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This article examines the principles of selection and arrangement of the letters of Basil the Great in the Aldine edition and in the major manuscript families. It argues that the ordering of Basil’s letters in them was mainly based on the content of the letters, whether thematical or by addressee. The article concludes that the ancient and medieval thematical orderings of the letters are helpful for our understanding of the contents of a large collection such as that of Basil, compared to the modern reconstructed chronological order presented in the editions.
The Aldine edition of the Greek epistolographers has been thoroughly studied in the light of its sources and its genesis, whereas comparatively little is known about how it could be read and used by its contemporaries. An analysis of the marginal notes which Scipione Forteguerri wrote into a copy now in the Vatican Library (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Inc. IV. 149) allows us first insights into these questions, on the basis of the example of his annotations to the highly esteemed Epistles of Phalaris: it soon emerges that Forteguerri, by correction ope codicum and addition of reading aids as folio numbering and running titles, tried to raise the text and the book as a whole to a higher editorial level. As a close collaborator of Aldus Manutius, he thus mirrored then-current ideas of book editing as well as contributing to them, and so proved himself surely to be an exceptional reader of the Aldine Greek epistolographers.
David Lloyd Roberts MRCS LSA MD FRCP FRS.Edin (1834–1920) was a successful Manchester doctor who made significant contributions to the advancement of gynaecology and obstetrics. His career was closely linked to the Manchester St Mary’s Hospital for Women and Children, 1858–1920. He lectured on midwifery at Owens College and the University of Manchester and was gynaecological surgeon to Manchester Royal Infirmary. He had many interests outside medicine, including a large collection of rare books, paintings and antiques. He produced an edition of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1898) and a paper, The Scientific Knowledge of Dante (1914). He donated his books to the John Rylands Library and the London Royal College of Physician, his paintings to the Manchester Art Gallery, and he left a large endowment to Bangor College, Wales. This article reviews his medical work alongside his legacy to literature, the arts and education.
The article describes copies of three early-printed books at the Manchester Grammar School, which have not previously been noted in the bibliographies. These are the Missale Romanum (Venice, 1494), De Re Militari (Rome, 1494), and Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (Cologne, 1501). Two of the books have Hungarian connections, as is shown by inscriptions in them. They appear to have been at the grammar school since the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but their detailed provenance remains obscure.
This article examines cuttings from a now-lost manuscript decorated by the little-known Florentine illuminator Littifredi Corbizzi (1465–c.1515) at the turn of the sixteenth century. This manuscript, a choirbook produced for the monks at San Benedetto in Gubbio in 1499–1503, was dismembered in the nineteenth century. Until now, all but one of its cuttings were believed to be lost. Through the emergence of several key pieces of evidence, most notably the identification of tracings of the manuscript made by the German artist Johann Anton Ramboux in the mid-1830s before its dismemberment, I have been able to link definitively three initials to this largely unresearched commission. Two of these are in a previously unstudied manuscript album at the John Rylands Library, recently digitised. Considering the cuttings stylistically and, critically, interrogating their provenance, I propose that a further ten cuttings can also be linked to Littifredi’s work for the monastery, and argue that Ramboux played a significant role in their initial collection.
The beautiful Latin MS 198 of the John Rylands Library preserves one of two currently known manuscript copies of the Servite Lorenzo Opimo of Bologna’s Scriptum on the Sentences, the only such text by a Servite that survives. In 1494, the Chapter General of the Servite Order made Lorenzo the order’s teaching doctor, since the representatives declared that his work, primarily his questions on the Sentences, would be required reading for Servite students and masters of theology. No doubt as a result, Lorenzo’s Scriptum was printed in Venice in 1532. To most medieval intellectual historians, the printing, the author, and even the religious order are virtually unknown. This two-part article puts this unique text in its doctrinal and institutional context. Part I argues that Lorenzo delivered his Sentences lectures at the University of Paris in 1370–71, presents and analyses the tradition of the three textual witnesses, and offers a question list.
Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.
The twenty-three Ur III cuneiform texts presented in this article are housed in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts. This article publishes thirteen Neo-Sumerian tablets from Puzriš-Dagan which primarily deal with animals, and a further ten texts from Umma, including five messenger texts. The aim of the article is to offer an edition and an updated catalogue of these texts, with a special focus on the Neo-Sumerian administration.