Books, and What to Do with Them, #3

It’s been an age since I posted last. I’ve been very busy I have to say, working, teaching, writing and the like. More anon. But for now, some book craziness, just to reassure you that things are ticking along nicely.

Some time ago I posted about wanting the Habitat Louis de Bernières Book Caddy and despaired of ever finding one. This cyber lament appears to have been an excellent idea because I was contacted by someone who had one to sell and before putting it on eBay, he offered me first refusal. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. So here is a little picture of it, in red, up against my red couch! You’ll immediately see that it is a Dante Caddy, with the Ricciardi Opere minori, the Meridiani Commedia and the first volume of the Opere, the SISMEL Comedìa and the Rime on the upper shelf, while on the lower shelf is the Edizione nazionale, Commedia, Rime, Convivio, Monarchia, and then the 1932 Vita nuova. All on wheels. What’s not to love!

I’ve been making some exciting acquisitions lately, such as a lovely (unread and uncut) copy of Branca’s critical edition of the Decameron published by the Accademia della Crusca in 1976. It is quite hard to find, and, very appropriately, I found it the very day before I travelled to Berlin to see the autograph manuscript, MS Hamilton 90. Exciting and enjoyable and fascinating. I also acquired the Storia della lingua italiana Einaudi, which I’m very happy with and am using quite a bit lately. I ordered what I thought would be the three volumes of the Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione from BOL.it but they are having trouble finding the first and third volumes, alas. My GDLI is growing nicely, with recent acquisitions of the two supplements (2004 and 2009), the latter of which was bought for a mere £2.50 online and which I was almost incredulous to find at that price. I’ve also acquired Bruni’s L’italiano nelle regioni, vol. 1, Lingua nazionale e identità regionali and vol. 2, Testi e documenti, and am delighted with it. You’ll see there Serianni’s Grammatica italiana, all keyed to the GDLI.

I also made another acquisition (or rather a gift, actually) which is the Storia della letteratura italiana published by Salerno, in the volumes that appeared along with Il Sole 24 Ore. The pagination is the same and so it is possible to cite from them without having to check the Library copy, so they’re extremely useful and I’m delighted to have them. It’s in 24 volumes, which is a bit bulky, but it is very useful.

Raimondi

(c) Monica Silva

I do rather like this photo of Ezio Raimondi in his study. And I'm looking forward to reading his new: Le voci dei libri (Bologna: il Mulino, 2012).

Worse than Selfridges

Yet again, I find myself in the terrorising elbow-patched bruise-fest that is the Cambridge University Press booksale and let me tell you, it’s been worth every dig. I’ve stopped being polite at these things: I used to be ‘Oh I’m sorry, I couldn't just squeeze past you there?’, while they politely ignored me. Now I just shove past and thrust my hand towards shelves, and anyone in my way takes their chances. During a particularly brutal crush, one girl turned to me and said: ‘It’s worse than the Selfridges Sale’. I agreed, though I’ve never been to a Selfridges sale. It must be awful though. But I doubt you see a certain member of the royal family getting stuck in like the rest of them. So I feel this sale experience has a certain amount of class. The worst is when one of the assistants brings out fresh boxes and there is a flurry of activity where everyone present jostles for the best position to see them come out of the box. There’s an awkward moment where people realise that they cannot actually put their hands into the box while she’s trying to empty it, but you can see that everyone wants to do that. As soon as they are put on the shelf, hands begin to desperately reach for whatever is placed there. It’s all wonderfully primitive and surely mitigates all the civilising influence of books. Imaging acting like a vulture over the The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music, and yet, that is just what it’s like.

