Stephen J. Milner

Animal origin of 13th-century uterine vellum revealed using noninvasive peptide fingerprinting

Significance This study reports the first use, to our knowledge, of triboelectric extraction of protein from parchment. The method is noninvasive and requires no specialist equipment or storage. Samples can be collected without the need to transport the artifacts; instead, researchers can sample when and where possible and analyze when required. The level of access we have achieved highlights the importance of this technique. For this study, we have extracted proteins from 513 parchment samples, used to resolve the long-standing question of the origin of “uterine vellum.” We find no evidence of unexpected species, such as rabbit or squirrel. We suggest that uterine vellum was often an achievement of technological production using available resources, and would not have demanded unsustainable agricultural practices. Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called “uterine vellum,” has been a long-standing controversy in codicology. Use of the Latin term abortivum in many sources has led some scholars to suggest that the skin of fetal calves or sheep was used. Others have argued that it would not be possible to sustain herds if so many pocket Bibles were produced from fetal skins, arguing instead for unexpected alternatives, such as rabbit. Here, we report a simple and objective technique using standard conservation treatments to identify the animal origin of parchment. The noninvasive method is a variant on zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) peptide mass fingerprinting but extracts protein from the parchment surface by using an electrostatic charge generated by gentle rubbing of a PVC eraser on the membrane surface. Using this method, we analyzed 72 pocket Bibles originating in France, England, and Italy and 293 additional parchment samples that bracket this period. We found no evidence for the use of unexpected animals; however, we did identify the use of more than one mammal species in a single manuscript, consistent with the local availability of hides. These results suggest that ultrafine vellum does not necessarily derive from the use of abortive or newborn animals with ultrathin hides, but could equally well reflect a production process that allowed the skins of maturing animals of several species to be rendered into vellum of equal quality and fineness.

Partial readings: addressing a Renaissance archive

By considering a variety of readings of Renaissance Florence from Burckhardt to the present, this article discusses the nature of the interrelation between the archive and the historian, with a view to illustrating the partiality of both. The records contained within the archives are by nature fragmentary; vestiges of the past, they are also partial in the sense of being subjective, testimonies to past relationships either between individuals or between individuals and institutions - social or political. Likewise, the readings of historians are partial both in the sense that the historian’s research is focused upon particular parts of the archive and in his or her subjectivity as an historian. Interestingly, in this context post-Burckhardtian Florentine historiography shares common ground, however unwittingly, with certain aspects of post-modern writing in decentring the subject, for observations concerning the partial subjectivity of Burckhardt’s Renaissance individual apply equally to observations concerning the partial subjectivity of historians as writers. The fiction of an objective historical method producing hard history becomes apparent once the static relation of historian as subject researching the archive as object is reconfigured as a dynamic and dialectical process. Through the acknowledging of the contingency of such archival readings it becomes apparent that the archive itself is a symbolic construct constituted through the process of writing.

CITING THE RINCHIERA: THE POLITICS OF PLACE AND PUBLIC ADDRESS IN TRECENTO FLORENCE

Abstract The intention of this article is to study the significance of the raised platform, or ringhiera, of the Palazzo Pubblico in Florence as both an architectural and symbolic construct, and to examine how its physical situation and literary citation imagined it as the locus of legitimation in the context of continued political struggle within the nascent popular commune of the Trecento. The premise of the argument is that the consideration of the sociology of space provides an important tool in understanding the cultural construction of community, the socio-political configuration of power relations, the origins and maintenance of social inequality, and the possibilities for resistance. In assuming this perspective, the ringhiera of the Florentine Palazzo Pubblico is understood as neither an inert material place within and around which communal rituals and social relations revolved, nor a symbolic space which determined such activity. Rather, it is conceived as an active component in the continual redescription of ideological boundaries. An examination of the platforms liminality, therefore, is necessary, for whilst conferring legitimacy upon its occupants during periods of civic peace, it was the site where anxiety concerning the permanency of the prevailing political order was most clearly evidenced in times of political upheaval.

