Nordic Latin man­u­script frag­ments: the destruc­tion and recon­struc­tion of medieval books
Much of what is known about the past often rests upon the chance sur­vival of objects and texts. Nowhere is this bet­ter illus­trat­ed than in the frag­ments of medieval man­u­scripts re-used as book­bind­ings in the six­teenth and sev­en­teenth cen­turies. Such frag­ments pro­vide a tan­ta­liz­ing, yet often prob­lem­at­ic glimpse into the man­u­script cul­ture of the Mid­dle Ages. Explor­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ties and dif­fi­cul­ties such doc­u­ments pro­vide, this vol­ume con­cen­trates on the c. 50,000 frag­ments of medieval Latin man­u­scripts stored in archives across the five Nordic coun­tries of Den­mark, Fin­land, Ice­land, Nor­way and Swe­den. This large col­lec­tion of frag­ments (most­ly from litur­gi­cal works) pro­vides rich evi­dence about Euro­pean Latin book cul­ture, both in gen­er­al and in spe­cif­ic rela­tion to the far north of Europe, one of the last areas of Europe to be con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty.
As the essays in this vol­ume reveal, indi­vid­ual and groups of frag­ments can play a key role in increas­ing and advanc­ing knowl­edge about the acqui­si­tion and pro­duc­tion of medieval books, and in help­ing to dis­tin­guish local­ly made books from import­ed ones. Tak­ing an imag­i­na­tive approach to the source mate­r­i­al, the vol­ume goes beyond a strict­ly medieval con­text to inte­grate ear­ly mod­ern per­spec­tives that help illu­mi­nate the pat­tern of sur­vival and loss of Latin man­u­scripts through post-Ref­or­ma­tion prac­tices con­cern­ing reuse of parch­ment. In so doing it demon­strates how the use of what might at first appear to be unpromis­ing source mate­r­i­al can offer unex­pect­ed and reward­ing insights into diverse areas of Euro­pean his­to­ry and the his­to­ry of the medieval book.
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The nature essay: eco­crit­i­cal explo­rations
The Nature Essay: Eco­crit­i­cal Explo­rations is the first extend­ed study of a pow­er­ful lit­er­ary form born out of the tra­di­tions of Enlight­en­ment and Roman­ti­cism. It traces the var­ied styl­is­tic par­a­digms of the ‘nature essay’ down to the present day. Read­ing essays as plat­forms for eco­log­i­cal dis­course, the book analy­ses canon­i­cal and mar­gin­alised texts, main­ly from Ger­man, Eng­lish and Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture. Simone Schröder argues that the essay’s envi­ron­men­tal impact is root­ed in its nego­ti­a­tion of sci­en­tif­ic, poet­ic, spir­i­tu­al, and eth­i­cal modes of per­ceiv­ing nature. Togeth­er, the chap­ters on these four aspects form a his­tor­i­cal panora­ma of the nature essay as a genre that con­tin­ues to flour­ish in our time of eco­log­i­cal cri­sis.
Authors dis­cussed include: Alexan­der von Hum­boldt, Hen­ry David Thore­au, Vir­ginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Ernst Jünger, W.G. Sebald, Kath­leen Jamie, and David Fos­ter Wal­lace.
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