Despite all this, dear readers, I’ve managed a lovely little haul and am delighted with myself. I now look a bit like Karl standing on my coffee table and looking around, ever so slightly mad. Sadly I don't have quite the space he does for books. It’ll run for another couple of weeks and I’ll probably only get a few more visits. Unless I see Cornish’s wonderful new book on volgarizzamenti, then I think I've done for this year. Now joining the crazy world of me are:

Kowaleski & Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England; Farrell & Puppa (eds), A History of Italian Theatre; G.H. & E.R. Crichton, Nicola Pisano and the Revival of Sculpture in Italy [1938]; D. M. Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti Duke of Milan (1351-1402): A Study in the Political Career of an Italian Despot [1941]; C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper [1980]; J. M. Hastings, St Stephen’s Church: An Illustrated Study of the Origins of ‘Perpendicular’ Architecture in England [1955]; Maiden, Smith & Ledgeway (eds); The Cambridge History of The Romance Languages, vol. 1; Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature; Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare; Keith, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic; Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise?; Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative; Kuehn, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence; Ricketts, Visualizing Boccaccio: Studies on Illustrations of The Decameron, from Giotto to Pasolini; Payne, The Architectural Treatse in the Italian Renaissance; Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century; Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism; Matthews (ed), The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge; Najemy (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli; Ferris (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin; Everist (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music; McAuliffe (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an; Brand, Italy and the English Romantics; Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil; Martindale (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil; Gowing, Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture; Dover (ed), Plato: Symposium; Kenney (ed), Ovid: Heroides XVI-XXI; Hinds, Allusion and Intertext; Moule, An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek; Logan (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More; Tacconi, Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore; Kelley, Reinventing Allegory; Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing.

Not in the CUP sale, but picked up in the Heffers sale were: Wolfthal, In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Art (Yale, 2010) and Andrew Cole & D. Vance Smith (eds), The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (Duke, 2010); while in Oxfam I found a lovely copy of D.F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts in the lovely Panizzi series published by the BL in 1986. I’ve also been very fortunate in finding a copy of Gerhard Rohlfs, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vols (Einaudi, 1966-1969), which I’m really delighted to have.

Welcome, my pretties, one and all!

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:

British Library, Royal Manuscripts Exhibition

I have not yet managed to get to this marvellous and lavish exhibition but draw my reader’s attention to the review by my learned friend and colleague David Rundle, over on Bonae litterae.

The image is via the British Library's excellent Facebook page, which has several albums of photos of manuscripts in the exhibition.

‘A Letter to King Richard II’

This unusual manuscript is the fruit of over a decade of diplomatic rapprochement between England and France. The Letter to King Richard was written in support of Charlves VI of France's policy of reconciliation with England. The image here illustrates this union, with the crowns of France and England joined through the peace of Christ, represented by the Crown of Thorns, between them.

Philippe de Mézières, Epistre au Roi Richart.

Paris, 1395.

Presented to Richard II

Royal 20 B. vi, f. 1v

© The British Library Board

Unpacking My Library

A couple of years ago Jo Steffens brought out a book called Unpacking my Library: Architects and Their Books (Yale University Press, 2009), a wonderfully snoopy interesting look at the libraries of architects. Now, the very fine scholar Leah Price has brought out, in the same series, a book called Unpacking my Library: Writers and Their Books (Yale University Press, 2011). I want it!

Recently the FT did a piece on it, which you can read here.


This is library of James Wood and Claire Messud, in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Weekend, dir. Andrew Haigh (2011)

Weekend, written, edited and directed by Andrew Haigh, opened in the UK on Nov. 3. It tells the story of Russell (Tom Cullen), a nice gay guy, pretty sorted, who has an ordinary life and good friends, who are mostly straight. After visiting his best friend Jamie, along with his wife and child and some of their friends, he makes excuses and goes home. Instead he goes to a nightclub where he (eventually) picks up Glen. The story turns on their weekend together. Little ‘happens’, in the sense that they spend time taking drugs, having sex, and especially, talking. Talking about nothing, talking about identity, about what each wants from life, what each gets from it. The film is about intimacy, about love, about intersubjectivity. It is nothing short of a stunning achievement and Tom Cullen’s performance is one of the best I have ever seen on screen. It is shot beautifully in Nottingham, with Russell’s 14th-floor flat observed with the power of someone who has lived there for a lifetime. The most powerful thing about this film is its ordinariness, its lack of veneer, or polish. It depends for its success on a magnificently moving script and a remarkable chemistry between both main actors (Tom Cullen and Chris New).

On the weekend of the ridiculously over-hyped opening of the Leonardo exhibition, I felt as if I had just discovered another masterpiece. High Art is alive and well.

Images

I'm really annoyed that my photos have been deleted by Google+, so this is kind of an act of rebellion. A statement. I like this image very much.

