No 1 (2011)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/80624
Manuscript culture in the age of print
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Item Permeable Boundaries: Manuscript and Print in Concert in Early Modern Sweden(LIR. journal, 2011) Nyström, EvaThis article intends to show how manuscript and printed texts continued to co-exist during the first centuries following the invention of the printing press. The two media depended on and nourished each other in various ways. The handwritten text usually precedes the print, but often the print also becomes a model for handwritten copies. Furthermore, there are texts – and books – which were never intended to be printed due to their personal character, or which could not be printed due to their particular or provocative contents. Variations within this concomitance of printed and handwritten material are discussed on the basis of a number of manuscript books from Skara Stifts- och Landsbibliotek. The examples include authors’ originals, miscellanies, study compendia, interfoliated and annotated prints, and books that display manuscript and printed text items bound together. The creation of apographs by Swedish war prisoners during their Siberian captivity is referred to as a case where sheer necessity brought about manuscript book production in the early eighteenth century.Item The Official Letter. Remarks on Style and Editing. Count Hernán Núñez’ Letters to the Spanish Dowager Queen, Mariana de Austria(LIR. journal, 2011) Söhrman, IngmarEpistolary writing consists of contemporary testimonies of political and cultural events and linguistic usages and it is vital to have access to good editions. There are two main groups of epistolary writing: informal and official letters. This article focuses on the characteristics of an official letter from the late 17th century. There are three basic prerequisites for any kind of written communication: Purpose, Style and Distinctive character. The main purpose is to transmit a message that will be read by several people who might be unknown to the sender and the letter is often filed in archives. The style of an official letter is often very elaborate and even if the purpose and style are basic when analyzing texts every written message has its own distinctive character that could be seen as stylistic but not always so like in the case of diplomatic letters where some parts of the text can be codified. All these characteristics are dealt with in this article, which is based on letters that the Spanish ambassador to Sweden in 1671 wrote to the Dowager Queen of Spain.Item Degrees of Publicity. Handwritten Newspapers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries(LIR. journal, 2011) Droste, HeikoMy paper concerns the handwritten newspaper in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The genre appeared in late sixteenth century as part of a growing public news market, which from the early seventeenth century onwards expanded rapidly with the introduction of the printed newspapers. The latter in parts replaced the handwritten one. However, at about 1700 the handwritten newspaper is still there, fulfilling specific functions alongside its printed twin. The question must therefore be what these functions were and why costumers were willing to pay for a medium that was much more expensive, although subject to the governments’ censorship in the same way as printed newspapers. The paper argues for different degrees of publicity, which shaped the public news market as well as private news correspondences. In consequence, there were different news genres, tailor-made for a general public or more specific groups of recipients. This argument relies on contemporary tracts on the printed newspaper as well as Swedish and Northern German collections of handwritten newspapers.Item ”The place is swarming with libels” – Manuscript Publication of Oppositional Texts During the Reign of Gustav III (1771–1792)(LIR. journal, 2011) Mattsson, AnnieThe article is based on some of the findings from the author’s doctoral thesis, Komediant och riksförrädare. Handskriftcirkulerade smädeskrifter mot Gustaf III (approx. Jester and traitor. Manuscript published libels against Gustav III), and concerns the manuscript publishing of oppositional libels during the reign of Gustav III (1771–1792). Some of the terms and definitions from Harold Love’s Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-century England (1993) are applied to the material in order to deepen our understanding of the clandestine system of diffusion of these texts. The dominant type of publishing was in this case »user publication«, where interested readers made their own copies and showed them to others. Particular interest is given to the role of the copier, who often combined functions of production, distribution and consumption in one person. The copiers are also the link in this system where we through manuscript collections can identify individual participants to a much larger extent than is the case when it comes to the anonymous authors and readers who never made any copies.Item The Academic Lecture. A Genre In Between(LIR. journal, 2011) Lindberg, BoThis article provides some observations on the production and function of academic lecture notes in the early modern period at the universities of Uppsala and Lund int the 17th century. Books being relatively scarce, students aquired most of their knowledge by listening to lectures or by reading notes taken during the lectures. Compared to dissertations, i.e. the printed texts defended in a disputation, the lecture notes were usually better accounts of knowledge, but their contents may deviate substantially from what the lecturer originally said due to the modifications and distortions caused by those who took the notes or those who copied the them. Further, the mode of lecturing – dictation versus a freer extemporizing delivery – affected the form of the manuscripts as well. A pair of manuscripts from the teaching of Samuel Pufendorf in the early 1670s are here used to illustrate the difficulty to determine the authenticity of extant manuscripts and how they originated.Item "Painting Forth the Things That Hidden Are": Thomas Nashe’s ”The Choise of Valentines” and the Printing of Privacy(LIR. journal, 2011) Sivefors, PerThis essay argues that the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe’s (1567–1601) erotic poem »The Choise of Valentines« explores early modern senses of distinction between manuscript writing and print. In his dedication and in subsequent responses to critique against the poem, Nashe invokes a sense of intimacy with his patron and his audience – an intimacy that is associated in his texts with manuscript writing but is enacted by references to, and directly in, the medium of print. In other words, »The Choise of Valentines« constructs a fiction of privacy that is rhetorically and commercially exploited in the medium of print – which is, in turn, constructed as the public opposite of the intimate, private medium of manuscript writing.Item Paper, Pen and Print(LIR. journal, 2011) McKitterick, DavidHow far is it possible to understand the penetration of books in any society, by using statistical methods? How far are the existing short-title catalogues helpful in this respect? More specifically, if we measure the output of printing and of printed books, are we likely to arrive at a useful conclusion about the circulation of knowledge and opinion? The continuing circulation of manuscripts long after the invention of printing, even down to the twentieth century, is a reminder of the importance of alternatives to print.Item Editor's Introduction(LIR. journal, 2011) Lindberg, Bo; Wingård, Rikard; Rosengren, Cecilia; Karlsson, Britt-Marie; Nauman, Sari