In this volume the McGill University Research Group on Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Cultures and their collaborators initiate a new reflection on the dynamics involved in receiving texts and ideas from antiquity or from other contemporary cultures. For all their historic specificity, the western European, Arab/Islamic and Jewish civilizations of the Middle Ages were nonetheless co-participants in a complex web of cultural transmission that operated via translation and inevitably involved the transformation of what had been received. This three-fold process is what defines medieval intellectual history. Every act of transmission presumes the existence of some 'efficient cause' - a translation, a commentary, a book, a library, etc. Such vehicles of transmission, however, are not passive containers in which cultural products are transported. On the contrary: the vehicles themselves select, shape, and transform the material transmitted, making ancient or alien cultural products usable and attractive in another milieu. The case studies contained in this volume attempt to bring these larger processes into the foreground.They lay the groundwork for a new intellectual history of medieval civilizations in all their variety, based on the core premise that these shared not only a cultural heritage from antiquity but, more importantly, a broadly comparable 'operating system' for engaging with that heritage.Each was a culture of transmission, claiming ownership over the prestigious knowledge inherited from the past. Each depended on translation. Finally, each transformed what it appropriated.

Change is a matter of central concern and interest in the study of history, and it has been approached with various methodological and theoretical means in different historical disciplines. The concept is, however, rarely addressed per se, despite its fundamental role for historical insight. This book addresses different kinds of change in medieval textual culture as examples or models of change. A model can take different forms: it consists of abstract representations, like a flowchart or a series of stages within a development, it might be a concept, like paradigm shift, or a single, but telling historical example. In their different forms, models serve as conceptual tools to enlighten historical instances of change. The contributions of this volume gather cases from a series of aspects of medieval textual culture which are subject to change: physical books, the acoustics of performed text, textualized worlds, scribes and authorship, genre, the choice of language in texts, and paleographic variance. The book also addresses problems of thinking in models and metaphors of change, as they also - as idols of the market - have the power to lead us astray if not carefully meditated.

The book highlights aspects of mediality and materiality in the dissemination and distribution of texts in the Scandinavian Middle Ages important for achieving a general understanding of the emerging literate culture. In nine chapters various types of texts represented in different media and in a range of materials are treated. The topics include two chapters on epigraphy, on lead amulets and stone monuments inscribed with runes and Roman letters. In four chapters aspects of the manuscript culture is discussed, the role of authorship and of the dissemination of Christian topics in translations. The appropriation of a Latin book culture in the vernaculars is treated as well as the adminstrative use of writing in charters. In the two final chapters topics related to the emerging print culture in early post-medieval manuscripts and prints are discussed with a focus on reception. The range of topics will make the book relevant for scholars from all fields of medieval research as well as those interested in mediality and materiality in general.

Changes in words, changes in the world, and changes in minds: transitions between states of speaking, writing, thinking, and being are the subjects of the 14 essays in this collection, which celebrates and was inspired by the work of Allen J. Frantzen. Ranging from individual word-studies to investigations of artifacts and material culture, to historical, philosophical and theological syntheses, the essays are characterized by the same combination of multi-disciplinarity and meticulous attention to detail as the scholarship of the honorand. Transitional States shows how the interplay of tradition and innovation, historical currents and individuality, loss, memory and memorialization combine to produce both the culture of the Middle Ages and our understanding of it.

This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.

The English literary canon is haunted by the figure of the lost woman writer. In our own age, she has been a powerful stimulus for the rediscovery of works written by women. But as Jennifer Summit argues, "the lost woman writer" also served as an evocative symbol during the very formation of an English literary tradition from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Lost Property traces the representation of women writers from Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, exploring how the woman writer became a focal point for emerging theories of literature and authorship in English precisely because of her perceived alienation from tradition. Through original archival research and readings of key literary texts, Summit writes a new history of the woman writer that reflects the impact of such developments as the introduction of printing, the Reformation, and the rise of the English court as a literary center. A major rethinking of the place of women writers in the histories of books, authorship, and canon-formation, Lost Property demonstrates that, rather than being an unimaginable anomaly, the idea of the woman writer played a key role in the invention of English literature.

Examines the changes in Athenian culture at the end of the fifth century BC.

This selection of papers by major scholars introduces students to the history of the book in the West from late Antiquity to the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and the beginning of the print revolution. The collection opens with wide-ranging papers on handwriting and the physical make-up of the book. In the second group of papers the emphasis is on the ’look’ of the book, complemented by a third group dealing with scribes, readers and the availability of books. The editors’ introduction provides an overview of the medieval book.

This book applies a legal anthropological framework to high medieval Norwegian history. It formulates the question of state formation in a new and challenging way by showing how the king a substantial degree based his dominion on unpredictability and presence.