Abstract The repetition of a text in a medieval manuscript is rarely remarked upon as anything more than the product of scribal oversight. This essay argues that it is much more. Taking as a central exemplum the codex now cataloged in the holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France as MS Français 185, the author will show how the reappearance of previously copied Lives in a single codex was received by medieval readers neither as a copyist error nor as an accident of rebinding but rather as a highly legible roadmap to the political and devotional structure of the text en mouvence. The designation in this manuscript in particular of five vitae, marked from the outset for repetition, offers precious information on the polyphonic complexities of medieval authorship, even as it provides new insight into what is perhaps the most persistent mystery in literary hagiology, that of the pleasure that might originally have undergirded a tradition so overwhelmingly constructed around the principle of repetition itself.
Abstract Compilers of manuscript verse miscellanies in early Stuart England regularly organized poems into loose clusters based on genre or topic, a practice derived from the compilation of commonplace books, where owners entered reading excerpts under topical headings. But there is another kind of clustering in miscellanies that merits attention. Several miscellanies contain verse pairings and clusters linked not by the poems’ main topics but, rather, by a single striking metaphor or image that they share, one that may be buried deep in the verse. Blowing dust in poems by Robert Herrick and Ben Jonson, for instance, leads to their pairing in six miscellanies. Jewel images also link poems internally and allude to the gift giving behind verse exchange. Metaphors of Blackness, Black beauty, Moors, and Æthiopes link other clusters and raise questions about how compilers understood race and colonization. The article charts some of the more interesting examples of this compilation convention and argues that the practice worked as a kind of coded game between compilers and readers, highlighting the compilers’ impressive familiarity with contemporary verse, readers’ keen ability to recognize the logic behind the compilation, and the way linked metaphors reveal manuscript culture’s shared values, privileges, and prejudices.
Abstract This article explores how Nabokov articulates a specific concept of memory as a curated collection of textual and material fragments in the final version of his autobiography. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, Nabokov foregrounds the curatorial nature of recollection, positing remembering and compiling as analogous processes that are predicated on retrieval, selection, and arrangement. In the final version of the autobiography, the metaphor of compilation operates beyond a thematic level, shaping the very form of the autobiographical text. Through added intertextual citation, Speak, Memory draws attention to itself as a multi-voiced compilation of intergenerational memory, which draws on and recontextualizes external sources. The integration of the added paratextual elements—photographs, map, index—extends the metaphor of compilation further into the book as a material object. The article argues that these editorial gestures complicate notions of a single authorship of memory and of the past. In this context, the metaphor of compilation assumes a critical function, repositioning the author as compiler—one who continuously reorders fragments of the past, striving for but never attaining a stable, permanent structure.
Abstract Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, large language models (LLMs), once the purview of machine learning experts, computational linguists, and cultural analytics scholars, have entered the public discourse. Many different metaphors have been used to describe these models, and all of them reach past thinking of large language models as simply instruments for using language (or, as the companies that sell chatbots would have it, as artificial intelligence itself)—instead, many scholars ask us to consider the model as something that both uses language and is made of language. This essay will contextualize the history of LLMs within a larger history of compilation in text technologies and the digital humanities. In this broader historical view, it is possible to understand LLMs as programs that use compilations as training inputs to produce compilations as readable output but are not themselves compilations within their model architecture. The metaphor of compilation is useful, alongside the many other metaphors used to understand these often-opaque models, as a way of capturing the historical continuities in how language models are trained and how their outputs are read.
Between 1856 and 1861, Walt Whitman embarked upon a project of compiling a notebook that would examine the uniquely hybridized form of American English found in the antebellum republic. Consisting of over two hundred individual paper slips, Whitman's Words notebook-as a slip pasted to its cover titles it-contains an assortment of handwritten definitions, lists of phrases, notes on grammar, pasted-on print clippings, and illustrative sources. While the Library of Congress identifies the volume as simply a "notebook," it is in fact formed out of an almost unrecognizable copy of Charles Beecher's little-known theological work The Incarnation (1849). Mangled into disrepair by the inquisitive poet, almost all the print pages of this copy of The Incarnation have been torn from the binding, transforming it into a scrapbook for Whitman's copious notes. The book's fragmentary structure preserves this precursor volume but also adds a kind of bibliographic friction to the word lists and excerpts strewn throughout its interleaved slips. Rather than aid in information retrieval, this internal organization unevenly distributes written material across its makeshift pages, generating an uneasy tension between the compiler and the compilation. Left unfinished and still to be fully examined by critics, Whitman's patchwork compilation represents a key resource in a developing poetic project that he called "a language experiment."
Abstract Attempts to apprehend Stéphane Mallarmé’s intractable Livre frequently situate it as an apophatic effort toward the total expansion and annihilation of semiotic linkage. Blanchot and Derrida consider the Livre as negatory; so say Trevor Stark and Anna Sigrídur Arnar. The author argues to the contrary; that rather than dematerialization, it is by rematerialization that we can make sense of, and even become involved in, Mallarmé’s work. This article proposes the Livre as a compilation of objects, attitudes, and movements that in the aggregate achieve a particular field of exaltation. An especially potent interlocutor is Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus and the notion that the assemblage of various sensorial, abstract, and bookish specificities evokes divinity and total knowledge. By triangulating Mallarmé’s devotion to the book, his mystical inheritance, and the potency of multimedia assemblages, this article destabilizes the bibliographic concept per se and reasserts an attention to material participation and fluctuation.
