A History of Reading
Page 36
READING THE FUTURE
1. Michel Lemoine, “L’Oeuvre encyclopédique de Vincent de Beauvais”, in Maurice de Gandillac et al., La Pensée encyclopédique au Moyen Age (Paris, 1966).
2. Voluspa, ed. Sigurdur Nordal, trans. Ommo Wilts (Oxford, 1980).
3. Virgil, Aeneid, ed. H.R. Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass., & London), VI: 48–49.
4. Petronius, Satyricon, ed. M. Heseltine (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1967), XV. 48.
5. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1952).
6. Pausanias, Description of Greece, ed. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1948), X. 12–1; Euripides, prologue to Lamia, ed. A.S. Way (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1965).
7. In The Greek Myths (London, 1955), II. 132.5, Robert Graves notes that “the whereabouts of Erytheia, also called Erythrea or Erythria, is disputed.” According to Graves, it might be an island beyond the ocean, or off the coast of Lusitania, or it might be a name given to the island of Leon on which the earliest city of Gades was built.
8. Pausanias, Description of Greece, X. 12.4–8.
9. Aurelian, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, 25, 4–6, quoted in John Ferguson, Utopias of the Classical World (London, 1975).
10. Eusebius Pamphilis, Ecclesiastical History: The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, in Four Books (London, 1845), Ch. XVIII.
11. Ferguson, Utopias of the Classical World.
12. Bernard Botte, Les Origines de la Noël et de l’Épiphanie (Paris, 1932). Despite a reference in the Liber pontificalis indicating that Pope Telesphorus initiated the celebration of Christmas in Rome between 127 and 136, the first certain mention of December 25 as the date of Christ’s birthday is in the Deposito martyrum of the Philocalian Calendar of 354.
13. The Edict of Milan, in Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1943).
14. The English novelist Charles Kingsley made the Neoplatonic philosopher the heroine of his now neglected novel Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face (London, 1853).
15. Jacques Lacarrière, Les Hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris, 1975).
16. C. Baur, Der heilige Johannes Chrysostomus und seine Zeit, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1929–30).
17. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993). Also, see the remarkable Jacques Giès & Monique Cohen, Sérinde, Terre de Bouddha. Dix siècles d’art sur la Route de la Soie. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, 1996.
18. J. Daniélou & H.I. Marrou, The Christian Centuries, Vol. I (London, 1964).
19. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History.
20. Cicero, De Divinatione, ed. W.A. Falconer (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972), II. 54.
21. Saint Augustine, The City of God, Vol. VI, ed. W.C. Greene (London & Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
22. Lucien Broche, La Cathédrale de Laon (Paris, 1926).
23. Virgil, “Eclogue IV”, as quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History.
24. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, British Film Institute Film Classics (London, 1992).
25. Anita Desai, “A Reading Rat on the Moors”, in Soho Square III, ed. Alberto Manguel (London, 1990).
26. Aelius Lampridius, Vita Severi Alexandri, 4.6, 14.5, quoted in L.P. Wilkinson, The Roman Experience (London, 1975).
27. Cf. Helen A. Loane, “The Sortes Vergilianae”, in The Classical Weekly 21/24, New York, Apr. 30, 1928. Loane quotes De Quincey, according to whom tradition held that the name of Virgil’s maternal grandfather was Magus. The people of Naples, says De Quincey, mistook the name for a profession and held that Virgil “had stepped by mere succession and right of inheritance into his wicked old grandpapa’s infernal powers and knowledge, both of which he exercised for centuries without blame, and for the benefit of the faithful.” Thomas De Quincey, Collected Writings (London, 1896), III. 251–269.
28. Aelius Spartianus, Vita Hadriani, 2.8, in Scriptores Historiae Augustae, quoted in Loane, “The Sortes Vergilianae”. Not only Virgil was consulted in this manner. Cicero, writing in the first century BC (De Natura Deorum, II. 2) tells of the augur Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who in 162 BC “caused the resignation of the consuls at whose election he had presided in the previous year, basing his decision on a fault in the auspices, of which he became aware ‘when reading the books’.”
29. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, 1989).
30. “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.…” Deuteronomy 18: 10–12.
31. Gaspar Peucer, Les Devins ou Commentaire des principales sortes de devinations, trans. Simon Goulard (?) (Sens [?], 1434).
32. Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, 10–12.
33. Manuel Mujica Láinez, Bomarzo (Buenos Aires, 1979), Ch. II.
34. William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, A.D. 1598 to A.D. 1867 (London, 1868).
35. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ed. J.D. Crowley (London & Oxford, 1976).
36. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London, 1874).
37. Robert Louis Stevenson (with Lloyd Osbourne), The Ebb Tide (London, 1894).
THE SYMBOLIC READER
1. André Kertész, On Reading (New York, 1971).
2. Michael Olmert, The Smithsonian Book of Books (Washington, 1992).
3. Beverley Smith, “Homes of the 1990s to stress substance”, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Jan. 13, 1990.
4. Andrew Martindale, Gothic Art from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1967).
5. Quoted in Réau, Louis, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, Vol. II (Paris, 1957).
6. Marienbild in Rheinland und Westfalen, catalogue of an exhibition at Villa Hugel, Essen, 1968.
7. George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford, 1954).
8. De Madonna in de Kunst, catalogue of an exhibition, Antwerp, 1954.
9. The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden, intr. by Frank Crane (New York, 1974).
10. Protoevangelion, ibid., IX, 1–9.
11. Mary at the well and Mary at the spinning-wheel are the most common images of the Annunciation in early Christian art, especially in Byzantine depictions from the fifth century onwards. Before that time, portrayals of the Annunciation are scarce and schematic. The earliest extant depiction of Mary and the angel precedes Martini’s Annunciation by ten centuries. Painted in grubby colours on one wall of the Catacomb of St. Priscilla, in the outskirts of Rome, it shows a featureless seated Virgin listening to a standing man — an angel wingless and uncrowned.
12. John 1: 14.
13. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1986).
14. The Letters of Peter Abelard, ed. Betty Radice (London, 1974).
15. Hildegard of Bingen, Opera omnia, in Patrologia Latina, Vol. LXXII (Paris, 1844–55).
16. Quoted in Carol Ochs, Behind the Sex of God: Toward a New Consciousness—Transcending Matriarchy and Patriarchy (Boston, 1977).
17. San Bernardino, Prediche volgari, in Creighton E. Gilbert, Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents (Evanston, 1980).
18. Victor Cousin, ed., Petri Abaelardi Opera, 2 vols. (London, 1849–59).
19. Five centuries later not much seemed to have changed, as witness the sermon delivered by the learned J.W. Burgon in 1884, on the occasion of a proposal made at Oxford to admit women to the university: “Will none of you have the generosity or the candour to tell [Woman] what a very disagreeable creature, in Man’s account, she will inevitably become? If she is to compete successfully with men for ‘honours’, you must needs put the classic writers of antiquity unreservedly into her hands — in other words, must introduce her to the obsceniti
es of Greek and Roman literature. Can you seriously intend it? … I take leave of the subject with a short Allocution addressed to the other sex.… Inferior to us God made you: and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain.” Quoted in Jan Morris, ed., The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford, 1978).
20. S. Harksen, Women in the Middle Ages (New York, 1976).
21. Margaret Wade Labarge, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life (London, 1986).
22. Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London, 1985).
23. Paul J. Achtemeier, ed., Harper’s Bible Dictionary (San Francisco, 1985).
24. Isaiah 7: 14.
25. Anna Jameson, Legends of the Madonna (Boston & New York, 1898).
26. Proverbs 9: 1, 9: 3–5.
27. Martin Buber, Erzählungen der Chassidim (Berlin, 1947).
28. E.P. Spencer, “L’Horloge de Sapience” (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, Ms. IV 111), in Scriptorium, 1963, XVII.
