England, Neo-Latin, and the Continental Journey: Linguistic and Textual Itineraries

This chapter examines the ramifications of continental travel and associated epistolary communication for English poets of the period. It argues that recourse to neo-Latin, the universal language of diplomacy, served not only to establish a sense of shared space—linguistic, cultural, generic—between England and the continent, but also to signal self-conscious differences (climatic, geographical, historical, political) between England and her continental peers. Through an investigation of a range of ‘performances’ on stages that were ‘academic’, poetic, autobiographical, and epistolographic, it assesses the central role of neo-Latin as a language that underwent a series of textual itineraries. These ‘itineraries’ manifest themselves in a number of ways. Neo-Latin as a shared linguistic medium can facilitate, and quite uniquely so, intertextual engagement with the classics, but now ancient Rome, its language, its mythology, its hierarchy of genres, are viewed through a seventeenth-century lens and appropriated by poets in both England and Italy to describe contemporary events, whether personal, or political. Close examination of the neo-Latin poetry of Milton and Marvell reveals, it is argued, a self-fashioning coloured by such textual itineraries and interchanges. The absorption and replication of continental literary and linguistic methodologies (the academic debate; the etymological play of Marinism; the hybridity of neo-Latin and Italian voices) reveal in short a linguistic and textual reciprocity that gave birth to something very new.

Musicologist-driven writer identification in early music manuscripts

Recent renewed interest in computational writer identification has resulted in an increased number of publications. In relation to historical musicology its application has so far been limited. One of the obstacles seems to be that the clarity of the images from the scans available for computational analysis is often not sufficient. In this paper, the use of the Hinge feature is proposed to avoid segmentation and staff-line removal for effective feature extraction from low quality scans. The use of an auto encoder in Hinge feature space is suggested as an alternative to staff-line removal by image processing, and their performance is compared. The result of the experiment shows an accuracy of 87 % for the dataset containing 84 writers’ samples, and superiority of our segmentation and staff-line removal free approach. Practical analysis on Bach’s autograph manuscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier II (Additional MS. 35021 in the British Library, London) is also presented and the extensive applicability of our approach is demonstrated.

Manuscripts

The aim of this chapter is three-fold: first, to explain systematically the multiple disciplines that have to be employed in the study of manuscripts; second, to review the evolution and development of methodologies used by the scholars who have shaped the present form of scholarship, and to chart outstanding problems that have yet to be resolved; and third, to offer some ideas of what future research might entail and in what way scholarship might unfold. Since numerous and disparate methodologies are employed in the study of Bach manuscripts, the discussions that follow will take nothing for granted, but will describe and define each one as it relates to understanding and reproducing, with as much accuracy as possible, Bach’s intentions in the manuscripts that contain his music.

An Irish eclipse prediction of AD 754: the earliest in the Latin West

This note announces the discovery of a tract on eclipse prediction in Paris, BnF, lat. 6400b, composed by an Irish scholar in ad 754. It is the earliest such text in the early middle ages and it is here placed in its scientific context.