Journal articles on the topic 'Autograph verse'

The strong association between prison writing and writing on walls, whether by graffiti or carving, is as true of Tudor and Stuart England as of other times and places. Yet even if prison-writers associated themselves with the idea of writing on a wall, they need not have done so in reality. This article considers the topos in the writings and afterlife of the Catholic priest, poet and martyr John Ingram, and asks whether it is to be taken at face value.Ingram’s verse, composed in Latin and mostly epigrammatic, survives in two contemporary manuscripts. The notion that the author carved his verses with a blunt knife on the walls of the Tower of London while awaiting death derives from a previous editorial interpretation of a prefatory sentence within the more authoritative manuscript of the two, traditionally held to be autograph. However, though several Tudor and Stuart inscriptions survive to this day on the walls of the Tower of London, no portions of Ingram’s verse are among them, nor any inscriptions of similar length and complexity. Ingram might instead have written his verse down in the usual way, using wall-carving as a metaphor for the difficulty of writing verse when undergoing incarceration and torture.1

Warren Hastings composed occasional short verse translations and imitations of classical Latin texts over many years, perhaps particularly in later life. Almost all extant examples are recorded in autograph in the multiple volumes of his diaries now in the British Library (in some cases, elsewhere too). They have never been printed nor given scholarly attention, but are of very high quality. This note contextualizes and provides transcriptions of six of these works, viz. translations and imitations of Lucan (two passages), Horace (three odes), and Catullus.

In classical antiquity Propertius' eloquence was renowned. His successor Ovid referred to theblandi praecepta Properti(Trist.2.465) and toblandi…Propertius oris(ibid. 5.1.15). Quintilian (10.1.93) stated that to his taste the mosttersusandelegansLatin elegist was Tibullus, butsunt qui Propertium malint. Martial (14.189) mentioned thefacundi carmen iuuenale Properti.Turn now from the opinions of ancient authors to those of some modern commentators as they try to elucidate various passages as presented in the extant manuscripts, and you encounter not the adjectivesblandus, tersus, elegans, andfacundus, but ‘strange’, ‘obscure’, ‘odd’, ‘slovenly’, and the like.A major reason for such striking differences of opinion should be evident. Ovid, to whom Propertius wasblandi oris, read a text separated from Propertius' autograph by at most a few decades. Modern scholars, however, must form their text from a few relatively late manuscripts, none earlier thanc.1200, in which Propertius' eloquence has been obscured by over twelve centuries of careless blundering and deliberate interpolation by a succession of scribes.A generally accepted example of deliberate interpolation in the Propertian archetype is found at 2.32.3-6:nam quid Praenesti dubias, o Cynthia, sortes,quid petis Aeaei moenia Telegoni?cur tua te Herculeum deportant esseda Tibur?Appia cur totiens te uia †ducit anum†?(ducitFLP,dicitN), where the name of some neighbouring town is required in the fourth verse to balance Praeneste, Tusculum, and Herculeum in the preceding three.

There are many sources for Purcell's I was glad: the anthem was clearly very popular, existing both in a ‘symphony anthem’ form with strings and also in various ‘verse anthem’ versions with organ accompaniment. It was common to make arrangements of Purcell's most attractive anthems so that they could be performed in places and at times when strings were not available. The geographical spread of the sources suggests that I was glad was in the repertoire of most of the main choral foundations in England. The only autographs of the piece are of the ‘symphony anthem’ version, although very early sources not in Purcell's hand give the piece as a verse anthem with organ accompaniment. Some sources that we think of as secondary because they are not autographs could actually pre-date those in the composers' hand, and they provide evidence about alternative textual traditions, performance practice, and the reception of Purcell's music.

This publication presents poems by Lydia Averianova dedicated to Vsevolod Petrov, art critic, art historian and the author of “memoirs and reflections” about notable participants of the Leningrad culture in the 1930s. Some of these poems were included in Averianova’s “Collected Verse,” others were saved by Petrov. Currently these autographs are preserved in the collection of Galeev-Gallery (Moscow). The publication includes Petrov’s poems written in response to Averianova’s dedications, as well as her other poems, which do not have a specific romantic prototype, but were created during the years of her infatuation with Petrov.