Google+ just deleted my photos on Blogger

I'm so upset about this. It seems that Google+ and Blogger host photos in the same place. When I opened my Google+ account, it gave me one of those automatic messages about importing photos from Blogger, which, unthinkingly, I did. I then thought, again unthinkingly, that nobody really needed to see such random pictures on my Google+ account and deleted the album. But Google+ failed to tell me that it would delete all my blogger photos...permanently.

They're gone. All gone.

I may just close this blog down. I may just close my stupid Google+ account down too.

Hour by Hour, grain by grain

One of my favourite words in Italian is clessidra, meaning hourglass, from the Greek klepsydra, meaning water clock.

Well, this is now my favourite clessidra: Marc Newson’s Ikepod Hourglass. It is a 60-minute counter, measuring 265 x 300 x 3 mm, and the ‘sand’ is carbon or nickel plated nanoballs.






For some other photos and a review see here. While my heart says that I have to have one, my head (and other half) says, Lear-like: never, never, never, never, never.

K P Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (OUP, 2011)

K P Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Texuality, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) has just been published.

Below is from the OUP website:

• Examines Chaucer and his Italian sources with a strong emphasis on Italian manuscripts

• Seeks to understand Chaucer’s Italian sources as they were read by Chaucer himself, within a manuscript context that accommodates many layers of meaning on the page

• An appendix of the Mannelli glosses published in one place for the first time

When Chaucer came into contact with Italian literary culture in the second half of the fourteenth century he was engaging with a productive, lively and highly varied tradition. Chaucer and Italian Textuality provides a new perspective on Chaucer and Italy by highlighting the materiality of his sources, reconstructing his textual, codicological horizon of expectation. It provides new ways of thinking about Chaucer’s access to, and use of, these Italian sources, stimulating, in turn, new ways of reading his work. Manuscripts of the major works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch circulated in a variety of formats, and often the margins of their texts were loci for extensive commentary and glossing. These traditions of glossing and commentary represent one of the most striking features of fourteenth-century Italian literary culture. These authors were in turn deeply indebted to figures like Ovid and Statius, who were themselves heavily glossed and commented upon. The margins provided a space for a wide variety of responses to be inscribed on the page. This is eloquently demonstrated in the example of Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli’s glosses in Decameron, copied by him in 1384. This material dimension of Chaucer's sources has not received sufficient attention; this book aims to address just such a material textuality. This attention to the materiality of Chaucer's sources is further explored and developed by reading the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale through their early fourteenth-century manuscripts, taking account not just of the text but also of the numerous marginal glosses. Within this context, then, the question of Chaucer's authorship of some of these glosses is considered.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Chaucer and Ovid: The Latin and Vernacular Heroides
2: Boccaccio as Glossator
3: Reading Boccaccio in the Fourteenth Century
4: Chaucer as Glossator?
Conclusion
Appendix One
Appendix Two
Bibliography

Readership: Students and scholars of medieval literature


K. P. Clarke, Sykes Research Fellow in Italian Studies, Pembroke College, Cambridge

Kenneth Clarke studied Italian and History of Art at Trinity College, Dublin and the Alma Mater Studiorum, at Bologna, and went on to do his doctorate in medieval English at University College, Oxford. He is the Sykes Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he currently teaches medieval Italian and English literature.

Bernard O’Donoghue, Farmers Cross (Faber, 2011)

Flying over Farmers Cross, Cork; Photo credit: © Donncha O Caoimh, via here

Bernard O’Donoghue (born in Cullen, Co. Cork, 1945) has just published his fifth collection of poetry Farmers Cross (sixth if you count his Selected Poems by Faber in 2008) and it is a work of beauty, of sadness, of delicate memories polished by continual, countless recollection. Much of O’Donoghue’s poetic voice is poised between the Ireland of his childhood and the England of the greater part of his life, his education and his career as a fellow in Oxford, where he teaches medieval literature as well as twentieth-century poetry. This inbetweenness makes for a powerfully observed poetic of belonging and non-belonging, of the outsider and the local, with an eye for detail that no local could see but to which no outsider would have access.

