Nineteenth-century Irish Anacreontics: the literary relationship of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Moore

The odes of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, celebrating wine, women and song, were made newly popular in the nineteenth century through the efforts of Thomas Moore, a writer whose first volume of verse, a loose translation of the Odes of Anacreon, published in 1800, marks him out today as a poet of Romantic sociability par excellence. I argue that the Anacreontic ode popularised by Moore continued to resonate through nineteenth-century Ireland – albeit in a heavily mediated form – in the work of the poet's successor, James Clarence Mangan, who picked up the cup in the series of drinking songs he wrote periodically throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the decades during which Mangan sank into alcoholism and emotional estrangement. The easy charm of Moore's Anacreontic song mutates in Mangan's verse into a more complex, often allusive and fragmented form, a perverse Anacreontics, which corresponds both to the poet's psychic trauma (his alcoholism and self-alienation) and to a broader cultural and political dislocation experienced by Ireland under British rule. This discomfort is registered in Mangan's verse in the playful refusal of a single authorial voice and in the poet's tendency both to ventriloquise and to distort influence – not just that of Moore but also of the British Romantics, notably Byron and Coleridge.     

Jean Lemaire de Belges's Rhetorical Masks in L’Amant Vert and “Les Regretz de la Dame Infortunée”

A prominent feature of the poetry of Franco-Burgundian poet and rhetorician Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1524) is his use of a rhetorical mask—a persona—through which to proffer his utterances and assert his identity. Because the early sixteenth-century court poet's financially and politically subservient position vis-à-vis powerful aristocratic patrons demands an encomiastic rhetoric that leaves little room for the poet's self-assertion within the body of the poetic text, Lemaire must employ the indirect means of a narrative mask to assert his own existence and concerns. This article examines first the narrative mask of the parrot-lover in the 1505 Epîtres de l’Amant Vert, through which Lemaire is able to voice concerns about his precarious position as a writer almost entirely at the mercy of his patron's good health and good will. A discussion of “Les Regretz de la Dame Infortunée” (1506) follows, in which Lemaire takes an intriguing narratological stance that unites his voice to that of his patroness, Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), ultimately forging an authorial je that speaks for both poet and patron. This nearly mystical union of narrative voices allows Lemaire to express his own concerns about the volatility of the patronage system while concomitantly giving voice to Margaret's mourning at the death of her brother, Philip the Handsome (1478–1506).     

Regensburg,Wandalgarius and the novi denarii: Charlemagne's monetary reform revisited

Until now, Philip Grierson's tentative dating of Charlemagne's monetary reform to 793/4 has been generally accepted. His dating was based not only on numismatic evidence but also on his attempt to set this event in the context of Charlemagne's activities from 792 to 794. This traditional date of the reform does not, however, take into account evidence provided by Codex Sangallensis 731, in which the scribe Wandalgarius drew the image of a post‐reform coin around mid‐October 793. Based on this evidence as well as the historical contextualization of Charlemagne's stay in Regensburg in 791–3, this paper attributes the introduction of the novi denarii to the period between the autumn of 792 and the early autumn of 793, when his court was located in Regensburg.     

The date of Marvell’s Hortus

A post-Restoration dating of Marvell’s poem The Garden and its Latin companion piece “Hortus” to around 1668 has been generally accepted in recent criticism, despite some counter-arguments from those who defend the traditional dating to Marvell’s period at Nun Appleton (1650–2). None of these analyses, however, have attempted to date the Latin rather than the English poem. This article offers a new dating of “Hortus” to around 1654, during Marvell’s time at Eton as tutor to John Dutton. The argument is based on a series of parallels and allusions to Latin poetry either dating from, or demonstrably particularly fashionable in, the period between 1646 and 1654, as well as close attention to the political resonance and contemporary understanding of the poem’s classical sources. As such, it is also a case study in the dating of neo-Latin verse, of which many thousands of examples survive from seventeenth-century England.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