The article examines the problem of translating experimental poetic texts into other languages. The focus is on the transfer of verse’s spatial design between the source and the target languages. We analyze some cases of unconventional poetry translation with particular attention to verbal/visual properties of avant-garde poems. Stéphane Mallarmé’s, Guillaume Apollinaire’s, Augusto de Campos’ and Dmitry A. Prigov’s visual poetry provides examples of autographic (hand-written or hand-drawn) and allographic (typewritten or typeset) texts. The former, as we argue, are problematic for translation, just like pictures in painting, whereas the latter may be rendered in another language. The analysis of E. E. Cummings’ allographic experimental verse allows to propose a special strategy for translating this kind of texts. By analogy with ‘phonetic translation’, this strategy can be called ‘graphic translation’. This type of translation preserves the visual and metagraphemic forms of the original text, rearranging its lexical elements in translation. It specifically applies to visually-oriented avant-garde and experimental texts. Graphic translation ‘transcreates’ the text to a certain degree and this contributes to preserve and reinforce the experimental nature of avant-garde verse in languages other than its own.

The contribution of nurses to the morale of wounded and dying young men during World War 1 was immense. Alice Welford came from the small North Yorkshire village of Crathorne, joined the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service in 1915 and spent the following two and one half years in nursing casualties from some of the fiercest battles of the war including Gallipoli and Salonika. She kept an autograph book inscribed by wounded and dying soldiers, with poignant verses and humorous drawings showing love, wit and tragedy. Despite the dreadful conditions, kindness and compassion brought them comfort and raised their morale – a critical message for today, and Alice’s gift to us from World War I.

ABSTRACT The present article studies Cynewulf’s creative manipulation of heroic style in his hagiographic poem Juliana written around the 9th century A.D. The four poems now attributed to Cynewulf, on the strength of his runic autographs appended to each, Christ II, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles, and Juliana are written in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of heroic alliterative verse that Anglo- Saxons had inherited from their continental Germanic ancestors. In Juliana, the theme of treasure and exile reinforces the allegorical structure of Cynewulf’s poetic creation. In such poems like Beowulf and Seafarer treasure signifies the stability of bonds between people and tribes. The exchange of treasure and ritualistic treasure-giving confirms bonds between kings and their subjects. In Juliana, however, treasure is identified with heathen culture and idolatry. The traditional imagery of treasure, so central to Old English poetic lore, is inverted in the poem, as wealth and gold embody vice and corruption. The rejection of treasure and renunciation of kinship bonds indicate piety and chastity. Also, while in other Old English secular poems exile is cast in terms of deprivation of human company and material values, in Juliana the possession of and preoccupation with treasure indicates spiritual exile and damnation. This article argues that the inverted representations of treasure and exile in the poem lend additional strength to its allegorical elements and sharpen the contrast between secular world and Juliana, who is an allegorical representation of the Church.

The article presents the analysis of the new book of the famous bibliophile, researcher and populariser of rare books and bibliophilism, the Chairman of the National Union of Bibliophiles M.V. Seslavinsky about the history of creation, specific aspects of publishing and art design of the famous bibliophilic edition “Cantata” by A.A. Sidorov (Moscow, 1921). Comic verses of the future famous bibliologist and art critic, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR became the text for the first edition of the Russian society of the friends of books (1920—1929), the largest Association of booklovers of the 1920s. Two small runs totalled only 20 copies. The study is based primarily on the copies of “Cantata” preserved in the state collections (the Russian State Library, the State Tretyakov Gallery) and private collections, including the M.V. Seslavinsky’s one. The discovery of new documents on the history of the publication allowed restoring the list of owners of the autographed copies. Using the copy-by-copy method, the researcher succeeded in describing the numerous design options of the rarity of bibliophile publishing. The use of art-historical methods allowed to finally establish that the prototype for the image on the engraving “Bibliophile in 1920” (artist N.B. Baklanov, engraver I.N. Pavlov) was A.N. Benoit, the famous painter. The author introduces into circulation the handwritten poetic epistles of A.A. Sidorov to the owners of the autographed copies and other unique materials about preparation for printing, distribution and provenance of “Cantata”. In general, it can be concluded that M.V. Seslavinsky’s approaches to the analysis of “Cantata” can become basic in the study of bibliophile book as a special cultural phenomenon and trend in book publishing.