The collection’s title poem, ‘Farmers Cross’, explores events immediately following the death of his father and his mother’s decision to return to England. A cheque signed on the day he died, paying for his subscription to the Irish Farmers Journal, was returned marked ‘Not honoured: signatory deceased’. While his mother ‘took to farming like a native’, his father ‘hated farming: every uphill step | on the black hill where he’d been born and bred.’ Farming for him was a cross, unwillingly inherited. She was good at it, despite her city upbringing (‘as if she’d not grown up by city light’), and has a strong sense of the honour, dignity, and sacrifice of the work. Its rewards, for her, are reaped in the next life: ‘she always said the front row in Heaven | would be filled exclusively by farmers’. But no matter how good she was at farming, no matter how much of a native she resembled, she had married into it, and when her husband died, her connection with the farm was lost. The townland of Farmers Cross is where the airport in Cork was built, on a hill and prone to fog. It is from here that his mother leaves for good, as ‘the lights | fought a losing battle with the fog’. Its atavic identity as a farm persists over its subsequent use as an airport: ‘they’d | always said it was a hard farm to work’. Farmers Cross, then, becomes the point of departure as well as the point of return for the poet, both in his imaginative and real geography.

The ground worked in Farmers Cross is not just that in the Cork of O’Donoghue’s childhood but that which he came to work himself over the years: the poetry of the middle ages. There is a translation of Piers Plowman (B Prologue 1—37), a man who knew the land, a poem all about getting into that front row in Heaven. There is a translation of Dante’s Purgatorio 2. 61—81, Virgil and Casella, which opens: ‘«Voi credete | forse che siamo esperti d’esto loco; | ma noi siam peregrin come voi siete’, rendered as: ‘I think you must believe | that we know all about arrangements here; but we are outsiders, just the same as you are.’ That esperti d’esto loco (echoing of course Inferno 26. 98 and the ‘expertise’ of another great traveller, Ulysses) becomes a very vernacular ‘arrangements’, while peregrin moves from ‘pilgrim’ and ‘stranger’ to the somewhat starker ‘outsider’, echoing a theme very much being explored in Farmers Cross. The theme of the traveller, the outsider, is not explored via the figure of (Dante’s) Ulysses but instead an older, and altogether stranger figure in the Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’. O’Donoghue effortlessly allows the poem’s universality to compellingly apply itself to the present (pp. 28—9):

Cities lie in ruins; populations lie dead,
their bodies heaped by the crumbling walls.
Some die in battle, but more are victims
of assaults from the skies. Some are left
for scavengers to come under cover of night
to steal what they can. Few have the honour
of dignified burial by friend or relation.

Compare the Old English:


Wōriað þā wīnsalo,———walden licgað
drēame bidrorene,———duguþ eal gecrong,
wlonc bī wealle.———Sume wīg fornōm,
ferede in forðwege,———sumne fugel oþbær
ofer hēanne holm,———sumne se hāra wulf
dēaðe gedǣlde,———sumne drēorighlēor
in eorðscræfe———eorl gehȳdde.

Bruce Mitchell, the great Old English scholar, described the Wanderer’s philosophizing as ‘strong in feeling, high in dignity, and wisely reflective’: I can think of no better description of Bernard O’Donoghue’s Farmers Cross.

The Survival of Letters: Faddan More Psalter on Display

The Faddan More Psalter—discovered in a bog in Co. Tipperary in July 2006—after extensive technical examination and restoration, has gone on display in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. Its discovery was the subject of an Archaeology Ireland special, as well as a wonderful documentary on RTE television. Two leaves have now gone on display, as well as the book’s cover—itself a remarkable survival—whose technical examination has revealed the presence of papyrus. The precise meaning of such an extraordinary discovery is still being teased out and will be for some time to come.

They have included a short film on the discovery and highlights of its conservation, and the displays carry some material on the huge task of preserving what remains and understanding it. For example, due to some of the inks used, the parchment has disappeared while the letters themselves have survived, like a kind of 8th-century insular alphabet soup.

The National Museum have released two publications to mark this exhibition; The Faddan More Psalter: Discovery, Conservation and Investigation and Reading the Faddan More Psalter: An Introduction while the documentary is also available for purchase.

If you are in Dublin this summer, this is a must see, the kind of survival no one dared hope for nor thought they would ever see in their lifetime.

