Papers by Adrian Papahagi
Die Handschriften der Hofschule Kaiser Karls des Großen. Individuelle Gestalt und europäisches Kulturerbe. Ergebnisse der Trierer Tagung vom 10.–12. Oktober 2018, ed. Michael Embach, Claudine Moulin, Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, 2020
The Lorsch Gospels is the last product of the so-called „Ada Group“, a series of luxury liturgica... more The Lorsch Gospels is the last product of the so-called „Ada Group“, a series of luxury liturgical books produced at the Court School of Charlemagne. This group comprises the following manuscripts: the Godesscalc Evangelistary (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. MS 1203), made around 781–83; The Arsenal or Saint-Martin-des-Champs Gospels (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 599), produced before 790; the first part of the Trier or Ada Gospels (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, MS 22, fols 6r–38v), copied around 791–95; the Dagulf Psalter (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1861), made before 795; a Gospel fragment datable to c. 800 (London, The British Library, Cotton Claudius MS B. V, fol. 132v); the Centula or Saint-Riquier Gospels (Abbeville, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 4), made shortly before 800; the Harley Gospels (London, The British Library, Harley MS 2788), made in the last decade of the eighth century; the Saint-Médard de Soissons Gospels (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. MS 8850), made in the same decade as the Harley Gospels, but perhaps later than it; the second part of the Trier or Ada Gospels, containing notably the four pictures of the evangelists, made before 810 (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, MS 22, fols 39r–171r); and, finally, the Lorsch Gospels (the first part of the book is now Alba Iulia, Biblioteca Batthyaneum, MS II.1; the second part is Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. MS 50...
Bulletin des Anglicistes Médiévistes / Etudes Médiévales Anglaises, 2001
Papahagi Adrian. Michael Alexander, A History of English Literature, Macmillan (Foundations), 200... more Papahagi Adrian. Michael Alexander, A History of English Literature, Macmillan (Foundations), 2000. In: Bulletin des anglicistes médiévistes, N°59, été 2001. pp. 45-47
This article discusses four fragments from a fifteenth-century antiphonal with Hungarian chant no... more This article discusses four fragments from a fifteenth-century antiphonal with Hungarian chant notation. Two of these membra disiecta are kept at the National Archives of Hungary, and at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, and are well-known to scholars of medieval music and liturgy. Two further fragments have recently been identified in the bindings of printed books at the Library of the Romanian Academy, in Cluj, and are studied here for the first time. The authors suggest that the original choir book was used in Transylvania and was possibly dismembered in the former Benedictine abbey of Cluj-Mănăștur in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.
Caliban: Ideology Meets Irony. The essay argues that Caliban works as an ironic counterpart of ev... more Caliban: Ideology Meets Irony. The essay argues that Caliban works as an ironic counterpart of every character in The Tempest. Through his ambiguous and complex nature, the monster frustrates the fashionable ideological readings, which invariably reduce him to an illustration of the plight of natives at the dawn of colonialism. REZUMAT. Caliban: Ideologie versus ironie. Studiul de față argumentează că, în Furtuna lui Shakespeare, Caliban funcționează ca dublu ironic al fiecărui personaj din piesă. Prin natura sa ambiguă și complexă, monstrul eludează lectura ideologică la modă astăzi, care îl reduce la o simplă ilustrare literară a exploatării coloniale.
