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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.