The article focuses on the textological analysis of “The song of the creation of the Mother-Earth” manuscript as recorded by K. G. Orosin, with edited variants also taken into consideration. The song is being prepared for the publication in the volume “Yakut Folk Songs” of the academic series “Monuments of Folklore of the Peoples of Siberia and the Far East.” The choice of this song for the analysis is due to the fact that all the stages of the creative process from a manuscript to published texts can be followed. The manuscript is characterized by multiple layers, representing as it does an autograph in the form of fair copy with editor’s alterations. This article is dedicated to reconstructing the original version without editorial changes. For an objective assessment of the text changes within the editing practice, we have made a textological interpretation of various readings in edited versions of the song. The song was published three times and republished once in different sources. Two main publications of the song were selected for the analysis. The first publication of 1912 is considered to be the first attempt to divide the straight text into verses. The second publication of 1947 is different in having the “improvements” of the text as a result of editing with a focus on conformity with literary norms. Thus, the textological comment was made to reconstruct the authentic text “The song of the creation of the Mother-Earth” recorded by K. G. Orosin and identify the alterations in edited and published texts.

“Bird-tracks” and “tadpoles” are both names for ancient script. As customs changed, the script came to be used less and less, until any basis for knowledgeable discussion was lost and it was known only from hearsay. The Grand Preceptor said: “When the [forms of the] rites are lost, search for them in the countryside.” Might not ancient script be even better than the countryside?The names of dozens of artists from the tenth century have come down to us, for the most part with very little information about their lives and scarcely more about their art. Fortunately, the life and professional career of Guo Zhongshu 郭忠恕 (928–977) can be reconstructed in enough detail to give a sense of the personality of the artist and the world that he experienced. Indeed, we are doubly fortunate because Guo, it turns out, had no ordinary life. Known to art historians today primarily as one of the great painters of architectural subjects in Chinese history, Guo entered adult life in a different guise, as a brilliant young paleographer and calligrapher. This aspect of his career, no less important than his painting, is the subject of the present study. Although specialists have recognized his scholarly and calligraphic achievements, we still lack a contextualized account that incorporates what can be known of his biography and social circumstances. More important for the theme of this special issue, the material dimension of Guo's paleographic and calligraphic activities also remains to be explored. Any discussion can only be very partial, however, since no manuscripts or autograph calligraphies survive, only stone steles; fortunately, Guo's engagement with stele production is in itself of the highest historical interest. The chronologically organized text that follows tells a biographical story, with as much detail as the available sources allow, which eventually opens out onto the material world of steles, before returning to biography to recount the last chapter of Guo Zongshu's life. Rather than offering a conclusion, I end with a reflection on the materialities of transmission of paleographic and calligraphic knowledge. For the purposes of this article I have not thought it necessary to choose between the very different lenses of biography and material culture, since my goal is not to prove a thesis but to reconstruct an unfamiliar world. As I hope to show, the understanding of one person's life can enrich the understanding of artifacts associated directly and indirectly with the person, and vice versa.

