Project MUSE®: Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2006) through current issueLatest Articles: Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, InterpretationTWOProject MUSE®Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation1933-74181559-2936Latest articles in Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Archives, Law and Us (April 2025)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963468
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We in the Society for Textual Scholarship concern ourselves daily with both the minutiae and the large questions of our disciplines, from textual variants to transnational and historical trends that span centuries. Though we would greatly prefer to remain at work in the archives and at our desks, today conscience summons us to speak out against the illegitimate and profoundly damaging acts of a US administration that puts our work and the very principles that govern and drive it — the preservation and interpretation of the documentary record of the past and the safeguarding of this record for the future — in peril.On 7 February 2025, for the first time in the history of the National Archives, its director, Colleen
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallThe Archives, Law and Us (April 2025)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USThe Archives, Law and Us (April 2025)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®83792026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Towards a Taxonomy of Interpolation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963469
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Interpolation is everywhere in manuscript culture. It's hard to find a text copied without a word added here or a phrase inserted there. In more extreme cases, whole romances, lyrics, hagiographies, image programs, and letters exuberantly crop up in foreign textual fields. Some of these intruders are so well known that they have their own monikers: the "Great Interpolation" in the gospel of Luke or the "Helen episode" in the Aeneid. In the Western Middle Ages, the focus of this article, interpolations appear in works as generically diverse as histories, romances, fabliaux, lays, allegories, and the Bible, in Latin and in various vernaculars. Sheer frequency demonstrates that interpolation was a major component of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallTowards a Taxonomy of Interpolation2025-06-25text/htmlen-USTowards a Taxonomy of Interpolation2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®1116322026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25"Genesis is a great lie, but"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963470
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Narrative theory studies are permeating an ever-increasing number of scholarly disciplines, and genetic criticism is no exception. The analytical accounts of modern manuscripts1 are shifting towards examining how narratological devices have changed during the writing and revision stages.2 The tendency to incorporate knowledge of the tools by which literary fiction is constructed into genetic analysis can be rationalized in two ways. The first relates to a characteristic feature of genetic research: various literary disciplines (narratology being one of them) offer opportunities to interpret textual changes. Psychoanalysis, socio-criticism, and stylistics (to name but a few) are drawn upon to support the argument
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmall"Genesis is a great lie, but"2025-06-25text/htmlen-US"Genesis is a great lie, but"2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®1258372026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Clusters and Graphs: Revealing and Modeling Documentary Indefiniteness
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963471
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Scholarly editors often face these common challenges, of many, when we edit interrelated, multimedia literary works: how to order the materials and how to decide what medium should serve as a point of reference. When trying to address these challenges using either paper-based technology or technology that replicates the surface structures of paper-based technology like TEI, an editor might run into limitations.2 What if the order of the materials can't be resolved decisively, given the available evidence? The editor would be stuck choosing one order and pointing out possible others, making them known but perforce leaving them largely inaccessible. And what if each medium were equally important? Neither a book nor a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallClusters and Graphs: Revealing and Modeling Documentary Indefiniteness2025-06-25text/htmlen-USClusters and Graphs: Revealing and Modeling Documentary Indefiniteness2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®524652026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Transformissions in Trade Digitization and Shadow Libraries: A case study of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963472
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Trade book digitization lags behind other media industries. Music, television, and film had largely adapted to the material conditions of digital technology during the 2000s. The sharp shock of both Google Book's launch in 2004 and Amazon's release of the Kindle in 2007 demonstrated trade publishers' lack of preparedness for large-scale structural change.1 In the interim period mass digitization projects such as HathiTrust and the success of self-publishing platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing increased acceptance of digital publishing but the digitization of trade publications has stalled. For example, in my study of the availability of British books published in 1989 via the Kindle Store I found that only
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallTransformissions in Trade Digitization and Shadow Libraries: A case study of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire2025-06-25text/htmlen-USTransformissions in Trade Digitization and Shadow Libraries: A case study of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®1127212026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Prime Indagini Per La Nuova Edizione Critica Del Dittamondo Di Fazio Degli Uberti
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963473
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Il presente studio1 mira a tracciare le linee per la nuova edizione critica del Dittamondo di Fazio degli Uberti, un obiettivo che nasce e trova il suo fondamento nell'incontro di due punti di vista: riportare l'attenzione su un poema dal grande valore storico-culturale — che, non a torto, è stato definito "la gran pietra sepolcrale del medio evo erudito"2 — e, parallelamente, fornirne un testo critico filologicamente fondato, aggiornato rispetto all'ormai datata ultima edizione oggi disponibile comparsa nel 1952.3Negli ultimi anni, gli studiosi sono tornati a confrontarsi con la figura di Fazio degli Uberti, specialmente in relazione alle Rime, di cui è stata procurata, a cura di Cristiano Lorenzi, una recente
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallPrime Indagini Per La Nuova Edizione Critica Del Dittamondo Di Fazio Degli Uberti2025-06-25text/htmlen-USPrime Indagini Per La Nuova Edizione Critica Del Dittamondo Di Fazio Degli Uberti2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®1739122026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Reconstructing the Librairie du Louvre
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963474
