Collections in context : the organization of knowledge and community in Europe / edited by Karen Fresco & Anne D. Hedeman.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Fresco, Karen L., 1947-

Hedeman, Anne D., 1952-

Series:

Text and context (Columbus, Ohio)

Text and context

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature, Medieval--History and criticism.

Literature, Medieval.

Manuscripts--History.

Manuscripts.

History.

Manuscripts--Collectors and collecting.

Manuscript design.

Physical Description:

xvii, 340 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, [2011]

Summary:

The fourteen essays that comprise Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe interrogate questions posed by French, Flemish, English, and Italian collections of all sorts-libraries as a whole, anthologies and miscellanies assembled within a single manuscript or printed book, and even illustrated ivory boxes.

Collecting became an increasingly important activity during the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, when the decreased cost of producing books made ownership available to more people. But the act of collecting is never neutral: it gathers information, orders material (especially linear texts), and prioritizes everything-in short, collecting both organizes and comments on knowledge. Moreover, the context of a collection must reveal something about identity, but whose? That of the compiler? The reader or viewer? The donor? The patron?

With essays by a wide array of international scholars, Collections in Context demonstrates that the very act of collecting inevitably imposes some kind of relationship among what might otherwise be naively thought of as disparate elements and simultaneously exposes something about the community that created and used the collection. Thus, Collections in Context offers unusual insights into how collecting both produced knowledge and built community in early modern Europe. Book jacket.

Contents:

Collections : editing, exhibitions, and e-science initiatives / Peter Ainsworth

The wings of chivalry and the order of Bodleian Library, Ms. Douce 308 / Nancy Freeman Regalado. Appendix

Buried treasure : a lost document from the debate on the Romance of the rose / Julia Simms Holderness

Pages filled with dreams : notes on the reorganization of epic cycles in fifteenth-century Italy / Eleonora Stoppino

The Turk in the Trésor politique (1598/1608) or the anthological as political mode / Marcus Keller

Collecting images : the role of the visual in the Shrewsbury book (BL Ms. Royal 15 E. vi) / Anne D. Hedeman ; Appendices

The time of an anthology : BL Ms. Royal 15 E. vi and the commemoration of chivalric culture / Andrew Taylor

The treatise cycle of the Shrewsbury book, BL Ms. Royal 15 E. / Craig Taylor

Christine de Pizan's Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie and the coherence of BL Ms. Royal 15 E. vi / Karen Fresco ; Appendices

A Livre d'Eracles within the library of the fifteenth-century Flemish bibliophile, Louis de Bruges : Paris, BnF Ms. fr. 68 in context / Erin K. Donovan

Reading royal allegories in Gautier de Coinci's Miracles de Nostre Dame : the Soissons manuscript (Paris, BnF, Ms. n. a. fr. 24541) / Kathryn A. Duys ; Appendix

The Prato fiorito, the Selva di cose diverse and other compilations by Suor Fiammetta Frescobaldi / Elissa B. Weaver

A curious collection in ivory : the Lord Gort casket / Paula Mae Carns ; Appendix

Repeat performances : Adam de la Halle, Jehan Bodel, and the reusable pasts of their plays / Carol Symes

Of books and other miscellaneous revolutions : medieval miscellanies in context / Tania Van Hemelryck.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-321) and indexes.

ISBN:

0814211712

9780814211717

OCLC:

729341785

Publisher Number:

99948067539