Boots Book-lovers' Library and the novel: The impact of a circulating library market on twentieth-century fiction

In a Report for the Society of Bookmen in 1928, British publishers estimated that between a quarter to two thirds of all the books they published went to four circulating libraries: Boots, Smith’s, Mudie’s, and The Times bookclub. This essay examines the literary impact of one of the largest of these, Boots Book-lovers’ Library (1899-66), which by 1935 had around 400 libraries attached to their high-street pharmacies catering for the tastes of over one million subscribers a year. Compared to the wealth of studies examining the influence of the library market in the Victorian period, the significance of the subscription libraries as key distributors of fiction in the twentieth century is not well known. But private libraries expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century to cater for what Sidney Dark termed a ‘new reading public’, and records in publishers’ archives indicate that authors routinely adapted their unpublished manuscripts in order to meet the perceived demands of this library reader. This article examines the impact of the Boots Book-lovers’ Library market on authors’ practices of writing and revision, and on literary marketing and censorship. It focuses in particular on the author James Hanley (1897-1985), using unpublished correspondence in the Chatto & Windus archive at the University of Reading to demonstrate how the publisher’s sense of the tastes and expectations of the Boots library reader influenced the editorial process.

Κύριε, Δέσποτα, Domine: Greek Politeness in the Roman Empire

Why did the Greeks of the Roman period make such extensive use of the vocative κύριε, when Greeks of earlier periods had been content with only one vocative meaning ‘master’, δέσποτα? This study, based primarily on a comprehensive search of documentary papyri but also making extensive use of literary evidence (particularly that of the Septuagint and New Testament), traces the development of both terms from the classical period to the seventh century AD. It concludes that κύριε was created to provide a translation for Latin domine, and that domine, which has often been considered a translation of κύριε, had a Roman origin. In addition, both κύριε and domine were from their beginnings much less deferential than is traditionally supposed, so that neither term underwent the process of ‘weakening’ which converted English ‘master’ into ‘Mr’. δέσποτα, which was originally far more deferential than the other two terms, did undergo some weakening, but not (until a very late period) as much as is usually supposed. These findings in turn imply that Imperial politeness has been somewhat misunderstood and suggest that the Greeks of the first few centuries AD were much less servile in their language than is traditionally assumed.

Writers' rooms: theories of contemporary authorship in portraits of creative spaces

This article analyzes two series of photographs and essays on writers’ rooms published in England and Canada in 2007 and 2008. The Guardian’s Writers Rooms series, with photographs by Eamon McCabe, ran in 2007. In the summer of 2008, The Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival began to post its own version of The Guardian column on its website by displaying, each week leading up to the Festival in September, a different writer’s “writing space” and an accompanying paragraph. I argue that these images of writers’ rooms, which suggest a cultural fascination with authors’ private compositional practices and materials, reveal a great deal about theoretical constructions of authorship implicit in contemporary literary culture. Far from possessing the museum quality of dead authors’ spaces, rooms that are still being used, incorporating new forms of writing technology, and having drafts of manuscripts scattered around them, can offer insight into such well-worn and ineffable areas of speculation as inspiration, singular authorial genius, and literary productivity.

Technology, ritual and Anglo-Saxon agrarian production: the biography of a seventh-century century plough coulter from Lyminge, Kent

The discovery of an unusual early medieval plough coulter in a well-dated Anglo-Saxon settlement context in Kent suggests that continentally derived technology was in use in this powerful kingdom centuries before heavy ploughs were first depicted in Late Saxon manuscripts. The substantial investment required to manufacture the coulter, the significant damage and wear that it sustained during use and the circumstances of its ultimate ritual deposition are explored. Investigative conservation, high-resolution recording and metallographic analysis illuminate the form, function and use-life of the coulter. An examination of the deposition contexts of plough-irons in early medieval northern Europe sheds important new light on the ritual actions of plough symbolism in an age of religious hybridity and transformation.

The Earls of Kildare and their books at the end of the Middle Ages

The two surviving inventories of the library of the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare bear witness to a particularly large and diverse collection of books in the Earls' castle at Maynooth, Co. Kildare. Between them, the lists record well over one hundred separate items in four languages: Latin, French, English and Irish. This paper traces the history of the library and analyses the Fitzgeralds' particular interests as book collectors and as readers. It provides the first full published set of suggested identifications and bibliographical details for the books at Maynooth. It also includes a fresh transcription of the library lists and a discussion of the manuscript context in which they are preserved. Sources like the Kildare library lists provide valuable evidence for the potential circulation of a wide range of non-native manuscripts and prints in late-medieval Ireland.

Columnar translation: an ancient interpretive tool that the Romans gave the Greeks

Among the more peculiar literary papyri uncovered in the past century are numerous bilingual texts of Virgil and Cicero, with the Latin original and a Greek translation arranged in distinctive narrow columns. These materials, variously classified as texts with translations or as glossaries, were evidently used by Greek-speaking students when they first started to read Latin literature. They thus provide a unique window into the experience of the first of many groups of non-native Latin speakers to struggle with reading the classics of Latin literature.

Family, locality and nationality: vernacular adaptations of the Expugnatio Hibernica from late medieval Ireland

This paper examines two late medieval abridgements of Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica, one in Hiberno-English and one in Irish. The manuscripts in which these adaptations survive all date from the late fifteenth century and appear to bear witness to a sudden and pronounced interest in Gerald’s text. Drawing on evidence from the extant manuscripts, this paper explores the readerships of, and the nature of their interest in, these adaptations. A key conclusion is that the Expugnatio, which gives prominence to Gerald's own relatives, the Fitzgeralds, was valued as a family history by the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and their allies. The Earls were at the height of their power in the period in which these manuscripts were produced. Examination of this neglected evidence of the adaptation and readership of the Expugnatio in late medieval Ireland suggests that, for some medieval readers at least, the primary identities Gerald’s text expressed were familial and local rather than colonial or national.

