Transforming Scientific Communication for the 21st Century

Since its inception in the 17th century the research journal emerged as the formal communication method in the sciences. The last half of the 20th century has seen stresses develop on the journal system due to the explosion of scientific research, increasing subscription costs, and technological advances. New models, taking advantage of digital technology, have demonstrated that great improvements are possible if the scientific community is willing to embrace change. Two methods for significantly changing the model are suggested: adopting an e-print moderator model which decouples the dissemination of information from its review, and shifting the costs of publication from the reader to the author and sponsoring agencies and organizations

La Noble Science des Joueurs d’Espée: Fight Book and Commercial Product

La Noble Science des Joueurs d’Espée (originally La Noble Science des Ioueurs Despee) is a fight book printed in 1538 by Willem Vorsterman, a local printer in Antwerp. Printed in several exemplars, the book is the French translation of a German fencing treatise written by Andre Paurnfeindt, which itself was first published in Vienna in 1516. The study of Vorsterman’s edition shows several errors were made in recreating Paurnfeindt’s work, including inversions of image and text, which have the potential to alter the transmission of the text’s martial knowledge. This raises the question of Vorsterman's commercial intentions when editing and printing this fight book, especially regarding the flourishing printing business in sixteenth-century Flanders. This paper aims to describe the differences in construction between Vorsterman and Pauernfeindt’s treatises in the context of both printing and martial cultures in Antwerp and the surrounding region

Social Network Centralization Dynamics in Print Production in the Low Countries, 1550-1750

The development of a professionalized, highly centralized printmaking industry in northern Europe during the mid-sixteenth century has been argued to be the inevitable result of prints' efficacy at reproducing images, and thus encouraging mass production. However, it is unclear whether such a centralized structure was truly inevitable, and if it persisted through the seventeenth century. This paper uses network analysis to infer these historical print production networks from two large databases of existing prints in order to characterize whether and how centralization of printmaking networks changed over the course of this period, and how these changes may have influenced individual printmakers

Museum Collections as a Research Source for the Study of Religion: From the History of the State Museum of the History of Religion (St Petersburg, Russia)

In the very heart of St Petersburg, at 14 Pochtamtskaya Street, one finds a unique museum, the State Museum of the History of Religion (SMHR), sitting right next to the world-famous architectural masterpieces – the Admiralty and St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Today, it is the only museum in Russia – and one of the few in the world – that is devoted solely to the universal phenomenon of religion and the role it plays in human culture. The museum was founded in 1932 by Vladimir Bogoraz- Tan, an outstanding Russian citizen and director of academic institutions. He was a scholar of linguistics, ethnography, anthropology, and history of religion, as well as a poet, author, journalist, teacher, and full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. For 85 years, the museum has been acting as a research centre, studying religions of the past and present, in addition to playing a significant role in the culture of the city of St Petersburg

Mapping Dutch Nationalism across the Atlantic

1648 witnessed the legal birth of the Dutch Republic, and Claes Jansz Visscher capitalized on Dutch nationalism by publishing maps of Dutch-controlled territories in Brazil and New Netherland. The maps presented a unified image of possession in both arenas and featured them as secure and stable locations worthy of investment amidst tensions in the Republic c. 1650. These maps contributed to shape a global and historical Dutch national consciousness at this critical moment of their so-called Golden Age

Czech Reformational biblical translation: the case of pericopes in the Unity of the Brethren in the 1550s‒1570s

The pericopes in vernacular languages were one of the achievements of the European Reformation. In Bohemian Lands, the pericopes were read in Czech already soon after 1415, namely as a feature of the Hussite movement. Fully Bohemicised liturgy, thus promoting Czech as the first vernacular within the Roman obedience to holy languages, was adopted by the Unity of the Brethren. The development of pericopes within the Unity was dynamic and noteworthy. The study describes and by textual probes illustrates the development of pericopes in the Unity after the reform of Lukas of Prague, which is tightly connected to the most literal Czech biblical translation in the 16th century, published in 1525. In the 1540s, the bishop Jan Augusta attempted at a reform of the pericopal system and in his Summovník he translated pericopes rather literally from Biblia Tigurina. His translation was modified by other Brethren bishops and printed in 1557‒1559. A new revised version came out in 1563 but no copy has survived. In 1571 Blahoslav’s Evanjelia and in 1575 Štefan’s Postil were published, both including pericopes. The study explores in detail the mutual textual relations of these prints

European Fight Books 1305-1630: Classification, typology and comparison between manuscripts and prints

No bibliometric or analytic studies of the fight books have been conducted and few reference publications offer analyses of the genre as a whole. Moreover, the existing bibliographies all have their own limitations and do not allow for an investigation of the larger corpus. This contribution applies a typology developed by the author to the corpus of those fight books created between 1305 and 1630, for a total of 187 sources (manuscript and print). It also updates the bibliography published in 2016 for the same chronological framework. The author’s typology allows for a study, based on objective criteria, of the corpus and the genre alike. It analyses the impact of the development of printing technology on the production of knowledge about the art of fighting, as well as the main characteristics of the fight book genre. The limits of any bibliometric study and implementation of a typology are due, on the one hand, to the conservation of the primary sources compared to the documented corpus, and on the other to the extent of scientific investigation conducted into each element. Such limits are flagged and discussed in order to offer a proper classification of the fight books’ production prior to the Thirty Years War, where major changes affected books about fighting in Europe

The use of books in 16th-century Vilnius

The main goal of the paper is to answer the question of what was unique about the use of books in Vilnius between 1522 and 1610. The reason to take a closer look at the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is the fact that it has always been a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious city. This observation allows the author to assume that the use of books there could have been different than in other European cities of the time. To find possible answers to the question posed, the author traces the changes in production, distribution and reading of books in the city. The research is based on several sorts of sources, such as printed books, manuscripts and documents from Vilnius archives (mainly the municipal archive, the Catholic chapter, the castle court etc.). He was supported by contemporary studies about early modern Vilnius scriptoria and printing houses (Kawecka-Gryczowa, Topolska, Nikalaieu), bookbinders (Laucevičius), book writing (Ulčinaitė, Narbutienė, Narbutas) and the history of the city (Frick). At the beginning of the paper the author recalls the main facts about Vilnius in the 16th century. The city had increasingly grown in importance as a political, economical and cultural centre of the Jagiellonian monarchy.The central part, divided in four chronologically arranged chapters, focuses on several problems, among them: the beginnings of Cyrillic prints and Skaryna’s printing house, languages and alphabets of books (Latin, Ruthenian, Polish, Lithuanian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic), book production, dissemination, storage and reading. The author notices that a significant contributing factor to the spreading book culture in Vilnius was the royal court and chancery. He puts emphasis on the significance of humanistic schools that were established in Vilnius in the 2nd half of the 16th century by four different Christian confessions (Calvinist, Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox). The most influential one was the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius. This process was accompanied by the establishment of no less than 11 printing houses. Having said that, the author argues that books printed in Vilnius, imported to the city and held in its libraries reflect a fruitful competition between main religious communities. At the end, the author reaches the conclusion that the use of books in Vilnius was similar to other European cities of the time, yet the capital of Lithuania still seems to be a good deal more complex a case. He ventures a hypothesis that the book can be deemed as one of the tools or factors by which religious or ethnic identity in Vilnius was defined

Special Libraries, July 1933

Volume 24, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1933/1005/thumbnail.jp