Journal articles on the topic 'Ethiopian Illumination of books and manuscripts'

This study stems from an exhibition/ conference of the same name, “Beyond Words,” presented in Boston in 2006; however, it goes well beyond the bounds of a conventional exhibition catalog, which was produced at the time to accompany the objects on display. The volume produced here expands these initial parameters to consider additional questions about the manuscripts held in these Boston collections, notably Houghton Library at Harvard University, McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Boston. The book is divided into four major sections, devoted respectively to monastic manuscripts (3 essays), courtly culture and patronage (5 essays), princes, patricians, prelates and pontiffs (4 essays), and illuminating history (3 essays) with a coda on manuscripts in the modern era provided by the final essay. As the editors remark in their introduction, the emphasis is Christian and central European; this is due in part to the collection parameters themselves (the above institutions have no Ethiopian or Hebrew manuscripts, for example) and in part by limitations of time and focus (there are a number of Islamic manuscripts in the Boston collections which have not been included here but would be well worth exploring in a separate study of their own). The richness and depth of the sixteen essays here offer insights into many aspects of the late medieval world. The chapter by Patricia Stirnemann on Gilbert de la Porrée traces book collection of the works of a single, theologically problematic author, and offers a valuable case study on the transmission of writings by a scholar charged (though exonerated) with heresy. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak demonstrates how the charters of the abbey of Sawley preserved in the Houghton library allow us to consider the “medial role” of document writing, and how this practice assisted an English Cistercian monastery to shape its own representation with its neighbors by crafting records of land ownership disputes. Kathryn M. Rudy examines manuscript workshops among nuns in Delft in the fifteenth century, providing a vivid model of book production practices in these devotional contexts.

The canon lists in Sēnodos und Fetḥa nagaśt do not represent the original arrangement of biblical books, since they go back to coptic traditions. Most of the biblical manuscripts are younger than the lists (c. 14 to c. 20), and their order of books is very disparat. Although the original arrangement cannot be identified from them, they reveal aspects of arrangement, which generate a specific ethiopian shape of the bible. Books or groups of books are bound together in different ways. In the OT there are eight books of the Law instead of five, and the rest remains in great variance. In the NT the internal order of the groups is stable, but the ar­rangement of the groups varies. Looking at this variability from a perspective of reception, the manuscripts are important, for they show what the believing community actually had before it. The ethiopian biblical canon seems to be construed as a net of various innerbiblical dialo­gues.

Ethiopian Muslims introduced literary culture and manuscript collection in the mosques after the introduction of Islam in the seventh century. Books stored and preserved in a bookshelves known as taqet (Arabic, tāqat, shelf). This clearly shows African endogenous culture of preserving textual material that before the introduction of European models for archives and museums. This article demonstrates the collection of Islamic manuscripts in Ethiopian state archives and private collections and illustrates their challenges with recommendation to rescue the collections.

This article examines the book culture of the Jesuit mission to Ethiopia (1557–1632). Combining archival and field research, it considers the composition of the mission’s now-lost libraries, the use of books as tools of conversion, book production, and missionary engagement with Ethiopian Orthodox book culture. Furthermore, it illuminates the Jesuit reliance upon Ethiopian collaborators both to understand Orthodox texts and to produce Catholic manuscripts in the absence of a printing press. Using the personal libraries of Pedro Páez, S.J. and Afonso Mendes, S.J. as case studies, it posits that the gradual acceleration of acts performed by Jesuits upon Orthodox books—including collecting, translating, editing, and destroying—paralleled the rising aggression and cultural intolerance of the mission. Ultimately, this resulted in the expulsion and murder of the Jesuits, and the destruction of their libraries in a series of state-sanctioned book burnings that permitted a revival of Ethiopian Orthodoxy.

This article considers the major cycles of illumination in two Books of Hours belonging to Thomas Butler, seventh Earl of Ormond (c.1424–1515). The article concludes that the iconography of the two manuscripts reflects the personal and familial piety of the patron and was designed to act as a tool in the practice of devotion.

Review(s) of: Illuminated manuscripts and incucabula in Cambridge: A catalogue of western book illumination in the Fitzwilliam museum and the Cambridge colleges, part five: Illuminated incunabula, volume one: Books printed in Italy, by Andriolo, Azzura Elena and Reynolds, Suzanne, (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2017) hardcover, 288 pages, RRP 149 pounds/Euro175; ISBN: 9781909400856.

ABSTRACTThis research is presented to examine the decoration contained in the manuscripts in Kerinci, because it is seen from the problem that in the development of civilization and the tradition of writing manuscripts it is common to change the form of illumination and illustration in manuscripts due to various factors which are the result of human creativity. For the method that the author uses in this research is using a qualitative method with a codicological approach, whose primary source focuses on several Kerinci manuscripts that have been digitized. Then for other sources this research is assisted by references such as books, articles, and other sources related to this study. The result of this paper is knowledge and description of the decoration on the manuscript in the form of illumination and illustration on several manuscripts found in the Kerinci region in the form of manuscript decoration and explanation of the meaning of the contents of the manuscript.Keywords: Decoration, Script, Illumination, Illustration, Kerinci. ABSTRAKPenelitian ini dihadirkan untuk menelisik hiasan yang terdapat pada naskah yang ada di Kerinci, dikarenakan dilihat dari persoalan bahwa dalam perkembangan peradaban dan tradisi penulisan naskah lumrah terjadi perubahan bentuk iluminasi maupun ilustrasi pada naskah karena disebabkan oleh berbagai faktor yang merupakan hasil dari kreativitas manusia. Untuk metode yang penulis gunakan dalam penelitian ini yaitu memakai metode kualitatif dengan pendekatan kodikologi, yang sumber primernya berfokus kepada beberapa naskah-naskah Kerinci yang sudah digitalisasi. Kemudian untuk sumber-sumber lainnya penelitian ini dibantu oleh referensi seperti buku, artikel, dan sumber lainnya yang berkaitan dengan kajian ini. Adapun hasil dari tulisan ini adalah pengetahuan dan deskripsi tentang hiasan pada naskah berupa iluminasi dan ilustrasi pada beberapa naskah yang terdapat di wilayah Kerinci yang berupa hiasan naskah dan penjelasan dari makna isi naskah.Kata Kunci: Hiasan, Naskah, Iluminasi, Ilustrasi, Kerinci.

The Karang Mindu manuscript is one of the ancient manuscripts originating from Kerinci, one of the collections of Bakhtiar Hanif, which we know that these ancient manuscripts are very important to protect, because they are relics of our ancestors that have high historical value. Not only that, from ancient manuscripts we can find out about the culture of the past about the illumination on the bamboo manuscript "Karang Mindu" collection of Bakhtiar Hanif Kerinci. The purpose of this article is to find out about the manuscript. Overall, the method used in this research is to use a qualitative method using a literature study, by collecting the main source from the EAP Library with documentation number EAP 117/63/1/15, besides that the author also collects sources from various previous studies, books, articles, journals, which are related to the research theme. The result of this research is the content of the manuscript text Karang Mindu explains about a poet whose love is unrequited, besides that there are also interesting illuminations such as Pucuk Rebung, and Keluk Paku. The manuscript motive also describes the life of ancient people who always utilized nature for their needs. Therefore, studying the illuminations in the manuscript helps to strengthen and maintain Kerinci's cultural heritage or local wisdom.

