary.

The catalogue, beautifully illustrated, has the following essays: 1. Derek Krueger, ‘The Religion of Relics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium’; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Relics and Their Veneration’; Holger A. Klein, ‘Sacred Things and Holy Bodies: Collecting Relics from Late Antiquity to the Early Renaissance’; Guido Cornini, ‘“Non Est in Toto Sanctior Orbe Locus”: Collecting Relics in Early Medieval Rome’; Éric Palazzo, ‘Relics, Liturgical Space, and the Theology of the Church’; James Robinson, ‘From Altar to Amulet: Relics, Portability, and Devotion’; Martina Bagnoli, ‘The Stuff of Heaven: Materials and Craftsmanship in Medieval Reliquaries; Barbara Drake Boehm, ‘“A Brilliant Resurrection”: Enamel Shrines for Relics in Limoges and Cologne, 1100–1230’; Cynthia Hahn, ‘The Spectacle of the Charismatic Body: Patrons, Artists, and Body-Part Reliquaries’; and finally, Alexander Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’.

Those who can are encouraged to watch the recent one-hour piece on BBC 4 presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon, featuring Sr Wendy Beckett and Neil MacGregor (as well as Pembroke’s own Emily Guerry talking about La Sainte-Chapelle). Well worth watching, with an especially interesting segment on Bishop Oscar Romero, known in El Salvador as San Romero.

Read Bynum’s new book, go to the exhibtion.

Wycliffe, In Our Time

Glasgow, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, MS Hunter 191 (T. 8. 21), f. 2v, from the opening of the Gospel of St John in the Wycliffite translation.

Listen to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, with Sir Anthony Kenny, Prof. Anne Hudson, and Dr Rob Lutton discussing John Wycliffe and the Lollards.

from the website:

John Wyclif was a medieval philosopher and theologian who in the fourteenth century instigated the first complete English translation of the Bible. One of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages, he also led a movement of opposition to the Roman Church and its institutions which has come to be seen as a precursor to the Reformation.
Wyclif disputed some of the key teachings of the Church, including the doctrine of transubstantiation. His followers, the Lollards, were later seen as dangerous heretics, and in the fifteenth century many of them were burnt at the stake. Today Lollardy is seen as the first significant movement of dissent against the Church in England.

Listen Again

Listen to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time with Miri Rubin, Ian Wei and Peter Denley talk about the Medieval University.

From the website:

In the 11th and 12th centuries a new type of institution started to appear in the major cities of Europe. The first universities were those of Bologna and Paris; within a hundred years similar educational organisations were springing up all over the continent. The first universities based their studies on the liberal arts curriculum, a mix of seven separate disciplines derived from the educational theories of Ancient Greece.

The universities provided training for those intending to embark on careers in the Church, the law and education. They provided a new focus for intellectual life in Europe, and exerted a significant influence on society around them. And the university model proved so robust that many of these institutions and their medieval innovations still exist today.

CFP: Error: Aspects and Approaches, Lincoln College, Oxford 16-17 April 2010

ERROR: Aspects and Approaches

An international Conference at the University of Oxford, April 16-17 2010

This conference is aimed at early career scholars and graduate students. A volume of proceedings comprising selected papers will appear in the Medium Ævum Monographs Series. Contributions are welcomed from diverse fields of research such as history of art and architecture, history, theology, philosophy, anthropology, literature and history of ideas.

Papers will be 20 minutes or less. Please email 250-word abstracts (text only, no attachments please) to oxgradconf@gmail.com by 5th January 2010.

Suggested topics might include:

• Misunderstanding; Miscommunication; Misinterpretation; Misattribution; Mistranslattion
• Scribal error; Mismatch (image vs. text); Retractions; Textual variance
• Factual error; Received error
• Personification of error
• Mistaken identity
• Political mistake
• False confessions; Lying
• Confusion; Deception
• Knightly errance
• Theological error; Spiritual error
• Scientific error
• Disharmony/Discord
• Medievalism; Early Modern and later (mis)corrections
• Epistemology; Logic
• Crime and misdemeanour

The conference fee is expected to be in the region of £25 (twenty-five pounds). We hope to organize a conference banquet in Lincoln's lovely hall on the Friday night and will provide details of this as soon as they are available. All updates and further information can be obtained from www.medieval.ox.ac.uk/omgc.html

In Our Time with St Thomas Aquinas

Sandro Botticelli (attrib), St Thomas Aquinas, O.P. (c.1225-1274),
Abegg-Stiftung Museum, Riggisberg, Switzerland

Listen to Martin Palmer (Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture), John Haldane (Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews), and Annabel Brett (Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge) talk about St Thomas Aquinas with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio4's In Our Time.

Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man (Princeton UP, 2004)

Lordy, it's been a while since I last posted. Apologies. I've been trying to finish something before term begins and it is taking much longer than I had hoped. Sigh.

I have very much enjoyed reading Robert Bartlett's book The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2004). It is aimed at a broad audience, not exclusively academic; the highly engaging writing style will ensure such a wide audience.

The story is relatively simple, if somewhat striking. Around 1290 a notorious brigand called William Cragh was hanged in Swansea. The process of execution did not go smoothly: the gallows broke and while Cragh was considered dead, he was hanged again for good measure. This second hanging assured everyone that he was dead and the man was taken down and brought away. An eye witness (William de Briouze junior) described the dead man:

His whole face was black and in parts bloody or stained with blood. His eyes had come out of their sockets and hung outside the eyelids and the sockets were filled with blood. His mouth, neck, and throat and the parts around them, also his nostrils, were filled with blood, so that it was impossible in the natural course of things for him to breathe air through his nostrils or through his mouth or through his throat ... his tongue hung out of his mouth, the length of a man's finger, and it was completely black and swollen and as thick with the blood sticking to it that it seemed the size of a man's two fists together. (p. 6).

I provide this dramatic and rather gory account because it does not look like a man in that shape would be capable of much, let alone recover. But that is what he did, living for another fifteen years or so. As he was being prepared for burial those present noticed him moving. The Lady Mary de Briouze, stepmother to the eyewitness cited above, wife of the lord, he who condemned Cragh to death, had prayed to Thomas de Cantilupe to protect the man, and it was this event that lead to an investigation in 1307 into Thomas's sanctity. Bartlett sifts through the documentation of this investigation (now in the Vatican Archives) and provides a rigorous analysis and contextualization of what is found there. So there's a fascinating chapter on 'Time and Space', pp. 53-67, in which he discusses how the accounts describe distance and time. Distance, for example, is referred to in the length of crossbow shot, and time in terms of how long it takes to walk between places. There is a tradition that he who is hanged once cannot be hanged again, one that seems to be in the background of Piers Plowman B 18. 380-4, 'It is noght used on erthe to hangen a feloun | Other than ones' (cf. C 20. 421-422). This is not exactly the scenario here, in that it does not appear to be an imperfect hanging, but a case of resurrection. Cragh had prayed to the right saint, since Cantilupe was particularly associated with resurrections. Apparently resurrections were still rather unusual in the late thirteenth century:

'a careful study of 4,756 miracle accounts from eleventh- and twelfth-century France found only sixty cases of resurrection; that is, 1.26 percent. Thomas de Cantilupe's forty is thus a number equivalent to fully two-thirds of the miraculous resurrections over these two centuries in France. It is worth noting, however, that resurrection grew more common over the course of the Middle Ages. While they form only 1.26 percent of miracles recorded in eleventh- and twelfth-century France, they constitute 2.2 percent of miracles examined in thirteenth-century canonization processes and 10.2 percent in fourteenth-century ones' (pp. 51-52).

This is fascinating: why is there such a leap in resurrection miracles in the fourteenth century?

In sum, this is a riveting story, marvellously written. Read it.

I've been picking some interesting things up lately too (here in Dublin). Found a very nice copy of Helen Barr's Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England, and also Gianni Vattimo's The Transparent Society, which is marvellous. I then picked up his Beyond Interpretation, which I'd bought several years ago and never read, and am increasingly drawn to his work. Have also managed to pick up some very nice s/h philosophy, mainly Heidegger, but some Caputo, too who is quite fascinating. I also picked up a copy of the lovely Tel quel anthology from 1968 entitled Théorie d'ensemble (Éditions du Seuil).

On my desk now is the score of Scarlatti's Griselda (1721), and that's the next thing I'll post about.

The Grimani Breviary

The publishing house Salerno Editrice, based in Rome, has just announced the publication of a splendid facsimile of Venice, Bibl. Nazionale Marciana, MS Lat. I 99 (2138), the so-called Breviario Grimani, named after its owner Cardinal Domenico Grimani. The manuscript comprises 832 folios, 28 x 19.5 cm (11 x 7 ¹¹/16); justification: 15.5 X 11.5 cm (6⅛ X 4½ in.); 31 lines of gotica rotunda in two columns; 50 full-page miniatures, 18 large miniatures, 18 small miniatures, 12 bas-de-page calendar miniatures.

The Grimani Breviary is the most elaborate and arguably the greatest work in the history of Flemish manuscript illumination. Purchased by Cardinal Domenico Grimani by 1520 for the enormous sum of five hundred ducats, it brought together the leading illuminators of the time, including the Master of James IV of Scotland (probably Gerard Horenbout), Alexander Bening (the Master of the First Prayer Book of Maximilian?), the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary, Simon Bening, and Gerard David. More important, each of these artists created for this manuscript some of his most exquisite and original miniatures.

