‘Their lamentable hone’

This chapter examines the sounds and voices of caoineadh (keen), an Irish Gaelic form of lament, associated with performance by women as part of the burial process and with the female expression of political protest. It opens with a study of the sounds of caoineadh, setting non-Gaelic, often travellers’ accounts, from the 1570s through to the 1770s, in context with the genre’s long-established formal conventions of metre, rhyme, and theme. This is grounded in a critical history of the genre and illustrated with examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Questions of oral transmission, performance, textual authority, and authenticity are crucial to the history of the surviving texts and, therefore, central to the discussion.

‘Not at all afraid’: Queer Temporality and the School Detective Story

Kate Haffey has recently argued that if queer time can be seen as a turning away from narrative coherence, it suggests new possibilities for considering narrative structures more generally. Combining the narratively rigid structures of the school story and the detective novel, the four novels discussed in this article – Gladys Mitchell’s Laurels are Poison (1942), Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) – disrupt conventional understandings of linear time. Depicting not only queer, or potentially queer, characters, but a queer phenomenological perspective, they challenge reader expectations with a focus on aporias and gaps, whether in terms of trauma (Jackson), the blurring of fact and fiction (Lindsay), or the prolonged delay of both crime and resolution (Tey). These novels draw attention to the insufficiency of texts to capture experience, and the inadequacy of textual authority. As such, they reveal the extent to which mid-twentieth-century women’s fiction was able to challenge the genres and narrative structures with which it was most closely associated.

Coins and Flowers: Some Images of the Textual Authority in the Works of Isidore of Seville

В статье обсуждается значение авторитета цитируемого текста в свете дихотомии авторитет текста / авторитет личности в культуре последних веков Поздней Античности на Латинском Западе на материале наследия Исидора Севильского. На основании анализа метафор, связанных с фигурой благоразумного читателя (prudens lector), а именно – собирания цветов и экспертизы монет, делаются следующие выводы: 1) авторитет цитируемых текстов позволяет произведению репрезентировать традицию, а его автору-епископу – «образ отцов церкви». Это определяет символический характер авторитета личности церковного учителя, требующий, в то же время, воспроизведения первообраза; 2) цитируемые тексты образуют поле возможных альтернатив, из которых «разумный компилятор» осмысленно выбирает необходимые для воздействия на читателя; 3) читатель при этом, применяя монашеское искусство памяти, на основании накопленных коннотации использовал авторитетные высказывания для созидания новых смыслов. Таким образом, авторитет текста на рубеже Поздней Античности – Раннего Средневековья скорее оказывается средством обоснования и производства новых смыслов, чем ограничивающей их рамкой. The article considers the function of the authority of the quoted text through the lens of the dichotomy of personal / textual authority. The study is focud on the last ages of Late Antiquity and particularly on the works of Isidore of Seville. By consideration of the images related to the prudent reader (prudens lector) the article comes to the following conclusions. The extensive use of the authoritative quotations allows the text to represent the tradition, while its author as religious leader represented the Apostles and fathers of the Church. Thus, the authority of this leader turns out to be essentially symbolical. Relatively wide range of texts were considered authoritative. Making his own text, a prudent compiler (prudens compilator) as a prudent reader (prudens lector) chose the quotations not randomly, but according to the presupposed effect of the compilation. The reader of this kind of text, according to the monastic craft of the thought, produced new ideas by mediation upon the quotations, i.e. remembering all the connotations and relating them to the situation of the reader. Thus, the main function of authority of the quotations was to give an impetus to the thought in terms of tradition and not to suppress it.

Textual Authority in the Vita Nova’s Nineteenth-Century Editions

This article focuses on the nineteenth-century print circulation of Dante’s Vita Nova (1292–94) and especially on the response in print media to the tension between new critical approaches to text editing, on the one hand, and editors’ dependence on the text’s complex history on the other. At the center of this discussion is one of the thorniest aspects of the Vita Nova’s text: the divisions (technical prose of a scholastic nature in which Dante explains the formal structure of his poems). Over the centuries, Dante’s authority over his own text was brought into question on account of the inclusion in the literary text of what readers and editors considered to be commentary. Even though in the second half of the nineteenth century the editors began recognizing the divisions’ rightful place within the libello’s text, they continued—operating within the centuries-long tradition that did not consider them “text” but rather “gloss”—to engage in efforts to differentiate them from the rest of the text in order to point out their different textual nature.

