The purpose of this thesis is to establish the contribution of the Soviet weekly, Literaturnaya gazeta, to the debunking of official dogmas during the Brezhnev years. Launched in 1967, the second section of Literaturnaya gazeta has frequently been dismissed as a mere safety valve, highly controlled by the authorities, to placate the educated middle classes demoralized by the conservative backlash. It is argued in this study that, although the paper accepted the political parameters of the post-Thaw conservative leadership, as evinced, in particular, by the extreme limitations of the economic debates and the absence of any material investigating the country’s Stalinist past, it nevertheless succeeded in promoting values which ran counter to the official ideology. The paper reflected the demoralization of Soviet society and its inability to change within the existing structures. Soviet society emerged as being morally corrupt, riddled with individualism, suspicion and petty authoritarianism. Individuals were shown at the mercy of faceless bureaucracies and overpowered by a judiciary system dominated by the state procuracy. The paper actively promoted a more individual-centred type of society by overtly challenging the collectivist ethos, campaigning for the recognition of consumer rights and arguing the case for a fairer judiciary system.

The five texts contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114 (c. 1420-50) are seminal to understanding the centrality of asceticism in medieval English devotional literature. This thesis addresses the ways in which Douce 114 can be comprehended as a ‘whole book’ and as such outlines a transformation from extreme bodily mortification (in its first text) to the mortification of mind (in its last). It suggests that the manuscript was envisioned as a spiritual tool, its contents designed to be read in order, and that the central theme of asceticism is a hermeneutical device which guides the (Carthusian) reader’s spiritual development. The introduction provides a history of Christian asceticism while the first chapter contextualises attitudes to the phenomenon in late-medieval England. Chapters two and three examine the themes of Passion devotion and imitatio Christi in the Life of Elisabeth of Spalbeek, chapter four addresses the nature of embodiment and earthly purgatory in the Life of Christina Mirabilis, and chapter five examines the inherent problem of misguided bodily imitation of spiritual exemplars in reference to the Life of Marie of Oignies. In conclusion, chapter six argues that the Life of Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso’s Seven Points of True Love and Everlasting Wisdom, which emphasise the transcendence of bodliness, clarify the true inwardly ascetical nature of the preceding texts.

Travel writing criticism has sometimes suggested that little travel writing has been produced by Africans. This thesis shows that this is not the case, through a literary study of writing about travel published in Yoruba-speaking southwestern Nigeria between 1914 and 2014. This is a study of writing about domestic travel – Nigerians travelling within Nigeria – and of both Yoruba- and English-language texts. It is both a study of conventional ‘travel writing’ such as first-person travelogues, and of the motif of travel in writing more broadly: it encompasses serialised newspaper columns, historical writing, novels, autobiography, book-length travelogues and online writing. As well as close readings, this study draws on archival research and an in-depth interview with travel writer Pelu Awofeso. This is not an exhaustive study but rather a series of case studies, placed in their historical context. I examine southwestern Nigerian writers’ re resentations of laces within Nigeria and changing communal identities: local, translocal, regional and national. I explore their ideas about the benefits of travel and travel writing, knowledge and cosmopolitanism. I argue that we can read these texts as products of a local print culture, addressed to local readers, as well as in relation to the broader travel writing tradition.

The Special Collections of the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham hold seven early Qur’ānic pieces on parchment and papyrus dating from the seventh century. Alphonse Mingana purchased them from the antiquarian dealer von Scherling in 1936. Through investigation of the private correspondence of Mingana and archival documents, this research provides new information about the origin and history of the fragments, whose reception has been influenced by the European cultural context at the beginning of the twentieth century, in contrast with the public image proposed in catalogues, official documents and previous studies. Furthermore, this research is an attempt to initiate an alternative perspective in analysing and editing the physical objects and texts of early Qur’ānic manuscripts by applying digital philology, thus using XML-encoded expressions to transcribe all of the richness of manuscripts in reconstructing the history of their transmission. This perspective interprets the process of the making of the manuscript text and the context in which the manuscript was written, thus editing its mobile and multi-layered text, differently from previous examples of the edition of early Qur’ānic manuscripts.