Medium Ævum, 2009
The question of the transmission of Boethius' De consolatione Pbilosopbiae (V. 5 2 4) has giv... more The question of the transmission of Boethius' De consolatione Pbilosopbiae (V. 5 2 4) has given rise to more than one fascinating - but not always irrefutable - theory. There is nonetheless something of a consensus among Boethian scholars, who regard Alcuin (735-804) as the providential figure who rescued the famous prosimetrum from oblivion, and brought it to the attention of the Carolingian world.1 According to this hypothesis, Alcuin discovered in Italy one rare sixthcentury codex of the Consolatio, which he then brought to France. Copies were then made and circulated from one end of Charlemagne's empire to the other, from Tours to St Gall.2 Some scholars, however, have argued that Alcuin was not the first Anglo-Saxon to have known the Consolatio: Aldhelm (V.630,- 709), Bede (f.672- 735), and Tatwine (d. 734) are amongst those believed to have been familiar with the text before Alcuin was even born. In that case, at least one Consolatio manuscript must have existed in England, and Alcuin would have had no need to discover in Italy a text that had been long known in his home country.But is there any evidence that the Consolatio was known in Britain before 800, or even before 900? Is there any evidence that Alcuin played a part in the 'rediscovery' of the Consolation In the following pages, I would like to reassess the evidence and the existing theories, in an attempt to suggest that a centre of learning like Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, better known as Fleury, appears to be more closely involved in the transmission and exegesis of the Boethian masterpiece than any centre connected with Alcuin (York, Saint-Martin of Tours, or the court school of Charlemagne). In the light of what we know about the circulation of Consolatio manuscripts, it is perhaps easier to demonstrate that Boethius' prosimetrum reached England through Carolingian Francia, rather than the other way round.It is legitimate to believe that if anyone knew the Consolatio Philosophiae in Anglo-Saxon England before the time of Alcuin, the Venerable Bede did, for his learning far exceeds that of any other Anglo-Saxon scholar before or after him.3 In his Books Known to Anglo-Latin Writers from Alâhelm to Alcuin, J. D. A. Ogilvy suggested that Bede was familiar with the Consolatio? but he abandoned this opinion in later publications,5 and acquiesced that Bede did not know any of Boethius' works.6Nonetheless, this view was challenged by Fabio Troncarelli, author of invaluable studies about the circulation of Boethian manuscripts. In his Tradizioni perdute, Troncarelli puts up an entire scaffolding of arguments, trying to prove that the Consolatio was known in seventh- and eighth-century England, and that it started circulating in Europe due to the activity of insular scholars on the Continent.7 The second point is easier to disprove, and can thus be addressed first. The Italian palaeographer believes that most authors who knew the Consolatio in the ninth century were of insular origin, or belonged to abbeys of insular foundation.8 He quotes the names of Alcuin, the 'editorial patron' of the text, of Waldramus of St Gall, of Saxo, the author of the Annales de gestis Caroli Magni, and of Paschasius Radbertus, Sedulius Scotus, and John Scotus. Nonetheless, in addition to these, one may quote Theodulf and Jonas of Orleans, Modoinus of Auxerre, Walafrid Strabo, Lupus of Ferneres, Remigius of Auxerre, and many others who are not in the least of insular descent. Moreover, one must be reminded that all the insular scholars mentioned by Troncarelli were working on the Continent, and that in all likelihood they became acquainted with the Consolatio in the provinces where they were engaged in teaching and writing. Consequently, all one can say is that Carolingian scholars of Irish and British descent, among others, knew the Consolatio in the ninth century, and on the Continent.9Troncarelli's main demonstration is based on a comparison of passages from the Consolatio to riddles by Tatwine and Aldhelm, and to Bede's De die iudicii. …
Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, 2011
Among the many items of pret-a-penser that the medievalist must constantly fight, one in particul... more Among the many items of pret-a-penser that the medievalist must constantly fight, one in particular has the endurance of an archetype. This diehard prejudice is, alas, linked to the very name of the Middle Ages. Thus we are all obliged, at one stage or another, to patiently explain that the Middle Ages were not a thousand years of darkness between the golden age of Rome and the splendor of Florence; that the Renaissance was not that much of a virgin birth, since its seeds had been sown centuries before; that the humanists’ antiqua was in fact an imitation of Caroline minuscule; that without the libraries and scriptoria of the Middle Ages there would have been little for the Renaissance to resuscitate.
Library & Information History, 2015
The medieval dioceses of Transylvania, Oradea, and Cenad were the easternmost ramparts of Western... more The medieval dioceses of Transylvania, Oradea, and Cenad were the easternmost ramparts of Western culture. Cathedrals, Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys, Franciscan and Dominican convents, parish churches, and urban communities owned books and libraries in the Middle Ages. Most of these were lost to fires and plunders. The Tartars' invasion in 1241 and the Reformation were also major occasions for book destruction. Starting from surviving book lists and manuscripts preserved in Romania and abroad, the present article attempts to reconstruct the landscape of literacy in medieval Transylvania.
The Catholic Historical Review, 2019
The predestination controversy, which involved some of the most important figures of Europe betwe... more The predestination controversy, which involved some of the most important figures of Europe between 848-860, also made literary victims. A distich, found in the margins of five manuscripts copied from the ninth to the eleventh century, reads "Here lies Hincmar, a fiercely avaricious thief; the only noble thing he did was to die." By looking afresh at the manuscripts, their context, and their relationships, the present study investigates the vexed question of the authorship of the Hincmar mock epitaph. It also offers the first edition of the text to take into account all manuscript variants.
