L’Alcorano of Andrea Arrivabene

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 130-154
Author(s):  
Maria Teresa Chicote Pompanin

L’Alcorano published by Arrivabene in 1547 has been considered a servile copy of Theodor Bibliander’s edition since the sixteenth century, but this conception has changed radically due to a recent publication (Tommasino, 2013). Starting off from this publication, this essay aims to delve further into L’Alcorano suggesting that the book was an innovative product, not only because of its literary sources and translation, but also due to the presence of meaningful iconographical details in its capital letters. At the same time, an analysis of the cornice istoriata reveals its images as the very first visual representation of Muhammad’s life. The paper also puts forward a hypothesis about the book’s creation, considering it a joint venture involving several bookmen: Arrivabene, Comin da Trino, Bernardino Bindoni, and Bertolomeo detto Imperatore. The final section deals with the influence and material history of the book and its iconography during the centuries following its publication.

Author(s):  
Charles Hefling

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.


Quaerendo ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-149
Author(s):  
Bert Van Selm

AbstractBook historians have generally seen the introduction of the printed book auction catalogue as an important event in the history of the book trade. Catalogues were already being printed in the Dutch Republic in about 1600 and the present article discusses the factors that favoured this remarkably early development. In section 2 the author surveys present knowledge of book auctions from classical antiquity up to the year 1598. In particular, he discusses sales of books in the estates of deceased persons in the Low Countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with particular reference to auctions in Leiden and The Hague in the last part of the sixteenth century. From the data assembled it emerges that the auctioning of books was certainly not first thought of in the Dutch Republic and that many auctions of property, including books, were held before 1599. In 1596 Louis (II) Elzevier was granted permission to hold book auctions in the Great Hall of the Binnenhof in The Hague, and in the hands of a bookseller it was possible for this form of trade to develop in the best possible way. In section 3 the author moves on to the earliest book sales with printed catalogues, namely the Marnix sale of 1599 and the Daniel van der Meulen sale of 4


1994 ◽  
Vol 108 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Hugo Van Der Velden

AbstractA South Netherlandish panel in the collection of the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, painted around 1475-85, can be identified as one of the few surviving fifteenth-century justice pictures. Bruyn succeeded in tracing the painting's enigmatic iconography to a mediaeval 'exemplum', The King's Brother Threatened with Death, in which elements from The Sword of Damocles and from the story of the trumpet of death in the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat are combined into a single history. In the Gesta Romanorum, under the heading 'De timore extremi iudicii', the tale is told of a wise and righteous king who threatens to have his frivolous brother executed as a means of demonstrating his own state of mind: the thought of the Last Judgement makes it impossible for him to abandon himself to the pleasures of earthly life. In written sources this 'exemplum' is often associated with 'righteousness', becoming more closely interwoven with the practice of secular justice as time passed. In the fourteenth century, for example, it featured in a moralizing discourse on good and righteous government (the Ludus Scaccorum) and in the fifteenth century as a model of god-fearing conduct - even in a code of law (the Wetboek van Den Briel). This development corresponds closely with the literary history of other judgement scenes, such as the Judgement of Cambyses. The cited literary sources stress that judges should be filled with 'Timor Dei' as exemplified by the story of the king and his brother. The tenor of the 'exemplum' is a reminder that the secular judge will eventually have to answer for his actions to the Supreme Judge, an idea which was conveyed in town halls by representations of the Last Jugement. In view of the written tradition it is quite likely that the panel in Sarasota and two other representations of The King's Brother Threatment with Death - a drawing attributed to Lucas van Leyden and a stained-glass window - served as (designs for) a judgement picture. This interpretation is substantiated by sixteenth-century pictorial sources. In both a South German drawing and a print by Theodoor de Bry the story of the king's brother is combined with a number of familiar 'exempla iustitiae'.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 111-142
Author(s):  
Raphaële Mouren

In November 2007, l’École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques—France’s national school for information and librarianship—launched an ambitious project, following William Kemp’s proposal: establishing, in electronic form, an exhaustive, retrospective bibliography of books printed at Lyons during the sixteenth century. The implementation of this project was the object of numerous reflections, mostly upon the way the history of the book and the history of philology complement each other. Professional and disciplinary specificities concerned the identification of the types of users of such a base, the needs of these users, the norms regularly used, and the different levels of description considered to be necessary. This article recounts these conceptual progressions as they helped define bibliography in the twenty-first century. With precise comparisons to existing databases, and with concise and detailed definitions of methodology and issues, the author exposes the necessary decisions required of any bibliographic undertaking. Public, descriptions, corpus, standardization, and use are approached with reference to both conception and concept.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-116
Author(s):  
Mikhail Sergeev ◽  

The article concerns the influence of humanist scholarship on sixteenth-century etymological practices, testified in the Neo-Latin reference works and special treatises on linguistics and history. Being an important part of historical research, which relied mostly on Greek and Latin literary sources, etymology could not but adopt some important principles and instruments of contemporary philological work, notably on the source criticism. The foremost rule was to study the sources in their original language, form, and eliminate any corrupted data as well as any information not attested in written sources. This presumed that every text had its own written history, which tended to be a gradual deterioration of its state, represented in the manuscript tradition that was subject to scribal errors and misinterpretations. This view on the textual history was strikingly consonant with that on the history of languages, which was treated by the humanists as permanent corruption and inevitable degeneration from the noble and perfect state of their ancient ancestors. In an effort to restore the original text, philology used emendation as a cure for scribal abuse and textual losses; likewise, language historians had their own tool, namely etymology, to reconstruct and explain the original form of words (including the nomenclature of various sciences). The intersection of both procedures is taken into account in the article and it demonstrates how textual conjectures, manuscript collation, and graphical interpretation of misreadings were employed by the sixteenth-century scholars to corroborate their etymological speculations, which established themselves as one of the ways of the reception and criticism of classical scholarly heritage.


Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott

Asking why adaptation has been seen as more problematic to theorize than other humanities subjects, and why it has been more theoretically problematic in the humanities than in the sciences and social sciences, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to both explicate and redress “the problem of theorizing adaptation” through a metacritical history of theorizing adaptation from the late sixteenth century to the present, a metatheoretical theory of the relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities, and analysis of and experimentation with the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation. Adaptation was not always the bad theoretical object that it increasingly became from the late eighteenth century: in earlier centuries, adaptation was celebrated and valued as a means of aesthetic and cultural progress. Tracing the falling fortunes of adaptation under humanities theorization, the history nevertheless locates dissenting voices valorizing adaptation in every period. Adaptation studies can learn from history not only how to theorize adaptation more positively, but also to consider “the problem of theorization” for adaptation. The metatheoretical section finds that theorization and adaptation are rival, overlapping, inimical processes, each seeking to remake culture—and each other—in their images. It is not simply the case that adaptation has to adapt to theorization: rather, theorization needs to adapt to and through adaptation. The final section attends to the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation, analyzing how tiny pieces of rhetoric have constructed adaptation’s relationship to theorization, and turning to figurative rhetoric, or figuration, as a third process that can mediate between adaptation and theorization and refigure their relationship.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Julianne Werlin

This book is an experiment in conjoining two approaches to early modern English literature which, despite a seemingly obvious affinity, are rarely pursued together: the material history of texts and Marxist historical analysis. No trend in scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature in the past three decades has been more important than the rise of research on media, not confined to the history of the book or even manuscript, but encompassing communications as a whole. A wide variety of phenomena, including but by no means limited to methods of papermaking and bookbinding, readers’ habits of annotation, and the development of the postal system, have been shown to be relevant to early modern textual and literary history....


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