Before the invention of printing, all forms of writing were done by hand. For a literary text to circulate among readers, and to be transmitted from one period in time to another, it had to be copied by scribes. As a result, two copies of an ancient book were different from one another, and each individual book or manuscript has its own history. The oldest of these books, those that are the closest to the time in which the texts were composed, are few, usually damaged, and have been often neglected in the scholarship. Ancient Latin Poetry Books presents a detailed study of the oldest manuscripts still extant that contain texts by Latin poets, such as Virgil, Terence, and Ovid. Analyzing their physical characteristics, their script, and the historical contexts in which they were produced and used, this volume shows how manuscripts can help us gain a better understanding of the history of texts, as well as of reading habits over the centuries. Since the manuscripts originated in various places of the Latin-speaking world, Ancient Latin Poetry Books investigates the readership and reception of Latin poetry in many different contexts, such schools in the Egyptian desert, aristocratic circles in southern Italy, and the Christian élite in late antique Rome. The research also contributes to our knowledge about the use of writing and the importance of the written text in antiquity. This is an innovative approach to the study of ancient literature, one that takes the materiality of texts into consideration.
From the marginalia of their readers to the social and cultural means of their production, books bear the imprint of our humanity. Embodying the marks, traces, and scars of colonial survival, Indigenous books are contested spaces. A constellation of nontextual components surrounded Native American–authored publications of the long nineteenth century, shaping how these books were read and understood—including illustrations, typefaces, explanatory prefaces, appendices, copyright statements, author portraits, and more.
Centering Indigenous writers, Book Anatomy explores works from John Rollin Ridge, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Pretty Shield, and D’Arcy McNickle published between 1854 and 1936. In examining critical moments of junction between Indigenous books and a mainstream literary marketplace, Amy Gore argues that the reprints, editions, and paratextual elements of Indigenous books matter: they embody a frontline of colonization in which Native authors battle the public perception and reception of Indigenous books, negotiate representations of Indigenous bodies, and fight for authority and ownership over their literary work.
Provocative yet sober, Digital Critical Editions examines how transitioning from print to a digital milieu deeply affects how scholars deal with the work of editing critical texts. On one hand, forces like changing technology and evolving reader expectations lead to the development of specific editorial products, while on the other hand, they threaten traditional forms of knowledge and methods of textual scholarship.
Using the experiences of philologists, text critics, text encoders, scientific editors, and media analysts, Digital Critical Editions ranges from philology in ancient Alexandria to the vision of user-supported online critical editing, from peer-directed texts distributed to a few to community-edited products shaped by the many. The authors discuss the production and accessibility of documents, the emergence of tools used in scholarly work, new editing regimes, and how the readers' expectations evolve as they navigate digital texts. The goal: exploring questions such as, What kind of text is produced? Why is it produced in this particular way?
Digital Critical Editions provides digital editors, researchers, readers, and technological actors with insights for addressing disruptions that arise from the clash of traditional and digital cultures, while also offering a practical roadmap for processing traditional texts and collections with today's state-of-the-art editing and research techniques thus addressing readers' new emerging reading habits.
Since the days of the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous populations of Andean Bolivia have struggled to preserve their textile-based writings. This struggle continues today, both in schools and within the larger culture. The Metamorphosis of Heads explores the history and cultural significance of Andean textile writings--weavings and kipus (knotted cords), and their extreme contrasts in form and production from European alphabet-based texts. Denise Arnold examines the subjugation of native texts in favor of European ones through the imposition of homogenized curricula by the Educational Reform Law. As Arnold reveals, this struggle over language and education directly correlates to long-standing conflicts for land ownership and power in the region, since the majority of the more affluent urban population is Spanish speaking, while indigenous languages are spoken primarily among the rural poor. <I>The Metamorphosis of Heads</I> acknowledges the vital importance of contemporary efforts to maintain Andean history and cultural heritage in schools, and shows how indigenous Andean populations have incorporated elements of Western textual practices into their own textual activities.
Based on extensive fieldwork over two decades, and historical, anthropological, and ethnographic research, Denise Arnold assembles an original and richly diverse interdisciplinary study. The textual theory she proposes has wider ramifications for studies of Latin America in general, while recognizing the specifically regional practices of indigenous struggles in the face of nation building and economic globalization.
King Lear exists in two different texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Because each supplies passages missing in the other, for over 200 years editors combined the two to form a single text, the basis for all modern productions. Then in the 1980s a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represent different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare revised his play in light of theatrical performance. The two-text theory has since hardened into orthodoxy. Now for the first time in a book-length argument, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars challenges the two-text theory. At stake is the way Shakespeare’s greatest play is read and performed.
Sir Brian Vickers demonstrates that the cuts in the Quarto were in fact carried out by the printer because he had underestimated the amount of paper he would need. Paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period, and printers counted the number of lines or words in a manuscript before ordering their supply. As for the Folio, whereas the revisionists claim that Shakespeare cut the text in order to alter the balance between characters, Vickers sees no evidence of his agency. These cuts were likely made by the theater company to speed up the action. Vickers includes responses to the revisionist theory made by leading literary scholars, who show that the Folio cuts damage the play’s moral and emotional structure and are impracticable on the stage.
This collection of original essays examines how the idea of an authentic Chaucerian text was reimagined and reproduced by medieval and early modern scribes and editors to satisfy and shape the cultural expectations of their audiences. These “reproductions” of Chaucer’s works epitomize the tension between developing notions of what makes a text “authentic” and the cultural pressures that led scribes and editors to construct their own versions of Chaucer and his works.
The book begins by exploring medieval and early modern notions of origins and how they at once illuminate and problematize the recovery of Chaucerian texts. Essays in the second section examine how individual scribes and reading communities reshaped Chaucer’s texts. Finally, we see how the printing press—bringing with it a renewed concern about the idea of authenticity—led both to an increase in the number of works attributed to Chaucer and to increasing anxiety about their authenticity.
The focus on the ways in which Chaucer was rewritten in different cultural and aesthetic contexts will enable medieval and early modern critics to situate Chaucer more fully within his cultural milieu, while illuminating the ways in which his reputation as both a “laureate poet” and a “lewed compilator” affected rewritings of his works. Rewriting Chaucer, then, will appeal both to scholars interested in the critical juncture between manuscript and print culture and to those interested in how culture affects the reproduction of authoritative texts.
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