Timothie Bright And The Origins Of Early Modern Shorthand

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination—less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright’s proscriptions. These are followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative—and prophylactic. Bright’s technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information—as theory, and technology.

An excerpt from Shorthand and Typing, Vol. I: THE first man in England who invented marks to represent words was Timothy Bright, M.D., who published in the reign of Elizabeth, in the year 1588, a treatise called "Characterie, an arte of shorte, swifte and secrete writing by character. Invented by Timothe Bright, Doctor of Phisike. Imprinted at London by I. Windet, the assigne of Tim. Bright, 1588. Cum privilegio Regise Majestatis. Forbidding all other to print the same." Mr. Angel, in his work on Shorthand (1759), to which reference will be made more in detail in jts chronological order, says: "I have indeed an English manuscript, dated 1331, but from the language, spelling and letters I cannot think it of that antiquity, and therefore shall not dispute Mr. Bright's claim to his being the first publisher of Shorthand in English." The book is dedicated to the Queen - "To the most high and mighty Prince Elizabeth." He says: "Cicero did account it worthy his labour, and no less profitable to the Roman Commonweale, to invent a speedy kind of writing by character." He quotes Plutarch, and adds that this invention was increased afterwards by Seneca, and that the number of characters grew to seven thousand. There are few characters, short and easy, "Every Character Answering A Word." It appears there was no alphabet. There are, it is true, certain marks for the letters, but they are incapable of being joined. They are on the principle of the secret writing which was so common at that period, purely arbitrary. The letter A was a vertical stroke ( | ). By adding various marks in different positions the letter A represented 12 words, namely, abound, about, accept, accuse, advance, air, again, age, all, almost, also, although. But A is also represented by a horizontal stroke (-), and by final additions in varying positions Bright gets another dozen words.... The reader is next instructed to learn the characterie words by heart: he is to join every character to the word: then he is to learn to refer either words of like signification or of the same kind, or contraries, into those that be quite characterie: and thus "thou hast in this book an English Dictionary." The reader is also informed that "thou may'st attain it if thou wilt but one month take pains therein: and by continuance of another month may'st thou attain to great readiness." There is a Table of Words, with characters annexed, which, said the author, addressing the reader in the simplest language, "thou art to get by heart." John Willis (1602) says of this Table of Words, "it required such understanding and memory that few of the ordinary sort of people could attain to the knowledge thereof." Subsequently Peter Bales published the Table of Words considerably increased. Queen Elizabeth granted Timothy Bright a patent dated 26th July 1588 (Patent Office Roll, 30th Elizabeth, part 12), as follows:- Elizabeth, by the Grace of God, to all manner of printers, booksellers, stacyoners, and other oure officers, ministers, and subjects greetinge. Whereas, oure well-beloved subject, Tymothe Brighte, Doctor of Phisicke, hath latelie invented a shorte and newe kynde of writing by charecter to the furtheraunce of goode learninge, knowe ye that wee of oure Grace speciall, mere mocyon and c'ten knowledge have graunted and geven priviledge, free libertie and lycence, and by theise presents for us oure heires and successors do graunte and gyve pryvyledge, free liberty and lycence to the saide Tymothe Brighte and to his assignes for and dueringe the space of fyfteene yeeres next ensewinge the date hereof for hym and his assignes onlie to teache, imprynte and publishe or cause to be taughte, imprynted and published in or by character not before this tyme com'onlye knowne and used by anye other oure subjects....

Interdisciplinary Edo brings together scholars from across the methodological spectrum to explore new approaches to innovative humanistic research on early modern Japan (1603–1868). It makes an intervention in the field by thinking across conventional disciplinary boundaries toward a holistic and cohesive approach to Japan’s early modern period. By taking historical, religious, literary, and art historical analyses into account, the contributors hope to begin a new, transdisciplinary conversation on political formation, social interaction, and cultural proliferation under the “Great Peace” of the Tokugawa regime. This book comprises 14 essays by specialists of history, literature, religious studies, and art history. Major topics include Edo-period Japan’s cultural, intellectual, and economic connections to the early modern world; environmental humanities and material culture; popular culture and aesthetics; and the question of how contemporary academic demarcation lines impact the current study of Tokugawa Japan. Individual essays range in scale from individual paintings and works of prose fiction to the tectonic plates underlying the Yamashiro basin and span topics from overseas medicinal exchange and premodern cartography to the history of intoxication. Interdisciplinary Edo will be of immediate interest to all scholars focusing on the early modern period, as well as to researchers studying other periods of Japanese studies. As part of an ongoing and inclusive process of pluralizing and deprovincializing global conceptions of early modernity, this book will contribute to historiographical interventions outside Japan studies as well.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.

This is the first comprehensive study of an ingenious number-notation from the Middle Ages that was devised by monks and mainly used in monasteries. A simple notation for representing any number up to 99 by a single cipher, somehow related to an ancient Greek shorthand, first appeared in early-13th-century England, brought from Athens by an English monk. A second, more useful version, due to Cistercian monks, is first attested in the late 13th century in what is today the border country between Belgium and France: with this any number up to 9999 can be represented by a single cipher. The ciphers were used in scriptoria - for the foliation of manuscripts, for writing year-numbers, preparing indexes and concordances, numbering sermons and the like, and outside the scriptoria - for marking the scales on an astronomical instrument, writing year-numbers in astronomical tables, and for incising volumes on wine-barrels. Related notations were used in medieval and Renaissance shorthands and coded scripts. This richly-illustrated book surveys the medieval manuscripts and Renaissance books in which the ciphers occur, and takes a close look at an intriguing astrolabe from 14th-century Picardy marked with ciphers. With Indices. "Mit Kings luzider Beschreibung und Bewertung der einzelnen Funde und ihrer Beziehungen wird zugleich die Forschungsgeschichte - die bis dato durch Widerspruechlichkeit und Diskontinuit�t gepr�gt ist - umfassend aufgearbeitet." Zeitschrift fuer Germanistik.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages' explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople.