Ethiopia is home to a unique Christian culture dating back to Late Antiquity. Even after the Ethiosemitic language of Gəʿəz died out as a spoken language after the collapse of the kingdom of Aksum, it remained for centuries and, indeed, down to the present, as one of the mainstays of the Ethiopian Church. This ancient culture has been shaped by such historical factors as the kingdom of Aksum and its contact with the Roman Empire, relations between medieval Ethiopia and the Coptic Church of Egypt, and political events within Ethiopia. In the course of its long history, the Ethiopian Church has not only produced a vast literature of its own but has also preserved translations of literature now lost in its original language.

Taking its cues from John Tzetzes’ commentaries on Aristophanes, this chapter investigates the idea of exegesis as performance. Commenting on texts was far from a disembodied act in Byzantium; on the contrary, it required an effort that was both intellectual and physical. Not unlike today, holding a class was an exercise calling for a series of structured bodily and mental practices to be successful. The first part of this chapter addresses the entanglements between performativity and manuscript production by looking at what Tzetzes’ scholia on Aristophanes tell us about the setting and the execution of the actual exegetical activity. The second part focuses on Commentary on Aristophanes’ Frogs 843a in order to show that appropriation of non-Hellenic traditions played a part in the performative and exegetical engagement with the classics in Constantinople toward the end of the twelfth century.

The introduction pursues three aims: it examines the problems of representing beginnings in literary history in general; it explains the value of a literary history that focuses on the beginnings, rather than the subsequent development, of vernacular literatures in medieval Europe; and it describes the advantages of a comparative approach. In respect of the first aim, it argues that we should neither posit a unitary beginning for literature in any language nor think in terms of causes and effects: every literary tradition passes through multiple moments of incipience and opening, and their study reveals conditions of possibility, not mechanistic causes. Second, a concentration on beginning obliges us to define what begins, thereby bringing to light the distinctive features of each vernacular literature. Third, the comparative perspective reveals the matrix of defining characteristics that the nascent European literatures of the Middle Ages all share: their manuscript materiality, their institutionalization in systems of textual practice which confer stability and persistence in space and time, and, finally, their linguistic vernacularity, which defines them over against their respective ‘parental’ literacies in Latin, Greek, or Church Slavonic.

The Introduction situates the book within the theoretical parameters of Cultural Memory Studies, Print Culture Studies and British Studies. It provides a short history of Memory Studies, focusing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as well as Aleida Assmann’s, Astrid Erll’s and Ann Rigney’s focus on media and memory. It surveys the complex media ecology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the role that printed texts played in articulating sites of memory changed between 1688 and 1745 as the meaning of print itself changed in relation to oral and manuscript cultures. It compares the media environments of the beginning and end of this period by focusing on the creation and circulation of two documents – the Declaration of William of Orange (1688) and the Particulars of the Victory regarding the Battle of Culloden (1746). The Introduction concludes by suggesting that Michael Rothberg’s concept of noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory) provides a useful model for examining printed works of British national memory in the mid-eighteenth century.

This essay surveys the literate culture of the antebellum and Civil War eras among marginal southerners – African Americans, both free and enslaved, and poor and middle-class whites – and explores examples of the ways reading and writing, though quite distinct in formal pedagogies, blended together in the literary lives of the self-educated. Focused especially on Basil Armstrong Thomasson, a yeoman farmer in North Carolina whose diary records his reading practices as well as original verse, and John M. Washington, a Virginia man who kept a diary while enslaved, the essay presents a study in the surprising complexity and variegation of the textual landscape such people inhabited and helped create. It also discusses the scarcer archival traces of the literacy practices of ordinary southern women.

Studying puritan literature requires a sense of the erratic paths that seventeenth-century New England writing take in the world as well as the material contexts that give rise to more or less stable texts gathered up in anthologies and modern editions. The aim of this chapter is to elaborate the ways that the logic of manuscript culture informs puritan literary culture across material genres, using the poet Anne Bradstreet’s unusual case to elucidate typical means of manuscript practice, production, and circulation. A bit of knowledge of manuscript culture, its generic and practical conventions, and its role in the larger world of “colonial mediascapes” can go a long way in enabling new insights and more nuanced readings of puritan texts derived from various original sources.

