This dissertation analyzes the practice of making indigenous maps and their circulation in Oaxaca from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Indian maps functioned as visual aids to distribute land for agriculture, ranching, subsistence farming, and mining, they served as legal titles to property, and they participated in large-scale royal projects including aqueducts and assessments of human and natural resources. Map production is examined from four distinct vantage points including social networks, materials and technology, authentication, and reproduction. In each case, maestros pintores--native master painters--collaborated with a host of individuals including Spanish officials, scribes, merchants, ranchers, farmers, town councils, caciques and lesser lords, and legal professionals to visually describe the region's geographical environment. Indigenous mapping practices fostered the development of a new epistemology that combined European and Mesoamerican worldviews to negotiate the allocation of natural resources among the region's Spanish, Amerindian, and mixed-race communities. This work stresses the role of Indian painters in the formation of early modern empires highlighting the way mapmakers challenged Spanish ideals of visual representation instead re-envisioning spatial relations according to local and regional concerns.

Flann Mainistrech (active c. 1014 to 1056) is well-attested in medieval and post-medieval Gaelic manuscripts and in early printed works on Irish history as an authority on history and literary tradition. He appears to have been an ecclesiastical scholar, based at Monasterboice (modern Co. Louth, Ireland), but potentially operating within wider ecclesiastical and political networks. Almost fifty texts or fragments of texts, mostly poems, are at some point attributed to him. Their subject-matter includes the regnal history of early medieval Irish kingdoms, legendary material on Ireland and the Gaels’ more distant past, universal and classical history, hagiography, and genealogical traditions. In addition, various sources are extant that concern Flann Mainistrech as a character. Most imply that he was considered a pre-eminent authority; some go further and provide impressionistic sketches of his scholarship and locating him in certain social or political settings. The secondary literature on medieval Gaelic authors like Flann has been largely concerned with establishing what can be securely stated about their historical biographies and with delineating reliable corpora of their works. In addition, there has been much discussion around whether medieval Gaelic literature is to be fundamentally characterised as secular or ecclesiastical. Recently, however, studies have begun to focus less on the literal realities of medieval authorship and more on how authorship was conceived in the Middle Ages, how it functioned as a form of authority, and how it might have been used or constructed within texts’ or manuscripts’ overall argumentation. In response, in this thesis, I survey manuscript materials and early printed works relating to Flann Mainistrech and discuss how his status as an author-figure relates to his identity as an individual, considering how he was interpreted in different contexts, the extent to which later scribes or compilers used or manipulated his identity, and what made him useful or applicable to them. After analysing the textual material in light of these issues, I conclude that Flann was consistently placed in certain definable historiographical and biographical contexts and that his authority may thus have been tied to this specific characterisation. However, presentations of Flann can vary quite dramatically in emphasis, while close examination of material attributed to him and their contexts within compilations and manuscripts reveals appropriation of his perspective, pseudonymous use of his identity, and re-contextualisation of his purported work according to later compilers’ interests and priorities. Relatively consistent treatment of his persona is thus ostensibly juxtaposed with dynamic, creative reading practices. Yet such conclusions are overshadowed by evidence, also considered in this study, suggesting that what survives of the manuscript tradition may well fall short of being representative both of Flann’s actual biography and of his textual persona. As well as offering a case study into medieval Gaelic concepts of authorship, authority, and textuality, this thesis also necessarily presents more basic analyses of previously under-explored and, in a few cases, unedited texts that come to be of relevance. Several such texts are printed and translated in Appendices.

