The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings, and its remarkable collection of manuscripts and rare books. However, a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval library down and replace it was only narrowly prevented. This brief history of Europe's oldest surviving academic library begins with its origins in the thirteenth century, when a new type of community of scholars was first being set up, and follows through to the present day and its multiple functions as a working college library, a unique resource for researchers, and a delight for curious visitors. ​Drawing on the remarkable wealth of documentation in the college's archives, this is the first history of the library to explore collections, buildings, readers, and staff across more than seven hundred years. The story is told in part through stunning color images that depict not only exceptional treasures but also the library furnishings and decorations, and which show manuscripts, books, bindings, and artifacts of different periods in their changing contexts. Featuring a historical timeline and a floor plan of the college, this book will be of interest to historians, alumni, and tourists alike.

Established in 1264, Merton College was the first self-governing college in Oxford and the model for all the historic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. This history also covers the development of the college library and the impact of John Wyclif.

Few composers have responded as powerfully to place as Frederick Delius (1862–1934). Born in Yorkshire, Delius resided in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia before settling in France, where he spent the majority of his professional career. This book examines the role of place in selected works, including 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', Appalachia, and The Song of the High Hills, reading place as a creative and historically mediated category in his music. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary art, and literature, and more recent writing in cultural geography and the philosophy of place, this is a new interpretation of Delius' work, and he emerges as one of the most original and compelling voices in early twentieth-century music. As the popularity of his music grows, this book challenges the idea of Delius as a large-scale rhapsodic composer, and reveals a richer and more productive relationship between place and music.

Relates the early history of the University of Georgia from its founding in 1785 through the Reconstruction era. In this history of America's first chartered state university, the author recounts, among other things, how Athens was chosen as the university's location; how the state tried to close the university and refused to give it a fixed allowance until long after the Civil War; the early rules and how students invariably broke them; the days when the Phi Kappa and Demosthenian literary societies ruled the campus; and the vast commencement crowds that overwhelmed Athens to feast on oratory and watermelons.

For forty years, James Finley’s Merton's Palace of Nowhere has been the standard text for exploring, reflecting on, and understanding the rich vein of Thomas Merton's thought. Spiritual identity is the quest to know who we are, to find meaning, to overcome that sense of “Is this all there is?” Merton’s message cuts to the heart of this universal quest, and Finley illuminates that message as no one else can. As a young man of eighteen, Finley left home for an unlikely destination: the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton lived as a contemplative. Finley stayed at the monastery for six maturing years and later wrote this Merton’s Palace of Nowhere in order to share a taste of what he had learned on his spiritual journey under the guidance of one of the great religious figures of our time. At the heart of the quest for spiritual identity are Merton's illuminating insights—leading from an awareness of the false and illusory self to a realization of the true self. Dog-eared, tattered, underlined copies of this book are found on the bookshelves of retreat centers, parish libraries, and the homes of spiritual seekers everywhere. This anniversary edition brings a classic to a new generation and includes a new preface by Finley.

Descriptive catalogue provides a crucial guide to one of the most important repositories of medieval manuscrips. Merton College, Oxford, one of the oldest colleges in the University, was founded in 1264. Its library contains some 328 complete medieval manuscript books (plus several hundred fragments in, or extracted from, the bindings of early printed books), dating from the ninth to the late fifteenth century. Most of them came to the College before the Reformation, and are the remains of its medieval collection, part of which was chained in the library, part in circulation amongst the Fellowship. Together with the College's surviving medieval archive, which includes no fewer than twenty-three book-lists, this material provides an important window on intellectual life at the University of Oxford between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the manufacture, acquisition and use of the books that supported it. This first catalogue of the medieval manuscripts since 1852 offers full and detailed descriptions of each item, supported by a colour frontispiece, 50 colour plates, and 107 black and white plates. Its introduction provides the first detailed history of Merton's medieval library, including an account of the building anddesign of the College's 'Old Library', built in the 1370s, western Europe's oldest library room still in use today; and the volume is completed with four appendices (including a comprehensive set of extracts from the College's medieval account rolls referring to its books and library) and two indexes. RODNEY M. THOMSON is Professor of History and Honorary Research Associate in the School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania.

Following the format of Fitzroy Dearborn's highly successful International Dictionary of Historic Places and International Dictionary of University Histories, the International Dictionary of Library Histories provides basic information for each institution - location and holdings - followed by an extensive (1,000-5,000 word) essay on its history as well as a Further Reading list. In addition, the dictionary includes introductory articles on the history of various types of libraries and a library history in various regions of the world. The dictionary profiles more than 200 institutions from around the world, including the world's most important research libraries and other libraries with globally or regionally notable collections, innovative traditions, and significant and interesting histories. The essays take advantage of the growing scholarship of library history to provide insightful overviews of each institution, including not only the traditional values of these libraries but their innovations as well, such as developments in automated systems and electronic delivery. The profiles will emphasize the unique materials of research in these institutions - archives, manuscripts, personal and institutional papers. The introductory articles on types of libraries include topics ranging from theological libraries to prison libraries, from the ancient to the digital. An international team of more than 200 leading scholars in the field have contributed essays to the project.

This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticsm or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers -- which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.

First published in 2003 and now available in paperback to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Thomas Merton's birth, When the Trees Say Nothing has sold more than 60,000 copies and continually inspires readers with its unique collection of Merton's luminous writings on nature, arranged for reflection and meditation. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, author, poet, social commentator, and perhaps the most influential and widely published spiritual writer of the twentieth century. In When the Trees Say Nothing, editor Kathleen Deignan sheds new light on Merton by focusing on a neglected theme of his writing: the natural world as a manifestation of the divine. Drawing from Merton's voluminous writing on nature, Deignan has thematically assembled a collection of lucid, poetic reflections. Chapters on the four elements, the seasons, the Earth and its creatures, and the sun, moon, and stars provide brief passages from his diverse works that reveal the presence of God in creation.

"With the [publication of this book], an ever-wider audience may more fully appreciate the ... range of the poet's technique, the scope of his concerns, and the humaneness of his vision"--Back cover.