Thus Thomas Kren, Maryan W. Ainsworth and Elizabeth Morrison in their catalogue entry, No. 126 in Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), pp. 420-424. One can hear the frustration in their tone when they wrote about the massive amount of work still to be done on this manuscript: 'Indeed, the two-day examination of the manuscript by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Thomas Kren proved woefully inadequate to the task of sorting out all of the stylistic and technical issues that the book raises' (p. 420), a frustration all more acute since the manuscript was not actually displayed in this exhibition.

After you finish drooling, read Michael Camille, 'The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Critical Inquiry, 17 (1990), 72-107; and see too Sandra Hindman and Nina Rowe, (eds), Manuscript Illumination in The Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction (Evanston, Il: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2001).

If anyone would like to buy me this facsimile for a birthday or Christmas, or Easter, or really, any other day of the week, please feel free. It is selling, apparently, for €22,000.

Getting Medieval on the BBC

Great long silence lately on my part: apologies. I've been busy, writing like crazy, travelling, and teaching. Was in Oxford yesterday for a school's dinner with my old second years. Lovely to see them again. Lovely. They'll do well.

Picked up a couple of lovely things in Oxfam books:, but most happy with J. B. Whiting's Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press & Oxford University Press, 1968) for a cool seven squids. Also picked up a copy of Anne Carson's Decreation and have been making my way v e r y v e r y s l o w l y t h r o u g h i t. I've been lucky to pick up a number of other things lately. For example, the second edition of Barbi's edition of the Vita Nuova (Bemporad, 1932), in super condition, from the library of an Irish priest! I also found a copy of Gombrich's Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd ed. (Phaidon, 1986), which I cannot wait to get into.

Over the past while the BBC has been broadcasting lots of stuff on poetry, including medieval poetry. Michael Wood has a programme on Beowulf, and Simon Armitage has one on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While the first on Beowulf is quite good, though there's a bit too much lunatic fringe about it and looking meaningfully into meres and the like. But generally it was ok.

I was quite looking forward to Armitage on Gawain, thinking that he would talk about translating the text, how he went about it, what poetic challenges he faced. And there are glimmers here and there of this. But mainly it is not very good. Not very good at all in fact. He makes just a few references to the Middle English, including testing out words on local northern farmers to see if any of it sounds familiar (admitting he was disappointed he didn't find them speaking in fluent Middle English NW Midland dialect...). The rest is filmed 'on location', but based speculatively on where that location might be. There isn't a trace of a medievalist to be found. Michael Wood discussed Heaney's translation of Beowulf with the man himself. Why didn't Armitage talk to Bernard O'Donoghue about translating the poem, as a poet and a medievalist. (I'm tempted to wonder why O'Donoghue did not do the documentary himself). It was a real missed opportunity.

One worrying thing was his reference, twice, to the Green Knight picking up his head and putting it back on his shoulders. This first happens when Armitage opens the film, and then while talking to someone who'd been healed at the well of St Winefride (in Holywell), he repeats it while comparing the gesture to the miracle of the said saint, whose severed head is reattached by Saint Beuno and restored to life.

The Green Knight never replaces his head on his shoulders. What happens is far more interesting and a poet of Armitage's creativity and imagination should not be so deaf to this. The Green Knight's head is kicked about the court for a bit as his torso remains. This torso reaches down and picks up the head and opens his eyelids and speaks. When he gets back on his horse he does so continuing to hold his head in his hand. The scene is one of an extraordinarily careful management of the horror. Putting his head back on his shoulders would have been positively banal by comparison.

For þe hede in his honde he haldez vp euen,
Toward þe derrest on þe dece he dressez þe face,
And hit lyfte vp þe yȝe-lyddez and loked ful brode,
And meled þus much with his muthe, as ȝe may now here:
'Loke, Gawan, þou hatz hette in þis halle, herande þise knyȝtes;
To þe grene chapel þou chose, I charge þe, to fotte
Such a dunt as þou hatz dalt—disserued þou habbez
To be ȝederly ȝolden on Nw Ȝeres morn.
Þe knyȝt of þe grene chapel men knowen me mony;
Forþi me for to fynde if þou fraystez, faylez þou neuer.
Þerfore com, oþer recreaunt be calde þe behoues.'
With a runisch rout þe raynez he tornez,
Halled out at þe hal dor, his hed in his hande,
Þat þe fyr of þe flynt flaȝe from fole houes.
To quat kyth he becom knwe non þere,
Neuer more þen þay wyste from queþen he watz wonnen.
What þenne?
Þe kyng and Gawan þare
At þat grene þay laȝe and grenne,
Ȝet breued watz hit ful bare
A meruayl among þo menne.

