Gura catalogues and describes the 288 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts held by the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College.

The first full account of North America’s largest collection of traditional Irish-language manuscripts. Harvard University has the largest collection of Irish-language codices in North America, held in Houghton Library, its rare book repository. The manuscripts are a part of the age-old heritage of Irish book production, dating to the early Middle Ages. Handwritten works in Houghton contain versions of medieval poetry and sagas, recopied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which period most of the library’s documents belong. Contemporary writings from that time, as well as ones by the post-Famine Irish immigrant community in the United States, are included. This catalogue describes the collection in full for the first time and will be an invaluable aid to research on Irish and Irish American cultural and literary output. The author’s introduction examines how the collection was formed. This untold story is an important chapter in America’s intellectual history, reflecting a phase of unprecedented expansion in Harvard University’s scholarship and teaching during the early twentieth century when the institution’s program of studies began to accommodate an increasing range of European languages and literatures and their sources. This indispensable guide to a major repository’s records of the Irish past, and of America’s Irish diaspora, will interest specialists in early and post-medieval codices. It should prove of relevance as well to scholars and students of comparative literature, cultural studies, and Irish and Irish American history.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

Visual Translation breaks new ground in the study of French manuscripts, contributing to the fields of French humanism, textual translation, and the reception of the classical tradition in the first half of the fifteenth century. While the prominence and quality of illustrations in French manuscripts have attracted attention, their images have rarely been studied systematically as components of humanist translation. Anne D. Hedeman fills this gap by studying the humanist book production closely supervised by Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Lebègue for courtly Parisian audiences in the first half of the fifteenth century. Hedeman explores how visual translation works in a series of unusually densely illuminated manuscripts associated with Laurent and Lebègue circa 1404–54. These manuscripts cover both Latin texts, such as Statius’s Thebiad and Achilleid, Terence’s Comedies, and Sallust’s Conspiracy of Cataline and Jurguthine War, and French translations of Cicero’s De senectute, Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and Decameron, and Bruni’s De bello Punico primo. Illuminations constitute a significant part of these manuscripts’ textual apparatus, which helped shape access to and interpretation of the texts for a French audience. Hedeman considers them as a group and reveals Laurent’s and Lebègue’s growing understanding of visual rhetoric and its ability to visually translate texts originating in a culture removed in time or geography for medieval readers who sought to understand them. The book discusses what happens when the visual cycles so carefully devised in collaboration with libraries and artists by Laurent and Lebègue escaped their control in a process of normalization. With over 180 color images, this major reference book will appeal to students and scholars of French, comparative literature, art history, history of the book, and translation studies.

This volume pays homage to manuscripts and early printed books as material witnesses in the Middle Ages. The essays discuss broad questions relating to the partisan interpretation of texts, but they also illustrate how small details of format, script, and decoration uncover the text, its context, and its reception. Some articles explore scientific methods, examining whether social network analysis can offer an advance over traditional methods of establishing textual connections and using statistics to understand the transmission of ancillary materials. Others present critical editions and contextualize lost genres, providing a first edition of an unedited summary of Ovid's Metamorphoses steeped in the Boccaccian genealogical tradition, exploring mock funeral eulogies for animals, and discussing the variety of texts that pay witness to Ovid's penetration into vernacular literature. A closing brace of essays catalogue collections and reflect on changing trends in the study of manuscripts.

This practical book is a detailed guide to various databases and computer services worldwide that provide access to medieval manuscripts. Covering everything from First Century Latin texts and ancient Greek manuscripts to medieval and Renaissance mathematical studies, Bibliographic Access to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts provides thorough descriptions of electronic cataloging methods and the databanks either in progress or in existence that include these manuscripts. Five independent systems of cataloging these materials with computers and PCs are explained and evaluated in detail. This thorough volume features a discussion of the difficulties of using MARCs and AMCs to handle manuscript descriptions for which they were not designed and offers new ideas for meeting the needs of individual users and the needs of libraries networking through computer systems. Authoritative contributors include international experts in the use of computers for humanistic research and prominent scholars in the history of science and mathematics, medieval history and literature, and cartography. The helpful chapters contain valuable information on computer systems created to function as information retrieval catalogs for book descriptions in readable formats. Researchers will appreciate the practical advice for locating and using manuscripts and rare books in libraries. Archivists and rare collections librarians will find this a helpful and in-depth tool in finding information on successful cataloging and access to medieval sources.