Abstract Long sidelined by art historians, the Wandalgarius Codex is a compendium of legal texts dated to 793 that represents an early venture in a trend associated with the 790s: populating initial letters with lively figures. This article centers the Wandalgarius Codex in discussion of experimental book illumination in the late eighth century. The decade saw re-definition of the visual organization of books, the uses illumination could serve, and the ways manuscripts in many genres reflected and shaped projects of education and reform. The essay sets Wandalgarius’ approach to initials in conversation with the well-known Gellone Sacramentary, and investigates the scribe-draftsman’s characterization of his own work as an ambitious contemporary book-maker.

Abstract This essay follows three different stages of the fusion of images and words in the tradition of the book. More specifically, it tackles the transformation undergone by the initially religious combination of visual figures and scriptural texts, exemplified by medieval illuminated manuscripts into the spiritual, non-dogmatic, illuminated books printed and painted by poet-prophet William Blake in a manner that combines mysticism and literature. Eventually, the analysis reaches the secularized genre of the graphic novel that renounces the metaphysical element embedded in the intertwining of the two media. If ninth-century manuscripts such as the Book of Kells were employed solely for divinely inspired renditions of religious texts, William Blake’s late eighteenthcentury illuminated books moved towards an individual, personal literature conveyed via unique pieces of art that asserted the importance of individuality in the process of creation. The modern rendition of the image-text illumination can be said to take the form of the graphic novel with writers such as Will Eisner and Alan Moore overtly expressing their indebtedness to the above-mentioned tradition by paying homage to William Blake in the pages of their graphic novels. However, the fully printed form of this twentieth-century literary genre, along with its separation from the intrinsic spirituality of the visual-literary fusion in order to meet the demands of a disenchanted era, necessarily reconceptualize the notion of illumination.

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

Abstract The Royal Library of Belgium (kbr) has opened a new permanent museum showcasing the historical core of its collections: the luxurious manuscript library of the dukes of Burgundy. Centred around a late medieval chapel that is part of kbr’s present-day building, the museum introduces visitors to medieval book production, the historical context of the late medieval Low Countries, and the subject matter of the ducal library. The breadth of the dukes’ (and their wives’!) interests is reflected in the manuscripts that have come down to us, ranging from liturgical books over philosophical treatises to courtly literature. The Museum places late medieval book production squarely in its historical and artistic context. Visitors are not only introduced to the urban culture that provided a fruitful meeting place between artists, craftsmen, and patrons, but also to the broader artistic culture of the late Middle Ages. By presenting the manuscripts in dialogue with other forms of art such as panel paintings and sculpture, the exhibition stresses that artists at times moved between various media (e.g. illumination and painting) and were influenced by iconography in other forms of art.

Monastic illumination of manuscripts gave to writings a force and prestige which was unprecedented. Throughout the millennium of western monasticism (500-1500 A.D.), the rich founded monasteries so that monks might pray and worship on their behalf. The monks displayed the fruit of their labours to their patrons in their churches and other works of art, particularly in their books. When with growing prosperity from about 1250 onwards the demand for individual prayer reached down to the middle class of knights and burgesses, they began to want wonderworking books of their own. They could not afford to buy a chantry chapel or a jewelled reliquary, but a small illuminated manuscript came within their means as the first step towards the purchase of paradise. Ladies in particular took to reciting the Latin Psalter and treasuring illuminated Books of Hours. In fifteenth-century depictions of the Annunciation, Mary is often shown seated in a sunlit bower with an open Book of Hours on her lap or displayed on a lectern. Likewise she is sometimes depicted with the Child Jesus on her knee, showing him a Book of Hours. The habit of possessing books might never have reached the laity if writing had not been so luxurious and so covetable. Illumination introduced the laity to script through images which could not fail to attract the eye. The children of the prosperous were introduced to the Psalter by their mothers or a priest for the purpose both of learning to read and of beginning formal prayer. To own a Psalter was therefore an act of familial as well as public piety.These words were written twenty years ago, for a conference at the Library of Congress in 1980 on ‘Literacy in historical perspective’. Since then, these themes have been addressed in several lectures and research papers at conferences, and I would stand by the main ideas expressed in that passage. Monks had indeed given extraordinary prestige to books and in particular to the illuminated liturgical book, which is a medieval invention. By the thirteenth century such books were being adapted for lay use and ownership, typically in Books of Hours. However, it is mistaken to say that lay use ‘began’ then, as the aristocracy – particularly in Germany – had been familiar with prayer books for centuries. In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen was said to have learned only the Psalter ‘as is the custom of noble girls’. A Psalter for lay use dating from c.1150, which belonged to Clementia von Zähringen, has been preserved. It contains a full-page portrait of a lady – presumably Clementia herself – at folio 6v between the end of the Calendar and the Beatus page beginning the Psalms. This book has 126 folios in its present state (possibly one folio is missing at the end) and it measures 11 cm X 7 cm, no larger than a woman’s hand. The biography of Marianus Scotus, the eleventh-century Irish hermit who settled at Regensburg, describes how he wrote for poor widows and clerics ‘many little books and many Psalter manuals’ (‘multos libellos multaque manualia psalteria’). The diminutive form ‘libellos’ and the adjective ‘manualia’ emphasise that these manuscripts were small enough to hold in the hand, like Clementia von Zähringen’s book.

Abstract In 1482, Erhard Ratdolt, a prominent German printer in Venice, issued the editio princeps of Euclid’s Elements. Ratdolt experimented with the new technology of printing to overcome the difficulty in arranging geometric diagrams alongside the text. This article examines the materials and techniques that Ratdolt used in his edition of Elements including his use of vellum, gold printing, and illumination for special copies as well as his use of woodcuts, movable type, and metal-cast diagrams. Significantly, the legacy of Ratdolt’s innovations continued almost one hundred years later in subsequent editions of Elements. In 1572, Camillo Francischini printed Federico Commandino’s Latin translation and commentary, and today, there are at least two surviving copies of this edition printed on blue paper. Both printers, Ratdolt and Francischini, used the printing press to produce unique and bespoke books using material and visual cues from luxury objects like illuminated manuscripts. These case studies of Euclid’s Elements brings together the fields of art history, history of the book, and the history of geometry, and analyzes the myriad ways that printers employed the printing press in the early modern period to elevate and modernize ancient, mathematical texts.

Modern medieval studies consider the “Libros de Privilegios” as an important and very informative source for the history of medieval municipal administration and the town chanceries. These manuscripts, being essentially cartularies, constitute a special group of legal texts originating from the city. The features of their codicology, paleography and illumination make it possible to study the development of document management practices in cities. The article compares the “Libros de Privilegios” from four towns of the Kingdom of Castile — Toledo, Seville, Murcia and Lorca. Ordered by concejos to municipal scribes, they testify to a common vector of development of municipal government in different towns, regardless of the time of their inclusion in the Kingdom of Castile. The books of privileges considered in the article were compiled in the period from the last quarter 13th century until the end of the 30s of the 14th century, although the Fuero of Toledo taken as a basis in them was formed and was issued in the form of a charter in the first quarter of the 13th century. After the consejos received from the king the Fuero of Toledo in the version of 1222 as a fundamental document regulating local legal life, they later either independently selected documents for inclusion in their «Libros de Privilegios» (Toledo, Seville, Murcia), or determined a sample for copying (Lorca).