Máire Flavin, mezzo-soprano

Listen to Máire Flavin, an Irish mezzo-soprano, at the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition 2011. Beautiful voice and a great performance. She eats up the stage and has a wonderful presence. A star in the making, clearly.

She sings Clara Schumann’s Lorelai; Henri Duparc, Chanson triste; Manuel Rosenthal, La souris d’Angleterre; and Philip Martin’s setting of The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Books, and What to Do with Them, #2

This is the Casa Kike, in Costa Rica, designed by architect Gianni Botsford for his father and his 16,000 books. It won the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize in 2008, and the RIBA International Award Winner 2008. I think you’ll agree that it is a very striking house. I am in love with how the books have been included as co-occupant of the house, almost built around them.

This (and photos and drawings) from Botsford’s website:

By coupling indigenous techniques and materials with modern design technologies and aesthetics GBA has created this intimate double pavilion for a writer in Costa Rica.

A main studio space, with library, writing desk and grand piano, is the writer’s daytime space. The pavilion’s wooden structure, sourced from local timber, sits on a simple foundation of wooden stilts on small concrete pad foundations. Roof beams of up to 10 m long and 355 mm deep allow for an interior with no vertical columns. The mono-pitched roof elevates towards the sea shore, while the interior is through ventilated via a completely louvred glazed end façade.

Set at a short distance along a raised walkway, a second smaller pavilion mirrors the first. This contains sleeping quarters and a bathroom. Externally, the pavilions are clad in corrugated steel sheeting, another locally used construction material. The overall effect is that of a building which blends with its surroundings, both visually and environmentally.

Photographs © Christian Richters

Books, and What to Do with Them

I am a simple man with simple taste. The worst part of my taste is that it is so good, resulting in me constantly having to do without what those tastes demand. Some years ago I was at a meeting with a medievalist in Oxford. While in her rooms I noticed a rather nice book caddy in perspex set on castors. She told me that she had bought it in Habitat and set me off on a quête worthy of a medieval knight. Now mostly when I visit scholars in their place of work I’m more distracted by what is on the shelves rather than the shelves themselves. I don’t often suffer from shelf envy; that happens much more often with books. But this was a bit different. It was one of a series of limited edition pieces that Habitat, in 2004, had commissioned from various celebs to celebrate 40 years in business. The book caddy was designed by Louis de Bernières, intended to hold those books used very often, like a thesaurus or a dictionary, and to save having to get up from one’s desk. From time to time (which means, eh...daily) I look on Ebay and generally online to see if one might appear for sale and it never does. It would seem that when they said limited edition, they meant it. As Habitat goes into administration, and its future is uncertain, my mind turns once again to this lovely book caddy and I wonder will one ever appear. I know exactly what I would put on these shelves too, my copy of the Commedia (Petrocchi, Repr. corr. edn. 1994 [4 vols]), the Rime (De Robertis, 2002 [5 vols]), the Convivio (Brambilla Ageno, 1995 [3 vols]) and the Monarchia (Shaw, 2009 [1 vol]) in the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante (Firenze: Le Lettere), and my Enciclopedia Dantesca (ed. Umberto Bosco, 1970–8 [6 vols]).

I did spot one in Lady Antonia Fraser’s study, though not while we were having tea and talking about literature and scented candles. Rather, it was while I was having tea with myself and reading the Guardian’s wonderful online (though now sadly discontinued) Writer’s Rooms series, photographed by Eamonn McCabe.

There must be something wrong with me that while I admire the lovely bookcases, the gorgeous desk and elegant room, I cannot really keep my eyes of that little book caddy.

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.

Cavalcanti, Rime, ed. De Robertis, finally

Those attentive to my 'Books I Dream of Owning' will note that I have managed to find a copy of Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, con le rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti, ed. Domenico De Robertis, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati, 10 (Torino: Einaudi, 1986). This took quite a bit of looking and in the end I picked up a copy for a mere €13 from the rather good website selling secondhand books: www.libri-usati.com and well worth a visit. A bit of underlining but all in pencil and easy to remove.

I know that the standard edition is now Rime, ed. by Letterio Cassata, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 3 (Anzio: De Rubeis, 1993)—which I have—but I really like De Robertis’ commentary.