The present article discusses Alba Iulia, Batthyabeum Library, MS II. 106 from a palaeographical,... more The present article discusses Alba Iulia, Batthyabeum Library, MS II. 106 from a palaeographical, codicological and philological perspective. MS II. 106 has never been properly described so far, and the two texts it contains have not hitherto been identifies. The manuscript is a fourteenth-century book of small size (23 fols. 237 x 175 mm), written in a decent testualis rotunda, typical for Northern Italy. It contains texts in Italian, whose dialect confirms that the manuscript was produced in the area of Benice. In earlier literature, the manuscript was called, after the rubric of its first text, libro de moralites; the second text went unnoticed by scholars. The two texts can now be identified as Italian translations of (Pseudo-) William of Conches Moralium dogma philosophorum and Guido Fava' s Summa vitiis et virtutibus. The Moralium in volgare is transmitted by 13 manuscripts, all in Florentine dialect; a single MS of Guido' s Summa, also in Florentine dialect, has been ...
The present dissertation is a philological and philosophical analysis of the Old Anglish corpus (... more The present dissertation is a philological and philosophical analysis of the Old Anglish corpus (glosses, poetry, and prose); it also contains chapters on Anglo-LAtin and other Germanic literatures (Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Icelandic). I analyse the philosophical, mythological and literary image of fate, and the relationship between this force and divine providence. The influences of Late Antiquity, both mythological and philosophical (Stoic, Neoplatonic, patristic), have been considered in an attempt to assess the sources and originality of the Anglo-Saxon idea of wyrd. My philological analysis of the occurrences of wyrd establishes the poetic and formulaic origin of the word, as well as the originality of the Anglo-Saxon image of a fatal power hostile to men, and constantly associated with death and disaster. The fatalistic picture of wyrd that survives in Old English alliterative poetry is different from Boethius' Neoplatonic doctrine, which subordiates fate to divine ...
Magyar Könyvszemle
A Fragment of the Graduale Varadiense at the Romanian Academy Library in Cluj (Kolozsvár). * In 1... more A Fragment of the Graduale Varadiense at the Romanian Academy Library in Cluj (Kolozsvár). * In 1872, Bishop János Zalka of Győr (Jaurinum, Raab) undertook the restauration of a lavishly illuminated fifteenth-century antiphonary owned by his diocese, and inscribed his name on a parchment leaf added at the beginning of the newly rebound manuscript. The entire operation and the book itself were described by Flóris Rómer in an article published a few years later 1. What remained of the original two volumes was rebound together, so that in its present form the book amounts to 318 (179 + 139) fols. and measures 840 × 570 mm. The resulting volume, often referred to as the 'Zalka Antiphonary', now bears the shelfmark MS A 2, and is on permanent display at the Diocesan Treasury and Library (Egyházmegyei Kincstár és Könyvtár) in Győr. Earlier scholars, like Polycarpus Radó 2 , believed that the book had been made for the Cathedral of Győr, but subsequent research by Janka Szendrei has shown that the Antiphonary contains elements characteristic for the rite of Oradea (Varadinum, Nagyvárad, Grosswardein) 3. In the light of its late-fifteenth-century date, it has been suggested that the antiphonary is one of the great choir books ordered by Johannes Filipec, bishop of Oradea (1476-1490) and Olomouc (Olmütz, 1484-1490), and chancellor of King Matthias Corvinus (1485-1490), a remarkable diplomat and humanist of Moravian origin 4 .
The Library
Petrus Gotfart from Brașov (Corona in Latin) is the only medieval layman from Transylvania whose ... more Petrus Gotfart from Brașov (Corona in Latin) is the only medieval layman from Transylvania whose books have come down to us. This scholar taught Aristotle at the University of Vienna between 1456-1476, and in 1473 served as rector of that institution; he died in 1476, leaving most of his books to his university. Four manuscripts and four incunabula are still in Vienna, but one incunabulum bearing the ownership note of the Ducal College ended up in Oxford. Another incunabulum travelled to Transylvania with its binder, who had worked for Petrus Gotfart. Furthermore, in 1460 Petrus had copied Basil the Great’s Ad adolescentes, now part of a miscellaneous manuscript in Melk. These books disclose the interests of a Central European scholar, and give insight into the peregrinatio academica, the circulation of books, and the growth and dissolution of private libraries in the late Middle Ages.
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2012
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Papers by Adrian Papahagi
This volume discusses extant books, book fragments, and information about lost books connected to the Catholic bishoprics of Cenad, Oradea, and Transylvania before the Reformation. It presents the work of the few identifiable scribes, illuminators and bookbinders active in these dioceses, and the circulation of manuscripts and incunabula to and from these provinces.
The present research complements a recent census of medieval manuscripts in Romanian libraries by adducing as evidence manuscripts of local origin, provenance or relevance kept in foreign libraries.
The reference version is kept at: http://fragmentology.ms