Language is the main instrument in the wider spread and documentation of Islam and Islamic history in Africa and beyond. Historical development and rapid spread of Islam in African societies were historically accredited to African languages. The historic contact of the first Muslim generations with the Ethiopian emperor opens up the gate for the socio-linguistic development of translating Islamic dogma and messages into African languages. The Hausa factor in West African Islam is well noted in the writings of the early Muslim scholars. African linguistics contributions enhance the converts' literacy and develop a strong community of scholars of the highest historical relevance in the history of Islam in the African context. Africa is the home of about 2000 languages, Nigeria is with more than 556 languages, having Hausa leading the race with about 150 million speakers was rated as number 11 out of 7500 languages in the modern world as of 2022. Interestingly, about 85% of the Hausa native speakers are Muslims and about 69 percent of the Nigerian Muslim scholars are either Hausa natives or hausanized through Islamic activities in Hausaland. Thus, the spread of Islam in Africa was the handwork of African languages and not by the sword as alleged by the observers. My contact with Muslim scholars of various regions in Hausaland justified that, the technique of identification and naming Arabic alphabets are the same across the regions. In addition, the Ajami writing styles are the same. Hundreds of books and manuscripts are of the same orthography. These gave me the courage to investigate how it helps Islamic scholarship in the West African regions. This paper aims to study the role of Hausa Muslim scholars in the translation, naming, and adaptation of the 28 Arabic alphabets into the Hausa language which led to the innovation of Hausa Ajami writing and subsequent development of scholarship in the Hausaland. The paper would critically look into the Hausa-Arabic battle of alphabets treatment and the role of mother tongue in Islamic scholarship activities in West Africa Islam, with special emphasis on Hausa-speaking communities of West Africa.

Illustrated manuscripts in the Ethiopic language, as material objects that carry textual and visual information, are among the most valuable sources of data for art historians specializing in this area. This article provides a handlist of illustrated early Solomonic manuscripts housed in German libraries and museums. The contribution was created within the framework of the AHRC-DFG project Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270–1527) so our data reflects the project’s research focus on visual matter. This is the first time that the illuminations of the manuscripts included in the handlist are analysed comprehensively. We believe that the resulting work sheds new light on the history of book illustration in early Solomonic Ethiopia and hope that it will provide researchers with a valuable instrument to foster comparative research and a more integrative approach to the study of Ethiopian art.

As material objects bearing textual and visual information, illustrated Christian manuscripts from the Horn of Africa are among the most valuable sources of data for scholars specializing in this field. This article is the second handlist produced within the framework of the AHRC-DFG project Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in Early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270– 1527). It focuses on illustrated Early Solomonic manuscripts housed in public libraries in the United Kingdom. This is the first time that this body of illuminations has been comprehensively analysed. The resulting work sheds new light on the history of book illustration in Early Solomonic Ethiopia and provides insights into the connected histories of the Christian empire of the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands and the wider Mediterranean world. Moreover, it showcases the movements of manuscripts and the development of collections of Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Europe.

Illumination is visual decoration in form of coloured fonts, designed or illustrated page in print media. In middle age bibles or manuscripts, there are forms and type of illuminations that may applied as a system of content delivery in books. A framework of illumination design methodology may elaborated through content analysis on several illuminations in bibles and religious manuscripts. This research will enrich visual communication design study, especially typography and illustration study in developing an information system delivery based on visual elements.