(SGGK, ll. 444-466, ed. Tolkien & Gordon, rev. Davis, [1967], p. 13)

He held the head up straight with his hand,
and turned the face towards the king who sat on the throne.
He raised his eyelids and stared at him open-eyed;
then with his mouth said the words you will hear.
'Be sure, Gawain, you're ready, as you have sworn
to seek conscientiously until you find me,
as you've said in this hall, in these knights' hearing.
Seek out the Green Chapel, I urge you, to get
such as blow as you have struckf. You've earned the right
to be promptly repain on New Year's morning.
Most people call me the Green Chapel Knight;
so, if you ask, you won't fail to find me.
Therefore come, or be called a defaulter.'
With a violent tug he pulled the reins round,
and galloped out the hall door, his head in his hand,
so that fire from the flint sparked off the hooves.
To what country he went no one there knew,
any more than they knew where he'd come from at first.
What next?
The king and Gawain then
laughed at this green man.
But they had to face the truth
that this was unnatural.

(trans. Bernard O'Donoghue [Penguin, 2006], p. 16).

I should say that his translation does not make this mistake; it seems to be a kind of misremembering. I know I'm being a bit snippy about this as a mistake, and it is a mistake. But it is also interesting. It is as if Armitage wishes to make the Green Knight whole, to restore him to a fully human form as soon as possible after Gawain decapitates him. This is in such contrast with the Green Knight himself, who might be said to accentuate his non/in-human form. And this is a very important part of his character and of the story. It also feels like a kind of injustice to the violence of Gawain's act. He performs an act of great violence, described in detail: the blade shatters the bone, and goes through his neck with such force that the edge of the blade bites into the ground. This too is important.

Call for Papers: Play: Aspects and Approaches

Miglior acque is pleased to announce that the 2009 Oxford Medieval Aspects and Approaches Conference will take place on April 3-4, and that it will be on the subject of Play. For further information and updates click here.

Stephen Medcalf (ed), The Later Middle Ages (London, 1981)

When I was in Cambridge last week I picked up a couple of rather things, all for under five of these English pounds. The first was David Bevington's 1975 Houghton Mifflin anthology Medieval Drama; the second, wonderfully, was the 1983 third edition of Beryl Smalley's The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. These are both marvellous and I'm heartily happy to have them. The third was something I'd been keeping a casual eye out for lately and was surprised and happy to see it: Stephen Medcalf (ed), The Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1981). I am now happy to read it. I saw a good many references to it in the Hoccleve criticism, but this is not a book that gets cited much outside this criticism and I am very puzzled as to why. Then I got curious about him and did a bit of online snooping, only to discover that he died last September. And his obituaries have all been extraordinary: in the Guardian, by Josipovici, his colleague at Sussex; in the Independant, the Telegraph, the Times, and the Church Times. The descriptions of the chaos in which he lived are memorable and I particularly enjoyed his response to the question, could he find any volume in his library, "Within a foot or two". Gabriel Josipovici writes:

He would not have lasted long in the present academic climate, which is the poorer for turning its back on people like Medcalf and Dyson and a whole host of Oxbridge teachers of an earlier generation, who felt that what they were there for was to teach, to impart to their students the values they themselves had learned from their teachers and from the authors they admired.

There is far too much truth in these words, and the things that are being allowed to happen in the academy make me sad, sad for all that is being lost. I am, then, coming to the book with a slightly different dispositio, reading it as a memorial and knowing, in a small way, some of the things that made Medcalf tick. The volume makes sense in a slightly different way now, I think, than it did to its reviewers (Lois Ebin in Spec 58 [1983], 509-511; M.G.A. Vale, English Historical Review 99 [1984], 418-419).

The volume is collaborative, comprising five individually-authored chapters. The first, by Medcalf, is entitled 'On reading books from a half-alien culture', pp. 1-55; the second, by Marjorie Reeves and Stephen Medcalf, 'The ideal, the real and the quest for perfection', pp. 56-107; the third, by Medcalf, 'Inner and outer', pp. 108-171; the fourth, by Nicola Coldstream, 'Art and architecture in the late Middle Ages', pp. 172-224; and finally, the fifth, by David Starkey, 'The age of the household: politics, society and the arts c. 1350-c. 1550', pp. 225-290. An epilogue, by Mecalf, entitled 'From Troilus to Troilus' (pp. 291-305) closes the book. The final two chapters are very interesting, and extremely good introductions to the architectural history of the period, and the chapter on the household is fascinating - my reading nicely segueing with publication of Elliot Kendall's new study, Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household. Medcalf's contributions are extremely good, I think. There is something of a mind wrestling about them, of a tough thinking through big big ideas. It's a broad-brush stroke study, so I can see how critics might want more micro detail. But I think that the zoomed out view is very compelling, and there are many points where it is clear that the water is running very deep. And then there are the startling little details, which I hope will give you a sense of the way that tiny details can get picked up across a wide wide range of reading and be brought together. Medcalf is comparing Hoccleve's Prologue to the Regiment of Princes and Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence' and 'The Leechgatherer':