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masochistic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. The oscillations between the sexual and textual body in Wilmot’s poetry, and in our assessments of her life and writings, should help us approach her works (like the works of Rochester) as possessing a three-dimensionality that they have long been denied. ReferencesBartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 129-54.Behn, Aphra. “Song. Love Arm’d.” The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 1: Poetry. Ed. Janet Todd. London: William Pickering, 1992. 53.Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005). ‹http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bsl159›. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Doctor Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Diamond, Irene, Ed. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.Farley-Hill, David. Rochester’s Poetry. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester’s Monkey. New York: Penguin, 1974. Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, Ed. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. New York: Noonday Press, 1988. Kemp, Theresa D. “Early Women Writers.” Feminist Teacher 18.3 (2008): 234-39.King, Kathryn. “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text.” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. "Manuscript Transmission and Circulation." The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 55-80. Love, Harold. "Systemizing Sigla." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. 11 (2002): 217-230. Marotti, Arthur F. "Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England." A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 185-203.McNay, Lois. Foucault And Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern, 1992.Moody, Ellen. “Elizabeth Wilmot (neé Mallet), Countess of Rochester, Another Woman Poet.” Blog entry 16 March 2006. 11 Nov. 2008 ‹http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=400›. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 23 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/28/index.php›. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 392-413. New York: Norton, 2007.Russell, Anne. “Aphra Behn, Textual Communities, and Pastoral Sobriquets.” English Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 41-50.———. “'Public' and 'Private' in Aphra Behn's Miscellanies: Women Writers, Print, and Manuscript.” Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 29-48. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Seal, Jill. "The Perdita Project—A Winter's Report." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 10.1-14. ‹http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/perdita.htm›.Wilders, John. “Rochester and the Metaphysicals.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Hamden: Archon, 1982. 42-57.Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. “Song” (“Nothing Ades to Love's Fond Fire”) and “Song” (“Cloris Misfortunes That Can Be Exprest”) in Kissing the Rod. 230-32.