The central text to be discussed in this chapter is a short, strange, Greek prose work, about which the most fundamental questions remain unresolved. The text is known as Joseph and Aseneth, and it narrates the story of the marriage of the biblical figure of Joseph and his subsequent rule in Egypt. It has been stridently contested whether the work was written from within a Jewish milieu and can be dated as early as the second century BCE, or whether it is a Christian text from as late as the fourth century CE. Moreover, whatever the date or the provenance of Joseph and Aseneth, it is unclear even what the text is for – it cannot be determined what its genre is, or, more productively, how we should understand its function. This is a text that has proved highly provocative for classicists and religious studies scholars, for all that it has never entered the canon of classical literature or the history of religion. One aim of this chapter is not so much to reclaim Joseph and Aseneth for the canon, as to diagnose the ideology that has led to its exclusion.

This chapter examines the extent to which the Gaelic literary tradition was in a state of transition during the period 1780–1830. It discusses the growing influence of the English language and contemporary English literature on the Gaelic tradition that led to new innovations in genre and style. In addition, contact with English influenced the manner in which creative material in the Irish language was treated. The confluence of languages also had implications for the orthographic system employed in manuscripts and methods of transmission, both manuscript and printed. A growing interest in Irish-language literature, manuscripts, and historical sources among non-native scholars drawn from the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite led to the preservation of much Gaelic material in English translation. These translations served another important purpose, however, as they provided new source material that would be drawn upon for inspiration by Anglo-Irish writers later in the nineteenth century.

As shown in chapter 5, reception reveals its powerful translative attitude when considered as a transformative act. This is evident in the case of loose translations such as abridgments, which, through their own reception, are continuously transformed into new texts. The chapter thus offers a different insight into the ways in which Aristotle was read and adapted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly when his legacy is combined with the reception of other authors. Here I explore the vernacular afterlife of Luca Mannelli’s Latin Compendium moralis philosophiae (circa 1350) and the multifaceted transmission of Jacopo Campora’s vernacular dialogue De immortalitate anime (circa 1430). Both compendia were written by members of the Dominican order with typically scholastic backgrounds and were not particularly innovative in their philosophical content. However, their interest lies in the various ways in which they were disseminated, reshaped, repackaged and marketed. By tracing the transformation of the two works, the chapter documents the broad implications entailed by the proactive nature of vernacular reading practices in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Chapter 2 moves from Dante Alighieri’s contribution to the establishment of the vernacular as a language of knowledge and his critique of contemporary vernacular translation, which offer yet another perspective on the multifaceted process through which vernacular culture appropriated and, in a sense, tamed Aristotle’s authority. The chapter situates Dante’s portrayal of Aristotle within the poet’s broader reflection on language. Taking the appearance of Aristotle in the Divine Comedy as a starting point, I show that Dante’s notion of language cannot be understood without looking at his discussion of the relations between Latin and the vernacular, particularly in the Convivio. From this point of view, Dante’s harsh criticism of Taddeo Alderotti’s Italian translation of the Summa Alexandrinorum invites us to reconsider the failure of the Convivio itself, a project which did not foster the cultural revolution that Dante sought. By exploring the textual transmission of Taddeo’s translation between 1300 and 1500, the final section of the chapter enlightens its relevance to the vernacular reading communities that found forms of cultural and social legitimation in works of this kind.

What do Dickinson’s habitual composition strategies indicate about her poetics? I argue that Dickinson and her peers wrote the way they did, generating variants and saving their writings in hand-bound booklets, because of the education they received in composition and rhetoric. This chapter draws on archival evidence to argue that many of Dickinson’s contemporaries composed in similar ways because of ideas about the importance of diction in the New Rhetoric. Dickinson’s training in varieties of skeptical, realist, and nominalist semiotic theory derived from Locke contribute to her persistent doubt and fragile faith in language. In a reading of several of Dickinson’s poems reflecting upon the composition process, I demonstrate both the presence of these rhetorical theories and their consequences in repeatedly staged crises of reference and articulation. This chapter lays the groundwork for subsequent chapters by depicting Dickinson’s poetics as evolving out of conflicts in a particular philosophical milieu.

This chapter lays out the central themes of the book: the study of Sri Lankan Malay history and culture via the trope of mobility in its many forms, with a particular focus on exile and its literary, religious and imaginative associations with the island; the Sri Lankan Malays’ history and literary culture from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century; connected histories across the Indian Ocean as viewed through the prism of Malay linguistic continuity and writing practices in Ceylon and the Indonesian-Malay world, as well as a range of multilingual texts from the two regions. The chapter introduces the methodology and comparative approach employed in writing which seeks to explore the Sri Lankan Malays’ history, literature and perspectives on exile through multiple lenses and from different shores, integrating sources in Malay, Javanese, Arabic, Dutch and English to present the views of colonized and colonizer in the Dutch and British periods, poetic and prose depictions of exile, single texts that move between and across languages, religious traditions relating to Ceylon and documents ranging from letters to family diaries to theological manuals and charms.