Recent Books
- Recent Books
This is a collection of selected essays by Ralph Hanna. Ten chapters are reprinted from elsewhere with some updated references, three others are new productions, and the final fifth of the book is a new extended study, a monograph in miniature, with its own bibliography. The first section of the book gathers writings on the polylingual state of medieval English books and texts, recording and studying the interpenetration of what modern scholarship might see as separate languages. Its chapters are: 'Literacy, Schooling, Universities', 'Vernacular Exegesis in Fourteenth-Century England?' (first published here), 'Lambeth Palace Library, MS 260 and the Problem of English Vernacularity', 'Editing "Middle English Lyrics": The Case of Candet nudatum pectus', and 'Performing Exegesis: Lyric and Sermon in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.26' (first published here). The essays of the second section all revolve around manuscripts which contain disjunctions and messy evi dence of production and use. Its chapters are: 'Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenth-Century Textual Transmission', 'Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93', 'A Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Miscellany Revisited', and 'Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c.66'. The third section contains pieces which bring local history to bear on specific book-historical case studies. Its chapters are: 'Yorkshire Writers', 'Some North Yorkshire Scribes and their Context', 'Dr Peter Partridge and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 98', and 'John of Wales and "Classicising Friars"' (first published here). The fourth section, the miniature monograph, is a literary-critical study of the figure of Patience in Piers Plowman, and a sustained argument for the value of direct and precise reading in approaching Langland's poetry. The book as a whole models, inculcates, and implicitly argues for a type of scholarship which attends to the very immediate details of specific situations in books and texts from the past.
Oxford Daniel Sawyer
GERMANY
This volume makes available papers given at a conference on writers and their libraries, held in Weimar in November 2016 under the joint auspices of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. The aim, broadly, was to investigate afresh questions such as what light writers' book collections in various periods might throw on their work and working practices as well as on networks linking authors. In other words, the intention was to go beyond the mere listing of books in writers' collections by examining them in the broader context of what they could tell us about their owners. Of particular interest are the essays on the libraries of the theologian, philosopher, and literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the von Arnim family, the writer Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), the classical scholar August Boeckh (1785–1867), and the poets Stefan George (1868–1933) and Karl Wolfskehl (1869–1948). In detail, the volume includes: Stefan Höppner, 'Bücher sammeln und schreiben'; Dirk Werle, 'Autorschaft und Bibliothek. Literaturtheoretische Perspektiven'; Sarah Ruppe, 'Eine Gelehrtenbibliothek am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Herders Bücherverzeichnis von 1776'; Yvonne Pietsch, 'Bettina von Arnim als Nutzerin der Familienbibliothek. Spurensuche einer weiblichen Lese- und Sammelleidenschaft'; Yong-Mi Rauch, 'Verborgene, verteilte und rekonstruierte Büchersammlungen. Gelehrtenbibliotheken an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin'; Philipp Messner, 'Eine offene Bibliothek. Der Nachlass des Marcel-Duchamp-Übersetzers Serge Stauffer an der Schweizerischen Nationalbibliothek'; Ulrike Gleixner, 'Erforschung frühneuzeitlicher Autorinnenbibliotheken'; Doreen Mildner, 'Autorschaft (an)erkennen. Maxie Wanders Guten Morgen, du Schöne, ihr Bücherverzeichnis und die hinterlassenen Bücher'; Clément Fradin, 'Mit dem Buch / gegen das Buch schreiben. Zu dem Gedicht Unverwahrt von Paul Celan und der Lektüre von Alexander Spoerls Buch Teste selbst'; Sascha Seiler, 'Zwischen Kafka und Kriegsspielen. Bibliothek als Ersatz für die verlorene Heimat bei Roberto Bolaño'; Alexander Nebrig, 'Der Katalog als literaturkritisches Werk...