Such is my delight, I reproduce a sonnet below:


Chi è questa che vèn, ch’ogn’om la mira,
che fa tremar di chiaritate l'âre
e mena seco Amor, sì che parlare
null’omo pote, ma ciascun sospira?

O Deo, che sembra quando li occhi gira!
dical’ Amor, ch’i’ nol savria contare:
cotanto d’umiltà donna mi pare,
ch’ogn’altra ver’ di lei i’ la chiam’ira.

Non si poria contar la sua piagenza,
ch’a le’ s’inchin’ ogni gentil vertute,
e la beltate per sua dea la mostra.

Non fu sì alta già la mente nostra
e non si pose ’n noi tanta salute,
che propiamente n’aviàn canoscenza.

(Rime IV, ed. De Robertis, pp. 16–19)

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.

Jane Draycott, Pearl (Carcanet, 2011)

British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x., art. 3, f. 42r.

The four poems in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x. art. 3 are known to students of medieval literature with the modern titles Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the poet often referred to as the ‘Pearl Poet’ or the ‘Gawain Poet’. Much has been written about the four poems and about the manuscript, about the fascinating set of images contained therein, with much of the attention directed at the remarkable Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The beautiful poem that opens the manuscript, however, has certainly been less studied. It has also been less translated: Marie Borroff published one in 1977, Vantuono in 1983 and Casey Finch produced one in 1993. These translations are for the most part by professional academics and medievalists, while one can point to translations of Gawain by contemporary poets, such as Armitage or Merwin. This situation has now happily changed with the wonderful translation by the English poet Jane Draycott. Introduced by the medievalist and poet Bernard O’Donoghue, the short poem is rendered with a great simplicity and power. It is a dream vision in which the narrator laments the loss of his pearl, often thought to be his little daughter. During his vision he sees her across a stream and begins a dialogue with her. She explains what he sees and comforts him, clarifying what he cannot understand. The poem’s masterful control is most evident in having the narrator continue to not understand, and when he attempts to cross the stream to be with his pearl, he wakes up. Bereft. The poem is technically extraordinary: written in an alliterative meter, with 101 stanzas of 12-lines, divided into five-stanza sections. It turns on a series of what are called concatenating rhymes, where the rhyme-word ending one section will begin the next section, and where the word’s sense is stretched and elongated with dazzling dexterity.

The first stanza (ll. 1-12; f. 39r in the manuscript) amply demonstrates Jane Draycott’s skill:

Perle plesaunte, to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere:
Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,
Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.
So rounde, so reken in vche araye,
So smal, so smoþe her sydez were;
Queresoeuer I jugged gemmez gaye
I sette hyr sengeley in synglure.
Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere;
Þurȝ gresse to grounde hit fro me yot.
I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere
Of þat pryuy perle withouten spot.

One thing I know for certain: that she
was peerless, pearl who would have added
light to any prince’s life
however bright with gold. None
could touch the way she shone
in any light, so smooth, so small –
she was a jewel above all others.
So pity me the day I lost her
in this garden where she fell
beneath the grass into the earth.
I stand bereft, struck to the heart
with love and loss. My spotless pearl.

Look at the boldness of that opening line, the sense of certainty and incomprehension, the way she captures the emphasis of this first stanza, its almost hypnotic beat of statement after statement. I love the way it seems to rise and fall. I think that that ‘I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere’ translated as ‘I stand bereft, struck to the heart | with love and loss’ is just magnificent, where the enjambment renders the line more powerful (as O’Donoghue rightly sees in his introduction, p. 8). Great poems can make for great translations, other great poems really. Read this great translation because it is also a great poem.

Modern editions of the poem Pearl are available. The best is that of E. V. Gordon for Clarendon Press in 1953, but see too that in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, 5th ed., published with an English translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), the readily accessible Everyman edition, prepared by J. J. Anderson (London: J. M. Dent, 1996) and the rather more difficult to find The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus Edition, ed. William Vantuono, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1984), the first volume of which has Pearl. On the image above see Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390-1490, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), Cat. 12 (Vol. 2, pp. 66-68), and see also A.S.G. Edwards in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997). A digital facsimile (badly needed) is in preparation, with details available here.