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After Charles V, king of France, died in September 1380, his brother, Louis I, duke of Anjou, borrowed several books from the royal library. After two years and more trips, he removed a number of volumes, including many precious manuscripts. These rapacious acts would not have surprised Jean Froissart, who accused the duke of waiting at his brother's deathbed and once "he [Charles V] had closed his eyes, he [Louis] snatched all of the jewels of the king his brother" in order to fund his voyage to Italy.1 While Froissart believed that Louis I d'Anjou stole his dead brother's jewels and precious manuscripts to finance his military campaigns to claim Naples and Sicily, we have to take his story with a grain of salt.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallReconstructing the Librairie du Louvre2025-06-25text/htmlen-USReconstructing the Librairie du Louvre2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®1614672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Remediation Qualms & A Transmission History of Robert Frost's Public Talks
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963475
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What is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about Robert Frost today? Some might recall instances that exemplify his celebrity at public affairs, such as his role as a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1959 and his performance at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration ceremony in 1961. Some might have more personal memories of encountering his poems in their high school textbooks, while others might be tempted to brush him aside as a white, male, canonical author no longer in fashion. Regardless of how one feels about the poet, it is telling that, in 2020, the popular literary magazine McSweeney's opened its humorous article "Famous Lines of Poetry Revised for the Age of Coronavirus"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallRemediation Qualms & A Transmission History of Robert Frost's Public Talks2025-06-25text/htmlen-USRemediation Qualms & A Transmission History of Robert Frost's Public Talks2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®791042026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25A Problem of the Presses: Translating Ripley's Believe It or Not for Latin American Markets
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963476
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The Latin American book industry developed rapidly in the mid-twentieth century as a response to the economic, scholastic, and cultural growth of the region following independence. By the 1930s and 1940s, rising literacy rates and improvements in educational systems led to increased demand for print media, which resulted in a large expansion and refinement of the publishing industry. Within this period, we see an enormous uptick in the number of booksellers and publishers as well as readers of varying kinds coupled with a general push toward increased professionalization in virtually all of the industries surrounding book production.1 In the wake of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), there was also an influx of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallA Problem of the Presses: Translating Ripley's Believe It or Not for Latin American Markets2025-06-25text/htmlen-USA Problem of the Presses: Translating Ripley's Believe It or Not for Latin American Markets2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®711902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Appunti preliminari su un nuovo codice di Petrarca volgare: Parte I
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963477
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Dal momento dell'acquisizione, nel gennaio del 2024, da parte della Biblioteca della University of Pennsylvania, di un importante codice del 'Petrarca volgare' mai messo a disposizione del pubblico e ormai numerato MS Codex 2196, il manoscritto è subito diventato obiettivo di studi da parte dei petrarchisti coinvolti nella produzione del Petrarchive.1 I primi risultati dei nostri studi sono stati presentati e contestualizzati, in riferimento sia alla produzione manoscritta del Tre- e Quattrocento sia alla storia della miniatura e della decorazione e illustrazione del Petrarca, in occasione del simposio "Petrarca / is again / in sight", una serata di studi e presentazioni al Kislak Center for Special Collections
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallAppunti preliminari su un nuovo codice di Petrarca volgare: Parte I2025-06-25text/htmlen-USAppunti preliminari su un nuovo codice di Petrarca volgare: Parte I2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®1947662026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25'The Graz Mummy Book' (UBG Ms I 1946): Impressions from an Experts' Meeting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963478
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UBG Ms I 1946 is a papyrus fragment dating from around 260 BCE. It had been recycled as mummy cartonnage and was excavated in the early twentieth century from the archaeological site of El Hibeh in Egypt by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt on behalf of the London-based Egypt Exploration Fund.2 The University of Graz received the fragment as a part of the Fund´s distribution programme.3 In May 2023, during routine conservation work on papyrus fragments in the Graz collection, Theresa Zammit Lupi noticed that the fragment displays several features normally associated with a bifolio of a codex (a central fold, apparent margins, holes possibly associated with a binding) (see Fig. 1, below). These features led to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmall'The Graz Mummy Book' (UBG Ms I 1946): Impressions from an Experts' Meeting2025-06-25text/htmlen-US'The Graz Mummy Book' (UBG Ms I 1946): Impressions from an Experts' Meeting2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®489782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Limits of Scholarly Editing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963479
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This note continues the ideas expressed in "What is Scholarly Editing",1 where I reviewed the characteristics of scholarly editions that distinguish them from all other types of editions. I suggested there were only two rules of scholarly editing: The first requires the discovery, analysis, and presentation in some form of the documentary history of a verbal work from inception to latest edition; the second requires the reasoned production of a text based on an analysis of the work's textual history along with an explanation of editorial principles. These two rules can be adequately applied regardless of the goal, interests, or favored methodology of the editor. Having fulfilled the demands of the two rules, an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallLimits of Scholarly Editing2025-06-25text/htmlen-USLimits of Scholarly Editing2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®183452026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives by Tanya E. Clement (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963480
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First, let's get one thing straight: audio matters. This is the fundamental claim of Dissonant Records, Tanya E. Clement's important new book on sound recordings, orality, media technologies, and what is often referred to simply as the archive, a site still pulsing with the power relations that summoned its scraps into an archipelago of library file boxes. Dissonant Records asks us to take archival audio recordings seriously, even the unserious ones. It asks us to abandon the unexamined hierarchy of text up top — I'm talking paper and ink — and oral histories, readings, addresses, and just plain joshing around caught on tape down below. Clement isn't the first to make this case — indeed, there will come a day when