IntroductionThere are two types of Africa. The first is a place where people and cultures live. The second is the image of Africa that has been invented through colonial knowledge and power. The colonial image of Africa, as the Other of Europe, a land “enveloped in the dark mantle of night” was supported by western states as it justified their colonial practices (Hegel 91). Any evidence that challenged the myth of the Dark Continent was destroyed, removed or ignored. While the looting of African natural resources has been studied, the looting of African knowledges hasn’t received as much attention, partly based on the assumption that Africans did not produce knowledge that could be stolen. This article invalidates this myth by examining the legacy of Ethiopia’s indigenous Ge’ez literature, and its looting and abduction by powerful western agents. The article argues that this has resulted in epistemic violence, where students of the Ethiopian indigenous education system do not have access to their books, while European orientalists use them to interpret Ethiopian history and philosophy using a foreign lens. The analysis is based on interviews with teachers and students of ten Ge’ez schools in Ethiopia, and trips to the Ethiopian manuscript collections in The British Library, The Princeton Library, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and The National Archives in Addis Ababa.The Context of Ethiopian Indigenous KnowledgesGe’ez is one of the ancient languages of Africa. According to Professor Ephraim Isaac, “about 10,000 years ago, one single nation or community of a single linguistic group existed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa” (The Habesha). The language of this group is known as Proto-Afroasiatic or Afrasian languages. It is the ancestor of the Semitic, Cushitic, Nilotic, Omotic and other languages that are currently spoken in Ethiopia by its 80 ethnic groups, and the neighbouring countries (Diakonoff). Ethiopians developed the Ge’ez language as their lingua franca with its own writing system some 2000 years ago. Currently, Ge’ez is the language of academic scholarship, studied through the traditional education system (Isaac, The Ethiopian). Since the fourth century, an estimated 1 million Ge’ez manuscripts have been written, covering religious, historical, mathematical, medicinal, and philosophical texts.One of the most famous Ge’ez manuscripts is the Kebra Nagast, a foundational text that embodied the indigenous conception of nationhood in Ethiopia. The philosophical, political and religious themes in this book, which craft Ethiopia as God’s country and the home of the Ark of the Covenant, contributed to the country’s success in defending itself from European colonialism. The production of books like the Kebra Nagast went hand in hand with a robust indigenous education system that trained poets, scribes, judges, artists, administrators and priests. Achieving the highest stages of learning requires about 30 years after which the scholar would be given the rare title Arat-Ayina, which means “four eyed”, a person with the ability to see the past as well as the future. Today, there are around 50,000 Ge’ez schools across the country, most of which are in rural villages and churches.Ge’ez manuscripts are important textbooks and reference materials for students. They are carefully prepared from vellum “to make them last forever” (interview, 3 Oct. 2019). Some of the religious books are regarded as “holy persons who breathe wisdom that gives light and food to the human soul”. Other manuscripts, often prepared as scrolls are used for medicinal purposes. Each manuscript is uniquely prepared reflecting inherited wisdom on contemporary lives using the method called Tirguamme, the act of giving meaning to sacred texts. Preparation of books is costly. Smaller manuscript require the skins of 50-70 goats/sheep and large manuscript needed 100-120 goats/sheep (Tefera).The Loss of Ethiopian ManuscriptsSince the 18th century, a large quantity of these manuscripts have been stolen, looted, or smuggled out of the country by travellers who came to the country as explorers, diplomats and scientists. The total number of Ethiopian manuscripts taken is still unknown. Amsalu Tefera counted 6928 Ethiopian manuscripts currently held in foreign libraries and museums. This figure does not include privately held or unofficial collections (41).Looting and smuggling were sponsored by western governments, institutions, and notable individuals. For example, in 1868, The British Museum Acting Director Richard Holms joined the British army which was sent to ‘rescue’ British hostages at Maqdala, the capital of Emperor Tewodros. Holms’ mission was to bring treasures for the Museum. Before the battle, Tewodros had established the Medhanialem library with more than 1000 manuscripts as part of Ethiopia’s “industrial revolution”. When Tewodros lost the war and committed suicide, British soldiers looted the capital, including the treasury and the library. They needed 200 mules and 15 elephants to transport the loot and “set fire to all buildings so that no trace was left of the edifices which once housed the manuscripts” (Rita Pankhurst 224). Richard Holmes collected 356 manuscripts for the Museum. A wealthy British woman called Lady Meux acquired some of the most illuminated manuscripts. In her will, she bequeathed them to be returned to Ethiopia. However, her will was reversed by court due to a campaign from the British press (Richard Pankhurst). In 2018, the V&A Museum in London displayed some of the treasures by incorporating Maqdala into the imperial narrative of Britain (Woldeyes, Reflections).Britain is by no means the only country to seek Ethiopian manuscripts for their collections. Smuggling occurred in the name of science, an act of collecting manuscripts for study. Looting involved local collaborators and powerful foreign sponsors from places like France, Germany and the Vatican. Like Maqdala, this was often sponsored by governments or powerful financers. For example, the French government sponsored the Dakar-Djibouti Mission led by Marcel Griaule, which “brought back about 350 manuscripts and scrolls from Gondar” (Wion 2). It was often claimed that these manuscripts were purchased, rather than looted. Johannes Flemming of Germany was said to have purchased 70 manuscripts and ten scrolls for the Royal Library of Berlin in 1905. However, there was no local market for buying manuscripts. Ge’ez manuscripts were, and still are, written to serve spiritual and secular life in Ethiopia, not for buying and selling. There are countless other examples, but space limits how many can be provided in this article. What is important to note is that museums and libraries have accrued impressive collections without emphasising how those collections were first obtained. The loss of the intellectual heritage of Ethiopians to western collectors has had an enormous impact on the country.Knowledge Grabbing: The Denial of Access to KnowledgeWith so many manuscripts lost, European collectors became the narrators of Ethiopian knowledge and history. Edward Ullendorff, a known orientalist in Ethiopian studies, refers to James Bruce as “the explorer of Abyssinia” (114). Ullendorff commented on the significance of Bruce’s travel to Ethiopia asperhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts… . They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. (133)This quote encompasses three major ways in which epistemic violence occurs: denial of access to knowledge, Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts, and the handling of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts from the past. These will be discussed below.Western ‘travellers’, such as Bruce, did not fully disclose how many manuscripts they took or how they acquired them. The abundance of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions can be compared to the scarcity of such materials among traditional schools in Ethiopia. In this research, I have visited ten indigenous schools in Wollo (Lalibela, Neakutoleab, Asheten, Wadla), in Gondar (Bahita, Kuskwam, Menbere Mengist), and Gojam (Bahirdar, Selam Argiew Maryam, Giorgis). In all of the schools, there is lack of Ge’ez manuscripts. Students often come from rural villages and do not receive any government support. The scarcity of Ge’ez manuscripts, and the lack of funding which might allow for the purchasing of books, means the students depend mainly on memorising Ge’ez texts told to them from the mouth of their teacher. Although this method of learning is not new, it currently is the only way for passing indigenous knowledges across generations.The absence of manuscripts is most strongly felt in the advanced schools. For instance, in the school of Qene, poetic literature is created through an in-depth study of the vocabulary and grammar of Ge’ez. A Qene student is required to develop a deep knowledge of Ge’ez in order to understand ancient and medieval Ge’ez texts which are used to produce poetry with multiple meanings. Without Ge’ez manuscripts, students cannot draw their creative works from the broad intellectual tradition of their ancestors. When asked how students gain access to textbooks, one student commented:we don’t have access to Birana books (Ge’ez manuscripts written on vellum). We cannot learn the ancient wisdom of painting, writing, and computing developed by our ancestors. We simply buy paper books such as Dawit (Psalms), Sewasew (grammar) or Degwa (book of songs with notations) and depend on our teachers to teach us the rest. We also lend these books to each other as many students cannot afford to buy them. Without textbooks, we expect to spend double the amount of time it would take if we had textbooks. (Interview, 3 Sep. 2019)Many students interrupt their studies and work as labourers to save up and buy paper textbooks, but they still don’t have access to the finest works taken to Europe. Most Ge’ez manuscripts remaining in Ethiopia are locked away in monasteries, church stores or other places to prevent further looting. The manuscripts in Addis Ababa University and the National Archives are available for researchers but not to the students of the indigenous system, creating a condition of internal knowledge grabbing.While the absence of Ge’ez manuscripts denied, and continues to deny, Ethiopians the chance to enrich their indigenous education, it benefited western orientalists to garner intellectual authority on the field of Ethiopian studies. In 1981, British Museum Director John Wilson said, “our Abyssinian holdings are more important than our Indian collection” (Bell 231). In reaction, Richard Pankhurst, the Director of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, responded that the collection was acquired through plunder. Defending the retaining of Maqdala manuscripts in Europe, Ullendorff wrote:neither Dr. Pankhurst nor the