Federico Zuliani: Una raccolta di scritture politiche della fine del sedicesimo secolo. Giacomo Castelvetro e la biblioteca di Christian Barnekow. Alla pagina 68 recto del manoscritto Vault Case Ms. 5086, 73/2, Newberry Library, Chicago, ha inizio il “Registro di tutte le scritture politiche del S[igno]r Christiano Bernicò”. Il testo è preceduto da un altro elenco simile, sebbene più breve, che va sotto il titolo di “Memoriale D’alcune scritture politiche, che furon donate alla Reina Maria Stuarda Prigioniera in Inghilterra l’anno di salute m.d.lxxxiii. Dal S[igno]re di Cherelles”. Il manoscritto 5086, 73/2 fa parte di una collezione di dieci volumi (originariamente undici) appartenuti a Giacomo Castelvetro e oggi conservati negli Stati Uniti. I codici, le cui vicende di trasmissione sono, in parte, ancora poco chiare, furono sicuramente compilati da Castelvetro durante il periodo che passò in Danimarca, tra l’estate del 1594 e l’autunno del 1595. Il soggiorno danese di Castelvetro ha ricevuto attenzioni decisamente minori di quelle che invece meriterebbe. Alla permanenza in Danimarca è riconducibile infatti l’opera più ambiziosa dell’intera carriera del letterato italiano: vi vennero assemblati, con l’idea di darli poi alle stampe, proprio i volumi oggi negli Stati Uniti. La provenienza è provata tanto dall’indicazione, nei frontespizi, di Copenaghen come luogo di composizione, quanto dalle annotazioni autografe apportate da Castelvetro, a conclusione dei testi, a ricordare quando e dove fossero stati trascritti; oltre a Copenaghen vi si citano altre due località, Birkholm e Tølløse, entrambe sull’isola danese di Sjællad, ed entrambe amministrate da membri dell’influente famiglia Barnekow. E’ a Giuseppe Migliorato che va il merito di aver identificato per primo in Christian Barnekow il “Christiano Bernicò” della lista oggi alla Newberry Library. Christian Barnekow, nobile danese dalla straordinaria cultura (acquisita in uno studierejse durato ben diciassette anni), a partire dal 1591 fu al servizio personale di Cristiano IV di Danimarca. Barnekow e Castelvetro si dovettero incontrare a Edimburgo, dove il primo era giunto quale ambasciatore del monarca danese e dove il secondo si trovava già dal 1592, come maestro di italiano di Giacomo Stuart e di Anna di Danimarca, sorella di Cristiano IV. Sebbene non si possa escludere un ruolo di Anna nell’introdurli, è più probabile che sia stata la comune amicizia con Johann Jacob Grynaeus a propiziarne la conoscenza. Il dotto svizzero aveva infatti dato ospitalità a Barnekow, quando questi era studente presso l’università di Basilea, ne era divenuto amico e aveva mantenuto i rapporti nel momento in cui il giovane aveva lasciato la città elvetica. Grynaeus era però anche il cognato di Castelvetro il quale aveva sposato Isotta de’ Canonici, vedova di Thomas Liebler, e sorella di Lavinia, moglie di Grynaeus sin dal 1569. Isotta era morta però nel marzo del 1594, in Scozia, ed è facile immaginare come Barnekow abbia desiderato esprimere le proprie condoglianze al marito, cognato di un suo caro amico, e vedovo di una persona che doveva aver conosciuto bene quando aveva alloggiato presso la casa della sorella. Castelvetro, inoltre, potrebbe essere risultato noto a Barnekow anche a causa di due edizioni di opere del primo marito della moglie curate postume dal letterato italiano, tra il 1589 e il 1590. Thomas Liebler, più famoso con il nome latinizzato di Erasto, era stato infatti uno dei più acerrimi oppositori di Pietro Severino, il celebre paracelsiano danese; Giacomo Castelvetro non doveva essere quindi completamente ignoto nei circoli dotti della Danimarca. La vasta cultura di Christian Barnekow ci è nota attraverso l’apprezzamento di diversi suoi contemporanei, quali Grynaeus, Jon Venusinus e, soprattutto, Hans Poulsen Resen, futuro vescovo di Sjælland e amico personale di Barnekow a cui dobbiamo molte delle informazioni in nostro possesso circa la vita del nobile danese, grazie all’orazione funebre che questi tenne nel 1612 e che venne data alle stampe l’anno successivo, a Copenaghen. Qui, ricordandone lo studierejse, il vescovo raccontò come Barnekow fosse ritornato in Danimarca “pieno di conoscenza e di storie” oltre che di “relazioni e discorsi” in diverse lingue. Con questi due termini l’ecclesiastico danese alludeva, con tutta probabilità, a quei documenti diplomatici, relazioni e discorsi di ambasciatori, per l’appunto, che rientravano tra le letture preferite degli studenti universitari padovani. La lista compilata da Castelvetro, dove figurano lettere e istrutioni ma, soprattutto, relationi e discorsi, era un catalogo di quella collezione di manoscritti, portata dall’Italia, a cui fece riferimento l’ecclesiastico danese commemorando Christian Barnekow. Tutti coloro i quali si sono