404 research outputs found

    From Clerks to Corpora: essays on the English language yesterday and today

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    Why is the Isle of Dogs in the Thames called Isle of Dogs? Did King Canute’s men bring English usage back to Jutland? How can we find out where English speakers suck their breath in to give a short response? And what did the BrontĂ«s do about dialect and think about foreign languages? The answers are in this collection of empirical work on English past and present in honour of Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Professor of English Language at Stockholm University. The first five chapters report individual studies forming an overview of current issues in the study of Old and Middle English phonology, lexis and syntax. The next six look at Early Modern and Modern English from a historical point of view, using data from corpora, manuscript archives, and fiction. Two more look at the Old English scholar JRR Tolkien and his work. The remaining chapters discuss aspects of Modern English. Several use corpora to look at English usage in itself or in relation to Swedish, French, or Norwegian. The last three look at grammatical models, the pragmatics of second language use, and modern English semantics

    Contextualizing Practical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

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    The topic of this book is practical knowledge in early modern Europe, interpreted widely as recipes containing art procedures or medical panaceas between 1400 and 1700. In this book, the 1) origin or creation, 2) transmission or dissemination, and 3) use or consumption are key subjects for understanding the place of practical knowledge in early modern European society. After a historiographical and theoretical approach, this book applies Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome metaphor to art technological literature. The first part ends with a study about medical practitioners and mediators who disseminate practical knowledge through the printing press. The second part of the book is entirely dedicated to the bookletA Very Proper Treatise (1573), using a microhistory approach to study it

    Calculating Value: Using and Collecting the Tools of Early Modern Mathematics

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    Through detailed evaluation of the Science Museum Library’s Rare Books Collection, this thesis explores the use, ownership and subsequent collection of mathematical books produced between 1550 and 1750. Research has been undertaken as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award between Swansea University and the Science Museum, London, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2018. Consisting of close to 1,700 titles published between 1486 and 1800 encompassing the pre-modern classification of mathematics, this subset of the Rare Books Collection represents a remarkable accumulation of the practical and the theoretical across a variety of disciplines and languages. My thesis begins by characterising these mathematical holdings in aggregate, analysing the contents and physical features of the texts therein. Findings are supplemented by examination of accompanying provenance, including bindings, bookplates, and signatures. Discrete case-studies then present key texts as part of their readers’ burgeoning mathematical practice, with chapters focussing on the spread of Ramist pedagogies of arithmetic, geometry, and trigonometry in sixteenth-century Germany; the interconnected use of text, instrument and theory in early modern English intellectual and navigational cultures; and the value attached to the related disciplines of mathematical astronomy and chronology at the University of Cambridge in the late 1690s. The thesis closes with a reconstruction of the library of the clergyman and mathematician, Nathaniel Torporley (1564-1632), tracing the journey of Torporley’s materials to the collection of the antiquarian Robert Brodhead Honeyman (1897-1987) and to the Science Museum thereafter. By placing the Museum’s Library and its holdings in their correct historical contexts, this thesis contributes to our understanding of mathematical culture in the early modern period, to the history of collecting in the modern era, and to the Science Museum’s understanding of its own holdings and of its role as an institutional collector

    “STRANGE SIMILES”: THE FAERIE OUEENE AND RENAISSANCE NATURAL HISTORY

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    Animals appear in every canto of every book of The Faerie Queene. This dissertation seeks to accentuate the strangeness of Spenser’s animals as well as to counter it. By placing Spenser’s epic in dialogue with early modem natural history, with which it shares a constant didacticism, I argue that the strangeness of his animals must first be recognized and then remedied by learning what was “meant” by those animals in the culture Spenser inhabited and helped make. Chapter One proposes ways in which Spenser, inhabiting a particular cultural time, place, and position, could have learned natural history as part of his formal education. Chapter Two argues for the centrality of exemplary symbolism in the presiding attitudes towards animals held during Spenser’s lifetime and how the practices and products of natural history embody these attitudes. Chapters Three and Four engage directly with two representative animals from Spenser’s poem, the lion and the crocodile, showing that animals are not merely imaginative conveniences but instead are complex, culturally encoded signifiers. The thesis also includes an appended compendium of all the animals of The Faerie Queene

    Contextualizing Practical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

    Get PDF
    The topic of this book is practical knowledge in early modern Europe, interpreted widely as recipes containing art procedures or medical panaceas between 1400 and 1700. In this book, the 1) origin or creation, 2) transmission or dissemination, and 3) use or consumption are key subjects for understanding the place of practical knowledge in early modern European society. After a historiographical and theoretical approach, this book applies Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome metaphor to art technological literature. The first part ends with a study about medical practitioners and mediators who disseminate practical knowledge through the printing press. The second part of the book is entirely dedicated to the bookletA Very Proper Treatise (1573), using a microhistory approach to study it

    The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing

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    In the late medieval and early modern periods, native tongues and traditions, including those of Scotland, cohabited and competed with latinitas in fascinating and inventive ways. Scottish latinity had its distinctive stamp, most intriguingly so in its effects upon the literary vernacular and on themes of national identity. The present book shows how, when viewed through the prism of its latinity, Scottish textuality was distinctive and fecund. The flowering of Scottish writing owed itself to a subtle combination of literary praxis, the ideal of eloquentia, and ideological deftness. This combination enabled writers to service a burgeoning national literary tradition, and to transcend the subject matter of nation through fruitful and energetic treatment of issues of universal appeal.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_smemc/1001/thumbnail.jp
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