Plainchant in nineteenth-century England: a review of some major publications of the period

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Bennett Zon

The history of plainchant in the nineteenth century is dominated by the various attempts at scholarly restoration both in Britain and abroad. Up to the middle part of the century these efforts were concentrated in France, although demands for revival were being voiced in Italy by Pietro Alfieri, and in Germany by Franz Xaver Witt, amongst others. The first scholarly attempt at the restoration of plainchant was made in 1846 as a result of Jean-Louis-Félix Danjou's discovery of the eleventh-century tonary of St Bénigne de Dijon. Like the Rosetta stone, it enabled scholars to decipher the meaning of symbols which had previously eluded them. In this case the manuscript is notated with both neumes and alphabetic script, so that for the first time the melodic ductus of ancient neumes could be interpreted with certainty. This manuscript became the source for the Rheims-Cambrai Graduale Romanum complectens missas, printed in Paris in 1851, later to be published under the auspices of Cardinal Sterckx of Mechelen and edited by Duval and Bogaerts. Despite the quality of the Mechlin Graduale, it did not fail to cause immense controversy. Louis Vitet, for example, ‘was astonished that a group of four notes in the Paris gradual of 1826 should be replaced in the Rheims-Cambrai edition with a melisma of 48 notes’. Other efforts at revival were equally plagued by controversy. Lambillotte's facsimile edition of St Gall 359, published, in 1851, proved to be ‘completely unreliable’, and the 1857 Parisian Graduale romanum upon which it is based ‘contained truncated melodies’.

1994 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 256-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Norton

St Mary's Abbey, York was one of the richest Benedictine monasteries in the country and its buildings reflected its wealth and status. The quality of its architectural remains is of the highest order, and the collection of medieval sculpture from the site is outstanding. Indeed, the set of life-size column-figures brought to light in 1829 must count as one of the most exciting discoveries ever made in the field of the history of sculpture in this country. Nor is the later history of the site any less interesting. At the Dissolution it became the seat of the King's Council in the North and acquired the name of King's Manor, which part of the complex retains to this day. The principal monastic buildings came down within a few years, and their demolition can be followed in considerable detail, as we shall see; but the centuries of Crown ownership prevented the division of the property until the nineteenth century, and it remains one of the best-preserved urban (albeit extra-mural) monastic precincts in Britain.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


Author(s):  
Michael D. Gordin

Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1907) is a name we recognize, but perhaps only as the creator of the periodic table of elements. Generally, little else has been known about him. This book is an authoritative biography of Mendeleev that draws a multifaceted portrait of his life for the first time. As the book reveals, Mendeleev was not only a luminary in the history of science, he was also an astonishingly wide-ranging political and cultural figure. From his attack on Spiritualism to his failed voyage to the Arctic and his near-mythical hot-air balloon trip, this is the story of an extraordinary maverick. The ideals that shaped his work outside science also led Mendeleev to order the elements and, eventually, to engineer one of the most fascinating scientific developments of the nineteenth century. This book is a classic work that tells the story of one of the world's most important minds.


Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.


Author(s):  
Jan Moje

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.


1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Hussey

John Mauropous, an eleventh-century Metropolitan of Euchaïta, has long been commemorated in the service books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion for the Office of Orthros on 30th January, the day dedicated to the Three Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, tells how the festival was instituted by Mauropous and describes him as ‘the well-known John, a man of great repute and well-versed in the learning of the Hellenes, as his writings show, and moreover one who has attained to the highest virtue’. In western Europe something was known of him certainly as early as the end of the sixteenth century; his iambic poems were published for the first time by an Englishman in 1610, and his ‘Vita S. Dorothei’ in the Acta Sanctorum in 1695. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars were really able to form some idea of the character and achievement of this Metropolitan of Euchaïta. Particularly important were two publications: Sathas' edition in 1876 of Michael Psellus' oration on John, and Paul de Lagarde's edition in 1882 of some of John's own writings. This last contained not only the works already printed, but a number of hitherto unpublished sermons and letters, together with the constitution of the Faculty of Law in the University of Constantinople, and a short introduction containing part of an etymological poem. But there remained, and still remains, one significant omission: John's canons have been almost consistently neglected.


