Manuscript and Text Cultures (MTC)

Naming the gods: traditional verse-making in Homer and Old Babylonian Akkadian poetry

Bernardo Ballesteros — 2024-03-25

This is an investigation of character-naming expressions in early Greek (ca. eighth–sixth c. BC) and Old Babylonian Akkadian narrative poetry (ca. nineteenth–seventeenth c. BC). It compares the mentions of Zeus and Enlil (the Babylonian chief god) in Iliad Book 8 and OB Atra-hasis, and proposes a three-layered classification system based on degrees of traditionality. The system involves metre and repetition parameters, and accounts for the techniques through which poets in both traditions made the mention sound venerable and ancient. Control cases include other characters in the Iliad (Diomedes, Hector) and OB Akkadian poetry (Isthar, Ea). The resulting figures are commensurate for the two traditions, supporting the hypothesis of a similar degree of orality-literacy interaction. The article seeks to offer a model for fine-grained cross-cultural literary criticism and verse study.

The recurring collocation of vreiðr and vega in Old Norse poetry

James Parkhouse — 2024-03-25

Poetry in early Germanic vernaculars exhibits variations on a metrical form predicated on a pattern of alliterating stressed syllables linking two halves of a line (in contrast to syllabic metres in which scansion requires a fixed number of syllables per line). This gave rise to the phenomenon of recurring alliterative collocations: the repeated combination of alliterating words or word-roots within a given poetic corpus. It is likely that such collocations originated, like formulae in oral-formulaic theory developed by Milman Parry and A.B. Lord, as building blocks for extempore composition during performance. However, there is strong evidence that Old Norse poetry was composed deliberatively and memorized for performance. Recurring collocations in Old Norse verse therefore reflect conscious artistic design rather than compositional expediency. This article focuses on one such collocation—the adjective vreiðr (angry) and the verb vega (to fight, to strike)—as a case study of the way in which composers of Old Norse eddic verse exploited the traditional resonances of certain collocations to shape audience understanding of character and plot.

‘Going through all these things twice’: the repeated phrase and the refrain in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

H.C. Carter — 2024-03-25

Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1343–1400) repeated phrases are a conundrum. Nancy Mason Bradbury has referred to them as ‘formulas’; Derek Brewer has described Chaucer’s poems as having a ‘traditional formulaic style’. But why would a literate poet make use of a device that tends to be associated with orality? This paper offers an alternative comparandum for Chaucer’s repeated phrases: the refrain. As well as writing narrative poetry, Chaucer acknowledges at the end of The Canterbury tales that during his career he has written ‘many a song and many a leccherous lay’ (‘many a song and many a lascivious ditty’). Few of these songs survive, but one in particular—a ballade known as ‘To Rosemounde’—shows Chaucer to have a keen facility with the paradoxical potential of the refrain. ‘To Rosemounde’ survives in only one manuscript copy, paired with Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde. This manuscript pairing, and Chaucer’s frequent presentation of Troilus and Criseyde itself as a ‘song’, invites a comparison of the poem’s repeated phrases to the refrains of a song lyric. In Troilus, phrases that are repeated at crucial moments—such as ‘I can no more’ and ‘without more’—emulate refrains by holding repetition and closure in an unstable synthesis.

A scribal device in oral clothing: functions of formulaic language in early Chinese divinatory texts

Flaminia Pischedda — 2024-03-25

This paper aims at broadening the scope of what the term ‘formula’ encompasses by studying a written context of formulaic applications and their complex connections to ritual performance. More specifically, it examines the interplay between the oral and the written in the language of the late Shang 商 (ca. 1230–1046 BC) oracle bone inscriptions (OBI). Drawing on the study on ‘formulaicity’ by Wray and Perkins, I propose a definition of formulae based on the OBI evidence and identify the structure-based formulaic types as found in the divinatory records. I then discuss the functions that formulae perform in the divinatory record. I suggest that formulae should be considered a scribal device, a set of stock phrases and technical words used by the scribes to record divination results. They formed a toolkit which was meant to facilitate the composition of written records on hard media. The writing act occurred after (and separately from) the oral divinatory act. Therefore, the oral and written coexisted but were independent from each other within the context of divinatory performance.