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallDissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives by Tanya E. Clement (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USDissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives by Tanya E. Clement (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®158352026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History by Laura E. Helton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963481
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The year 2025 marks the centennial of Alain Locke's editing of the special issue of Survey Graphic on "Harlem: Mecca of The New Negro" and the subsequent anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation. The twin publications would do much to crystallize what we've come to know as the Harlem Renaissance and are striking in their showcasing of what are still considered many of its most canonical works. One of those works, Arturo Schomburg's essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," accounts for its flourishing moment by recovering its long history, as conveyed in its opening declaration: "The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future" (699).Following Schomburg's edict, Laura E. Helton uncovers how an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallScattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History by Laura E. Helton (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USScattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History by Laura E. Helton (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®120432026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Reading with the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance by Sophie Coulombeau, and: Frances Burney's Evelina: The Book, Its History, and Its Paratext by Svetlana Kochkina (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963482
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Book history is an amorphous field that includes elements of textual studies, literary studies, bibliography, biography, reader response theory, cultural history, economics, material culture studies, etc. For that reason, various projects in book history are vastly different, and it is difficult to assess their quality. Fortuitously, two books have come out in the last year or so that offer book history interpretations around the same primary (literary) text, giving the reviewer the opportunity for some comparison. This text is Frances Burney's epistolary novel Evelina of 1778, which was so successful critically and commercially that it has been republished, translated, abridged, and adapted in over 100 popular and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallReading with the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance by Sophie Coulombeau, and: Frances Burney's Evelina: The Book, Its History, and Its Paratext by Svetlana Kochkina (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USReading with the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance by Sophie Coulombeau, and: Frances Burney's Evelina: The Book, Its History, and Its Paratext by Svetlana Kochkina (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®211782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations by Mark Letteney (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963483
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It is fair to say that, as the title of his book suggests, Mark Letteney is concerned here with both the Christianization of Europe in Late Antiquity as well as with identifying new methods in the production of knowledge. Letteney, though, is concerned with how these two concepts relate to each other causally. His larger claim is that changes in the production of knowledge, both theoretically and materially, are inherently linked to the growing dominance of Christianized intellectual traditions in the Roman Empire of the 4th and 5th centuries CE. This is not strictly a theological argument, though the origins of Christian argumentation lie in resolving theological disputes; rather, Letteney makes the compelling
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallThe Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations by Mark Letteney (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USThe Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations by Mark Letteney (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®138102026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Jewish Languages and Book Culture by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger and César Mechán-Hamann (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963484
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Jews throughout the diaspora have been compelled to adopt the languages of their hosts, while maintaining a foothold in their original language of Hebrew.1 Because, among other reasons, they were often restricted from fully integrating into the societies of their hosts before the emancipation,2 they developed dialects of these host languages. And the dialects came to differ from other dialects of the same languages to varying extents (Benor n.d.). These dialects are called Jewish languages.3In a set of expository essays, Jewish Languages and Book Culture celebrates this long history of linguistic creativity by showcasing several Jewish languages in all their variety and richness. Its authors comment on a slew of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallJewish Languages and Book Culture by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger and César Mechán-Hamann (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USJewish Languages and Book Culture by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger and César Mechán-Hamann (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®353232026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Oral Performance and the Veil of Text: Detexification, Paul's Letters, and the Test Case of Galatians 2–3 by Ben F. Van Veen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963485
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Distinguishing between the task of a historian of antiquity and that of a modern reader may at first glance appear quite simple. Yet an uncritical bifurcation overlooks some of the transactional complexities, similarities, and assumptions which govern each approach. Modern interpretative methods that determine notions of text, the concept of "meaning", etc., inform the work of historians, which in turn inform modern readers. When left under-scrutinized, these relationships can become muddled and lead to a host of problems when conceptualizing history and what it is that modern biblical scholars actually do. Such muddling is evident across a number of arenas within biblical studies, but, in particular, it can be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/392/image/coversmallOral Performance and the Veil of Text: Detexification, Paul's Letters, and the Test Case of Galatians 2–3 by Ben F. Van Veen (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USOral Performance and the Veil of Text: Detexification, Paul's Letters, and the Test Case of Galatians 2–3 by Ben F. Van Veen (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®185192026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25