"One way like a Gorgon, the other way’s a Mars"

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Valentina Rossi

The present essay aims at reconstructing the editorial history of Shakespeare’s _Antony and Cleopatra_, by comparing the original text printed in the so-called _First Folio_ (1623) with the later sixteenth- and eighteenth-century English editions, as well as with the Italian translations that were published from the 1900s on. By focussing on such a _corpus_, I will try to demonstrate how the evolution of both the theories and the techniques of translation, and the renewal of the publishing market have, in some cases, altered the original work, conditioning and orienting the reading.

Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo

In his great 1848 historical drama,Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:Auf halben Wegen und zu halber TatMit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.[That is the curse of our noble house:Striving hesitatingly on half waysto half action with half means.]True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it cannotbe said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.


1968 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-481
Author(s):  
Ernst Haenchen ◽  
Peter Weigandt

Shortly before May 1961 two Coptic parchment codices in an excellent state of preservation were discovered. One contains the Gospel of Matthew on 238 sheets, the size of which is 12.5 × 10.5 cm, and is now in Schweinfurt. The other contains Acts i. I–XV. 3 on 107 sheets of the same size and is now kept at the Pierpont Morgan Library. Both were written—by some professional copyists—in a thus far little known Middle Egyptian dialect. The text of Acts, unlike the text of Matthew, shows the characteristics of the so-called ‘western’ text type. Microfilms and photographs of the two codices have been kindly put at the disposal of Professor Kurt Aland for the ‘Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung’ of the University in Münster/W. It was within the framework of, and in connection with, this institution that the present essay originated.


PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Lorraine Piroux

This study focuses on the French Enlightenment's fascination with the materiality of non-Western and nonalphabetic scripts in the broader context of the history of the book. By examining definitions of writing in the Encyclopédie as well as Françoise de Graffigny's novelistic appropriation of the Inca quipu script in Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), I argue that there emerges from these texts a conception of the literary sign capable of challenging the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment printed book: dematerialized textuality and absolute legibility. Shaped by the scriptural imagination of eighteenth-century book culture, literature was able to acquire full aesthetic legitimacy only insofar as it was defined as the other of the purely semantic text. (LP)


2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mills Harper

Vona Groarke's 2008 version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's famous keen for her husband, Chaoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, features a poetic voice overtly inflected by Irish, English, and American diction and usage. Groarke's poem emphasizes its status as a textual event in more than one time frame as well as another spatial setting. The other time is multiple, including the many translations and discussions of the lament from its eighteenth-century composition until now. The place is also multiple: it might be Dublin or Manchester, Boston or London, or Wake Forest, North Carolina, where Groarke spends part of every year. This new poem stresses the mobility of Eileen's passionate lament: in Groarke's hands, it becomes a poem of the particular place that manages also, intriguingly, to highlight transnational cultural and linguistic implications. This version, another chapter in the history of a work that begins in the fluidity of oral composition and is repeatedly reworked in translations, emphasizes domestic space as generative as well as excessive, the site of desire. Groarke's poem locates itself both inside and, crucially, outside, a place to which one comes ‘carrying nothing’ in order to find, in a seeming paradox, nonrestrictive structures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Patat

In the last ten years, Noi credevamo (We Believed) (Martone 2010) has been the subject of a very careful criticism interested not only in its historical-ideological implications but also in its semiotic specificities. The purpose of this article is to summarize the cardinal points of these two positions and to add to them some critical observations that have not been noted so far. On the one hand, it is a matter of highlighting how, as a historical film, the work is connected with the history of emotions, a recent historiographical trend that aims to detect the narrative devices of ideological propaganda and the diffusion of feelings since the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, the article proposes a new interpretation of Mario Martone’s film, starting with the analysis of phenomena that are not only historical but also technical and structural.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 270-291
Author(s):  
Anne Regourd

Abstract A copy of the Kitāb Qiyām al-Ḫulafāʾ (Book on the reign of Rulers), identified in Ḏamār, Yemen, in 1993, is dated 8 Ǧumādā Awwal 1150 AH (= Sept. 1737 AD). Under the name of the famous Jewish astrologer MāšāʾAllāh, who practised at the early ʿAbbasid Court together with the Banū Nawbaḫt, this book displays the horoscopes of the Prophet Muhammad and of the caliphs up to Hārūn al-Rašīd. E.S. Kennedy & D. Pingree offered an English translation of the Kitāb Qiyām al-Ḫulafāʾ in The Astrological History of MāšāʾAllāh, Cambridge (MA), Harvard U. Press, 1971, Appendix 2, on the basis of “two late manuscripts”, one from Berlin, the other at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Since then, K. Yamamoto & Ch. Burnett have edited the text on the basis of three manuscripts, adding one from Bursa, and offered a revised English translation. Meanwhile, I came upon a second copy of the book in Ṣanʿāʾ. The copy preserved at the Waqf Library of Ḏamār belonged to the personal collection of a Yemeni cadi, who was a divinatory practitioner (munaǧǧim). At the intersection of textual studies and field work, this paper, following an introduction to the text, will concentrate on the circulation of the 1150/1737 manuscript and its potential uses.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew McCormack

ABSTRACTHeight is rarely taken seriously by historians. Demographic and archaeological studies tend to explore height as a symptom of health and nutrition, rather than in its own right, and cultural studies of the human body barely study it at all. Its absence from the history of gender is surprising, given that it has historically been discussed within a highly gendered moral language. This paper therefore explores height through the lens of masculinity and focuses on the eighteenth century, when height took on a peculiar cultural significance in Britain. On the one hand, height could be associated with social status, political power and ‘polite’ refinement. On the other, it could connote ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness and even castration. The article explores these themes through a case-study of John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, who was famously tall and was frequently caricatured as such. As well as exploring representations of the body, the paper also considers corporeal experiences and biometric realities of male height. It argues that histories of masculinity should study both representations of gender and their physical manifestations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Agnew

For Charles Burney, as for other Enlightenment scholars engaged in historicising music, the problem was not only how to reconstruct a history of something as ephemeral as music, but the more intractable one of cultural boundaries. Non-European music could be excluded from a general history on the grounds that it was so much noise and no music. The music of Egypt and classical antiquity, on the other hand, were likely ancestors of European music and clearly had to be accorded a place within the general history. But before that place could be determined, Burney and his contemporaries were faced with a stunning silence. What was Egyptian music? What were its instruments? What its sound? The paper examines the work of scholars like Burney and James Bruce and their efforts to reconstruct past music by traveling to exotic places. Travel and a form of historical reenactment emerge as central not only to eighteenth-century historical method, but central, too, to the reconstruction of past sonic worlds. This essay argues that this method remains available to contemporary scholars as well.


1991 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 53-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury

The literature on merchants and trade in the early modern Middle East is still rudimentary. Although the period witnessed basic changes in trade patterns of the region, there have been very few regional studies addressing the nature of trade and the various groups engaged in it, either from an internal or local perspective or from an international one (Masters, 1988; Raymond, 1984; Abdel-Nour, 1982). For much of the Arab world there is a gap in the literature between Goitein's and Ashtor's works on the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the eighteenth century on the other when northern European companies acquired a strong foothold in the area (Goitein, 1966, 1967; Ashtor, 1978). For Iraq there exist almost no general works on the early Ottoman period and the Iraqi archives remain inaccessible. Thus, any conclusions on trade and merchants in Iraq during this period are by necessity tentative and general. There are a number of issues that can be raised with respect to early modern Iraq, however, which are relevant to the history of early modern trade in general.


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