The shastri and the air-pump: Experimental fictions and fictions of experiment for Hindi readers in colonial north India

In the early twentieth century, the vernacular science periodical emerged as a key medium for building science-literate publics in colonial South Asia. This article argues that the Hindi science monthly Vigyan became a discursive laboratory for experiments with language, literary genres, narrative plots, and settings to create culturally grounded science lessons for Hindi readers in the mid-1910s. I focus on the writings of Prem Vallabh Joshi, a pandit, science graduate, and small town teacher, who experimented with distinct literary genres to create a sensibility for science – an experimental temper – amongst Vigyan’s readers. Through his strategic use of scientific experiments in the “history of” a particular branch of knowledge, detective mysteries, and the genre of the fictionalized dialogue, Joshi inducted colonial readers into experimental culture and global scientific modernity. As a reflexive participant in the ongoing confrontation between “Western” science and Hindu śāstra in colonial society, Joshi staged a fictional encounter between the experimental demonstration of the iconic air-pump and the textual authority of śāstra. This article examines the encounter between sastric commitments and scientific sensibilities and their conjoined mobilization in Vigyan in the era of linguistic nationalism. In this colonial vernacular publishing culture, the serial possibilities of the periodical and the history of science itself became critical resources in the ontological confrontations between experimental science and traditional authority.

A Dozen Lucretian Emendations

In this article, twelve new emendations are offered on the text of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. At 1.454 non tactus is proposed for the unparalleled intactus; at 2.99 et partim is suggested for the awkward pars etiam; at 2.258 quomque (late-Republican cumque) is advanced for quemque; at 2.615 the metrically problematic inuenti sint is altered to inueniantur; at 2.733 the unique use of nigrant is dispensed with by reading the expected nigra sunt; at 3.267 et tamen is made more naturally adversarial as at tamen; at 3.774 ne fessa is altered to the more Lucretian defessa (reading ne for et earlier in the line); at 4.160 the unusual feminine celer (his) is altered to (his) celeris; at 4.306 (331) the difficult gerund insinuando is changed to the gerundive insinuandis; at 4.318 (343) multisque is replaced with the more idiomatic multoque; at 5.323 the stark phrase deminui debet recreari is reordered as debet deminui et recreari; finally, at 6.266 uementes is read for the otiose uenientes. The discussion proceeds on the basis of the universally accepted stemma, namely that the three Carolingian manuscripts (O, Q, S) are the sole manuscripts with textual authority. The more than fifty surviving Renaissance manuscripts ultimately derive from O, but they remain a fertile source for conjectures.

Authority and Truth

Chapter 3 is divided into three sections. The first attempts to clarify what might be meant in calling a text authoritative. The second draws distinctions between different things that might be meant by saying that a text is truthful. The goal in both of these parts is to arrive at some general conclusions about texts, rather than specific conclusions about the Bible. Consequently, the chapter refrains from making assumptions about (e.g.) biblical interpretation or about the truth of particular biblical texts. Indeed, for much of the discussion, the Bible is not even directly in view. The third section draws out some of the implications of the discussions in the first two sections for the question of how textual authority and textual truth are connected to one another. It also comments on the significance of these conclusions for discussions about the relation between biblical authority and biblical inerrancy.

Dramatische ‹mise en page› in Handschrift und Druck

The paper compares the typography of the first edition of Goethe’s collected writings 1787–1790 with the layout (‹mise en page›) of the manuscript copies from which the print was set. It tries to establish the textual authority of particular typographic devices for print dramas such as the indications of scenes, stage directions, and speech prefixes by tracing their relation to the manuscript setting copies and their development in subsequent volumes of the print edition, but especially for the tragedy Torquato Tasso. It turns out that print typography is sensitive to the manuscript record but shows substantial tendencies to introducing additional typographic hierarchy, thereby underlining outward form, i. e. external characteristics of classicist drama. Later editions published during Goethe’s lifetime seem to go much further in this direction. The consequences for the typographic setup in critical editions of Goethe’s dramas are discussed.