Why do we digitize? The case for slow digitization

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Nota Bene: News from the Yale Library

Nota Bene is published during the academic year to acquaint the Yale community and others with the resources of the Yale Library

Codes and Hypertext: the Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law

The field of information studies reveals gaps in the literature of international and comparative law as part of interdisciplinary and textual studies. To illustrate the kind of theoretical and text-based work that could be done, this essay provides an example of such a study. Religious law texts, civil law codes, treaties and constitutional texts may provide a means to reveal the nature of hypertext as the new format for commentary. Margins used to be used for commentary, and now this can be done with hypertext and links in footnotes. Scholarly communication in general is now intertextual, and texts derive value and meaning from being related to other texts. This paper draws upon examples chosen after observing relationships between text presentation and hypertext as well as detailing similar observations by scholars to date. However, this essay attempts to go beyond a descriptive level to argue that this intertextuality, and the hypertext nature of the web, bring together texts and traditions in a manner conducive to the study of legal systems and their points of convergence

The Myth of Piers Plowman

Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poem's localization, and medieval readers' particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the 'Protestant Piers' was a reaction against the poem's oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem by figures including the maligned Chaucer editor John Urry, and contextualizes its first modernization by a literary forger inspired by the 1790s Shakespeare controversies. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched

Thomas Hoccleve and the Poetics of Reading

Thomas Hoccleve, the early fifteenth-century London poet who first promoted the notion that Chaucer was the father of English literature, demonstrates an acute awareness that readers would change the form of his own texts over time. Although many scholars consider Hoccleve\u27s style to be derivative of his English predecessors, I argue that his awareness of readers contributed to an innovative style that casts writing and reading as mutually dependent acts of performance. Thus, in depictions of manuscript production and circulation processes, Hoccleve treats his audiences as his creative collaborators. The rich surviving manuscript history for Hoccleve reveals how his texts reflect and incorporate the experiences of readers. Additionally, owing to the fact that Hoccleve\u27s manuscript record includes three autograph manuscripts of his verse, I argue that Hoccleve himself must be counted among his own readers. In this dissertation, I first explore the relationships between autograph and scribal manuscripts of his texts, and between the content and form of his poems in variant scribal manuscripts. I then discuss how readers and copiers interacted with his poems\u27 visual layouts, and how this impacted future reading performances of his texts. Finally, I examine the relationship between Hoccleve\u27s explicit criticism of readers of his poem, the Letter of Cupid, and his own rereading of the poem in one of his autograph manuscripts. From these investigations, I propose that the poetics of reading in Hoccleve\u27s works represent his response to cultural concerns with the instabilities of literary authority in the late Middle Ages. Hoccleve\u27s effort to involve readers both literally and figuratively in the construction of his texts, and his recentering of literary authority in his audiences, are his major contributions to English literature in the fifteenth century

Musicality, Subjectivity, and the Canterbury Tales

This thesis is concerned with musicality as an interpretive category in the reading of Middle English literature in both lyric and narrative texts. The anonymous musical lyrics of thirteenth century England emphasize the individual subjectivity of the speaker, a quality which is enhanced by their musical settings. Chaucer\u27s Canterbury Tales, written at the end of the fourteenth century, uses music in a narrative framework to critique the operation of this subjectivity. Because the lyric poetry of the period was nearly always set to music, the status of the texts as songs has an important impact on the way in which those texts create meaning. Specifically, music deepens and expands the way in which the lyric I creates an anonymous subjectivity into which the hearer or, especially, the performer of the song is called to enter. This emphasis on subjectivity reflects the ideology of affective piety, which was being disseminated in England in the thirteenth century by Franciscan friars, partly through the composition of songs. The same subjectivity is present in non-religious songs of the period as well, revealing a broader ideology that placed great importance on the individual. The Canterbury Tales feature many characters—both among the pilgrims and within the tales told by those pilgrims—whose practice of music reveals important aspects of their personality. Chaucer\u27s narrative technique offers these practices up for critique on an ethical basis. Separate chapters of this thesis are devoted to identifying the critiques of religious and amatory musical practices. In each of these chapters, musicality raises two interlocking issues: the degree to which music can evoke affective response in the hearer, and the relative values of rationality and natural wisdom

