Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn by Ann Moss (review)
2005; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 100; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2005.a826888
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Joseph Conrad and Literature
Resumo47? Reviews Literary Edition: The Case of Edward Capell' (an excellent and profusely illustrated account of Capell's editorial activity,especially his 1768 Shakespeare, in terms of the physical forms in which he chose to embody his editions); R. Carter Hailey's ' "This instance will not do": George Steevens and the Revision(s) of Johnson's Dictionary' (demonstrating Steevens's part in the 1773 and later revisions, some of it deriving fromhis work with Johnson on their 1773 Shakespeare); and Roger Osborne's 'Joseph Conrad's Under WesternEyes: The Serials and First Editions' (which shows Conrad to have been an inconsistent proof corrector not over-concerned with textual integrity, especially when preparing the American edition of the novel). Other, mainly shorter, contributions in the same general area are Paul J.Klemp, 'John Manningham's Diary and a Lost Whit-Sunday Sermon by Lancelot Andrewes'; David Chandler, 'A Bib? liographical History of Thomas Howes' Critical Observations (1776-1807) and his Dispute with Joseph Priestley'; and Andrew M. Stauffer, 'The First Publication of Byron's "To the Po"'. More enumerative is Arthur Sherbo's 'Unrecorded Writings by G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Padraic Colum, Mary Colum, T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats', which lists mainly reviews and letters contributed to magazines and journals. The volume's concentration on texts means that other, broader aspects of bib? liography are not covered: thus there is little here on non-textual printing history or manuscript studies, and nothing on libraries or on book collecting and reading by individuals (the 'sociology' of bibliography). Instead, the textual preoccupation stretches in the other direction, to take in questions of author attribution. The three essays in this area are intriguingly different,almost as if deliberately set against one other. Jill Farringdon, in 'A Funerall Elegye . . . not . . . by W.S. after All', shows that the technique of cusum analysis (which depends on analysing the use of small 'function' words) reveals the probable author of this work, recently claimed for Shakespeare, to be John Ford. Pamela Clemit and David Woolls, in 'Two New Pamphlets by William Godwin: A Case of Computer-Assisted Authorship Attribution', argue against the cusum technique and prefer a much fuller linguistic approach, using the computer to investigate the degree of lexical richness across a number of texts. In contrast, Martin C. Battestin uses his detailed personal knowledge of Henry Fielding's writing habits to make a strong case for 'Fielding's Contributions to The Comedian (1732)', largely on the basis of shared phrasing and allusions. Whether such studies have anything to do with bibliography, however, is another matter. For British literary bibliographers an essay of a differentkind again may prove to be the most attractive of all: James McLaverty's affectionate biography of 'David Foxon, Humanist Bibliographer', which treats at length his life, work, and impor? tance. Appropriately, a full bibliography of Foxon's writings is included. University of Leeds Oliver Pickering Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn. By Ann Moss. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. viii + 306 pp. ?50. ISBN 0-19-924987-3. Building upon the achievement of her Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structur? ing ofRenaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) as well as recent studies by Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, Erika Rummel, and others, Ann Moss here analyses the intellectual revolution that swept away the highly technical, 'scientific' Latin used by late medieval teachers of the trivium to prepare their pupils for the study of theology, and replaced it with a language based on classical Latin diction and with the strategies of argumentation taught by the Greek and Roman rhetoricians of antiquity. Her method is to examine the content of textbooks in the fields of grammar, MLRy 100.2, 2005 471 dialectic, and rhetoric that were printed in northern Europe, particularly in France and Germany, during the period from c. 1490 to c. 1540, before describing how the disciplines of rhetoric and dialectic, hitherto distinct, came to be fused under the influence of such writers as Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola, whose precepts were developed and extended from the study of language and logic to the field of theology by Philipp Melanchthon. She then goes on...
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