Saleroom Fiction versus Provenance

2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-54
Author(s):  
Konrad Hirschler

Abstract This article examines a group of twelve fragments in different languages and different scripts previously held in the Schøyen collection in London and Oslo. After they first emerged on the market in 1993, these fragments received colourful hypothetical and/or fictional pseudo-provenances. However, a consideration of the material logic of these parchment fragments (including folding lines and sewing holes) as well as an examination of the Arabic marginal manuscript notes they carry allows us to re-establish their historical trajectory from the seventh/thirteenth century onwards. At this point, they became part of Muslim Damascene manuscript culture and were reused as wrappers for small booklets in the scholarly field of ḥadīth. In the late ninth/fifteenth century, these booklets were subjected to a massive binding project and the fragments went into new large volumes. This article thus suggests approaches to use provenance research in order to re-historicize decontextualized fragments in modern collections.

Author(s):  
Antonio Urquízar-Herrera

Chapter 3 approaches the notion of trophy through historical accounts of the Christianization of the Córdoba and Seville Islamic temples in the thirteenth-century and the late-fifteenth-century conquest of Granada. The first two examples on Córdoba and Seville are relevant to explore the way in which medieval chronicles (mainly Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his entourage) turned the narrative of the Christianization of mosques into one of the central topics of the restoration myth. The sixteenth-century narratives about the taking of the Alhambra in Granada explain the continuity of this triumphal reading within the humanist model of chorography and urban eulogy (Lucius Marineus Siculus, Luis de Mármol Carvajal, and Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza).


Author(s):  
Steven N. Dworkin

This short anthology contains extracts from three Castilian prose texts, one from the second half of the thirteenth century (General estoria IV of Alfonso X the Wise), one from the first half of the fourteenth century (El conde Lucanor of don Juan Manuel), and one from near the mid-point of the fifteenth century (Atalaya de las corónicas of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera). These passages illustrate in context many of the phonological, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features of medieval Hispano-Romance described in the body of this book. A linguistic commentary discussing relevant forms and constructions, as well as the meaning of lexical items no longer used or employed with different meanings in modern Spanish, with cross references to the appropriate sections in the five main chapters, accompanies each selection.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Jenny C. Bledsoe

Written in the decades before Ancrene Wisse, the Early Middle English hagiographies of the Katherine Group depict three virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana. Using touch and eyewitness accounts as measures of proof, the legend equates St. Margaret’s body with the textual corpus inscribed on animal hide. The manuscript’s documentary authority is verified through proximity to the holy body of the saint, and, in a similarly body-centred (and precarious) authority, the anchoress functions as the centre of an ephemeral textual community in the early thirteenth century. The Katherine Group narratives and codicological evidence indicate an anchoritic-lay literary culture operating adjacent to clerical manuscript culture, consistent with Catherine Innes-Parker’s theory about co-existing informal and formal vernacular textual cultures in the West Midlands. This “informal,” or ephemeral, textual community shaped lay literacy and manuscript use, including perceptions about the documentary authority of vernacular textual artifacts.


Author(s):  
Sherry D. Fowler

Two wooden sculpture sets of Six Kannon, the thirteenth-century set from Daihōonji in Kyoto attributed to the artist Higō Jōkei and the fourteenth-century set from Tōmyōji in the Minami Yamashiro district of Kyoto, are well-documented sets that show the history, modifications, and movement of the cult. Copious inscriptions inside images in the respective sets reveal diverse sponsorship, from an elite female patron in the former to a huge group of patrons from a variety of backgrounds in the latter. Extant thirteenth- to fifteenth-century written records on ritual procedures, such as Roku Kannon gōgyōki, which focused on Six Kannon, contribute to the knowledge of how the rituals related to Six Kannon were performed as well as how the Six Kannon functioned in response to different needs, such as assisting with the six paths, protecting the dharma, or bolstering sectarian heritage, throughout their changing circumstances and movement over time.


Author(s):  
John Baker

This chapter surveys the development of English legal literature. It begins with the Latin treatises called Glanvill and Bracton, which by the end of the thirteenth century had given way to more accessible practical works in French. The most important of the new writings were the reports of real cases taken in court, the year books. The evolution of law reporting is traced, and there is an assessment of the changes in the Tudor period, particularly Plowden’s innovative Commentaries. The effect of printing is also considered. Access to case-law was at first primarily via abridgments rather than treatises, but Littleton’s student textbook on Tenures marked a new departure in the fifteenth century. Treatises of comparable importance to Littleton were few, but notable among legal authors were St German, Coke (also a major law reporter), Hale, and Blackstone.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Adamo ◽  
David Alexander ◽  
Roberta Fasiello

This work is focused on an issue scarcely examined in the literature, concerning the analysis of the relationship existing between time and accounting practice. The aim is to highlight how changes in the interpretation of the concept of time influenced the development of accounting practices and contributed to the rise of periodical accounting reporting from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. The socio-economic context existing in Italy in the Middle Ages, the development of commercial partnerships among merchants ( compagnie) and the international trade created the conditions for the development of periodical reporting. The relevance assigned to time in economic activity is one of the crucial factors of the rise of accounting information related to recurring accounting periods. Furthermore, the article shows how the concept of time is important and its significance widely underestimated, in a variety of further applications.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 571-599
Author(s):  
Eduard Frunzeanu ◽  
Isabelle Draelants

AbstractA short astrological treatise about the properties of the planets in the zodiac, called De motibus / iudiciis planetarum and attributed to Ptolemy (inc. Sub Saturno sunt hec signa Capricornus et Aquarius et sunt eius domus), appears from the thirteenth century onwards in two distinct traditions: in the encyclopedias of Bartholomew the Englishman and Arnold of Saxony, both written around 1230–1240, and in astronomical miscellanies copied in the fifteenth century either in or around Basel and in Northern Italy. These fifteenth-century manuscripts fall into two distinct groups of astronomical texts: the first is copied together with the De signis of Michael Scot, the second together with a part of the third book of Hyginus' De astronomia. The present article aims to describe the characteristics of the distinct textual filiations of De m. / iud. pl. and gives the first critical edition of the text.


2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-87
Author(s):  
Sverre Bagge

This article examines Machiavelli's understanding of the relationship between actors and structures in the history of Florence through a study of five selected episodes in the Istorie Fiorentine. Together, these episodes show the gradual decline of virtue in the city, from the relatively healthy conditions of the late thirteenth century to the pathetic incompetence of the Pazzi rebellion in 1478. These episodes also show that the main cause of this decline was not internal struggles, as stated in the preface, but the decline of military virtue which in turn was caused by changes in the class structure. In expressing these conclusions in the form of dramatic narrative and not only explicit reasoning, Machiavelli brings out tension between actors and structures, showing the limits the structural forces set to individual achievement as well as the possibilities for individuals to assert themselves under particular conditions. Generally, the scope for individual achievement increases as a result of the decline from the thirteenth-century republic, dominated by collective forces, to the fifteenth-century oligarchy dominated by the Medici family.


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