Twinkling Stars Over The Vast Grasslands

ＷｈｉｌｅｉｎＺｈｏｎｇｄｉａｎ，ＩｏｆｔｅｎｈｅａｒｄｌｏｃａｌＴｉｂｅｔａｎｓｓｉｎｇｉｎｇａｆｏｌｋｓｏｎｇ：“Ｆｏｒｗｈａｔｒｅａｓｏｎｔｈｅｒｅｉｓｓｏｍｅｔｈｉｎｇｔｗｉｎｋｌｉｎｇｄｏｗｎｔｈｅｓｎｏｗｍｏｕｎｔａｉｎ；“Ｔｈｅｙａ...     

The World under the Stars: Astrological Geography and the Bologna 1477 Edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia

ABSTRACT

This article is a re-examination of the first complete printed edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia (Bologna, de Lapis, 1477), hitherto considered flawed and defective. An investigation of the status and priorities of the team of court astrologers responsible for this edition, and an examination of the alterations they made to Ptolemy’s maps, suggests that their aim was a redaction intentionally different from existing versions of the Geography. It is suggested that the editors sought to adjust the arrangement of provinces from that recommended in Ptolemy’s Geography (book VIII) to the astrological arrangement detailed in his Tetrabiblos (book II) and that they modified the content of the key regional maps accordingly. In this light, the Bologna 1477 edition underlines the importance of assessing the reception of Ptolemy’s geographical work against a cultural background in which astrology prevailed as an integrated system of knowledge, practices and beliefs.     

Northern Songs,Sporting Heroes and Regional Consciousness,c.1800—c.1880: ‘Wor Stars that Shine’

Abstract

The achievements, triumphs and disasters of leading northern semi-professional sportsmen were already being celebrated in broadsides at the start of the nineteenth century, and with the rise of when music hall entertainment became popular songs featuring such sportsmen became an important part of popular culture in Northumberland, Durham and Cumberland, the three Border counties. This article first shows what we know of the surviving songs and their performers, and then explores the ways in which such songs presented a picture of the nature and characteristics of northern sporting celebrity, in the context of a complex variety of local and regional sporting identities, especially in relation to other towns in the North and, more particularly, London. Sporting songs focused on individual success. They rejected the amateur ideals of athleticism, especially in terms of betting, and celebrated physicality, manliness and having a good time. Rowing was the most common focus of songs on Tyneside, wrestling in Cumberland, while horse racing, pedestrianism and boxing were also regularly covered.     

‘Between my Brow and the Stars ...’: Linkages Between the Categories of Subject,Space, and Time in Jan Zahradníček’s Verse of the Second Half of the 1930s

The study enquires how the functional relationship between the broader framework of Czech poet Jan Zahradní?ek’s vision of the world and the narrower, governing principle shaped by his declared adoption of a fixed, ideologically unambiguous (confessional) model for viewing life and the world is realized. The present author’s deliberation is based on an analysis of the categories of lyrical subject, space and time as rendered artistically in two collections of verse by Jan Zahradní?ek: ?íznivé léto (Thirsty Summer, 1935) and Pozdravení slunci (A Salute to the Sun, 1937). It is found that, rather than speaking of the mutually contingent effect of these two planes of reality, it would be better to think in terms of a colliding of fragments, each of which represents a part of its own reality — poetic truth and truth sprung from an ideology. The literary text becomes a specific locus that makes this intersection possible, and it expresses an entirely new form of reality. Motivated on the one hand by the experience of creative freedom and on the other by having voluntarily accepted certain external ideological considerations which perforce refine poetic freedom, or poetic output, with regard to the appreciation of its meaning, thereby giving it added force and depth, the poet fashions — with various degrees of success — the sundry fragments of this and that layer of reality into a two-way correlation that is reinforced by the dominant effect of the aesthetic function. He thus creates a specific, imaginary whole that opens man up to the world and adumbrates for the reader the idea of unity in diversity. However, at the same time he does not veil the sense of disillusionment that lies at the root of all modern poetry, arising from the notion that neither life, nor the world can be integrated into some ideal, harmonious form.