Heidegger and the Critics

This paper uses the unpublished correspondence between Heidegger and Eduard Lachmann to contextualize Heidegger’s 1939 talk “‘Wie wenn am Feiertage…,’” which has been the focus of an excoriating critical response to Heidegger’s Hölderlinrezeption. Contra the protestations of critics like Paul de Man, the paper shows that Heidegger was fully aware of the intricacies of the hymn’s final manuscript page, using the correspondence with Lachmann to offer a reading of Heidegger’s inclusion of the variant referring to Semele’s ashes. It argues that Heidegger’s characterization of Semele’s incineration as a “Gegenspiel,” or counter-play, orients the possibility of a reception “without danger” that collapses the event of the hymn’s language into the treatment of the poem as an objective text. The paper’s central claim is that “danger” orients the mortal finitude of the hymn’s reception, whose excess as text becomes readable only against the testimony of Semele’s ashes.

The Mise-En-Page In Western Manuscripts

This chapter discusses the mise-en-page, that is, the arrangement and layout of different elements on the pages of Western manuscripts. The author addresses various aspects of the topic, including the dimensions of the page and the ratio of height to width, the amount of space alotted to text versus margin, the proportion of of written space to blank space, columns, the more complicated arrangements of texts with commentaries and glosses, and the relationship of text to image. Examples of manuscript page layouts from different periods highlight the variety of possibilities and the importance of the decisions that go into the selection of a layout.

Visual pragmatics of abbreviations and otiose strokes in John Lydgate’sSiege of Thebes

This paper1 addresses the visual-pragmatic functions of the so-called common mark of abbreviation, or macron, in a section of BL Royal MS 18 D II (ff. 147v–162r) – one of the best known “deluxe” manuscripts containing Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Contextualised within the framework of visual pragmatics, or Pragmatics on the Page (Carroll et al. 2013), the manuscript in question is considered here as a visual text (Kendall et al. 2013) – one for which the readers construe the meaning through internalising the physical organisation of discourse. The paper attempts to unpack the ways in which the common mark of abbreviation, employed by the scribes as a visual-pragmatic marker, organises the discourse of the manuscript page on three levels of meaning: textual, interactional and metalinguistic (following Erman 2001). The pragmatic roles of the macron are then confronted with the visual forms and possible functions of its notorious graphic doppelgänger (i.e., the otiose stroke).

Script as Image: Visual Acuity in the Script of Poggio Bracciolini

The fact that the graphic substance of writing oscillates between text and image is a potential which writing carries in itself from the very beginning. Every graphic trace on the manuscript page relates to the conventions of time in a way that is determined by the scribe. This becomes particularly tangible when the conventions are deliberately and systematically broken and replaced by new ones on the basis of a concrete concept. By introducing the humanistic minuscule, a script developed on the basis of the historical model of the Carolingian minuscule, Poggio Bracciolini and his mentors and friends Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò Niccoli, created philologically revised copies of the texts of classical authors in what they called littera antiqua, the new old script. This paper wants to show how the conscious incorporation of elements of historical manuscripts and their transformation into a specifically humanistic product makes use of the graphical potential of script and mise-en-page in order to translate a humanistic discourse into SchriftBild.

Revision and Self-Citation

Despite recent claims that serious poetic revision only started during the modernist period, most Romantic-period manuscripts yield evidence of sustained and sometimes obsessive revision, which could take place over a matter of hours, days, or years. This chapter surveys different editorial approaches to authorial revision and the vexed question of whether we should base our reading texts on the ‘first finished’ version or the author’s last ever set of revisions—the question which has haunted William Wordsworth’s editors for decades. After a brief discussion of the advantages of combining genetic criticism of the manuscript page with an awareness of biographical, social, and literary contexts, the chapter turns to public-domain manuscripts to analyse three examples of manuscript revision of poetry by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley.

Übergänge – Ornamente und Diagramme zwischen Text, Buchstabe und Bild in Handschriften des Frühmittelalters

Starting from the concept and definition of littera in the Grammar treatises of the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the contribution analyzes common graphic elements which were used by the scribes to create initials, ornamental patterns and the layout of the manuscript page. These elements and their functions were partly described in encyclopaedic works, e. g. of Isidor of Sevilla and Martianus Capella in the chapters about Geometry. Not only were these features well known through the study of the Artes, they also represented useful tools for the invention and production of medieval diagrams.

Identification of a small fragment of Mani's Living Gospel (Turfan Collection, Berlin, M5439)

Heretofore three fragments of Maniʼs Living Gospel – the most important work of Mani – have been recognized in Middle Persian and in Manichaean script: M17, M172/I/ and M644. This article, with a codicological and textological approach, shows that M17 and the new fragment M5439 are two separate pieces of a single manuscript page. The verso-side of M5439 has a new text. Now, after the identification and reading of this damaged fragment, we are able to correct the previous reconstructions and comment on a few Middle Persian words. The text contains a part of the exordium and of the chapter Aleph of the Living Gospel.

The Visual Text: Bibliographic Codes as Pragmatic Markers on a Manuscript Page

Abstract1 This paper explores the dynamics of the textual-visual interface of a medieval manuscript page within the frameworks of historical pragmatics and pragmaphilological approaches to the study of historical texts. Whilst the former focuses on the contexts in which historical utterances, manifested as texts, occur (Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 11), the latter involves a context-based perspective in the study of individual historical texts (Jucker 2000: 91). Combining the two approaches allows for a more comprehensive study of the “visual text” (cf. Machan 2011) than has been possible for paleographic, codicological, or linguistic analyses of medieval manuscripts. The present paper adopts the “pragmatics-on-the-page” approach (cf. Carroll et al. 2013, Peikola et al. 2014) in its analysis of bibliographic codes in British Library Royal MS 18 D II, which contains the texts of Lydgate’s Troy Book and Siege of Thebes. Such visual elements of the manuscript page as mise en page, ink colour, as well as type and size of script will be examined as pragmatic markers, functioning on three levels of meaning: textual, interactional, and metalinguistic (cf. Erman 2001, Carroll et al. 2013), and providing (visual) contexts for interpreting the linguistic message of the text.