Late Holocene Historical Ecology: The Timing of Vertebrate Extirpation on Crooked Island,Commonwealth of The Bahamas

We report eight new accelerator-mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates performed directly on individual bones of extirpated species from Crooked Island, The Bahamas. Three dates from the hutia (Geocapromys ingrahami), recovered from a culturally derived bone assemblage in McKay's Bluff Cave (site CR-5), all broadly overlap from AD 1450 to 1620, which encompasses the time of first European contact with the Lucayan on Crooked Island (AD 1492). Marine fish and hutia dominate the bone assemblage at McKay's Bluff Cave, shedding light on vertebrate consumption by the Lucayans just before their demise. A fourth AMS ¹⁴C date on a hutia bone, from a non-cultural surface context in Crossbed Cave (site CR-25), is similar (AD 1465 to 1645) to those from McKay's Bluff Cave. From Pittstown Landing (site CR-14), an open coastal archaeological site, a femur of the Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer) yielded an AMS ¹⁴C date of AD ～1050–1250, which is early in the Lucayan cultural sequence. From a humerus in a non-cultural surface context in 1702 Cave (site CR-26), we document survival of the Cuban crocodile on Crooked Island until AD ～1300–1400, which is several hundred years later than the well-documented extinction of Cuban crocodiles on Abaco in the northern Bahamas. We lack a clear explanation of why Cuban crocodiles likely survived longer on Crooked Island than on a larger Bahamian island such as Abaco. One AMS ¹⁴C date on Crooked Island's extinct, undescribed species of tortoise (Chelonoidis sp.) from 1702 Cave is BC 790 to 540 (2740 to 2490 cal BP), which is ～1500–1700 years prior to human arrival. A second AMS ¹⁴C date, on a fibula of this tortoise from McKay's Bluff Cave, is AD 1025 to 1165, thereby demonstrating survival of this extinct species into the period of human occupation.     

Ancient Greek Myth in Angelos Sikelianos

Abstract

In the introduction to Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, the translators speak of Sikelianos's ‘mythological attitude … toward life’ and of his conception of myth not so much ‘as a rhetorical or metaphorical device but as a spontaneous creation of the human soul directed toward the revelation of a hidden spiritual life’, in short, of mythology as a kind of religion closely related to Schelling's perception of the function of myth. These remarks, written originally some years ago, may have their just proportion of truth, but in keeping with most introductory remarks, they strike me as rather too general, rather too undiscriminating when one brings them face to face with Sikelianos's practice at different moments of his career. I want to try to be more discriminating by considering the role of myth – specifically ancient Greek myth – in the poet's work both early and late in his career. I think it is a changing role, perhaps not in his fundamental association of gods with a contemporary landscape and his revelation of those mysteries that lie hidden in our everyday lives, but in the mode of this association and this revelation, and in the depth of their poetic significance.     

Exile and return in John Mauropous,Poem 47

Abstract

The author reads an epigram by John Mauropous as an engagement with epic and biblical traditions. Critical studies of exile and return from different eras of the Greek literary tradition by Émile Benveniste, Gregory Nagy and Nancy Sultan are used to provide a theoretical approach to the tradition with which Mauropous engages. It is suggested that Mauropous' wanderings in the territory of the xenos and return to the familiar world of the philos, and especially his personification of his home as a trophos (nurse), allude to Homer, and that epic language and motifs strengthen the poet's assertion of selfhood and make ancient literary themes relevant to Mauropous' life as a scholar and churchman.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

The Date of the Gough Map

ABSTRACT

The date commonly given for the Gough map of Britain, about 1360, is, in the author's opinion, wrong. Arguments that have been offered to support such a dating are invalid. The best indication of the date of the map is the writing on it, which is essentially in a hand of about 1400, a dating endorsed by expert palaeographical opinion. Indeed, a few exceptional features of the handwriting may suggest a slightly later date. A few specific non-palaeographical features of the map confirm a date of production close to, or a little after, 1400. Comparison with other late medieval maps of large inland areas from any part of Europe shows how precocious or advanced the Gough Map is, even for the beginning of the fifteenth century. Arguments suggesting that the map had an earlier ‘prototype’, reflecting the affairs of King Edward I, are also found to be without merit.     