"The poems have the same seven-line stanza, rhyming ababbcc (rhyme royal), except that Wordsworth lengthens the last line each stanza by two syllables. So, although Hoccleve's poem was not printed till after Wordsworth's death, the coincidences seem great enough to suggest that Wordsworth had seen one of the manuscripts, possibly that in his own college of St John's, Cambridge, attracted perhaps by reading in Warton's History of English Poetry about the portrait of Chaucer, and moved by the theme he puts in his poem of 'Mighty poets in their misery dead'. If so, Hoccleve's poem would have given form to an incident that certainly happened to Wordsworth" (p. 136).

(Sub)Standard Medievalists

Some silly girl called Charlotte (above) wrote a silly article for something called the Weekly Standard about Kalamazoo. Evidently the standards are falling. No, not those at the Zoo, rather those at the Weekly Standard. She's got quite a little rant going here and it is pretty much directed at everyone. I particularly enjoyed:

I'm told that the dances of today are no match in noise and lasciviousness for those of the mid-1990s, when flocks of leather-clad gays took to the floor to celebrate their academic coming-out in a congress session on "Queer Iberia." Still, I spent two hours there nursing a beer and mesmerized by the bobbing fauxhawks, the shaking bare flesh (and plenty of it), the hip-hopper in the Blondie T-shirt, the fellow in the full kilt and sporran who had been wandering through the congress as though in search of the set for Brigadoon, the nose-rings, the Birkenstocks, the Pashtun caps, the bare feet of the learned professors of the Middle Ages and their grad-student acolytes.

Nevermind the homophobia, the bitterness, the pinched tut-tutting: I am shocked and APPALLED that she nursed a beer for TWO HOURS. I'm sorry but she's certainly like no medievalist I've ever met. This completely unacceptable and quite irresponsible attitude to alcohol leaves me, well, frankly in need of a drink. For responses with long and funny comments, see this and this.

Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed & comm. Rosanna Bettarini (Turin, 2005)

Rosanna Bettarini's marvellous commented edition of the Canzoniere has just become mine! Mwha mwha. I've wanted this for a good while but just bit the bullet last month. It is beautiful. I remember reading Boitani's review of it in Il Sole 24 Ore, back when it came out, and I decided to buy it because volumes in this series, the Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati go out of print rather quickly and then become impossible to find (a good example is Gorni's edition of the Vita nova, or De Robertis' edition of Cavalcanti's Rime). This commentary is extraordinarily rich, with an enormous bibliography. It also has a short introduction (Bettarini has published a monograph on Petrarch). She writes beautifully in this introduction about the study of Petrarch being a study of books, the books he wrote, collected, annotated:

Cosí la poco scrivibile storia di Petrarca è essenzialmente una storia di libri, strappati alla fuga temporis: quelli suoi, che crescono intrecciati e che vengono avanti l'uno dopo l'altro «in tam parva vite area» (Fam. XIX 16, 5), coltivati come giardini, ortulos e libellos del pari piantati con le sue mani (Fam. XI 12, 11), tutti, con avvolgente metafora, bisognosi dell'assiduità del buon coltivatore: «nec coluisse semel sufficit, sed semper insistere oportet qui singularem aliquem vel agri vel animi fructum cupit» (Fam. XIII 12, 7-8, del 1352); di quei libri che il peregrinus ubique porta sempre con sé, per terra, per mare e sul monte Ventoso, come le Confessioni di sant'Agostino, che sono la rivelazione (paolina) dell'acutezza degli occhi interiori, occhi del cuore o invisibiles oculi («Tunc vero montem satis vidisse contentus, in me ipsum interiores oculos reflexi», Fam. IV 1, 29, in particolare sintonia con le agostiniane Enarrationes in Psalmos, XLI 2) e dell'autoanalisi, sostenente i motivi del Secretum e ancor piú del Canzoniere, in quel misto di umbra montis e di umbra mortis che è la cifra della grande canzone di nostalgia Di pensier in pensier (CXXIX); di quei libri fisicamente non cercati in gioventú, le rime di Dante, la Commedia, come testimoniato in una famosa lettera al Boccaccio (Fam. XXI 15), sui quali grava un eccesso di memoria e un igienico distacco, comprovante che non c'è niente di piú filiale e amorevole che uccidere il padre; di quei libri perduti e riconquistati, decorati con ogni possibile segno di tenerezza, come il Virgilio Ambrosiano allestito dal padre ser Petracco, «michi subreptus» nel 1326 e «deinde restitutus» nel 1338 apud Avinionem (sottoscrizione autografa del foglio di guardia del codice Ambr. A 79 inf.), reso splendido e commovente da una miniatura di Simone Martini (su progetto iconofrafico dello stesso Petrarca) e dalla nota che registra la data di morte di molti amici, dell'unica amata (Avignone 6 aprile 1348), e poi, volando il tempo, del figlio Giovanni (1361); di quei vecchissimi volumi scovati nelle Biblioteche («inque bibliothecam ... velut in arcem fugio», Fam. XIX 16, 20), come le lettere di Cicerone ad Attico, a Bruto e al fratello Quinto (Capitolar di Verona, tarda primavera del 1345), che stanno a fondamento delle Familiares (appunto ciceronianamente Rerum familiarum libri), ma con l'impertinente novità di rivolgersi non a uno solo, come anche Seneca a Lucilio, ma a innumerevoli amici, moltiplicando se stesso nell'immagine di molti, selezionati «non sine suspirio» in quel rituale falò di carte che è descritto in testa alla raccolta: «omnis generis sparsa poemata seu familiares epystolas ... Vulcano corrigendas tradidi» (Fam. I 1, 9), sulla scorta di Ovidio che nei Tristia affida al fuoco la correzione del passato: «Multa quidem scripsi, sed, quae vitiosa putavi, | emendaturus ignibus ipse dedi» (IV X 61-62)' (Introduzione, pp. xii-xiii).

I was then reminded of A.C. de la Mare's remark about Petrarch's manuscripts: 'Over the years Petrarch must have acquired several hundred manuscripts and, to judge only from those so far identified, his collection must have been one of the largest and most important in private hands at any time before or since' (The Handwriting of Italian Humanists, Vol. 1, fasc. 1 [Oxford: Printed at the University Press for the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, 1973], p. 5). There is something about this that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

I enjoyed too the nod to E.H. Wilkins, the amicus transatlanticus, and wondered about how condescending that tag is. I know that Bettarini is simply following how he was recorded in the Petrarch Society, I know that she is repeating it out of great and evident respect, and I know too that Wilkins considered it a great honour. And it was. But it is funny how the Italians are very territorial about their medieval literature, and more precisely about its criticism. I was trying to think whether you'd get an Irish scholar praising Richard Ellmann as an amicus transatlanticus for his Joyce criticism. I'm not at all sure you would.

Bettarini's commentary is magisterial and I am deeply glad every time I open its pages and get lost in it.

Francesco Petrarca, De insigni obedientia et fide uxoria, ed. Albanese (1998)

This gorgeous little facsimile of Florence, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 991, prepared by the excellent Gabriella Albanese was published in 1998 by Edizioni dell'Orso (Alessandria); she is also responsible for writing an introduction. It appears to be out of print now, but I shall certainly keep my eyes open for it as I'd love to own a copy. The manuscript is rather unusual in that it comprises just 22 ff of Petrarch's Latin translation of Dec X. 10, the story of Gualtieri and his patient wife Griselda. Very few single volume 'monographs' of the work exist, being much more frequently compiled with other material into a miscellany. Its format is unusual, 18 cm X 12.5 cm, written in a humanist script that is light and spacious.

"L'elegante mise en page del testo, infatti, vergato in scrittura umanistica, a piena pagina, con uno specchio di scrittura arioso, di gusto classico, il formato decisamente moderno e 'petrarchesco' di «libretto da mano» ne fanno un maneggevole libro di lettura, scritto al contempo con eleganza e chiarezza, che ripete da vicino teoria e prassi della riforma del libro voluta e imposta da Petrarca negli ambienti delle più avanzate avanguardie umanistiche" (p. 39).

Perhaps most interesting is its unfinished iconographic programme, with blank spaces at key scenes. Albanese includes an analysis of these empty scenes and a comparison with other illuminated manuscripts with pictorial representations of these very moments in the text. This is a fascinating study and a fascinating manuscript and both are worth looking at carefully.

Renaissance Siena: Art for a City; National Gallery London, until 13 Jan

The National Gallery recently restored a triptych panel by the so-called Master of the Story of Griselda of the sequence for which he has become famous. The curator was so struck by its quality that he decided to put together a larger exhibition entitled Renaissance Siena: Art for a City, and the result is an extremely enjoyable collection of work. Siena was often considered the second city in Tuscany in terms of power and influence after Florence, and there is no doubt at all that this secondary position is reflected in the quality of the art it produced. But in a way that is what made this exhibition so enjoyable. You are seeing how a relatively normal Italian Renaissance city got on with creating its saints, its iconography, establishing its authority in artistic terms with the best artists it could grow at home and import from elsewhere.