29. C.G. Jung, “Answer to Job”, in Psychology and Religion, West and East (New York, 1960).
30. Merlin Stone, The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women’s Rites (New York, 1976).
31. Carolyne Walker Bynum, Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley & London, 1982).
32. St. Gregoire de Tours, L’Histoire des Rois Francs, ed. J.J.E. Roy, pref. by Erich Aurebach (Paris, 1990).
33. Heinz Kahlen & Cyril Mango, Hagia Sophia (Berlin, 1967).
34. In “The Fourteenth-Century Common Reader”, an unpublished paper delivered at the Kalamazoo Conference of 1992, referring to the image of the reading Mary in the fourteenth-century Book of Hours, Daniel Willi man suggests that “without apology, the Book of Hours embodies women’s appropriation of an opus Dei and of literacy”.
35. Ferdinando Bologna, Gli affreschi di Simone Martini ad Assisi (Milan, 1965).
36. Giovanni Paccagnini, Simone Martini (Milan, 1957).
37. Colyn de Coter, Virgin and Child Crowned by Angels, 1490–1510, in the Chicago Art Institute; the anonymous Madonna auf der Rasenbank, Upper Rhine, circa 1470–80, in the Augustinermuseum, Freiburg; and many others.
38. Plutarch, “On the Fortune of Alexander”, 327: 4, in Moralia, Vol. IV, ed. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972). Also Plutarch, “Life of Alexander”, VIII and XXVI, in The Parallel Lives, ed. B. Perrin (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970).
39. Act II, scene ii. George Steiner has suggested that the book is Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais (“Le trope du livre-monde dans Shakespeare”, conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Mar. 23, 1995).
40. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, ed. Celina S. de Cortázar & Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires, 1969), I: 6.
41. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s Table Talk, intr. by Hugh Trevor-Roper (London, 1953).
READING WITHIN WALLS
1. Thomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, English ed. (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1983).
2. Plato, Laws, ed. Rev. R.G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1949), VII, 804 c–e.
3. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
4. Ibid.
5. Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels.
6. C. Ruiz Montero, “Una observación para la cronología de Caritón de Afrodisias”, in Estudios Clásicos 24 (Madrid, 1980).
7. Santa Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la Vida, II:1, in Obras Completas, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos (Madrid, 1967).
8. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993).
9. Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (Oxford, 1964).
10. “The vast majority of women in Murasaki’s day toiled arduously in the fields, were subject to harsh treatment by their men, bred young and frequently, and died at an early age, without having given any more thought to material independence or cultural enjoyments than to the possibility of visiting the moon.” Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted ibid.
13. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968).
14. Ivan Morris, introduction to Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (Oxford and London, 1967).
15. Quoted in Morris, The World of the Shining Prince.
16. Lady Sarashina, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, edited by Ivan Morris (London, 1971).
17. Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, trans. Ivan Morris (Oxford and London, 1967).
18. Quoted in Morris, The World of the Shining Prince.
19. George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford, 1992).
20. Rose Hempel, Japan zur Heian-Zeit: Kunst und Kultur (Freiburg, 1983).
21. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York, 1989).
22. Edmund White, Foreword to The Faber Book of Gay Short Stories (London, 1991).
23. Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Act II, in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G.F. Mayne (London & Glasgow, 1948).
STEALING BOOKS
1. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978).
2. François-René Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Paris, 1849–50).
3. Jean Viardot, “Livres rares et pratiques bibliophiliques”, in Histoire de l’édition française, Vol. II (Paris, 1984).
4. Michael Olmert, The Smithsonian Book of Books (Washington, 1992).
5. Geo. Haven Putnam, Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages, Vol. I (New York, 1896–97).
6. Ibid.
7. P. Riberette, Les Bibliothèques françaises pendant la Révolution (Paris, 1970).
8. Bibliothèque Nationale, Le Livre dans la vie quotidienne (Paris, 1975).
9. Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneva, 1988).