Ethiopian and western scholars who have worked on this collection (and indeed on others in Europe) could have contributed so significantly to the elucidation of Ethiopian history without the rich resources available in this country. Had they remained insitu, none of this would have been possible. (Qtd. in Bell 234)The manuscripts are therefore valued based on their contribution to western scholarship only. This is a continuation of epistemic violence whereby local knowledges are used as raw materials to produce Eurocentric knowledge, which in turn is used to teach Africans as though they had no prior knowledge. Scholars are defined as those western educated persons who can speak European languages and can travel to modern institutions to access the manuscripts. Knowledge grabbing regards previous owners as inexistent or irrelevant for the use of the grabbed knowledges.Knowledge grabbing also means indigenous scholars are deprived of critical resources to produce new knowledge based on their intellectual heritage. A Qene teacher commented: our students could not devote their time and energy to produce new knowledges in the same way our ancestors did. We have the tradition of Madeladel, Kimera, Kuteta, Mielad, Qene and tirguamme where students develop their own system of remembering, reinterpreting, practicing, and rewriting previous manuscripts and current ones. Without access to older manuscripts, we increasingly depend on preserving what is being taught orally by elders. (Interview, 4 Sep. 2019)This point is important as it relates to the common myth that indigenous knowledges are artefacts belonging to the past, not the present. There are millions of people who still use these knowledges, but the conditions necessary for their reproduction and improvement is denied through knowledge grabbing. The view of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts dismisses the Ethiopian view that Birana manuscripts are living persons. As a scholar told me in Gondar, “they are creations of Egziabher (God), like all of us. Keeping them in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards” (interview, 5 Oct. 2019).Recently, the collection of Ethiopian manuscripts by western institutions has also been conducted digitally. Thousands of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitised. For example, the EU funded Ethio-SPaRe project resulted in the digital collection of 2000 Ethiopian manuscripts (Nosnitsin). While digitisation promises better access for people who may not be able to visit institutions to see physical copies, online manuscripts are not accessible to indigenous school students in Ethiopia. They simply do not have computer or internet access and the manuscripts are catalogued in European languages. Both physical and digital knowledge grabbing results in the robbing of Ethiopian intellectual heritage, and denies the possibility of such manuscripts being used to inform local scholarship. Epistemic Violence: The European as ExpertWhen considered in relation to stolen or appropriated manuscripts, epistemic violence is the way in which local knowledge is interpreted using a foreign epistemology and gained dominance over indigenous worldviews. European scholars have monopolised the field of Ethiopian Studies by producing books, encyclopaedias and digital archives based on Ethiopian manuscripts, almost exclusively in European languages. The contributions of their work for western scholarship is undeniable. However, Kebede argues that one of the detrimental effects of this orientalist literature is the thesis of Semiticisation, the designation of the origin of Ethiopian civilisation to the arrival of Middle Eastern colonisers rather than indigenous sources.The thesis is invented to make the history of Ethiopia consistent with the Hegelian western view that Africa is a Dark Continent devoid of a civilisation of its own. “In light of the dominant belief that black peoples are incapable of great achievements, the existence of an early and highly advanced civilization constitutes a serious anomaly in the Eurocentric construction of the world” (Kebede 4). To address this anomaly, orientalists like Ludolph attributed the origin of Ethiopia’s writing system, agriculture, literature, and civilisation to the arrival of South Arabian settlers. For example, in his translation of the Kebra Nagast, Budge wrote: “the SEMITES found them [indigenous Ethiopians] negro savages, and taught them civilization and culture and the whole scriptures on which their whole literature is based” (x).In line with the above thesis, Dillman wrote that “the Abyssinians borrowed their Numerical Signs from the Greeks” (33). The views of these orientalist scholars have been challenged. For instance, leading scholar of Semitic languages Professor Ephraim Isaac considers the thesis of the Arabian origin of Ethiopian civilization “a Hegelian Eurocentric philosophical perspective of history” (2). Isaac shows that there is historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence that suggest Ethiopia to be more advanced than South Arabia from pre-historic times. Various Ethiopian sources including the Kebra Nagast, the works of historian Asres Yenesew, and Ethiopian linguist Girma Demeke provide evidence for the indigenous origin of Ethiopian civilisation and languages.The epistemic violence of the Semeticisation thesis lies in how this Eurocentric ideological construction is the dominant narrative in the field of Ethiopian history and the education system. Unlike the indigenous view, the orientalist view is backed by strong institutional power both in Ethiopia and abroad. The orientalists control the field of Ethiopian studies and have access to Ge’ez manuscripts. Their publications are the only references for Ethiopian students. Due to Native Colonialism, a system of power run by native elites through the use of colonial ideas and practices (Woldeyes), the education system is the imitation of western curricula, including English as a medium of instruction from high school onwards. Students study the west more than Ethiopia. Indigenous sources are generally excluded as unscientific. Only the Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts is regarded as scientific and objective.ConclusionEthiopia is the only African country never to be colonised. In its history it produced a large quantity of manuscripts in the Ge’ez language through an indigenous education system that involves the study of these manuscripts. Since the 19th century, there has been an ongoing loss of these manuscripts. European travellers who came to Ethiopia as discoverers, missionaries and scholars took a large number of manuscripts. The Battle of Maqdala involved the looting of the intellectual products of Ethiopia that were collected at the capital. With the introduction of western education and use of English as a medium of instruction, the state disregarded indigenous schools whose students have little access to the manuscripts. This article brings the issue of knowledge grapping, a situation whereby European institutions and scholars accumulate Ethiopia manuscripts without providing the students in Ethiopia to have access to those collections.Items such as manuscripts that are held in western institutions are not dead artefacts of the past to be preserved for prosperity. They are living sources of knowledge that should be put to use in their intended contexts. Local Ethiopian scholars cannot study ancient and medieval Ethiopia without travelling and gaining access to western institutions. This lack of access and resources has made European Ethiopianists almost the sole producers of knowledge about Ethiopian history and culture. For example, indigenous sources and critical research that challenge the Semeticisation thesis are rarely available to Ethiopian students. Here we see epistemic violence in action. Western control over knowledge production has the detrimental effect of inventing new identities, subjectivities and histories that translate into material effects in the lives of African people. In this way, Ethiopians and people all over Africa internalise western understandings of themselves and their history as primitive and in need of development or outside intervention. African’s intellectual and cultural heritage, these living bodies locked away in graveyards, must be put back into the hands of Africans.AcknowledgementThe author acknowledges the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' 2019 Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award in conducting this research.ReferencesBell, Stephen. “Cultural Treasures Looted from Maqdala: A Summary of Correspondence in British National Newspapers since 1981.” Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 231-246.Budge, Wallis. A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia. London: Methuen and Co, 1982.Demeke, Girma Awgichew. The Origin of Amharic. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2013.Diakonoff, Igor M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.Dillmann, August. Ethiopic Grammar. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005.Hegel, Georg W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956.Isaac, Ephraim. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 2013.———. “An Open Letter to an Inquisitive Ethiopian Sister.” The Habesha, 2013. 1 Feb. 2020 <http://www.zehabesha.com/an-open-letter-to-an-inquisitive-young-ethiopian-sister-ethiopian-history-is-not-three-thousand-years/>.Kebra Nagast. "The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelik I." Trans. Wallis Budge. London: Oxford UP, 1932.Pankhurst, Richard. "The Napier Expedition and the Loot Form Maqdala." Presence Africaine 133-4 (1985): 233-40.Pankhurst, Rita. "The Maqdala Library of Tewodros." Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 223-230.Tefera, Amsalu. ነቅዐ መጻህፍት ከ መቶ በላይ በግዕዝ የተጻፉ የእኢትዮጵያ መጻህፍት ዝርዝር ከማብራሪያ ጋር።. Addis Ababa: Jajaw, 2019.Nosnitsin, Denis. "Ethio-Spare Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation and Research." 2010. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospare/missions/pdf/report2010-1.pdf>. Ullendorff, Edward. "James Bruce of Kinnaird." The Scottish Historical Review 32.114, part 2 (1953): 128-43.Wion, Anaïs. "Collecting Manuscripts and Scrolls in Ethiopia: The Missions of Johannes Flemming (1905) and Enno Littmann (1906)." 2012. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00524382/document>. Woldeyes, Yirga Gelaw. Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence against Traditions in Ethiopia. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2017.———. “Reflections on Ethiopia’s Stolen Treasures on Display in a London Museum.” The Conversation. 2018. 5 June 2018 <https://theconversation.com/reflections-on-ethiopias-stolen-treasures-on-display-in-a-london-museum-97346>.Yenesew, Asres. ትቤ፡አክሱም፡መኑ፡ አንተ? Addis Ababa: Nigid Printing House, 1959 [1951 EC].

