Scribes’ Voices: The Relevance and Types of Early Medieval Colophons

Schiegg, Markus

doi:10.1080/00393274.2015.1101354

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…16 In the Middle Ages, scribes reported occupational disturbances of writing; a widespread note was Dextera scriptoris careat gravitate doloris (The scribe's right hand shall be liberated from the gravity of pain). 17 Convincing material evidence of dystonia affecting handwriting has been found in legal documents written by the French scribe Bernard Blancard between 1297 and 1343. 18 The dated documents preserve the chronology of a progressive deterioration in Blancard's script, with a multi-directional, jerky tremor and probable involvement of hand posture.…”

Section: Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A History of Dystonia: Ancient to Modern

Newby

Thorpe

Kempster

et al. 2017

Movement Disord Clin Pract

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Before 1911, when Hermann Oppenheim introduced the term dystonia, this movement disorder lacked a unifying descriptor. While words like epilepsy, apoplexy, and palsy have had their meanings since antiquity, references to dystonia are much harder to identify in historical documents. Torticollis is an exception, although there is difficulty distinguishing dystonic torticollis from congenital muscular torticollis. There are, nevertheless, possible representations of dystonia in literature and visual art from the pre‐modern world. Eighteenth century systematic nosologists such as Linnaeus, de Sauvages, and Cullen had attempted to classify some spasmodic conditions, including torticollis. But only after Charcot's contributions to clinical neuroscience were the various forms of generalized and focal dystonia clearly delineated. They were categorized as névroses: Charcot's term for conditions without an identifiable neuroanatomical cause. For a time thereafter, psychoanalytic models of dystonia based on Freud's ideas about unconscious conflicts transduced into physical symptoms were ascendant, although there was always a dissenting “organic” school. With the rise of subspecialization in movement disorders during the 1970s, the pendulum swung strongly back toward organic causation. David Marsden's clinical and electrophysiological research on the adult‐onset focal dystonias was particularly important in establishing a physical basis for these disorders. We are still in a period of “living history” of dystonia, with much yet to be understood about pathophysiology. Rigidly dualistic models have crumbled in the face of evidence of electrophysiological and psychopathological overlap between organic and functional dystonia. More flexible biopsychosocial frameworks may address the demand for new diagnostic and therapeutic rationales.

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Section: Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A History of Dystonia: Ancient to Modern

Newby

Thorpe

Kempster

et al. 2017

Movement Disord Clin Pract

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“…In Schiegg's proposed classification scheme for colophons, the first two lines form the 'assertive' part of the poem, as they provide information about the text (in this case, who was involved in its production). 10 The second part of the colophon, containing the injunction that no one steal the book Bald (or Cild?) has so carefully compiled, finds no parallels in colophons from the Anglo-Saxon period (although a similar command is found in the prose preface to the Pastoral Care).…”

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confidence: 99%

The artistry of Bald’s colophon: Latin verse in an Old English medical codex

Kesling

2019

Anglo-Saxon England

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Bald’s Leechbook, the most famous of the Old English medical collections, derives its name from a colophon in Latin hexameter verse that occurs on the final folio of the collection. Previous scholarly attention to the colophon has been nearly entirely directed at discerning the relationship of two named figures (Bald and Cild) and their role (if any) in the creation of Bald’s Leechbook. Yet given the rarity of verse colophons in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and the unusual placement of this text at the end of a technical work in Old English, these verses also deserve study for their place within the larger genre of poetic colophons and framing texts from Anglo-Saxon England. This article examines for the first time the form of the colophon and its character as a work of Anglo-Latin verse as well as its relationship with the vernacular prefatory tradition associated with King Alfred.

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How to do things with glosses

Schiegg¹

2016

JHP

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This paper provides a novel view on marginalia from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics. It is based on the observation that existing studies often exclude entries in medieval manuscripts that do not comment on the text directly. Many of them, however, are crucial for understanding what medieval monks did when they studied manuscripts. Searle’s (1969) Speech Act Theory, his typology of illocutionary forces, offers a suitable framework for the systematic analysis of the different kinds of manuscript entries and to reconstruct the intellectual contexts of medieval glossing. We can see that in addition to assertives (i.e., glosses that provide further information on a specific text passage) expressives, directives, commissives and declaratives can also be identified in the margins of medieval manuscripts. Sometimes, even the perlocution of marginalia, their effect on medieval readers, can be traced today.

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Scribes’ Voices: The Relevance and Types of Early Medieval Colophons

Cited by 6 publications

References 21 publications

A History of Dystonia: Ancient to Modern

A History of Dystonia: Ancient to Modern

The artistry of Bald’s colophon: Latin verse in an Old English medical codex

How to do things with glosses

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