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Barceló ◽  
Anja Heidenreich

This article presents a study of the expansion of Islamic lusterware across the Mediterranean before its production was fully consolidated in al-Andalus between the end of the twelfth and the thirteenth century. A number of examples are presented here that indicate a flourishing trade around the Mediterranean as early as the tenth century, including pottery as well as other luxury goods. A survey of lusterware found on the Iberian Peninsula has yielded relevant information on the complex technical history of local luster production. We present seven Andalusi luster fragments from the eleventh century that feature decoration on both sides, with one piece bearing epigraphic inscriptions naming two of the Abbadid rulers of Seville, al-Muʿtaḍid and al-Muʿtamid. Discovered in Spain (Seville and Palma del Rio) and Portugal (Silves and Coimbra), these fragments indicate the existence of a ceramic production center in Seville and another at the Abbadid palace during the second half of the eleventh century. These pieces indicate the direct and marked influence that the various centers of luxury luster production in the Islamic East and West exerted on one another, a phenomenon not uncommon in the history of Islamic pottery.



1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 135-152
Author(s):  
Ellen Kappy Suckiel

Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century, is widely regarded as one of the greatest sages in the history of American thought. Among educated American citizenry, Emerson is probably the most commonly read indigenous philosopher—and for good reason. Emerson presents a vision of human beings and their place in the universe which gives meaning and stature to the human condition. His profound, even religious, optimism, gives structure and import to even the smallest and apparently least significant of human activities. The inspirational quality of Emerson's, prose, his willingness to travel far and wide to lecture, his ability to help people transcend the difficulties of the times, all led to his very great national as well as international significance.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Raúl Pino Andrade

Modernity has brought with it a series of scientific advances that, in the medical field, have improved not only the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, but also the quality of life of patients. This is undeniable. It is enough to carry out an exercise of imagination and place our life in two different historical settings: first the Renaissance, and second the XXI century or contemporary era. Leaving cultural or historical affinities aside, to the question: In which of these historical periods would you like to live? The most prudent answer is very likely: now, in this century. The advances of medicine can be traced historically, we cannot think about it without thinking in Vesalius, or Paré, and many others; however, it is true that the history of medicine accelerated markedly in the 20th century. Although it is true that in just over a hundred years the greatest scientific discoveries have been made in all fields of knowledge, modernity has also meant a change in time itself. Everything unfolds at previously unimaginable speeds: material and knowledge production, teaching and learning, communication and interpersonal relationships. The latter point should be highlighted, and the changes due to the acceleration of the relationship between doctors and their patients should be pointed out on time. It is as if life should climb the assembly line and obey a Fordist logic. It must be recognized that the acceleration of certain aspects is significant, such as the expansion of diagnostic tests, creation of procedures and medications, immediate response to emergencies, among others. But all these advantages seem to carry with them, as a current, all areas of life including what must necessarily be paused.


2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Doug Morrison ◽  
Ivan Barko

In January 1787, on board Lapérouse's Boussole anchored off Macao, the chevalier de Lamanon wrote a letter to the marquis de Condorcet, the then permanent secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. Lamanon's letter contained a summary of his magnetic observations made up to that point on Lapérouse's famous but ill-fated expedition. The letter, amongst other detail, included evidence that the Earth's magnetic field increased in intensity from the equator towards the poles. Sent to Condorcet via the then minister for the French Navy (the maréchal de Castries), the letter was subsequently lost, but not before it was copied. The copy, with early nineteenth-century ownership identified first to Nicolas Philippe Ledru and subsequently to Louis Isidore Duperrey, was itself then lost for over 150 years, but recently rediscovered bound-in with other manuscripts related to the Lapérouse expedition and terrestrial magnetism, including instructions by Ledru and remarks written in the 1830s and 1840s by Duperrey on Lamanon's letter and observations. The significance of Lamanon's letter and the Ledru and Duperrey manuscripts to the history of geomagnetism is discussed here. Duperrey's notes are transcribed in French for the first time and the Lamanon, Ledru and Duperrey manuscripts are translated into English, also for the first time.


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