10. Madeleine B. Stern & Leona Rostenberg, “A Study in ‘Bibliokleptomania’ ”, in Bookman’s Weekly, No. 67, New York, June 22, 1981.
11. Quoted in A.N.L. Munby, “The Earl and the Thief: Lord Ashburnham and Count Libri”, in Harvard Literary Bulletin, Vol. XVII, Cambridge, Mass., 1969.
12. Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes (Paris, 1834).
13. Albert Cim, Amateurs et Voleurs de Livres (Paris, 1903).
14. Ibid.
15. Léopold Delisle, Les Manuscrits des Fonds Libri et Barrois (Paris, 1888).
16. Marcel Proust, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris, 1896).
17. Munby, “The Earl and the Thief”.
18. Philippe Vigier, “Paris pendant la monarchie de juillet 1830–1848”, in Nouvelle Histoire de Paris (Paris, 1991).
19. Jean Freustié, Prosper Mérimée, 1803–1870 (Paris, 1982).
20. Prosper Mérimée, Correspondance, établie et annotée par Maurice Parturier Vol. V: 1847–1849 (Paris, 1946).
21. Prosper Mérimée, “Le Procès de M. Libri”, in Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, Apr. 15, 1852.
22. Delisle, Les Manuscrits des Fonds Libri et Barrois.
23. Cim, Amateurs et voleurs de livres.
24. Lawrence S. Thompson, “Notes on Bibliokleptomania”, in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, New York, Sept. 1944.
25. Rudolf Buchner, Bücher und Menschen (Berlin, 1976).
26. Thompson, “Notes on Bibliokleptomania”.
27. Cim, Amateurs et voleurs de livres.
28. Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, second series (London, 1833).
THE AUTHOR AS READER
1. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I–IX, ed. A.M. Guillemin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927–28), VI: 17.
2. Even the Emperor Augustus attended these readings “with both goodwill and patience”: Suetonius, “Augustus”, 89: 3, in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1948).
3. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I–IX, V: 12, VII: 17.
4. Ibid., I: 13.
5.
Ibid., VIII: 12.
6. Juvenal, VII: 39–47, in Juvenal and Persius: Works, ed. G.G. Ramsay (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1952).
7. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I—IX, II: 19.
8. Ibid., V: 17.
9. Ibid., IV: 27.
10. Horace, “A Letter to Augustus”, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D.A. Russell & M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1989).
11. Martial, Epigrammata, III: 44, in Works, ed. W.C.A. Ker (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1919–20).
12. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I—IX, I: 13.
13. Ibid., IX: 3.
14. Ibid., IX: 23.
15. Ibid., IX: 11.
16. Ibid., VI: 21.
17. According to the poet Louis MacNeice, after one of Thomas’s readings “an actor who had been standing dazzled in the wings said to him with amazement, ‘Mr Thomas, one of your pauses was fifty seconds!’ Dylan drew himself up, injured (a thing he was good at): ‘Read as fast as I could’, he said haughtily.” John Berryman, “After Many A Summer: Memories of Dylan Thomas”, in The Times Literary Supplement, London, Sept. 3, 1993.
18. Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Berne, 1958).
19. Dante, De vulgare eloquentia, trans. & ed. Vittorio Coletti (Milan, 1991).
20. Jean de Joinville, Histoire de saint Louis, ed. Noël Corbett (Paris, 1977).
21. William Nelson, “From ‘Listen Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader’ ”, in University of Toronto Quarterly 47/2 (Winter 1976–77).
22. Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid, 1969).
23. María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística de La Celestina (Buenos Aires, 1967).
24. Ludovico Ariosto, Tutte le opere, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan, 1964), I: XXXVIII, quoted in Nelson, “From ‘Listen Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader’ ”.
25. Ruth Crosby, “Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery”, in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 13, Cambridge, Mass., 1938.
26. Quoted in M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1993).