Ressenyes

Index de les obres ressenyades: E. COURTNEY, Musa Lapidaria. A selection of latin verse inscription

Irus and his jovial crew : representations of beggars in Vincent Bourne and other eighteenth-century writers of Latin verse

Alastair Fowler has written, with reference to the time of Milton, of ‘Latin's special role in a bilingual culture’, and this was still true in the early eighteenth century. The education of the elite placed great emphasis on the art of writing Latin verse and modern, as well as ancient, writers of Latin continued to be widely read. Collections of Latin verse, by individual writers such as Vincent Bourne (c. 1694–1747) or by groups such as Westminster schoolboys or bachelors of Christ Church, Oxford, could run into multiple editions, and included poems on a wide range of contemporary topics, as well as reworkings of classical themes. This paper examines a number of eighteenth-century Latin poems dealing with beggars, several of which are here translated for the first time. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the Latin poems recycled well-worn tropes about beggary which were often at variance with the experience of real-life beggars, and to how the specificities of Latin verse might heighten negative representations of beggars in a genre which, as a manifestation of elite culture, appealed to the very class which was politically and legally responsible for controlling them

The Old English Prose Homily on the Phoenix

The Old English prose homily on the phoenix, which is found in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 (eleventh century), and London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D. xiv (twelfth century), is the subject of this thesis. The study addresses the homily\u27s imagery, sources, and context. Comparison of the homily with two of its closest analogues, the Old English verse Phoenix and its source, the Latin De ave phoenice attributed to Lactantius, reveals that, in spite of similarities, the homily was based upon neither; its source likely was an overtly Christian Latin text unknown to us today. In addition, there are interesting points of coincidence between the homily and the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch. Evidence suggests that the homily was intended to be preached to a general, rather than a monastic, audience, perhaps on an occasion such as St. John\u27s (Midsummer) Eve, June 23, or perhaps on various occasions, as needed. Of special interest is a list of sins found in a conclusion added only to the CCCC 198 version of the homily. The author sets out to list eight principal sins but actually names eleven, including poisoning. The selection of sins suggests the influence of penitential texts

Augustine's Adoption of the Vulgate Gospels

This paper examines Augustine's text of the Gospel according to John to trace the process by which he adopted Jerome's revision of the Gospels. An important feature is the distinction between ‘primary citations’ taken from a codex and ‘secondary citations’ likely to have been made from memory, which change affiliation at different rates. Augustine's progress from Old Latin to Vulgate text-types is illustrated by the comparison of selected passages with surviving manuscripts. Textual variants in these citations suggest that Augustine's biblical text has been transmitted accurately

Huygens on translation

The tercentenary of the death of Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) presents a convenient occasion to trace the views held by this versatile and multilingual writer on the subject of translation. A first inventory of Huygens' pronouncements on the matter is all that will be attempted here. The choice of Huygens is not dictated by commemorative considerations alone. Both the contemporary appreciation of his work as a translator ? notably of John Donne ? and the fact that, as in Vondel's case, some of Huygens' comments on translation are echoed and occasionally challenged by other translators, indicate that his approach to the subject is sufficiently central to be treated as a point of reference

A Curator's Perspective: Communities in Communication, July-December 2014

As with any exhibition, intellectual and practical concerns combined to shape Communities in Communication: Languages and Cultures in the Low Countries, 1450-1530. In practical terms, I was keen to showcase the substantial holdings of the John Rylands Library from and about this dynamic culture. The corpus has been built up over more than a century: one manuscript, French MS 144, was acquired as recently as 1997.1 Yet libraries and users worldwide can easily underestimate how much material relates to the Low Countries. Catalogues invariably classify documents by language and/or medium; a practice exemplified by the very shelfmark of French MS 144, and which obscures the connections between the cultural products of a region where books were produced in Dutch, French, English, and Latin, and in both manuscript and print.2 Communities in Communication was conceived partly to counter this tendency towards fragmentation