The World Map as an Emblem: Abraham Ortelius and the Stoic Contemplation

Although the close association of word and image in medieval cartography is widely acknowledged, the significance of the relationship after the rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geography and throughout the Renaissance has been overlooked, despite Abraham Ortelius's choice of the term ‘Reader’ for users of the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570). In this paper, the map of the world, which (as in Ptolemy's Geography) opens Ortelius's Theatrum, is analysed to show how Ortelius's concept of space was very different from Ptolemy's. Attention is drawn to the content of the texts on the map, to Ortelius's notion of geography as the eye of history, and to the importance in the Renaissance of the emblem as a conceit, or device, in the system of acquisition and transmission of knowledge. As in emblems, the words on Ortelius's map are not there to explain or to comment on what is seen but to give the image meaning; the purpose of the map is to invite contemplation of God's world. The map is contradictory, however; for Ortelius's accurate and up‐to‐date presentation of the physical world is qualified by a verbal statement that the world is ‘nothing’, a mere pinpoint in the immensity of the universe. It is concluded that Ortelius was not a geographer in the same way Ptolemy was, and that Ortelius was using geography as a philosopher and his world map as an illustration of his moral and religious thinking.     

Medbh McGuckian's source texts and the challenge to authorial identity in “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”

This article contends that Medbh McGuckian's “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”, from her 2006 volume The Currach Requires No Harbours, offers an example of the poet's direct engagement with and rejection of negative commentary regarding her opaque style and incorporation of material from source texts. This article first presents a contextualising overview of the main strands of criticism of McGuckian's work. Following this, two detailed readings of this poem are offered. The first of these readings foregrounds McGuckian's challenge to the possibility of stable meaning in any linguistic act. The second reading identifies McGuckian's source texts and examines how their content and nature underline her deliberate destabilisation of identity and meaning.     

Le modèle des petites filles: structure familiale dans l'œuvre de la comtesse de Ségur

This article discusses how Petrarch's self-portrayal as a spokesman for peace, armed with quill and inkpot, is brought forward in the canzone "Italia mia benché 'l parlar sia indarno" and in his epistles of the 1350s. The poet's activity as peace mediator appears in this famous canzone dedicated to Italy well before the epistles were written. Dated to 1344, the poem's thematic kernel seems to have been subsequently unfolded and broken down into the epistles that Petrarch later sent to the political leaders of his day. Petrarch's cry for peace in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is threefold: he invokes spiritual, societal, and teleological peace. The different faces of this threefold pining for harmonic conciliation find an outlet in the invocations of, respectively, Chiare fresche e dolci acque, "Italia mia," and the Canzone alla Vergine. "Italia mia," his most distinctly political text as well as heartfelt plea to the lords of Italy, marks Petrarch's last attempt to recompose the political fractures of Italy within the peninsula itself; from the 1350s onward, Petrarch addresses his political appeals solely to foreign rulers, a sign of the waning independence of Italian states.     

A simple Bayesian approach to tree‐ring dating

Tree‐ring dating involves matching sequences of ring widths from undated timbers to dated sequences known as ‘master’ chronologies. Conventionally, the undated timbers (from a building or woodland) are sequentially matched against one another, using t‐tests to identify the relative offsets with the ‘best’ match, thus producing a ’site’ chronology. A date estimate is obtained when this is matched to a local master chronology of known calendar age. Many tree‐ring sequences in the UK produce rather low t‐values and are thus declared not to have a ‘best’ match to a master chronology. Motivated by this and the routine use of Bayesian statistical methods to provide a probabilistic approach to radiocarbon dating, this paper investigates the practicality of Bayesian dendrochronology. We explore a previously published model for the relationship between ring widths and the underlying climatic signal, implementing it within the Bayesian framework via a simulation‐based approach. Probabilities for a match at each offset are produced, removing the need to identify a single ‘best’ match. The Bayesian model proves successful at matching in both simulated and real examples.     