Nation and Compilation in England, 1270-1500

Scholarship has frequently explored how people in medieval England engaged the concept of nation. Scholarship has also investigated the manners in which book production participated in and enacted cultural phenomena. Hitherto, there has been limited consideration of these two concerns together. This is problematic because the manuscripts which carry medieval texts to modern scholars offer the best evidence of contemporary reception of these texts. This dissertation fills this void. It unites questions of compilation and nation in the study of medieval England from 1270 to 1500. It explores the manner in which the collection of works in one manuscript—the manuscript matrix—engages, shapes, denies, or ignores the discourses of the English nation. The dissertation opens with consideration of the textual network of those manuscripts containing one or two tales of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It further argues that such study reveals a political interpretation at the heart of the Clerk's Tale. This dissertation's attention to the manuscript matrix also challenges longstanding proto-nationalist readings of Layamon's Brut and Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur and replaces these with more complicated interpretations of their engagement with nation. Ultimately, the manuscript matrix proves a powerful tool for demonstrating the pluralistic and paradoxical engagements with concepts of nation within late medieval England

Authorial or Scribal? : spelling variation in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer__s Canterbury Tales has come down to us in about 80 fifteenth-century manuscripts, none of which is in his own hand. What is conventionally referred to as __Chaucer__s language__ is the language found in two early texts of The Canterbury Tales, the Hengwrt and the Ellesmere manuscripts. Despite the fact that these manuscripts were copied by the same scribe, traditionally known as Scribe B and recently identified as Adam Pinkhurst, they are characterised by significant spelling differences. This dissertation is an analysis of spelling variation in Hengwrt and Ellesmere, supplemented by comparisons with three other texts copied by this scribe, i.e. three quires of a manuscript of Gower__s Confessio Amantis, a fragment of the Prioress__s Prologue and the Prioress__s Tale and a fragment of Troilus and Criseyde. Comparison of spelling variants in all fifteenth-century manuscripts of the The General Prologue, The Miller__s Tale, The Wife of Bath__s Prologue and The Nun__s Priest__s Tale was made possible by the digital tools recently developed by the Canterbury Tales Project at the University of Birmingham. The results of the present study show that spelling differences between Hengwrt and Ellesmere are not due to changes in Scribe B__s spelling habits, but to his different approach towards the two texts. Hengwrt is a manuscript produced to collect all tales in one codex, whereas Ellesmere is a more prestigious version of the same work. The spelling in Hengwrt is probably more faithful to the original version, while in El the scribe appears to have normalised the spelling in accordance with his interpretation of what he assumed to be Chaucer__s orthographic habits. These findings will be helpful to scholars interested in doing further research on the spelling of the Hengwrt and the Ellesmere manuscripts, and more generally on Chaucer__s language.LEI Universiteit LeidenDescriptive and Comparative Linguistic

The [ftaires!] to Remembrance: Language, Memory, and Visual Rhetoric in Chaucer\u27s House of Fame and Danielewski\u27s House of Leaves

Geoffrey Chaucer\u27s dream poem The House of Fame explores virtual technologies of memory and reading, which are similar to the themes explored in Danielewski\u27s House of Leaves. [ftaires!] , apart from referencing the anecdotal (and humorous) misspelling of stairs in House of Leaves, is one such linguistically and visually informed phenomenon that speaks directly to how we think about, and give remembrance to, our own digital and textual culture. This paper posits that graphic design, illustrations, and other textual cues (such as the [ftaires!] mispelling in House of Leaves] have a subtle yet powerful psychological influence on our reading and memory of texts. Paratextual or secondary features of a text such as its typography, font choice, line design, color scheme, and even minutiae like kerning collectively approximate an ur-character whose sole function is to educate the reader on how the book should be read. Other interests explored in this paper include: catalogs (as a form of archiving), houses of memory, ekphrasis, and unreliable/extra-diagetic narrators