This study explores the literature of late Choson in its material context, examining how the physical aspects of the production and circulation of texts impacted the practice of writing. By analyzing various travelogues from Beijing (yonhaengnok) and private collections (munjip) from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, I examine how transcultural contacts across borders and changing textual environments influenced intellectual circles and literary trends in late Choson Korea. Interpreting the literary text as the material product of a culture, my study shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator of a text to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers, through whose hands a text is reshaped and given new meaning. In light of the concept of social authorship, the written culture of late Choson will be revisited in relation to complex networks of social interactions. The print and manuscript culture of the day, socio-political groups that the author belonged to, the book market, and the government policies of that time provide interesting information on the practices of literary production, based on the larger cultural dynamics of East Asia. This dissertation revolves around a series of questions about circulation networks and their impact. In regard to the social and cultural condition of literary production in the eighteenth century, I examine transnational interactions with foreign intellectuals as well as collective coterie activities of reading and writing among the literati in Seoul. How did the flourishing of print culture of the Jiangnan area and the book markets in Beijing change the textual dynamics of Korea? Did the government censorship carried out by the Qing and the Choson governments effectively control the circulation of books? How did the Choson literati consume the foreign books and why did they form so many literary communities in Seoul? By investigating the large scope of these textual situations, I explore how the transcultural contacts "across borders" and the changing textual environments influenced intellectual circles and literary trends in late Choson. With respect to textual dynamics, I emphasize the various "informal networks" that have been placed at the center of book reception and consumption. For example, a number of book brokers in the Qing and Choson facilitated the distribution of books, and the sharing of manuscripts among friends in literary coteries was influential in the shaping of new literary tastes and public culture. These unconventional routes outside of established channels functioned as the actual key drivers of book culture in late Choson. My argument throughout this dissertation is that "informal circulation" is a central, rather than marginal, feature of eighteenth-century book culture and literary production. Through a specific case study of a literatus-official, Yi Tong-mu (1741-1793), my dissertation addresses these issues in three parts that consist of seven chapters: (1) Part One, "Social Authorship and Manuscript Production," examines how the writings of Yi Tong-mu were constructed and transmitted through a complex of social interactions and how the physical aspects of texts inform various transactions of human and non-human agencies in the production of texts. (2) Part Two, "The Location of Texts: Circulation of Books, Censorship, and Community Activities" traces how social networks among the domestic literati as well as among foreign intellectuals facilitated the circulation of books. First, I examine the large scope of transnational interaction between China and Korea, and the literary inquisition carried out by the Choson government in response to the changing textual environment. This is followed by a discussion of the poetry communities in Seoul, in which the Choson literati shared their reading practices and produced their common aesthetic tastes in their writings. (3) Part Three, "Making Meaning: Reading Self and Social Discourses," examines how Yi Tong-mu read books from the Ming and the Qing--such as those by Yuan Hongdao of the Ming and Wang Shizhen of the Qing--and wrote his own poetry and literary criticism and embodied his interpretive activities in his own works. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Provincial town clerks and scriveners have hitherto been a neglected subject in the historiography of the legal profession, yet as this thesis demonstrates, they contributed significantly to medieval England’s legal and scribal culture. Arguing for a new definition of scriveners based on their legal and linguistic literacy, this fresh interpretation differentiates between scriveners, notaries, generic clerks and lawyers and modifies the existing tendency towards classifying scriveners purely on the basis of the work they did and the legal instruments they produced. The study not only rectifies a gap in our knowledge, but reconceptualises our understanding of the lower echelons of the legal profession by examining the work that scriveners did and the role that they played in the local legal administration of medieval England, and by extension, the ways in which they facilitated access to justice on several levels. Focussing primarily on Exeter, Bristol, Bridgwater and Southampton, this research for the first time reveals the identities of some of the many scriveners who worked outside of London and evaluates their activities in provincial England. In order to achieve this, the thesis considers the extent to which scriveners were an integral part of an urban legal service as members of the provincial secretariat. Underpinning the theoretical framework of this thesis are themes such as literacy, clerical identity and professionalization – all of which are examined through the prism of law, languages and access to justice. Grounded in a palaeographic and diplomatic approach to the manuscript sources, this research has yielded some surprising results regarding the essential role of provincial scriveners within the legal, political and administrative landscape of medieval England. Fundamentally, this thesis offers a new vision of provincial English scriveners and the influence of their work. Set against the backdrop of an increasingly ‘professional’ legal profession, the importance of provincial scriveners as the keepers and creators of legal memory is highlighted along with the impact that this had on the wider legal community of medieval England.