Sermon notes and manuscript communities

Any reader of manuscript catalogues knows how common the unhelpfully vague entry “sermon notes, 17th-century” can be. This essay explores whether we can find in sermon notes the kinds of textual communities that have been found through the reconstruction of other routes of manuscript circulation. It will unpick what those laconic catalogue entries mean, and distinguish the different kinds of sermon notes found in our archival collections (some derived from the original preacher, some from hearers, some from readers of manuscript and printed copies). The physical forms of different sorts of “sermon notes” alerts us to the different types of authors who created these manuscripts, and the different purposes involved in preserving an oration in textual form, purposes which included fostering the creation and maintenance of communal identities among the self-consciously godly or Catholic recusants.

Writing westwards: medieval English literature and its early modern Irish audiences

Quite a few texts from England were translated into Irish in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. The number of these texts was significant enough to suggest that foreign material of this sort enjoyed something of a vogue in late-medieval Ireland. Translated texts include Mandeville’s Travels, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, Fierabras and a selection of saints’ lives. Scholars have paid little attention to the origins and initial readerships of these texts, but still less research has been conducted into their afterlife in early modern Ireland. However, a strikingly high number of these works continued to be read and copied well into the seventeenth century and some, such as the Irish translations of Octavian and William of Palerne, only survive in manuscripts from this later period. This paper takes these translations as a test case to explore the ways in which a cross-period approach to such writing is applicable in Ireland, a country where the renaissance is generally considered to have taken little hold. It considers the extent to which Irish reception of this translated material shifts and evolves in the course of this turbulent period and whether the same factors that contributed to the continued demand for a range of similar texts in England into the seventeenth century are also discernible in the Irish context.

Language networks, literary translation and the friars in late medieval ireland

Dublin, Trinity College MS 667 (olim F 5 3) is something of a meeting point of languages and traditions, representing one of the most significant witnesses to Latin exemplars for vernacular translations to survive from medieval Ireland. What is more, the translated texts appear to travel in groups, with several Irish-language manuscripts bearing close comparison to Trinity 667 in the texts and versions of texts they contain. Examining these texts and the contexts in which they circulated in Irish can give us a sense of the sorts of historical and cultural currents to which such translation work appears to have been responding.

Common Features in Vector Nonlinear Time Series Models

This thesis consists of four manuscripts in the area of nonlinear time series econometrics on topics of testing, modeling and forecasting nonlinear common features. The aim of this thesis is to develop new econometric contributions for hypothesis testing and forecasting in these area. Both stationary and nonstationary time series are concerned. A definition of common features is proposed in an appropriate way to each class. Based on the definition, a vector nonlinear time series model with common features is set up for testing for common features. The proposed models are available for forecasting as well after being well specified. The first paper addresses a testing procedure on nonstationary time series. A class of nonlinear cointegration, smooth-transition (ST) cointegration, is examined. The ST cointegration nests the previously developed linear and threshold cointegration. An Ftypetest for examining the ST cointegration is derived when stationary transition variables are imposed rather than nonstationary variables. Later ones drive the test standard, while the former ones make the test nonstandard. This has important implications for empirical work. It is crucial to distinguish between the cases with stationary and nonstationary transition variables so that the correct test can be used. The second and the fourth papers develop testing approaches for stationary time series. In particular, the vector ST autoregressive (VSTAR) model is extended to allow for common nonlinear features (CNFs). These two papers propose a modeling procedure and derive tests for the presence of CNFs. Including model specification using the testing contributions above, the third paper considers forecasting with vector nonlinear time series models and extends the procedures available for univariate nonlinear models. The VSTAR model with CNFs and the ST cointegration model in the previous papers are exemplified in detail,and thereafter illustrated within two corresponding macroeconomic data sets.

October 2012: Volume 2 Issue 1

In this Issue: Friends of Dacus Endowment Nears GoalDacus Library of Winthrop UniversityMedieval Manuscripts Acquired; Carlisle Recognized by Friends

Catálogo dos livros de Horas da Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil

O presente trabalho objetivou identificar a coleção dos livros de horas da Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, com vistas a produzir um catálogo. A coleção abrange nove livros manuscritos iluminados; neste trabalho, porém, foram identificados apenas os oito livros produzidos na segunda metade do século XV. Quatro desses livros são provenientes da Real Biblioteca – Casa do Infantado, que veio para o Brasil em 1808 com a família real portuguesa, tornando-se o núcleo inicial da Biblioteca Nacional brasileira. Na primeira parte apresentamos as considerações teóricas situando o período no qual o livro de horas se inscreve, destacando a sua importância, tanto na sociedade quanto no desenvolvimento da piedade do homem na cristandade medieval. Apresentamos também um breve histórico da Biblioteca Nacional, depositária da coleção dos livros de horas e, concluindo a primeira parte, os dados referentes à construção do catálogo. A segunda parte é o catálogo propriamente dito, onde os livros estão descritos obedecendo às normas internacionais vigentes, viabilizando o acesso, a divulgação e o intercâmbio de informações, promovendo assim a valorização e a preservação desses bens culturais e patrimoniais.