The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Andrew Curran in Long Reads
The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty
Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.
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via the OUP blog by Sioned Davies
“Drudwy Branwen” by Anatiomaros. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The Mabinogion is a collective name given to eleven medieval Welsh tales found mainly in two manuscripts – the White Book of Rhydderch (c. 1350), and the Red Book of Hergest (dated between 1382 and c.1410). The term is a scribal error for mabinogi, derived from the Welsh word mab meaning ‘son, boy’; its original meaning was probably ‘youth’ or ‘story of youth’, but finally it meant no more than ‘tale’ or ‘story’. The title was popularized in the nineteenth century when Lady Charlotte Guest translated the tales into English. Despite many common themes, the tales were never conceived as an organic group, and are certainly not the work of a single author. Moreover, the ‘authors’ are anonymous, suggesting that there was no sense of ‘ownership’ and that the texts were viewed as part of the collective memory. Their roots lie in oral tradition as they reflect a collaboration between the oral and literary cultures, giving us an intriguing insight into the world of the medieval Welsh storyteller. Performance features such as episodic structure, repetition, verbal formulae, and dialogue are an integral part of their fabric, partly because the ‘authors’ inherited pre-literary modes of narrating, and partly because in a culture where very few could read and write, tales and poems would be performed before a listening audience; even when a text was committed to parchment, one can assume that public readings were the norm. Therefore, the overriding aim of this translation was to convey the performability of The Mabinogion; as such the acoustic dimension was a major consideration.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Milton Esterow in The New York Times
Yad Vashem Photo Archives
The hunt for the millions of books stolen by the Nazis during World War II has been pursued quietly and diligently for decades, but it has been largely ignored, even as the search for lost art drew headlines. The plundered volumes seldom carried the same glamour as the looted paintings, which were often masterpieces worth millions of dollars.
But recently, with little fanfare, the search for the books has intensified, driven by researchers in America and Europe who have developed a road map of sorts to track the stolen books, many of which are still hiding in plain sight on library shelves throughout Europe.
Their work has been aided by newly opened archives, the internet, and the growing number of European librarians who have made such searches a priority, researchers say.
“People have looked away for so long,” said Anders Rydell, author of “The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance,” “but I don’t think they can anymore.”
There is more but it is behind the NYT’s paywall.
There is more but it is behind the NYT’s paywall.
via About History
Barbarians are people who were foreigners to the ancient Greeks, and then to the Romans, spoke an incomprehensible language and were alien to their culture. In the new time, barbarians began to designate the aggregate of peoples who invaded the Roman Empire (barbaric conquests), taking advantage of its weakening, and establishing independent states (kingdoms) on its territory.
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
A XVIth Century book held in the National Library of Sweden's collection features a "sixfold dos-a-dos binding," meaning that the book could be opened in six different ways to reveal six different texts ("devotional texts printed in Germany during the 1550s and 1570s, including Martin Luther, Der kleine Catechismus"), with the hinges doubling as latches.
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via Interesting LIterature
‘To Sleep’ is not one of William Wordsworth’s best-known poems. It isn’t even one of his more famous sonnets. And yet, since it sees a major poet addressing a common theme, ‘To Sleep’ is worth reproducing here, along with a few words of analysis.
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via the Big Think blog by Kevin Mitchell
The relationship between our genotypes and our psychological traits, while substantial, is highly indirect and emergent.
Many of our psychological traits are innate in origin. There is overwhelming evidence from twin, family and general population studies that all manner of personality traits, as well as things such as intelligence, sexuality and risk of psychiatric disorders, are highly heritable. Put concretely, this means that a sizeable fraction of the population spread of values such as IQ scores or personality measures is attributable to genetic differences between people. The story of our lives most definitively does not start with a blank page.
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via the OUP blog by E. M. Dadlez
Royal Crescent 1829 by Unknown. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
There is a theory current among many of my fellow Janeites about what kind of a Jane Austen devotee one can be. Either, it is said, one unreservedly cleaves to the Austen of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, or one emphatically embraces the Austen of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. One cannot love both, not equally, not without reservations about one or the other set of works, even if one likes and admires all of Austen’s writing.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
This marble run is at a playground called Monkey Town in the Netherlands. The creator says it has “4 tipping containers which can release up to 10,000 marbles in one go! If the biggest 2 containers (with 1000 and 10,000 marbles) are tipping at the same time, it creates a flood of 11,000 marbles!”
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via Interesting Literature
‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ is one of the best-known nursery rhymes in English literature, but its words are so baffling and odd that it almost qualifies as nonsense literature. Whilst not quite up there with ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ in the nonsense stakes, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ is nevertheless an odd little children’s rhyme. What does it mean, and what are its origins?
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