Eucharist as sacrifice
By the end of the fourth century, there is a strong sense in some writers that the worshipper at the Eucharist stands in the presence of Christ sacrificed. John Chrysostom, for example, speaks of ‘the most awesome sacrifice’ and of ‘the Lord sacrificed and lying there and the priest bending over the sacrifice and interceding.
- R. J. Halliburton, The Study of Liturgy, Pt 2, ch 3.7, “The Patristic Theology of the Eucharist”
a hopeful sign re: academic criticism
Moreover, the seemingly automatic assumption that “sophisticated” works such as Rushdie’s somehow pack a potent (if nebulous) political punch is closely related to the assumption, by now thoroughly ingrained in the discourse of Western literary studies, that complexity is by definition a good thing, a clear sign (and for that matter, a prerequisite) of “genuine” art and thorough thought.
…. But there is a certain value in clarity…
- M. Keith Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War,” Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall & Co.), 284. I’m not (yet, anyway) sympathetic with Booker’s Marxist commitments, but I was delighted to read this earlier tonight.
Early English broadsides resource
Here: the English Broadside Ballad Archive, no subscription required. The archive contains high-quality digital versions of the ballads collected in five volumes by Samuel Pepys. It also includes what they call “facsimile transcriptions” – digital representations of the broadsides which attempt to retain the feel of the original, while replacing the text with more legible, modern type.
Wow.
Piozzi on the young Samuel Johnson’s first reading of Hamlet
…he was just nine Years old when having got the play of Hamlet to read in his Father’s Kitchen, he read on very qu[i]etly till he came to the Ghost Scene, when he hurried up Stairs to the Shop Door that he might see folks about him. This Story he was not unwilling to tell as a Testimony to the Merits of Shakespear.
- Hester Lynch Piozzi, Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The ‘Anecdotes’ of Mrs Piozzi in their Original Form (1786), ed. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto & Windus; The Hogarth Press, 1984), 6-7.
Samuel Johnson lived in another world
But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world and exhibited only what he saw before him.
- Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1765). I take my text from W. K. Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960)
Flutter
Hehe. Wishing WordPress could handle the video HTML code, I must instead send you away from the blog. But it’s worth the trip.
Sir Philip Sidney on the Bible
The knowledge of ourselves no doubt ought to be most precious to us: and therein the Holy Scriptures, if not the only, are certainly the incomparable lantern in this fleshly darkness of ours. For (alas!) what is all knowledge, if in the end of this little and wearisome pilgrimage, Hell become our schoolmaster? They, therefore, are diligently to be read.
- from a letter to his friend Sir Edward Denny, dated 22 May 1580. Text (modernized) taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, which I’m reading.
“Ralegh” vs. Ralegh
But if we consider that the “purest,” eighteen-line version of the poem survived only in a single manuscript, and the twenty-four or thirty-line versions of the poem were historically more important, what is the sense of editing “Ralegh” in a way that denigrates nonauthorial variants or that encourages historical erasure in the name of rescuing an authorial archetype that is allegedly prior to historical vicissitude? The “Ralegh” that emerged within the transmission and reception of a body of verse that was a mixture of authorially sanctioned work, additions and revisions to these texts, and the incorporation of texts by other writers is, finally, an authorship sign that makes sense historically in terms other than those of verifiable canon.
- Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 145-6
Carey on Barthes
In calling a text a space, then, Barthes has diverged from reality and has started to write not so much an argument as a kind of fantastical poem.
- more from Carey.
appeals to authorial intention defended?
…I have never understood how statements about what is valid or invalid in literary criticism can support themselves. To say that something is valid is to invoke a legal system or a set of rules, as in a game, which there is an agreed obligation to obey. But in the case of literary criticism, what is this system? Who made the rules? The readily observable reality is that critics are free to proceed as they choose, using or not using biographical material as seems to them fit, speculating or not speculating about the intention of the author. The claim that to do so is not valid can have no weight, since it can point to no accepted criteria of validity. It seems, indeed, not a statement but a wish or preference – the wish to denigrate biographical criticism as improper.
- John Carey, “Is the Author Dead? Or, the Mermaids and the Robot,” Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography, eds. Takashi Kozuka and J.R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006: 43-54).
an old poem
My wits my wealth, my learning is my lands
My gownes my goods, my bookes for buildings stand,
Arts are my acres, tongues my tenements,
Pens are my ploughs, my writings are my rents.
- a poem (partial?) transcribed in a Christ Church, Oxford manuscript anthology. Poet unknown, but the experience is common among graduate students. Found in Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, ch 1.
a shameless plug
Stephen Hackett (ForkBombr), a good friend of mine (he was a groomsman in our wedding), a former co-worker (haveastandard.com), my go-to guy for Mac and iPhone questions (at least the ones Google can’t solve), and the fellow who introduced me to Rooney, Johnny Cash, and Death Cab, has been interviewed for Cornfedtech.com. Check out the first installment of the interview (text, audio, and a beard-y picture).