occupati dei volumi oggi negli Stati Uniti si sono trovati concordi nel ritenerli pronti per la pubblicazione: oltre alle abbondanti correzioni (tra cui numerose alle spaziature e ai rientri) i volumi presentano infatti frontespizi provvisori, ma completi (con data di stampa, luogo, impaginazione dei titoli – a loro volta occasionalmente corretti – motto etc.), indici del contenuto e titolature laterali per agevolare lettura e consultazione. Anche Jakob Ulfeldt, amico e compagno di viaggi e di studi di Barnekow, riportò a casa una collezione di documenti (GKS 500–505 fol.) per molti aspetti analoga a quella di Barnekow e che si dimostra di grande importanza per comprendere peculiarità e specificità di quella di quest’ultimo. I testi di Ulfeldt risultano assemblati senza alcuna coerenza, si rivelano ricchi di errori di trascrizione e di grammatica, e non offrono alcuna divisione interna, rendendone l’impiego particolarmente arduo. Le annotazioni di un copista italiano suggeriscono inoltre come, già a Padova, potesse essere stato difficoltoso sapere con certezza quali documenti fossero effettivamente presenti nella collezione e quali si fossero smarriti (prestati, perduti, pagati ma mai ricevuti…). La raccolta di Barnekow, che aveva le stesse fonti semi-clandestine di quella dell’amico, doveva trovarsi in condizioni per molti versi simili e solo la mano di un esperto avrebbe potuto portarvi ordine. Giacomo Castelvetro – nipote di Ludovico Castelvetro, uno dei filologi più celebri della propria generazione, e un filologo egli stesso, fluente in italiano, latino e francese, oltre che collaboratore di lunga data di John Wolfe, editore londinese specializzato nella pubblicazione di opere italiane – possedeva esattamente quelle competenze di cui Barnekow aveva bisogno e ben si intuisce come mai quest’ultimo lo convinse a seguirlo in Danimarca. I compiti di Castelvetro presso Barnekow furono quelli di passarne in rassegna la collezione, accertarsi dell’effettivo contenuto, leggerne i testi, raggrupparli per tematica e area geografica, sceglierne i più significativi, emendarli, e prepararne quindi un’edizione. Sapendo che Castelvetro poté occuparsi della prima parte del compito nei, frenetici, mesi danesi, diviene pure comprensibile come mai egli portò con sé i volumi oggi negli Stati Uniti quando si diresse in Svezia: mancava ancora la parte forse più delicata del lavoro, un’ultima revisione dei testi prima che questi fossero passati a un tipografo perché li desse alle stampe. La ragione principale che sottostò all’idea di pubblicare un’edizione di “scritture politiche” italiane in Danimarca fu la presenza, in tutta l’Europa centro settentrionale del tempo, di una vera e propria moda italiana che i contatti tra corti, oltre che i viaggi d’istruzione della nobiltà, dovettero diffondere anche in Danimarca. Nel tardo Cinquecento gli autori italiani cominciarono ad essere sempre più abituali nelle biblioteche private danesi e la conoscenza dell’italiano, sebbene non completamente assente anche in altri settori della popolazione, divenne una parte fondamentale dell’educazione della futura classe dirigente del paese nordico, come prova l’istituzione di una cattedra di italiano presso l’appena fondata Accademia di Sorø, nel 1623. Anche in Danimarca, inoltre, si tentò di attrarre esperti e artisti italiani; tra questi, l’architetto Domenico Badiaz, Giovannimaria Borcht, che fu segretario personale di Frederik Leye, borgomastro di Helsingør, il maestro di scherma Salvator Fabris, l’organista Vincenzo Bertolusi, il violinista Giovanni Giacomo Merlis o, ancora, lo scultore Pietro Crevelli. A differenza dell’Inghilterra non si ebbero in Danimarca edizioni critiche di testi italiani; videro però la luce alcune traduzioni, anche se spesso dal tedesco, di autori italiani, quali Boccaccio e Petrarca, e, soprattutto, si arrivò a pubblicare anche in italiano, come dimostrano i due volumi di madrigali del Giardino Novo e il trattato De lo schermo overo scienza d’arme di Salvator Fabris, usciti tutti a Copenaghen tra il 1605 e il 1606. Un’ulteriore ragione che motivò la scelta di stampare una raccolta come quella curata da Castelvetro è da ricercarsi poi nello straordinario successo che la letteratura di “maneggio di stato” (relazioni diplomatiche, compendi di storia, analisi dell’erario) godette all’epoca, anche, se non specialmente, presso i giovani aristocratici centro e nord europei che studiavano in Italia. Non a caso, presso Det Kongelige Bibliotek, si trovano diverse collezioni di questo genere di testi (GKS 511–512 fol.; GKS 525 fol.; GKS 500–505 fol.; GKS 2164–2167 4º; GKS 523 fol.; GKS 598 fol.; GKS 507–510 fol.; Thott 576 fol.; Kall 333 4º e NKS 244 fol.). Tali scritti, considerati come particolarmente adatti per la formazione di coloro che