What I went to the exhibition to see was those recently-restored panels detailing the Griselda story and it was certainly worth it for that. The panels are thought to have been produced for a double wedding in the Spanocchi family and would have decorated the nuptial bedchamber. It would seem that they were placed in a row as they are all lit from the left. The first panel details Gualtieri out hunting and seeing Griselda (left background, and left middle ground). He goes to Griselda father to ask permission for her hand in marriage (right background), takes her outside, has her stripped naked (left foreground), and then marries her in her sumptuous bridal clothes (centre).


The second panel details Gualtieri's supposed killing of their two children (left background), his seeking a divorce (under the left arch), showing her the forged papal bull giving him permission to divorce her (under the central arch) and her scandalous disrobing (under right arch). She goes home in her camicia, or undergarment, to her father who is waiting for her.


The third panel details the wedding banquet. Gualtieri has asked Griselda to return to the castle and prepare the household for his impending wedding (left background). She agrees and welcomes the wedding guests, including the supposed bride and her brother (far background). Under the far right arch Griselda speaks to Gualtieri, explaining that he should not test his new wife like he did another (i.e. her). Under the far left arch Gualtieri reveals that is was all a test, a test that she has passed, and he embraces her (rather awkwardly). The central two panels details the restoration of order and Gualtieri and Griselda's re-marriage and happily-ever-after moment.

These are fascinating panels, not just for the very interesting representation of marriage, such as is discussed by Christiane Klapische-Zuber in "The Griselda Complex", but also the marriage iconography being used in such a specific nuptial context (see Baskins on Italian cassoni etc). Also, the artist has clearly created a very uneven composition, where there is much skipping and jumping between scenes, where one is often unsure what is happening, where clothes and headgear must be read in order to understand who's who. These are such vital concerns in the story that it represents an interesting example of a rich textual background informing the visual tradition. The animals playing on the floor in the final panel provide a wonderful marginal commentary to the story too, with chained monkeys and bears and such looking at various characters. One wonders at the central panel and its use of a forged papal bull in the context of often delicate relations with Rome. The bull is the central point in the panel, the vanishing point, clearly indicating that it is upon this authority that Gualtieri acts. As the central panel it balances the two others, provides their centre of gravity, or their fulcrum. Interesting too is the theory that the final panel was produced first, in time for the wedding, and that he others were added later. In the Spanocchi house, then, the resolution came first, and the problems were represented later. Given that the wall would have been prepared to receive the panels in advance, a bride might well have had a sense of foreboding at the two empty panels waiting for a story, explaining how Griselda ended up like that. I am troubled too by the awkwardness of Griselda's embrace of Gualtieri in the final panel. It speaks volumes in a scene in which she says nothing.

Go to see this exhibition.

Pausing, then Effecting

A quick visit to my local secondhand bookshop ended up a bit of a crisis of hyperventilation and overspending. The usual story. One of the retiring dons has off-loaded some of his books, and he had a research interest in good stuff, like Chaucer. This means that there were many things I wanted. I had to make three piles in the end. The stuff I couldn't live without. The stuff I could live without for today (but no guarantees about tomorrow). And the stuff I know I'll regret not buying. (That's usually as good as it gets, I'm afraid). In the end I think that I was exemplary in my restraint and good judgment. First to call out to me was M.B. Parkes' Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992). A hard to find book, very competitively priced (£20). That was the little gem. Something I've used, and coveted, and wanted to own for a long time. The rest was all criticism I don't own but have read (with varying degrees of attentiveness). Owning them now and having them on my shelf obviously means I can return to them in my own time and ruminate. (That's the justification). Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (CUP, 1973); David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (RKP, 1980), and very serendipitously Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 1992). Super stuff. A very happy bunny.

Islamic and Christian Medieval Astronomy: A Shared Heritage

These past three evenings there have been three public lectures held at the Dept. of Physics. Tonight's was on the Astrolabe, and it was given by Dr Stephen Johnston, from the Museum of the History of Science. In it he discussed the history of the astrolabe, how it works, and gave a really interesting demonstration of a little java applet of an astrolabe in action. He went through some interesting astrolabes, both Arabic and Western, as well as many others. I began to see how one might work, and how versatile as instruments they actually are. You can measure not just time, but you can also plot the planets and thus, someone's horoscope. It is so easy to forget that Chaucer actually wrote a manual on how to use the astrolabe, ostensibly at the request of his son Lewis. There are many interesting aspects to this work, not least the prologue, where he talks very directly about the nature and role of translation (for which see the very interesting article by Andrew Cole, 'Chaucer's English Lesson', Speculum 77 [2002], 1128-1167). It also occurred to me that this was a very anthropocentric way of thinking about time, at once very local (you have to use a plate with your latitude on it), and also universal, transnational. You could use an Arabic astrolabe for example in Europe with the right latitude plate and a bit of thinking.
Below is a wristwatch astrolabe, made by Dr Ludwig Oechslin at the Swiss watchmakers Ulysse Nardin. I can just imagine Lewis looking for one for his birthday! (Chaucer would have been writing a longer complaint to his purse then I rather think).