La presente tesis está divida en tres partes y un catálogo final que es producto de la investigación. En el primer capítulo se presenta un análisis del papel que tienen los impresos novohispanos del siglo XVI como parte del patrimonio cultural en México, destacándose la importancia de su conservación y protección en este país. En el segundo capítulo se presentan los elementos teóricos que dan cuenta de la investigación, relacionados principalmente con la bibliografía y con algunos aspectos técnicos de la imprenta manual, para finalmente abordar, en el tercer capítulo, la introducción de la imprenta en la Nueva España, los impresores del siglo XVI y las bibliografías mexicanas que cubren este periodo, encabezadas por la obra de Joaquín García Icazbalceta y adiciones que son la base del catálogo resultante.

Medieval cartularies have been the focus of many studies in the past few decades. Rather than simply repositories for charter texts, cartularies are now regarded by those who study them as carefully curated collections of texts whose contents and arrangement reflect the immediate concerns and archival environment of the communities that created them. One feature of cartularies which has not received attention is the ‘growth’ of their manuscripts beyond the initial phase of creation. This growth refers not only to the addition of fresh gatherings but also to the piecemeal addition of texts into the available spaces, often in a haphazard order and by many scribes working across a number of decades. ‘Manuscript growth’ is not an uncommon feature of cartularies from the central middle ages, particularly from the thirteenth century onwards. As a phenomenon, however, it has not been recognised or studied, for the good reason that it is difficult to discuss haphazard manuscript growth in a systematic way. This thesis offers a new methodology which engages with multi-scribe contributions to ‘active’ cartularies. It takes a holistic approach which integrates the textual and ‘physical’ evidence of cartularies, and embraces all forms of scribal activity. By studying the growth of cartulary manuscripts, we can gain significant insights into the contemporary use and perception of these valuable objects. This thesis therefore takes a fresh look at the ‘genre’ of medieval cartularies through the eyes of the manuscript evidence itself, and what this can reveal about its medieval scribes and readers. Two manuscripts are taken as the basis of this study: the older cartulary of Glasgow Cathedral (AUL SCA MS JB 1/3) and the older cartulary of Lindores Abbey (in private ownership in Caprington Castle). Chapter 1 introduces the field of cartulary studies, with reference to new work in this area (particularly in relation to cartularies in France and England). Central questions in this field are introduced, such as the definition of a cartulary, their creation and function. It also discusses approaches to analysing complex codices and multi-scribe activity within other manuscript genres. In Chapter 2, a new methodology will be introduced for analysing manuscript growth. This involves rethinking our approach to some familiar elements of manuscripts: their codicology, binding history, the scribes, as well as the challenge of dating the various contributions to the cartularies. New concepts and terminology will be introduced (such as ‘relative dating’ and ‘series’) that have been developed in response to these two complex cartularies. By applying this new methodology, the creation and subsequent growth of each manuscript can be examined in detail in Chapter 3 (for Glasgow Cathedral’s cartulary) and Chapter 4 (for Lindores Abbey’s). It is shown that the contemporary experience of these two cartularies was as a collection of simultaneously ‘active’ units (either unbound or in temporary bindings), offering new scribes a choice of where to place their material. Chapter 5 draws together the analysis, and focuses on the initial creation of the cartularies, the nature of their growth by piecemeal additions, and the reasons for this growth. This reveals two communities that took an active approach to reading and extending their cartularies, treating these manuscripts as a shared space. The vexed question of ‘repeated’ texts within cartularies is reconsidered in this light. The analysis allows us to develop a deeper understanding of the cartularies’ function and the role of their scribes as primarily readers, whose interactions with the manuscript were responsive and dynamic. The institutional setting is also discussed. The thesis concludes by considering the implications of this study for our understanding of the function and typology of cartularies, their relationship to archives of single-sheet documents, and as sources for institutional identity, as well as the potential of the methodology to act as a starting point for studying scribal interactions and scribes as readers in other manuscript genres with multi-scribe growth.