si fossero voluti dedicare all’attività politica in senso lato, supplivano a una mancanza propria dei curricula universitari dell’epoca: quella della totale assenza di qualsivoglia materia che si occupasse di “attualità”. Le relazioni diplomatiche risultavano infatti utilissime agli studenti, futuri servitori dello Stato, per aggiornarsi circa i più recenti avvenimenti politici e religiosi europei oltre che per ottenere informazioni attorno a paesi lontani o da poco scoperti. Sebbene sia impossibile stabilire con assoluta certezza quali e quante delle collezioni di documenti oggi conservate presso Det Kongelige Bibliotek siano state riportate in Danimarca da studenti danesi, pare legittimo immaginare che almeno una buona parte di esse lo sia stata. L’interesse doveva essere alto e un’edizione avrebbe avuto mercato, con tutta probabilità, anche fuori dalla Danimarca: una pubblicazione curata filologicamente avrebbe offerto infatti testi di gran lunga superiori a quelli normalmente acquistati da giovani dalle possibilità economiche limitate e spesso sprovvisti di una padronanza adeguata delle lingue romanze. Non a caso, nei medesimi anni, si ebbero edizioni per molti versi equivalenti a quella pensata da Barnekow e da Castelvetro. Nel 1589, a Colonia, venne pubblicato il Tesoro politico, una scelta di materiale diplomatico italiano (ristampato anche nel 1592 e nel 1598), mentre tra il 1610 e il 1612, un altro testo di questo genere, la Praxis prudentiae politicae, vide la luce a Francoforte. La raccolta manoscritta di Barnekow ebbe però anche caratteristiche a sé stanti rispetto a quelle degli altri giovani danesi a lui contemporanei. Barnekow, anzitutto, continuò ad arricchire la propria collezione anche dopo il rientro in patria come dimostra, per esempio, una relazione d’area fiamminga datata 1594. La biblioteca manoscritta di Barnekow si distingue inoltre per l’ampiezza. Se conosciamo per Ulfeldt trentadue testi che questi portò con sé dall’Italia (uno dei suoi volumi è comunque andato perduto) la lista di “scritture politiche” di Barnekow ne conta ben duecentoottantaquattro. Un’altra peculiarità è quella di essere composta inoltre di testi sciolti, cioè a dirsi non ancora copiati o rilegati in volume. Presso Det Kongelige Bibliotek è possibile ritrovare infatti diversi degli scritti registrati nella lista stilata da Castelvetro: dodici riconducibili con sicurezza e sette per cui la provenienza parrebbe per lo meno probabile. A lungo il problema di chi sia stato Michele – una persona vicina a Barnekow a cui Castelvetro afferma di aver pagato parte degli originali dei manoscritti oggi in America – è parso, di fatto, irrisolvibile. Come ipotesi di lavoro, e basandosi sulle annotazioni apposte ai colophon, si è proposto che Michele potesse essere il proprietario di quei, pochi, testi che compaiono nei volumi oggi a Chicago e New York ma che non possono essere ricondotti all’elenco redatto da Castelvetro. Michele sarebbe stato quindi un privato, legato a Barnekow e a lui prossimo, da lui magari addirittura protetto, ma del quale non era al servizio, e che doveva avere presso di sé una biblioteca di cui Castelvetro provò ad avere visione al fine di integrare le scritture del nobile danese in vista della sua progettata edizione. Il fatto che nel 1596 Michele fosse in Italia spiegherebbe poi come potesse avere accesso a questo genere di opere. Che le possedesse per proprio diletto oppure che, magari, le commerciasse addirittura, non è invece dato dire. L’analisi del materiale oggi negli Stati Uniti si rivela ricca di spunti. Per quanto riguarda Castelvetro pare delinearsi, sempre di più, un ruolo di primo piano nella diffusione della cultura italiana nell’Europa del secondo Cinquecento, mentre Barnekow emerge come una figura veramente centrale nella vita intellettuale della Danimarca a cavallo tra Cinque e Seicento. Sempre Barnekow si dimostra poi di grandissima utilità per iniziare a studiare un tema che sino ad oggi ha ricevuto, probabilmente, troppa poca attenzione: quello dell’importazione in Danimarca di modelli culturali italiani grazie all’azione di quei giovani aristocratici che si erano formati presso le università della penisola. A tale proposito l’influenza esercitata dalla letteratura italiana di “maneggio di stato” sul pensiero politico danese tra sedicesimo e diciassettesimo secolo è tra gli aspetti che meriterebbero studi più approfonditi. Tra i risultati meno esaurienti si collocano invece quelli legati all’indagine e alla ricostruzione della biblioteca di Barnekow e, in particolare, di quanto ne sia sopravvissuto. Solo un esame sistematico, non solo dei fondi manoscritti di Det Kongelige Bibliotek, ma, più in generale, di tutte le altre biblioteche e collezioni scandinave, potrebbe dare in futuro esiti soddisfacenti.