(currently) free web products and services that I would pay for
- Firefox. Goes without saying, I’m sure.
- Gmail and Google Calendar. I’ve been a Gmail user since October of 2004. The first Gmail message I sent was work-related, to Stephen Hackett.
- Adblock Plus (for ff3)
- Dropbox. I currently have a free 2GB account, and plan to upgrade as I approach the limit.
- foxmarks (assuming all goes well with this program, for which I signed up only recently).
Remember The Milk would be on this list, but I’m already paying for a Pro account. I’m not quite sure about WordPress, NuevaSync, and Google Reader–all of which I use daily, but aren’t quite essential.
I’d drop twitter and facebook in a heartbeat.
four unexpected perks in Apple’s standalone keyboard
1. Two USB 2.0 ports
2. control, option, and command keys are extra-large.
3. F13, F14, and F15 (oh, and F16, F17, F18, and F19)
4. Delete-forward key
Reformation humor
I recently found this comic in a 2004 Commonweal article. I think the anonymity of the saint is intentional.
What irks me about Calvinism
Anthony Sacramone (whose blog is often quite funny, especially when he moonlights as Martin Luther) expresses it here.
a delightful morning exchange
Nights and early mornings in the desert can get a bit chilly. This morning I left the kitchen in the middle of making breakfast:
Me: I’m going to put my shoes on – my feet are cold.
Noelle: Will you put some music on? My soul is cold.
So now we’re listening to an iPod Genius playlist, based on a Stacey Kent song.
Leithart on philosophical relativism
In a book that argues that relativism is not the defining characteristic of postmodernism, Peter Leithart has this objection to the real relativists:
In fact–and it’s a subtle point–if everything is different from everything else, then differences are all the same. For the relativist, a walnut is different from a candlestick in the same way and to the same degree that a buffalo nickel is different from a quasar. But if we can’t distinguish different sorts and degrees of difference (which is the same thing as distinguishing sorts and degrees of similarity), then saying that everything is the same makes as much sense as saying everything is different. So it is that the extreme celebrant of difference joins hands with the celebrant of sameness, the absolute pluralist is blood-brother to the absolute moralist.
- Solomon among the Postmoderns, ch. 2, note 1
Comforter, etymologically
I’m reading the 1559 Book of Common Prayer in a modern spelling edition (ed. John E. Booty). The Te Deum, an ancient Christian hymn, is sung during the morning prayer service. It includes these lines sung to the Trinity:
We praise thee, O God: we knowledge thee to be the Lord,
…
The Father of an infinite majesty.
Thy honorably, true, and only Son:
Also the Holy Ghost, the comforter.
The editor supplies a gloss for “comforter”: that it means “strengthener.” I might have noticed that, if I’d paid attention: “fort” is embedded in the word. But how different a sense that word carries, now.
T.C. and T.C.
I’m reading and writing about the Henrician “Reformation,” if Henry 8’s break from Rome (1534) and the subsequent doctrinal and liturgical innovations introduced during the latter years of his reign can be called that. For several years, two men figured large in this evangelical movement: Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) and Thomas Cromwell (Vicegerent in Spirituals). Why did their names have to be so similar?
Duffy on heresy and orthodoxy (or, metaphor of the day)
I’m reading Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992; 2nd ed., 2005) to establish a context for my last research project this semester: a study of the newly-protestant English Church’s first book of homilies, published in 1547 for use during the reign of (young) King Edward 6. E6’s reign was short; his Catholic half-sister Mary 1, who also ruled for short time (a mere five years, 1553-1558), would license a Catholic book of homilies (in the vernacular) to replace the Edwardian book. When Elizabeth 1 ascended (1558), the original book, slightly updated, would be re-issued, and would be in regular use until the mid- to late-17c.
Back to Duffy. This book famously advanced a new understanding of the religious climate of 15c and 16c England: that it was dominated by conservatives, who were not interested in leaving Catholicism. In the new “Preface,” Duffy describes the Church’s response to Lollardy (or “Wycliffism”), a late 14c and early 15c movement often characterized as a kind of proto-protestantism (but which he thinks historians have over-emphasized):
Concern over Lollardy probably did form part of the prehistory of such artifacts, just as heresy in general was one contributory cause among others of the heightened concern for theological correctness which is so striking a feature of late medieval religious culture (notably in France and the Low Countries). Such concern, however, hardly constitutes evidence of a continuing panic about heresy, but rather the pearly precipitation of heightened orthodoxy round an ancient piece of heretical grit, which in most places had long since ceased to irritate directly.
Sentences like that last one make for, not just informative, but enjoyable reading.