Paul Strohm (ed), Middle English (Oxford, 2007)

This volume appears as the first in a series called 'Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature'. As its editor explains in the introduction, it is not really designed to be a companion to anything. There are no 'major author' chapters for example. Instead, the chapter titles seeks to 'violate customary categorizations' (p. 2): 'Vision, Image, Text'; 'Symbolic Economies'; Episodes'; 'Feeling'; 'Learning to Live', for example. So it's not Middle English Literature or Middle English Culture or Textualities, or any such. No; we're past that very Twentieth Century approach. The result is a jumble, but very curiously pleasing. And how could a medievalist complain about such miscellaneous varietas? The book is valuable, interesting and full of gems.
There isn't the space to review every essay, though do have a look at the table of contents. The following are random thoughts and impressions. The book is divided into four parts, 'Conditions and Context', 'Vantage Points', 'Textual Kinds and Categories', and 'Writing and the World'.
Part one is very stimulating. The opening chapter, by Carol Symes, looks at the idea of the 'manuscript matrix', the complex interaction of canonical texts and canonical manuscripts. 'Nearly everything that we take for granted about the identification, classification, and evaluation of texts must therefore be subjected to rigorous scrutiny in the twenty-first century, so that we gain a new appreciation of the very different conditions in which all medieval writings came into being, while acknowledging that many of the texts that make up the medieval segment of the modern canon were elevated to that status based on a variety of criteria which does not account for the aesthetic, cultural, or social values of medieval people, nor the media through which these values were conveyed' (p. 21). [I'd have loved a bit more on Dante, especially since she cites Sanguineti's edition of the Commedia, p. 14 n18, unfortunately without comment on how this edition might have relevance to her argument]. Robert M. Stein's article, immediately following, similarly urges for a return to the manuscripts and a consideration of the codicological context of these texts in a multi-lingual environment. This issue is addressed, again, by Christopher Baswell's essay 'Multilingualism on the Page' (pp. 38-50). And later, Alexandra Gillespie in 'Books' urges a dynamic approach, implicating the likes of Foucault, MacKenzie and Adam Pynkhurst: 'If my first point is that there are lots of different ways of thinking about books, my second is that no one way of thinking about a book is secure in itself. A book is something that must be worked on and made sense of. It is discursively formed - and discursive formations, the forms of human knowledge, are partial and unstable' (p. 90). Some welcome essays surely include Bruce Holsinger's contribution entitled 'Liturgy', proceeding along a 'detheologizing' line of analysis [an approach familiar to all who've read Barolini].
And it would be remiss of me to ignore the remarkable essay entitled 'Vernacular Theology' by Vincent Gillespie (pp. 401-420), where he argues succinctly and elegantly [he rarely argues any other way] that 'vernacular theology' might now be better understood working 'with the assumption that each subperiod in medieval England produced multiple, interlocking, and overlapping vernacular theologies, each with complex intertextual and interlingual obligations and affiliations' (p. 406). His pages on Ullerston as a key figure in the Oxford translation debate will leave you hungry for more. It is hoped that this 'twenty-first century approach' will soon get another outing providing Gillespie with more space to explore and elucidate this fascinating figure.

Kalamazoo

It would appear that the Babel sessions at Kalamazoo went fantastically well, and the wonderful Eileen Joy is the talk of the town. This was so obviously going to happen sooner or later. I was supposed to give a paper on that session and part of me is upset I could not go - hugely upset really. But I'm also relieved that I didn't get to go because I think my paper would have been easily the most boring in the session, from the sounds of things. Anyways, the papers are going to be posted, so keep an eye out. A highlight is Timothy Spence's paper on Books of Hours and iPods.

Posting is down to a minimum on Miglior acque these days as the workload has increased, but I'll get down to a couple of posts soon on the wonderful film The Lives of Others, and Paul Strohm's edited collection Middle English which I am greatly enjoying. Do read, in the meantime, Estelle Stubbs' very interesting article in the latest Review of English Studies on Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 (a ms of the Canterbury Tales). Super stuff. And tonight Guglielmo Gorni is coming to talk about Dante, which I'll hopefully blog.