In the Ashkenazi public prayer domain, narratives and figures were limited to the illumination of large prayer books used by the cantor and smaller copies for private use, ordered by those members of the community who could afford them. Operation of word and image in this context enabled worshipers to interact with the human ancestors of the Jewish people and related fundamental biblical events perceived in the liturgy as ancestral merits. However, while the basic texts used in such collaborations were recited or sung by the cantor or believers and formed a consistent obligatory part of the liturgy, the images were always a flexible nonobligatory addition, open to variation. Often, there may be a clear gap between the two in regard to contents, a result of the way the Jewish visual language crystallized in Christian Europe. This article exemplifies the complexities involved in the process of such an operation as expressed in two Ashkenazi liturgical manuscripts of around 1300.

Erik Petersen: Suscipere digneris. A find and some hypotheses on the Copenhagen Psalter Thott 143 2° and its history. The Copenhagen Psalter Thott 143 2º has often, and rightly, been praised as an outstanding example of the subtlety and artistic quality of Romanesque art in manuscripts. Its illumination, the saints of its calendar and litany place it in an English context. Two added elements, an obituary notice on the death in 1272 of Eric duke of Jutland, son of the Danish king Abel, and a prayer of an anonymous woman, link the codex to Medieval Denmark and Scandinavia as well. Addressing the Holy Trinity with the words Suscipere digneris the woman prays for herself, pro me misera peccatrice, and for the souls of her father and mother, of her brothers and sisters, of all members of her family, and for the souls of all brothers and sisters and familiares of her order. She also prays pro anima Byrgeri ducis. The occurrence of duke Birger, or Birger Jarl, in her prayer has given the book the name “Psalter of the Folkungar”, in particular in Scandinavian scholarship. The assumptions have been that the Psalter belonged to the Swedish aristocratic family of the Folkungar, that the duke Birger mentioned in the prayer was the older member of the family bearing that name (d. 1202), and that the book later passed to Mechtilde, the mother of duke Eric and widow of king Abel killed in 1252, who married the younger duke Birger in 1261. Duke Birger died in 1266, Mechtilde in 1288. The fate of the Psalter from the end of the 13th century until it entered the huge library of count Otto Thott (1703–1785) has been entirely unknown. There are, however, a couple of clues to its history, one in the codex itself and one external, which do cast some light on its whereabouts. The first is a small piece of paper with bibliographical notes from the 18th century inserted at the very end of the codex. The second is an elaborate copy of the calendar and the prayer that I became aware of while working on the German humanist and theologian Johann Albert Fabricius (1668–1736) and his manuscripts. It could be proved that the copy was made in Fabricius’ own hand between 1720 and 1736. Since I knew that Fabricius did not leave Hamburg at any time during these years, it could also be proved that the Copenhagen Psalter must have been present in the city at least for some time in the same period. The codex did not belong to Fabricius, and since he left no information about it apart from the copy itself, I was not able to determine how he had had access to it. The answer was to be found in a hitherto unnoticed treatise De Psalterio Manuscripto Capelliano ob singularem elegantiam commemorabili observatio, written by Johann Heinrich von Seelen (1687–1762) and published in the third volume of his Meditationes Exegeticae, quibus varia utriusque Testamenti loca expenduntur et illustrantur, Lübeck 1737. Von Seelen’s treatise is based on an autoptic study of the codex. He informs his readers that the codex once belonged to Rudolphus Capellus (1635–1684), professor of Greek and History at the Gymnasium Academicum in Hamburg. Von Seelen gives a detailed description of the codex, which leaves no doubt about its identity with the Psalter now in Copenhagen. He also states that the codex was sent to him for his use and information by his friend Michael Richey (1678–1761) in Hamburg. Michael Richey had been a colleague and close friend of Fabricius, who must have copied the codex while it was in Richey’s library. After Rudolphus Capellus’ death it passed on to his son Dietericus Matthias Capellus (1672–1720), who noted down the bibliographical notes on the sheet of paper attached to the codex. It was sold by auction as part of the bibliotheca Capelliana in Hamburg in 1721, and it will have been on that occasion that Michael Richey acquired it. It is not known where and how Rudolphus Capellus acquired the Psalter. Von Seelen called it Capellianum, because Capellus was the first owner known to him. In the present paper the old Benedictine nunnery in Buxtehude, Altkloster, is suggested as the likely previous home of the codex. The short distance from Hamburg to Buxtehude, Capellus’ limited radius of action, and the fact that Altkloster was dissolved as a catholic monastery exactly in the period when Capellus acquired the codex is adduced in support of the hypothesis. In addition, archival material in Stade confirms that there were still several medieval manuscripts in the monastery when it was dissolved as a consequence of the Peace of Westphalia. Only one of them has been identified – actually another manuscript that found its way into the Thott collection in Copenhagen. This manuscript, Thott 8 8º with a late medieval German translation of the New Testament, contains a note in the hand of its first modern owner, Dietrich von Stade (1637–1718), which attests the presence of medieval books in Altkloster even as late as in 1696. They had been taken over by the first Lutheran minister in the former monastery and were in the custody of his widow when Dietrich von Stade visited it. Capellus left his marks and scars on the manuscript. His hand, which I recognize from an autograph manuscript now in the Fabricius Collection, can be identified as the one that added numbers to the psalms. He also added the heading to the list of relics on top of f. 1r, and four lines of text on f. 199v. He added a note to the prayer on f. 16v, and even wrote down the Greek passages in the NT as parallels to the Latin canticles Magnificat and Nunc dimittis on f. 185r–185v. As to the medieval additions in the manuscript it is pointed out in the paper that the owner of the relics listed on the first page of the book was not the owner of the manuscript. The name was erased at an unknown date, but the letters dns (for dominus) before the erasure indicate that the owner was a man, not a woman or a church or a monastery. It is suggested that the list of relics is probably younger than usually assumed. The text that Capellus completed with the four lines and a final Amen at the very end of the codex is itself an addition to the original manuscript. Despite its length (f. 194v–199v) it has received little attention from scholars. It is actually a version of the so-called Oratio Sancti Brandani, copied in a late medieval hand that imitates the script of the Psalter proper. Palaeographically as well as textually it appears to be a foreign element in the context of the Psalter, but it is, of course, interesting for its history. The text ends abruptly, so Capellus’ addition may perhaps be seen as more justifiable here than elsewhere in the book. The only date explicitly noted down in the entire codex is found in the calendar. There are two medieval additions in it, one, little noticed, mentioning the 11.000 virgins in October, and the one noting the death of Eric duke of Jutland in year 1272, added to the line of the 27th day of the month of May. The present paper offers new suggestions as to how to understand the notices, and argues against the interpretation most often put forward, namely that Mechtilde was the direct or indirect authoress of the obituary-notice about duke Eric. It also argues against the identification of Mechtilde with the ego of the prayer on f. 16v. Based on palaeographical and other formal observations it is contended that the text should be dated to the end of the 13th Century and not its beginning, and that Byrgerus dux is likely to be the younger Birger Jarl, not the older. It is pointed out that he is not included in the prayer as a family member, but merely as Byrgerus dux. Following a structural analysis of the text, it is concluded that the anonymous voice of prayer is not that of Mechtilde; instead it is suggested that it could belong to an otherwise unknown daughter of Mechtilde and king Abel, and thus a sister of Eric duke of Jutland. Her place was a monastery, her present time the year 1288 or later. Prayers beginning with words Suscipere digneris are found in many variations in medieval manuscripts. In one source, MS 78 a 8 in the Kupferstichkabinet in Berlin, a Psalter, this prayer as well as other significant elements, display a striking similarity with the Copenhagen Psalter. The Berlin Psalter, which is younger than the Copenhagen Psalter, has added elements that relates to persons in Sweden and Norway. The Berlin Psalter was presented to the nuns in Buxtehude in 1362 by a miles who passed by from his hometown in the western part of Northern Germany. The relation between the Psalters now in Berlin and Copenhagen is complicated. In the present paper it is suggested that, with respect to the prayer, they may depend on a common source. It is concluded that the Berlin Psalter may have had closer links to the Folkungar in Sweden than the Copenhagen Psalter, whose history, in so far as we know it, points rather to its presence in Medieval Jutland, that is Southern Denmark and Northern Germany.

