scholarly journals From The History of a Book to a "History of the Book"

2009 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Price

The ambition of this article is to wrest attention away from the fraction of any book's life cycle spent in the hands of readers and toward, instead, the whole spectrum of social practices for which printed matter provides a prompt. It asks, how accounts of print culture would look if narrated from the point of view not of human readers and users, but of the book. Turning to the nineteenth-century genre of "it-narrative"——which traces the travel of a book among a series of owners and handlers——it asks how such a narrative might compare to more familiar accounts of selves shaped by texts.

Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

Every performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’'s Mass in B Minor makes choices. The work’s compositional history and the nature of the sources that transmit it require performers to make decisions about its musical text and about the performing forces used in its realization. The Mass’s editorial history reflects deeply ideological views about Bach’s composition and how it should sound, not just objective reporting on the piece, with consequences for performances that follow specific editions. Things left unspecified by the composer need to be filled in, and every decision—including the choice to add nothing to Bach’s text—represents an interpretation. And the long performance history of the Mass offers a range of possibilities, reflecting a tension between the performance of a work like the Mass in Bach’s time and the tradition inherited from the nineteenth century. Every performance thus represents a point of view about the piece; —there are no neutral performances.


2021 ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Zsófia Kalavszky ◽  

In my essay I trace how – by which means and through what channels – the Ukrainian song «Ĭхав козак за Дунай» (Kozak was riding beyond the Danube) reached Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth-century and then by the means of German mediation, sprang out onto Hungarian territories. In the German language area, it spread essentially as a folk song. Translated (or rather transcribed) into German by Christopher Tidge, the Ukrainian song reached the Kingdom of Hungary most likely together with the troops that took part in the Napoleon wars. At the same time, another version of the song circulated among the Hungarian elite in German culture. The latter was known as Russisches Lied in the translation of Theodor Körner – it was also in vogue and was distributed mainly in print media. The history of this song that in the first decade of the nineteenth century, gained fame in Czech, Polish, and English, has another line that may be interesting from the point of view of Russian and Hungarian literary connections. In 1814, Russian poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker translated the song into German. His translation which remained in the form of the manuscript and was not known to the reading public reveals an amazing similarity and in some places direct coincidences with the poem by the Hungarian poet Count Ferenc Teleki written presumably before 1820.


Author(s):  
J. B. Brown-Gilpin

The wide variety of reproductive patterns and behaviour in the many species of Nereidae already studied clearly justifies further research. But the life history of Nereis fucata (Savigny) is not only of interest from the comparative point of view. Its commensal habit (it occurs within shells occupied by hermit crabs) immediately gives it a special importance. This alone warrants a detailed study, particularly as no commensal polychaete has yet been reared through to metamorphosis and settlement on its host (Davenport, 1955; Davenport & Hickok, 1957). The numerous interesting problems which arise, and the experimental methods needed to study them, are, however, beyond the range of a paper on nereid development. It is therefore proposed to confine the present account to the reproduction and development up to the time when the larvae settle on the bottom. The complete life cycle, the mechanism of host-adoption, and related topics, will be reported in later papers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-277
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sessions

Abstract On 26 April 1901, members of the Righa tribe overran the French colonial village of Margueritte in central Algiers province. They seized the settlement’s male colonists and demanded they ‘make [them]selves Muslims’ by reciting the shehada and donning North African clothing. Several Europeans who could not or would not comply were killed. This article explores the meanings of this forced conversion of European settlers, which made the Margueritte revolt unique in the history of Algerian resistance to French colonialism. For French colonial officials, the religious ritual indicated the causal role of ‘Islamic fanaticism’ in fomenting the revolt. Administrators and magistrates focused their investigations on the religious habits of the revolt’s leaders, possible ties to Sufi brotherhoods and pan-Islamist conspiracies. But in doing so, they largely overlooked the more quotidian meanings of the conversion ritual for the inhabitants of Margueritte itself. By resituating the symbolic transformation of body and soul within the cultural logics of everyday life in the settler village, the article attempts to map out the more mundane social practices by which ethno-religious colonial hierarchies were enacted and embodied in French Algeria.


1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (03) ◽  
pp. 166-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Dale

I have been asked to speak about the history of the experimental method in medicine, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. This indication, though I do not propose to regard it as setting a limit, seems to have a special fitness, since it is to the nineteenth century, and especially to its latter half, that we must look for the effective beginning and astonishingly rapid development, the veritable outburst, indeed, of activity in the application of the experimental method to medicine, which opened the new era of medical progress in which we are living today. It is curious, perhaps, that this should have come so late in the history of science. For medicine had figured early in man's attempts to understand nature and his relation to it, and many departments of science which have long ago achieved recognition as independent bodies of knowledge originated as aspects of the physician's equipment—botany, for example, zoology and chemistry, as well as human anatomy and physiology, which still retain their attachment to the medical group of the scientific disciplines. From this point of view, then, it is not surprising to find two physicians, William Gilbert and William Harvey, as the leaders in this country of the scientific revolution which had begun in Europe in 1543 with the publication, within a few weeks of one another, of two books—one by Copernicus of Cracow,De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, and the other by Vesalius of Padua,De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Both Gilbert and Harvey, we may be proud to remember, studied and first graduated in Medicine here, in Cambridge.


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