(Re)writing orality: editing the preaching of the Compileison de Dis Commandemenz

Samira Lindstedt — 2024-03-25

Sermons are a type of text ideally suited for analyzing historical methods of writing orality as a rhetorical technique, illustrating the rhetorical techniques employed to invoke the spoken word on the written page and the responses that the impression of orality was intended to elicit from a sermon’s envisioned audiences. Artes praedicandi, guides to composing and performing sermons, flourished during the High Middle Ages; reading them alongside contemporary sermons allows us to explore how the advice that they gave was carried out in practice. By combining this theoretical approach with the study of the material text—looking at cues particular to the manuscripts in which these works were found, such as punctuation—we can consider how, why, and for whom these texts set out to construct themselves as oral, and perhaps learn something about the methods and intentions of writing (or, perhaps, ‘feigning’) orality in the process.

Translating oral effects in East Asia: an Edo period version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Natasha Downs — 2024-03-25

This paper investigates how Konan Bunzan 湖南文山 confronted the issue of oral effects in the 17 th-century translation Tsūzoku sangokushi 通俗三國志 , a widely-read Japanese serialization of Luo Guanzhong’s 羅貫中 14 th-century Romance of the Three
Kingdoms. Despite being a famed written work, belonging to the ‘Four classic Chinese novels’ (si da qishu 四大奇書 ), Luo’s novel contains numerous oral elements which emulate domestic storytelling culture. The fecundity of the text for orality studies is thus apparent. In examining how the oral effects in Luo’s text were changed in translation into Japanese, I first use Idema’s model of the six markers of ‘the storyteller’s manner’ to evaluate how oral effects are mostly lost in translation, paying attention to certain aspects which are omitted over others. Second, I prove that certain oral elements, such as the inclusion of poems in parallel prose into the narrative, undergo less significant changes. Finally, I assess the usefulness of Idema’s framework beyond its original Sinological context, evaluating its applicability to Tsūzoku sangokushi.

Mouvance and the art of fiction in performance in manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian novella

Joseph Cross — 2024-03-25

Substantial textual variation found across manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian novella, The prebend of Amun, bears upon closer examination the features of mouvance, a kind of textual impermanence found in written versions of literature for which performance contexts are not only ongoing but are constitutive of their very textual shape. Alongside this mouvance, manuscripts of this work also maintain a high level of similarity and coherence down to the phrasal and word level. I argue that this unique combination of sameness and mouvance points to the desire of performers who possessed libretto-like copies of The prebend of Amun to tweak their texts in order to match their understanding of this work of prose fiction.

Orality in a world of manuscripts: reconstructing Purāṇic composition, preservation and transmission on the basis of the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa

Sanne Dokter-Mersch — 2024-03-25

Since the invention of the Indian writing system around the third century BC, Sanskrit literature was no longer exclusively oral. However, not all genres immediately adopted the new possibilities. In order to fully understand the orality and writing of Sanskrit literature, I will first define a threefold division of what I call ‘the compositional complex’, the totality of processes involved in the creation of texts and their subsequent usages. The first stage is the composition of the text, the second is its preservation for the sake of future generations, and the third is its transmission to the audience. Each stage can be oral or written. After a brief discussion of secondary literature on the compositional complex of the Vedas, the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas, I look for text-internal evidence for the compositional complex of Purāṇas in the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa, ‘the Purāṇa of the future’. On the basis of this single Purāṇa, it is possible to make a reconstruction of the composition, preservation, and transmission of Purāṇas, where orality and writing intertwine.

Introduction to ‘Writing orality’

Bernardo Ballesteros — 2024-03-25

John P. Clay and the Clay Sanskrit Library

2024-03-25

Manuscript and Text Cultures is published in collaboration with the Digital Clay Sanskrit Library (eCSL).

The Clay Sanskrit Library is a book series initiated by John P. Clay covering a wide spectrum of Classical Sanskrit literature spanning two millennia. Today, the list of published volumes encompasses fifty-six works. Bound in the convenient pocket size (4.5″×6.5″) in an elegant design, each work features the original Sanskrit text in transliterated Roman letters on the left-hand page with its English translation on the facing page.

John P. Clay’s vision came to life in the late 1990s, when he began to put the people and resources together for what would become the Clay Sanskrit Library. Since the publication of the first volume in 2005, fifty-six volumes have been published. The selection represents the richness and wide variety of Sanskrit literature, covering works of drama, poetry, satire, and novels, as well as the two famous epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa.

The Clay Sanskrit Library titles are in the process of conversion to digital format at the Digital Clay Sanskrit Library (eCSL). In eCSL, the editions retain the facing page translations and they provide additional search and navigation features, thus making it an immediate and
practical platform especially to students of Sanskrit. Visit the website of eCSL for more details.