The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio

Part I. Locating Boccaccio: 1. Boccaccio as cultural mediator Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels and Stephen J. Milner 2. Boccaccio and his desk Beatrice Arduini 3. Boccaccios narrators and audiences Rhiannon Daniels Part II. Literary Forms and Narrative Voices: 4. The Decameron and narrative form Pier Massimo Forni 5. The Decameron and Boccaccios poetics David Lummus 6. Boccaccios Decameron and the semiotics of the everyday Stephen J. Milner 7. Voicing gender in the Decameron F. Regina Psaki Part III. Boccaccios Literary Contexts: 8. Boccaccio and Dante Guyda Armstrong 9. Boccaccio and Petrarch Gur Zak 10. Boccaccio and humanism Tobias Gittes 11. Boccaccio and women Marilyn Migiel Part IV. Transmission and Adaptation: 12. Editing Boccaccio Brian Richardson 13. Translating Boccaccio Cormac O Cuilleanain 14. Boccaccio beyond the text Massimo Riva Guide to further reading.

Introduction: Encountering Consolation

What is consolation? Is it the action of an individual offering solace to another? Is consolation a moment of empathy, or an expression of sympathy? Do we console someone in person in silence, through gesture, or through speeches? Or do we console them from a distance by sending words or things: letters, poems, or gifts? Do we imagine that these things are effective? Or can consolation only be experienced and not given? For there is a power relation at stake as I explore the hierarchies of consoler and consoled. If I offer comfort to my friend, my role must be established in advance, my words borrowed from a common fund of expressions. I may invoke the ineffability of the other’s emotions: “I know my words cannot express your pain...” But if mere words can say nothing that counts, then why do we associate consolation with the sounds we make or symbolize, and why do we think a song can console, or a poem? I send my friend a picture in the hope that it may express whatever it is words cannot say. The picture has its own rhetoric, but I cannot control my friend’s reading of it. So, would my wordless presence be more consolatory than my verbose absence? After all, does consolation bring individuals together, or does it remind them that they are apart and do not know each other at all, merely bridging the gap through a fantasy of union and common experience?

'Coming Together: Consolation and the Rhetoric of Insinuation in Bocacccio's Decameron'

This chapter examines how Boccaccio in the Proemio and Conclusione of the Decameron subverts the normative medieval discourses of consolation as found within the Italian vernacular traditions of the Consolation of Philosophy and the ars dictaminis to serve a wholly different and erotically charged function. By exploiting the mediating function of written texts, Boccaccio-narrator seeks to console by imagining a transition from being in touch literally to literally being in touch. In the process he parodies Boethius’ and Dante’s journeys of meditative ascent, offering in their place the fantasy of a pedestrian journey that climaxes in an erotic “rendezvous.”

Reclamation, reclamation, reclamation: Place, voice, and text in premodern critical practice. An interview with David Wallace

Abstract David Wallace is currently Chair of Comparative Literature and Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The following interview took place in London on 21 July 2005, within earshot of the police response to what turned out to be the failed bombing of Warren Street tube station. It took as its point of departure his most recent published volume Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). A graduate of the University of York, David Wallace completed his Ph. D. at Cambridge in 1983 before moving to America. After a year as a Mellon Fellow at Stanford, he was appointed Associate Professor in English at the University of Texas at Austin, and then, from 1991, Paul W. Frenzel Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota prior to taking up his current post at Pennsylvania in 1996. His continued comparativist interest in Italian late-medieval literature and culture is apparent throughout his published work, from his monograph Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985) and his Italian contributions to the volume edited by A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), to his volume for the Landmarks of World Literature series, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In 1998 he was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize for the best book by a member of the MLA for the volume Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). As an editor he oversaw both The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and, together with Carolyn Dinshaw, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Womens Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).