This dissertation thesis follows on the contemporary research focused on the early modern manuscript culture. The thesis deals with the Moravian manuscript hymnals from the 17th and 18th century and with their repertoire. The manuscript hymnography is one of the richest sources for an understanding of the popular piety, the Baroque literature and the church music. Some of the hymnals are accompanied by musical notation and a large number of them are beautiful illuminated. However, they have never been made accessible through modern edition, and there are hardly any analytical studies concerning these hymnbooks. The opening chapter summarizes the existing research on the given topic. It is followed by the description of approximately forty manuscript hymnals. The next chapter concentrates on some specific qualities of the manuscript publication and focuses on the song repertoire. The third chapter further develops the general theses. It is devoted to four manuscript hymnals from the sixties and the seventies of the 17th century. The analysis of their writing, ilumination and repertoire proves the same author - Jan Klabík from Želechovice. This chapter concentrates on the song repertoire, relations to older hymnals and the song canon. The fourth chapter focuses on two specific groups of songs: the...

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The subject of my thesis is a little-studied hagiographical work that gives important insights into rewriting processes and their significance in medieval textual culture. The anonymous Life of Christina of Hane, a thirteenth-century Premonstratensian nun from the Palatinate, is an example of bridal mysticism which combines the medieval tradition of the reception of the Song of Songs with hagiographic elements. A codicological and palaeographical analysis of the only manuscript shows it to be a sixteenth-century copy, but the type of mysticism and the theological questions that it discusses suggest that the text was initially composed in the thirteenth century, when Christina is thought to have lived. The theological and spiritual ideas in the text belong to the wider context of communicating the transcendental within the world. My thesis uses performative language analysis to address the problems of textuality and authorization in the Life of Christina of Hane. It yields new insights into the ways in which this mystical text makes use of hagiographic strategies, how gender and vernacular theology are linked, how liturgical elements support the text’s pragmatic nature, and how somatic spirituality is reflected on an allegorical level in the embodiment of God’s bride. An assessment of three communicative aspects – medial, narrative, and allegorical – highlights the textualization of the mystical experience. The appellative structure of Christina’s text invites the reader to engage with the text. This study provides the first comprehensive interpretation of the text on Christina of Hane. It compares it to other mystical texts, to a German–Latin prayerbook, and to a fragmentary legend about Mary Magdalene. It challenges existing judgments about Christina’s biography and offers alternative solutions founded in the latest scholarship on female mystical literature.

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This dissertation contains a study of the multitext manuscript Codex Holmiensis D 3 based in Material Philology and its focus on the material conditions underlying manuscripts. The aim of the investigation is to describe D 3 in order to increase understanding of its material conditions including content and circumstance of copying, as well as its use and purpose. D 3 contains 14 text works in different genres, for example romances, chronicles, and edifying works. The paper manuscript in the format of a holster book has been dated through its watermarks to around 1487/1488. It was written for the noblewoman Elin Gustavsdotter (Sture). An older manuscript, Codex Holmiensis D 4a, has previously been identified as the exemplar of D 3. These manuscripts are very similar as regards language and content. However, it is shown here that D 4a could not have been the model for D 3 in the case of the romance Flores och Blanzeflor; nor can the manuscript as a whole be a copy of D 4a. There are few traces of use in D 3, but the first work, Herr Ivan Lejonriddaren, has several concluding texts before its final closing. These concluding texts suggest that parts of the work were being read while the rest was being copied. There are also dual quire signatures in this work, implying that the quires were in disarray, possibly because they were in use when the signatures were added. The purpose of D 3 was to educate and provide examples of good and bad behaviour for the nobility. Moreover, there is an owner-epilogue which also stresses courtly ideals and can be linked to the concept of exemplary behaviour. The contents can also be ordered thematically, with first a Carolingian connection, followed by one connected with Ireland and finally one focused on the Christian community. Codicological breaks divide the manuscript into two parts, which leads to the assumption of at least two common exemplars for D 3 and D 4a. An emphasis on the materiality of the manuscript reveals it to be not so much an unwieldy collection of unrelated text witnesses as a book created for a certain person and her time. / <p>Felaktigt ISBN i den tryckta versionen: 978-91-506-2618-6</p>