If Continental social theory emerges from a climate of intensely cold winters and short mild summers, how does Australia (or any nation defined by its large masses of aridity) function as an environment in which to produce critical theory and new knowledge? Climate and weather are intrinsic to ambience, but what impact might they have on the conditions of producing academic work? How is ambience relevant to thinking and writing and research? Is there an ambient epistemology? This paper argues that the ambient is an unacknowledged factor in the production of critical thinking, and draws on examples of academics locating their writing conditions as part of their thinking. This means paying attention to the embodied work of thinking, and so I locate myself in order to explore what it might mean to acknowledge the conditions of intellectual work. Consequently I dwell on the impact of heat and light as qualities specific to where I work, but (following Bolt) I also argue that they are terms that are historically associated with new knowledge. Language, then, is already a factor in shaping the way we can think through such conditions, and the narratives available to write about them. Working these conditions into critical narratives may involve mobilising fictional tropes, and may not always be ambient, but they are potent in the academic imaginary and impact the ways in which we can think through location. Present Tense As I sit in Perth right now in a balmy 27 degrees Celsius with the local afternoon sea-breeze (fondly known as the Fremantle Doctor) clearing the stuffiness and humidity of the day, environmental conditions are near perfect for the end of summer. I barely notice them. Not long ago though, it was over 40 degrees for three days in a row. These were the three days I had set aside to complete an academic paper, the last days available before the university opened and normal work would resume. I’d arranged to have the place to myself, but I hadn’t arranged for cooling technologies. As I immersed myself in photocopies and textbooks the intellectual challenges and excitement were my preoccupation. It was hot, but I was almost unreceptive to recognising the discomforts of the weather until sweat began to drip onto pages and keyboards. A break in the afternoon for a swim at the local beach was an opportunity to clarify and see the bigger picture, and as the temperature began to slide into the evening cool it was easier to stay up late working and then sleep in late. I began to work around the weather. What impact does this have on thinking and writing? I remember it as a haze. The paper though, still seems clear and reasoned. My regimen might be read as working despite the weather, but I wonder if the intensity of the heat extends thinking in different directions—to go places where I wouldn’t have imagined in an ambiently cooled office (if I had one). The conditions of the production of knowledge are often assumed to be static, stable and uninteresting. Even if your work is located in exciting Other places, the ‘writing up’ is expected to happen ‘back home’, after the extra-ordinary places of fieldwork. It can be written in the present tense, for a more immediate reading experience, but the writing cannot always happen at the same time as the events being described, so readers accept the use of present tense as a figment of grammar that cannot accommodate the act of writing. When a writer becomes aware of their surroundings and articulates those conditions into their narrative, the reader is lifted out of the narrative into a metaframe; out of the body of writing and into the extra-diegetic. In her essay “Me and My Shadow” (1987), Jane Tompkins writes as if ‘we’ the reader are in the present with her as she makes connections between books, experiences, memories, feelings, and she also provides us with a writing scene in which to imagine her in the continuous present: It is a beautiful day here in North Carolina. The first day that is both cool and sunny all summer. After a terrible summer, first drought, then heat-wave, then torrential rain, trees down, flooding. Now, finally, beautiful weather. A tree outside my window just brushed by red, with one fully red leaf. (This is what I want you to see. A person sitting in stockinged feet looking out of her window – a floor to ceiling rectangle filled with green, with one red leaf. The season poised, sunny and chill, ready to rush down the incline into autumn. But perfect, and still. Not going yet.) (128)This is a strategy, part of the aesthetics and politics of Tompkins’s paper which argues for the way the personal functions in intellectual thinking and writing even when we don’t recognise or acknowledge it. A little earlier she characterises herself as vulnerable because of the personal/professional nexus: I don’t know how to enter the debate [over epistemology] without leaving everything else behind – the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet. (126)The deferral of autumn and going to the bathroom is linked through the final phrase, “not going yet”. This is a kind of refrain that draws attention to the aesthetic architecture of locating the self, and yet the reference to an impending toilet trip raised many eyebrows. Nancy Millar comments that “these passages invoke that moment in writing when everything comes together in a fraction of poise; that fragile moment the writing in turn attempts to capture; and that going to the bathroom precisely, will end” (6). It spoils the moment. The aesthetic green scene with one red leaf is ruptured by the impending toilet scene. Or perhaps it is the intimacy of bodily function that disrupts the ambient. And yet the moment is fictional anyway. There must surely always be some fiction involved when writing about the scene of writing, as writing usually takes more than one take. Gina Mercer takes advantage of this fictional function in a review of a collection of women’s poetry. Noting the striking discursive differences between the editor’s introduction and the poetry collected in the volume, she suggestively accounts for this by imagining the conditions under which the editor might have been working: I suddenly begin to imagine that she wrote the introduction sitting at her desk in twin-set and pearls, her feet constricted by court shoes – but that the selection took place at home with her lying on a large beautifully-linened bed bestrewn by a cat and the poems… (4)These imaginary conditions, Mercer implies, impact on the ways we do our intellectual work, or perhaps different kinds of work require different conditions. Mercer not only imagines the editor at work, but also suggests her own preferred workspace when she mentions that “the other issue I’ve been pondering as I lay on my bed in a sarong (yes it’s hot here already) reading this anthology, has been the question of who reads love poetry these days?” (4). Placing herself as reader (of an anthology of love poetry) on the bed in a sarong in a hot climate partially accounts for the production of the thinking around this review, but probably doesn’t include the writing process. Mercer’s review is written in epistolary form, signaling an engagement with ‘the personal’, and yet that awareness of form and setting performs a doubling function in which scenes are set and imagination is engaged and yet their veracity doesn’t seem important, and may even be part of the fiction of form. It’s the idea of working leisurely that gains traction in this review. Despite the capacity for fiction, I want to believe that Jane Tompkins was writing in her study in North Carolina next to a full-length window looking out onto a tree. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and imagine her writing in this place and time. Scenes of Writing Physical conditions are often part of mythologising a writer. Sylvia Plath wrote the extraordinary collection of poems that became Ariel during the 1962/63 London winter, reputed to have been the coldest for over a hundred years (Gifford 15). The cold weather is given a significant narrative role in the intensity of her writing and her emotional desperation during that period. Sigmund Freud’s writing desk was populated with figurines from his collection of antiquities looking down on his writing, a scene carefully replicated in the Freud Museum in London and reproduced in postcards as a potent staging of association between mythology, writing and psychoanalysis (see Burke 2006). Writer’s retreats at the former residences of writers (like Varuna at the former home of Eleanor Dark in the Blue Mountains, and the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Centre in the hills outside of Perth) memorialise the material conditions in which writers wrote. So too do pilgrimages to the homes of famous writers and the tourism they produce in which we may gaze in wonder at the ordinary places of such extraordinary writing. The ambience of location is one facet of the conditions of writing. When I was a doctoral student reading Continental feminist philosophy, I used anything at hand to transport myself into their world. I wrote my dissertation mostly in Townsville in tropical Queensland (and partly in Cairns, even more tropical), where winter is blue skies and mid-twenties in temperature but summers are subject to frequent build-ups in pressure systems, high humidity, no breeze and some cyclones. There was no doubt that studying habits were affected by the weather for a student, if not for all the academics who live there. Workplaces were icily air-conditioned (is this ambient?) but outside was redolent with steamy tropical evenings, hot humid days, torrential downpours. When the weather breaks there is release in blood pressure accompanying barometer pressure. I was reading contemporary Australian literature alongside French feminist theories of subjectivity and their relation through écriture féminine. The European philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition and its exquisitely radical anti-logical writing of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva seemed alien to my tropical environs but perversely seductive. In order to get ‘inside’ the theoretical arguments, my strategy was to interpolate myself into their imagined world of writing, to emulate their imagined conditions. Whenever my friend went on a trip, I caretook her 1940s unit that sat on a bluff and looked out over the Coral Sea, all whitewashed and thick stone, and transformed it into a French salon for my intellectual productivity. I played Edith Piaf and Grace Jones, went to the grocer at the bottom of the hill every day for fresh food and the French patisserie for baguettes and croissants. I’d have coffee brewing frequently, and ate copious amounts of camembert and chocolate. The Townsville flat was a Parisian salon with French philosophers conversing in my head and between the piles of book lying on the table. These binges of writing were extraordinarily productive. It may have been because of the imagined Francophile habitus (as Bourdieu understands it); or it may have been because I prepared for the anticipated period of time writing in a privileged space. There was something about adopting the fictional romance of Parisian culture though that appealed to the juxtaposition of doing French theory in Townsville. It intensified the difference but interpolated me into an intellectual imaginary. Derrida’s essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, promises to shed light on Freud’s conditions of writing, and yet it is concerned moreover with the metaphoric or rather intellectual ‘scene’ of Freudian ideas that form the groundwork of Derrida’s own corpus. Scenic, or staged, like Tompkins’s framed window of leaves, it looks upon the past as a ‘moment’ of intellectual ferment in language. Peggy Kamuf suggests that the translation of this piece of Derrida’s writing works to cover over the corporeal banishment from the scene of writing, in a move that privileges the written trace. In commenting, Kamuf translates Derrida herself: ‘to put outside and below [metre dehors et en bas] the body of the written trace [le corps de la trace écrite].’ Notice also the latter phrase, which says not the trace of the body but the body of the trace. The trace, what Derrida but before him also Freud has called trace or Spur, is or has a body. (23)This body, however, is excised, removed from the philosophical and psychoanalytic imaginary Kamuf argues. Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz contends that the body is “understood in terms that attempt to minimize or ignore altogether its formative role in the production of philosophical values – truth, knowledge, justice” (Volatile 4): Philosophy has always considered itself a discipline concerned primarily or exclusively with ideas, concepts, reason, judgment – that is, with terms clearly framed by the concept of mind, terms which marginalize or exclude considerations of the body. As soon as knowledge is seen as purely conceptual, its relation to bodies, the corporeality of both knowers and texts, and the ways these materialities interact, must become obscure. (Volatile 4)In the production of knowledge then, the corporeal knowing writing body can be expected to interact with place, with the ambience or otherwise in which we work. “Writing is a physical effort,” notes Cixous, and “this is not said often enough” (40). The Tense Present Conditions have changed here in Perth since the last draft. A late summer high pressure system is sitting in the Great Australian Bite pushing hot air across the desert and an equally insistent ridge of low pressure sits off the Indian Ocean, so the two systems are working against each other, keeping the weather hot, still, tense, taut against the competing forces. It has been nudging forty degrees for a week. The air conditioning at work has overloaded and has been set to priority cooling; offices are the lowest priority. A fan blasts its way across to me, thrumming as it waves its head from one side to the other as if tut-tutting. I’m not consumed with intellectual curiosity the way I was in the previous heatwave; I’m feeling tired, and wondering if I should just give up on this paper. It will wait for another time and journal. There’s a tension with chronology here, with what’s happening in the present, but then Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that the act of placing ideas into language inevitably produces that tension: Chronology is time depicted as travelling (more or less) in a (more or less) forward direction. Yet one can hardly write a single sentence straight; it all rebounds. Even its most innocent first words – A, The, I, She, It – teem with heteroglossias. (16)“Sentences structure” DuPlessis points out, and grammar necessitates development, chronological linearity, which affects the possibilities for narrative. “Cause and effect affect” DuPlessis notes (16), as do Cixous and Irigaray before her. Nevertheless we must press on. And so I leave work and go for a swim, bring my core body temperature down, and order a pot of tea from the beach café while I read Barbara Bolt in the bright afternoon light. Bolt is a landscape painter who has spent some time in Kalgoorlie, a mining town 800km east of Perth, and notes the ways light is used as a metaphor for visual illumination, for enlightening, and yet in Kalgoorlie light is a glare which, far from illuminating, blinds. In Kalgoorlie the light is dangerous to the body, causing cancers and cataracts but also making it difficult to see because of its sheer intensity. Bolt makes an argument for the Australian light rupturing European thinking about light: Visual practice may be inconceivable without a consideration of light, but, I will argue, it is equally ‘inconceivable’ to practice under European notions of light in the ‘glare’ of the Australian sun. Too much light on matter sheds no light on the matter. (204)Bolt frequently equates the European notions of visual art practice that, she claims, Australians still operate under, with concomitant concepts of European philosophy, aesthetics and, I want to add, epistemology. She is particularly adept at noting the material impact of Australian conditions on the body, arguing that, the ‘glare’ takes apart the Enlightenment triangulation of light, knowledge, and form. In fact, light becomes implicated bodily, in the facts of the matter. My pterygiums and sun-beaten skin, my mother and father’s melanomas, and the incidence of glaucoma implicate the sun in a very different set of processes. From my optic, light can no longer be postulated as the catalyst that joins objects while itself remaining unbent and unimplicated … (206).If new understandings of light are generated in Australian conditions of working, surely heat is capable of refiguring dominant European notions as well. Heat is commonly associated with emotions and erotics, even through ideas: heated debate, hot topics and burning issues imply the very latest and most provocative discussions, sizzling and mercurial. Heat has a material affect on corporeality also: dehydrating, disorienting, dizzying and burning. Fuzzy logic and bent horizons may emerge. Studies show that students learn best in ambient temperatures (Pilman; Graetz), but I want to argue that thought and writing can bend in other dimensions with heat. Tensions build in blood pressure alongside isometric bars. Emotional and intellectual intensities merge. Embodiment meets epistemology. This is not a new idea; feminist philosophers like Donna Haraway have been emphasizing the importance of situated knowledge and partial perspective for decades as a methodology that challenges universalism and creates a more ethical form of objectivity. In 1987 Haraway was arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex contradictory structuring and structured body versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (Haraway 588)Working in intellectual conditions when the specificities of ambience is ignored, is also, I suggest, to work in a privileged space, in which there are no distractions like the weather. It is also to work ‘from nowhere, from simplicity’ in Haraway’s words. It is to write from within the pure imaginary space of the intellect. But to write in, and from, weather conditions no matter what they might be is to acknowledge the affect of being-in-the-world, to recognise an ontological debt that is embodied and through which we think. I want to make a claim for the radical conditions under which writing can occur outside of the ambient, as I sit here sweating over theory again. Drawing attention to the corporeal conditions of the scene of writing is a way of situating knowledge and partial perspective: if I were in Hobart where snow still lies on Mount Wellington I may well have a different perspective, but the metaphors of ice and cold also need transforming into productive and generative conditions of particularised knowledge. To acknowledge the location of knowledge production suggests more of the forces at work in particular thinking, as a bibliography indicates the shelf of books that have inflected the written product. This becomes a relation of immanence rather than transcendence between the subject and thought, whereby thinking can be understood as an act, an activity, or even activism of an agent. This is proposed by Elizabeth Grosz in her later work where she yokes together the “jagged edges” (Time 165) of Deleuze and Irigaray’s work in order to reconsider the “future of thought”. She calls for a revision of meaning, as Bolt does, but this time in regard to thought itself—and the task of philosophy—asking whether it is possible to develop an understanding of thought that refuses to see thought as passivity, reflection, contemplation, or representation, and instead stresses its activity, how and what it performs […] can we deromanticize the construction of knowledges and discourses to see them as labor, production, doing? (Time 158)If writing is to be understood as a form of activism it seems fitting to conclude here with one final image: of Gloria Anzaldua’s computer, at which she invites us to imagine her writing her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a radical Chicana vision for postcolonial theory. Like Grosz, Anzaldua is intent on undoing the mind/body split and the language through which the labour of thinking can be articulated. This is where she writes her manifesto: I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. (75) References Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bolt, Barbara. “Shedding Light for the Matter.” Hypatia 15.2 (2000): 202-216. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. [1980 Les Edition de Minuit] Burke, Janine. The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection. Milsons Point: Knopf, 2006. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge, 1997. [1994 Photos de Racine]. Derrida, Jacques, and Jeffrey Mehlman. "Freud and the Scene of Writing." Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2006. Gifford, Terry. Ted Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Graetz, Ken A. “The Psychology of Learning Environments.” Educause Review 41.6 (2006): 60-75. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2005. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. Kamuf, Peggy. “Outside in Analysis.” Mosaic 42.4 (2009): 19-34. Mercer, Gina. “The Days of Love Are Lettered.” Review of The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. Jennifer Strauss. LiNQ 22.1 (1995): 135-40. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pilman, Mary S. “The Effects of Air Temperature Variance on Memory Ability.” Loyola University Clearinghouse, 2001. ‹http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/306.php›. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History 19.1 (1987): 169-78.