Codex And Context

Most of the essays collected in this volume had their origins in a conference entitled Nouveaux regards sur le manuscript 564 de Chantilly/New Perspectives on the Chantilly Codex held on 13-15 September 2001 in Tours, under the auspices of the Centre d'Etudes Superieures de la Renaissance (Universite Francois Rabelais/Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique). The conference was the last in a series of meetings held that week marking the tenth anniversary of the musical research branch, Programme Ricercar. The idea to hold the conference had emerged in 1999 as we ourselves embarked on a collaborative project on this most fascinating of music sources from the late Middle Ages. Our own extended scrutiny of the codex and its contents, which has culminated in the publication of a detailed study and the first colour reproduction of the manuscript made us keenly aware of the significance of this source and its repertory to our understanding of the history of music before 1600. The Chantilly codex is beyond doubt one of the most important sources for late medieval secular polyphony.

"In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak issues a challenge to scholars working in medieval studies to account for the history of translation, and to experts in translation studies to read the work of medievalists. Focusing on the term "fixer," she unpacks modern uses of the words "interpreter" and "translator" and restores them to their premodern origins: as an active agent who performed a wide range of tasks, as insider informant, local guide, broker of knowledge, and transmitter of art. For Stahuljak, the fixer was a multifunctional intermediary, not a mere translator or interpreter (in the restricted modern sense), but an enabler, facilitator, and mediator, the engine driving the exchange of multiple linguistic, social, cultural, and topographic forms of knowledge. She proposes a paradigmatic shift for both medieval literary history and for the history of translation to confront and interrogate each other in their core disciplinary practices, which promote national, political, and colonial agendas masked as neutrality. Surveying a variety of texts from 1250 to 1500, including crusade treatises and travel writings, accounts of pilgrims and spies, chronicles and romances in both prose and verse, and traversing an impressive range of languages, including Latin, Middle French, German, Italian, and Spanish, Stahuljak asks both medievalists and translation studies scholars to reconsider their assumptions and methods as a way to reconstruct a premodern, precolonial, inclusive world literature"--

Enables the less well-known aspects of the Codex Buranus to receive greater scrutiny, and bring new perspectives to bear on the more thoroughly explored parts of the manuscript. Making accessible existing discourse and encouraging fresh debates on the codex, the essays advocate fresh modes of engagement with its contents, contexts, and composition.

The innovation of the codex in late antiquity -- The wooden tablet codex -- The single gathering codex -- The multigathering codex : an introduction -- Sewing the gatherings -- Boards and their attachment -- Spine linings -- Endbands -- Covers and their decoration -- Fastenings -- Bookmarks and board corner straps

The Codex Amiatinus is perhaps the most famous copy of the Bible surviving in Western Europe. A fascinating and elusive manuscript, with a suite of decorated folios, it was made in Anglo-Saxon England around the turn of the eighth century at the twin monastic foundation of Wearmouth and Jarrow as one of three such 'pandects'. Created at the monastic foundation celebrated in the work of the Venerable Bede, this vast and luxe manuscript was sent by the Northumbrian monks as a gift to the Pope in 716 and, after a sojourn of some 900 years at Monte Amiato (Tuscany), it was donated to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence in the eighteenth century. As a result of an international conference held to commemorate the 1300th anniversary of the departure of the manuscript from Northumberland and coinciding with the production and presentation of a facsimile of the Codex to the Museum at Jarrow, this volume - the first devoted to the Codex Amiatinus - brings together twelve essays that offer a new appraisal of this remarkable book, and of the contexts that surrounded its production. Encompassing its text, its images, its social, political and ecclesiastical contexts and its later medieval legacy, the contributions to this volume highlight several previously unrecognised aspects and details of the manuscript that further our understanding of the Codex as a book, and as inheritor and progenitor of manuscript traditions in its own right.