Tag Book History
by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri Even Thucydides, the celebrated father of historical realism, found it impossible to avoid revising the past in the telling of it. “With reference to the speeches in this history,” he writes in the opening to… Continue Reading →
by guest contributor Anna Gialdini In the Preface to the Magnum ac perutile Dictionarium (1523), Janus Laskaris put words into the mouth of his pupil Guarino Favorino about Favorino’s ethnic identity. Favorino argued that while his parents were Italian, he… Continue Reading →
by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri There are all kinds of ways in which a book’s form can intensify its content, draw its words into relationships, inscribe its title within the family trees of works written by other people in other… Continue Reading →
by Madeline McMahon After midday on August 14, 1483, the Dominican friar Felix Fabri and his fellow pilgrims to Jerusalem began to prepare for their celebration of the feast of the assumption of Mary. They constructed a small kind of… Continue Reading →
by guest contributor Nicholas Bellinson One Bohemian night in 1608, the Imperial Mathematician gazed up at the moon and the stars. In the seven years since he had received that title, Johannes Kepler had discovered many things about these celestial… Continue Reading →
by guest contributor Richard Calis In an earlier post I reported on the philological endeavors of Pieter Fontein and his strong interest in the marginalia of Isaac Casaubon. As I would like to underline here, this was much more than… Continue Reading →
by John Raimo “Those who don’t know, do theory.” As per Nikolaus Wegmann, this slogan of modern philology touches upon something odd this “ancient form of knowledge” and its persistence into the present day. Philology fitfully attempts to absorb theory… Continue Reading →
by John Raimo What is philology? The question may be almost perfectly academic, yet more people have begun to ask it. Scholars such as James Turner and Rens Bod argue that philology as a loosely-associated body of practices proved the… Continue Reading →
By guest contributor Erin McGuirl In studying annotations, we think of ourselves as entering into an otherwise impenetrable space: the mind of another reader. As I’ve looked closer and closer at Mai-mai Sze’s books and the marks she made in… Continue Reading →
by guest contributor Matthias Pfaller The Bedford Book of Hours, illustrated by the most capable artists of Paris of the fifteenth century, is one of the most splendid of late-medieval illuminated manuscripts, and one of the most famous pieces in… Continue Reading →