This article treats the Enigmata of Aldhelm of Malmesbury within the compilation in which they originally appeared, the Epistola ad Acircium that Aldhelm sent to Aldfrith, the new king of Northumbria. It finds in Aldhelm's seemingly disparate works a horticultural poetics that draws on botanical and horticultural imagery in scripture to figure Aldhelm's poetic accomplishments as extensions of the revelatory project of scripture itself. A second, historical compilation, in which Aldhelm's work was one of three book gifts to the new king, clarifies the stakes of Aldhelm's project. The De locis sanctis of Adamn & aacute;n of Iona and a now lost "book of cosmographers" from Abbot Ceolfrith of Monkwearmouth confirm that Aldhelm was writing an exegetical, poetic cosmography, demonstrating that the world could be mapped, by an Englishman, in Latin poetic form. Finally, the article considers Aldhelm's use of metaphors of grafting and growth in relation to his sources, specifically in its potential for our own critical and historical praxis, and suggests a "horticultural historicism" as an alternative to positivist models of fixed knowledge and linear progress.
Abstract Among the wide array of ancient Chinese ritual bronzes, the identification of ancient bronze weapons posed a particular challenge to nineteenth-century antiquarian scholars. Unlike ritual vessels, which had been systematically collected and studied since at least the late Northern Song dynasty (960–1167), and whose typological names had largely stabilized through centuries of scholarly consensus, the nomenclature for bronze weapons remained relatively obscure. Especially perplexing to the nineteenth-century scholars were the kui 戣 and qu 瞿 types of weapons. Although their names appear in the Confucian classics, they are mentioned with minimal explanation. The efforts of nineteenth-century scholars to identify these two categories of ritual weapons reveal a distinctive yet understudied approach within antiquarian compilation practices. Faced with limited guidance from both transmitted texts and excavated artifacts, scholars turned to the graphic composition of the characters themselves as metaphors for understanding material artifacts. The use of metaphor in late Qing antiquarian compilations, though it sometimes led to biased conclusions, offers an important window into the evolving scholarly mindset at a moment of transition.
Abstract An illuminated compilation of Persian poetry from 1800, the Murasalat-i shawqi (Selected Citations), presents a unique compilational schema: that of forty “stations” of love on the Sufi path toward God. The stations correspond to well-known genres and tropes in Persianate poetry, and their order implies the narrative shape of a Persianate romance poem. The blank spaces for the reader to insert new verses invite them to perform literary criticism to sort poems appropriately. But the book’s engagement with compilation goes deeper, as the introduction also uses the metaphor of a compiled notebook to describe the universe God created. The poetry’s organization by station invites the reader to progress through successive stages of a journey toward God, while training them to see the world around them as a manifestation of God’s “compilation” of the universe. These two metaphors of compilation allow the book to posit itself as a guide for the seeker who wishes to be closer to God. The manuscript offers a way to think through how Persianate literature was interpreted at the turn of the nineteenth century, when Sufi concepts, Persian poetic topoi, and modes of interpretation from Arabic and Hindi poetics intermingled in material texts from the Persianate world.
Abstract This article argues that applying Roger Chartier’s concept of “libraries without walls” to Colombian state-sponsored book series reveals how editorial practices—often shared across politically opposed parties—complicate narratives of partisan division and illuminate the entangled nature of the country’s lettered elite. Building on Chartier’s concept, the author proposes that Latin America book collections in the first half of the twentieth century belong to a broader, dynamic system of documents and publishers that continually redefine literary time and space with their bookish accumulation. Within this ecosystem, the author analyzes how, between 1940 and 1960, during Colombia’s undeclared civil war, the Ministry of Education engaged intellectuals to curate two state-led book series: the Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana and the Biblioteca de Autores Colombianos. Despite political polarization, both projects reflected distinct partisan agendas yet shared material and institutional conditions shaped by scarcity and limited internationalization. Through these retrospective series, the Colombian state acted as librarian, archivist, and printer, using seriality to shape national literary taste. Ultimately, liberal and conservative literary projects converged within the same modernization and delayed development of publishing capitalism context, underscoring how book collections embody cultural ambitions and political negotiations in shaping a nation’s literary canon.
Abstract Taking up Rubén Peinado-Abarrio’s work on composting as a metaphor of compilation in Valeria Lusielli’s Lost Children Archive, this article argues that the conditions of the Mexican-American border produce compost literature beyond Lusielli’s work; these narratives do so through multilinguality, obvious and subversive allusions, citations, and references that generate new meaning(s) through proximity (differently than hybridity, which makes a singular and patchworked whole). Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife, in addition to Luiselli’s novel, the author demonstrates that the materiality of these novels—especially the elements of untranslated Spanish—both reveal the conditions of the Mexican-American border and help readers imagine a world without it. This article investigates, in particular, extended references to death and dying as a site of potential new ways of understanding what it means to live along the Mexican-American border.
Abstract In Unclaimed Experience Cathy Caruth notes that “trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly” and that “the repetition at the heart of catastrophe . . . emerges as the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind.” Chaucer’s dream-vision, The Legend of Good Women, is defined by repetition on many levels, from its content to its structure. This repetition is significant because of what it is repeating and why: narratives of not just women but traumatized women, and not just stories in a collection but legends in a compilation. Trauma theory identifies not only traumatic narratives but also traumatic literary structures and forms; Chaucer’s Legend is a unique example in which compilation creates a seamless blending of both. The compiled legends read together become a repetitive symptom of a greater trauma—not to any individual but to a literary tradition sentenced, like the Legend’s narrator, to continuously portray “good” women only through stories of suffering. This article demonstrates that through this framework, the Legend becomes a literary representation of the traumatic process—a compilation of traumatic repetitions of traumatized women that bring their reader repeatedly back to the traumatic event—the violent genealogy of women in mythological narratives.
This article makes three arguments. First, it contends that the history of modern scholarship on ancient Judaism has erased Catholic scholars. As nineteenth-century Protestants dismissed Catholics as unscientific and unmodern, so contemporary historiography reinscribes those polemics. Second, the inquiry claims that some Catholics considered themselves part of a common historical science. In their sources, genres, accounts, and values, they operated with the same past-mindedness as Protestant counterparts. Third, the article submits that Catholics could present a different view of ancient Judaism, especially on subjects associated with anti-Judaism: Mosaic law, Jewish sects, and oral tradition. Like negative portraits of Jewish antiquity, which were long used to assault Judaism directly and other Christian churches indirectly, so positive portrayals-it argues further- could serve intraconfessional controversy, in which sympathetic representation of the other helped fortify the self. The inquiry focuses on the 1820-70 period (before betterknown developments in the century's final third), on the Munich context (where Catholic thought and culture was consciously cultivated), and on a trio of writers (Franz Allioli, Ignaz D & ouml;llinger, Daniel Bonifacius Haneberg). Ultimately, this inquiry asserts that the erasure of Catholic scholars from the history of modern scholarship is "partial" and doubly so: not only patchy, as in fragmentary, but also partisan, as in biased.
Few civilizations in the world have paid as much attention to the instrumentality of history as Chinese civilization. Over its long span, this tradition underwent several notable turns, the most significant of which occurred during the Song period (960-1279). Ouyang Xiu's reworking of the earlier histories and Sima Guang's compilation of the stately Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government were examples of establishing the writing of history as a useful mirror for issuing political and moral exhortations. Sima was driven to pursue this work by his innate conviction that history had philosophical didactic significance that may still be seen in the actual historical facts. Following the Song's terrible defeat a century later, the neo-Confucians built on and altered their legacy to enhance the instrumentality of history by introducing a metaphysical dimension. This endeavor was embodied in Zhu Xi's revision of Sima Guang's work, which signified an important modification in the way imperial China thought about and practiced history.
In this essay, the author explores the potential that ethnomusicology holds for studying the past's instrumental narratives, reflecting on their long-standing research about the conflicted city of Jerusalem and the hegemonic spatiotemporal order at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Drawing substantially from the critical insights of Michel Foucault and Chantal Mouffe, and their commentators, the author theorizes genealogy as a means for critique, arguing that its temporal and political agonisms can offer guidance for interrogating the past's lies and divesting from what they term liberal critique, a failure of imagination outside the present's spatiotemporal order.
This article tells the story of history's fragments related to the study of the Hebrew Bible. The author's twofold aim is to (1) elucidate the history of the fragments in biblical scholarship related to the ongoing struggle to understand, instrumentalize, and make meaning from the Hebrew Bible and the Southern Levant; and (2) to explore responsible practices for historians of the Hebrew Bible today. Charting a disciplinary trajectory that leads from the inception of critical historical practices to the current state of the field, the author proposes a path forward that includes building connection, honoring fragmentation, and harnessing irresolution as a historical practice.
Long before Mesopotamia's vast material remains began to reemerge under the archaeologist's pick and shovel in the mid-nineteenth century, the region occupied a significant but peculiarly phantasmic place in Western thought. The cities of Nineveh and Babylon, and the first millennium BCE empires of Assyria and Babylonia more generally, were widely known from references in the Bible and diverse ancient Greek sources- but as these sources also described the destruction of these once-great empires, it was little imagined that any very consequential traces of them had survived. In the 1840s, however, the first large-scale excavations in the region uncovered extraordinarily substantial material remains from Assyria's royal capitals. When the most spectacular of these were shipped to Paris and London for public display, they seized public as well as scholarly attention. Then-contemporary ideas of the history of the world were forced to confront and ultimately assimilate the astonishing materiality of Mesopotamia's ancient civilizations. The present study examines the consequences of this early assimilation for how we have come to study and understand Mesopotamia today, with particular attention to the subfields of literature and the visual arts and aesthetics.
