Excerpt from The Bodleian Library at Oxford Reserving books. Mss. And rare books should be used in the 0.r.r. And cannot be reserved, but should be given up each time that the reader leaves. Ah ordinary book or an orderly pile of books, if reserved by a slip of paper bearing name and date, is left, in o.r.r. 3 days at seat, 7 days more in an adjacent reserve (but at Selden End, 10 days at seat) in u.r.r. 3 days at seat, 7 in reserve in the Cam. R.r. Books to be reserved should be brought to the Assistant's table (each work With the reserving slip), and will there be reserved for 7 days. Unreserved books and all Reference and Select books are cleared away daily. A reasonable limit for reserved books is in general twenty volumes. Tracing and painting need special permission. Photography is undertaken by the Clarendon Press order forms are supplied on application. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The Poetry of Catullus The favourites of the gods are released from life before they have had time to outstay their youth. The tribute to those who died young is tribute to the youth which they never lived to lose - ih part, no doubt, objective, but in part also subjective, and prompted by the thought expressed in that line of Thackeray: Oh, the brave days, when we were twenty-one! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In Ethiopia and Eritrea manuscripts, often beautifully illustrated, have been for centuries the principal means of recording not just the Scriptures but also historical information. Ethiopic manuscripts thus provide a unique window into the life and culture of Ethiopians and Eritreans up to the twenty-first century. The collection of Ethiopic manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford is one of the most significant in Europe. The Bodleian acquired its first Ge'ez manuscript in 1636 and further expanded its collection in 1843, when it acquired twenty-four of the manuscripts that the Scottish explorer James Bruce had brought back from Ethiopia and Eritrea. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the Bodleian Library has continued to expand its holdings of Ethiopic manuscripts through new acquisitions. Especially noteworthy are the forty-five manuscripts that the former Oxford University Medical Officer Bent Juel-Jensen bequeathed to the library at his death in 2007. The essays in this lavishly illustrated volume shed light on Ethiopia and Eritrea's fascinating past by looking at some of the most remarkable Ethiopic manuscripts kept at the Bodleian Library. The first three essays function as an introduction and examine the history of the collection, the classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez) language, and the production of manuscripts in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The remaining nine contributions - each devoted to one of the Bodleian's manuscripts - explore different facets of the manuscript tradition of Ethiopia and Eritrea. With its unique focus on the Bodleian's collection, this landmark volume presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of the context in which Ethiopic manuscripts were produced and makes the library's treasures more accessible to scholars and the interested public.

Survey of one of the most important surviving medieval manuscripts reveals much of its contemporary cultural, literary and social milieu. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264 is one of the most famous and most sumptuous illuminated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages. Completed in 1344 in Tournai, in what is now Belgium, the manuscript preserves the fullest version of the interpolated Old French Roman d'Alexandre (Romance of Alexander the Great), and some of the most vivid illustrations of any medieval romance, ranking amongst the greatest achievements of the illuminator's art, its borders in particular offering a panorama of medieval society and imagination. A celebration of courtliness, a commemoration of urban chivalry, a mirror for the prince instructing in the arts of rule, and a meditation on crusade, it manifests the extraordinary richness and creativity of late medieval manuscript culture. This study examines the manuscript as a monumental expression of the beliefs and social practices of its day, placing it in its historical and artistic context; it also analyzes its later reception in England, where the addition of a Middle English Alexander poem and of Marco Polo's Voyages reflects changing concepts of language, historiography, and geography. Mark Cruse is Assistant Professor of French, School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University.

This innovative collection of essays shows how linguistic diversity has inspired people across time and cultures to embark on adventurous journeys through the translation of texts. It tells the story of how ideas have travelled via the medium of translation into different languages and cultures, focusing on illustrated examples ranging from Greek papyri through illuminated manuscripts and fine early books to fantasy languages (such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish), the search for a universal language and the challenges of translation in multicultural Britain.Starting with the concept of Babel itself, which illustrates the early cultural prominence of multilingualism, and with an illustration of a Mediterranean language of four millennia ago (Linear A) which still resists deciphering, it goes on to examine how languages have interacted with each other in different contexts.The book also explores the multilingual transmission of key texts in religion, science (the history of Euclid), animal fable (from Aesop in Greek to Beatrix Potter via La Fontaine, with some fascinating Southeast Asian books), fairy-tale, fantasy and translations of the great Greek epics of Homer.It is lavishly illustrated with a diverse range of material, from papyrus fragments found at Oxyrhynchus to Esperanto handbooks to Asterix cartoons, each offering its own particular adventure into translation.

The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.

During the Second World War the Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired a set of Aramaic letters, eight sealings, and the two leather bags in which the sealed letters were once stored. The letters concern the affairs of Aršāma, satrap of Egypt in the later fifth century. Taken with other material associated with him (mostly in Aramaic, Demotic Egyptian, and Akkadian), they illuminate the Achaemenid world of which Aršāama was a privileged member and evoke a wide range of social, economic, cultural, organizational, and political perspectives, from multi-lingual communication, storage and disbursement of resources, and satrapal remuneration, to cross-regional ethnic movement, long-distance travel, religious practice, and iconographic projection of ideological messages. Particular highlights include a travel authorization (the only example of something implicit in numerous Persepolis documents), texts about the religious life of the Judaean garrison at Elephantine, Aršāma's magnificent seal (a masterpiece of Achaemenid glyptic, inherited from a son of Darius I), and echoes of temporary disturbances to Persian management of Egypt. But what is also impressive is the underlying sense of systematic coherence founded on and expressed in the use of formal, even formalized, written communication as a means of control. The Aršāma dossier is not alone in evoking that sense, but its size, variety, and focus upon a single individual give it a unique quality. Though this material has not been hidden from view, it has been insufficiently explored: it is the purpose of the three volumes of Aršāma and his World: The Bodleian Letters in Context to provide the fullest presentation and historical contextualization of this extraordinary cache yet attempted. Volume I presents and translates the letters alongside a detailed line-by-line commentary, while Volume II reconstructs the two seals that made the clay bullae that sealed the letters, with special attention to Aršāma's magnificent heirloom seal. Volume III comprises a series of thematic essays which further explore the administrative, economic, military, ideological, religious, and artistic environment to which Aršāma and the letters belonged.