DENDROCHRONOLOGICAL DATING OF THE CHIEF JOHN ROSS HOUSE,ROSSVILLE, GEORGIA

Abstract

The Chief John Ross House is a two-story oak (Quercus spp.) and eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana L.) log structure located in downtown Rossville, Georgia. The log structure was reportedly built in 1797 by John McDonald, grandfather of Chief John Ross, for his Cherokee bride. This construction date first emerged in the 1950s, when efforts were underway to save the structure. Historical documents, however, indicate that the structure did not exist until 1816. Ross lived at the structure until 1828, when he was elected the last principal chief of the Cherokee before the tribe’s forced removal during the Trail of Tears. Using dendroarchaeological techniques, 28 archaeological (increment) cores were removed from the oak portion of the structure in 2007 to verify the construction date. Cores were processed and dated using the white oak (Quercus alba L.) Piney Creek Pocket Wilderness, Tennessee chronology. Of the 28 cores, 22 (from 19 trees) yielded cutting dates clustered around the winter of 1816–17, indicating the structure likely was not built by McDonald. This construction date does, however, make it possible for Chief John Ross himself to have been the builder. This correction to history should increase public attention and preservation efforts at the structure.     

An Essay on the Context and Formation of Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Thought

SUMMARY

This essay combines the study of Humboldt's sources with a critique of the treatment of this subject in most studies of Humboldt and his linguistic thought. One crucial issue is the date of his early ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’, which is our first evidence of his mature thinking about language. This text is conventionally dated 1795, thus ruling out that Humboldt might be indebted to the anthropo-linguistic philosophy that he explored in Paris a few years later. But a host of facts make the date untenable and the debt unquestionable, including incontrovertible evidence that ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ relies on Condillac's argument for the anti-idealist principle that the distinction between subject and object is the absolute precondition for self-awareness and reflection, and thus, by the same token, for the concept of Weltansicht. ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ also shows that Humboldt was inspired to choose Condillac's and Destutt de Tracy's argument over that of Fichte for what Berkeley disapprovingly called ‘outness’. This analysis exemplifies the critique that is advanced in this essay.     

The uses of Greek Orthodoxy in the early poetry of Yannis Ritsos

Abstract

The influence of Greek Orthodoxy on Ritsos' poetry, previously neglected because of the poet's political commitments, is examined. Against the backdrop of the poet's Orthodox upbringing and his early conversion to communism, Ritsos' uses of Orthodoxy in certain poems written before 1948 are considered. The diversity is demonstrated during this period of Ritsos' conception and treatment of the tensions and oppositions between Orthodoxy and Marxism. The ideological influence of Varnalis on the earliest collection, Tρακτ?ρ, can be contrasted with the more nuanced use of Orthodox material in Eπιταφιο? and the sympathetic depiction of childhood religion in Mια πυγολαμπιδα φωτιζ?ι τη νυχτα. Only in the particular conditions of wartime Greece does Ritsos manage a bridge between Orthodoxy and Marxism: H Kυρα Aμπ?λιων synthesizes Ritsos' liberation message with images rooted in popular religion.     

Evaluating the Reliability of Fluoride Dating at Two Prehistoric Mound Sites in Mississippi

Abstract

Ion-selective electrode fluoride dating is used to address chronological problems at two mound sites located in Mississippi. At the Mississippian period (A.D. 900–1520) Lyon's Bluff site, 220K520, the fluoride content of deer and human bone is compared with radiocarbon dates and stratigraphic levels to evaluate the reliability of the fluoride dating method for understanding relative burial chronology. At a second site, Pocahontas Mound A (22HI500), fluoride content of deer bone is used to corroborate radiocarbon dates and to establish the proper chronology of levels associated with two distinct occupations (Archaic and Coles Creek/Plaquemine) identified in a large midden area. Fluoride analysis also is used to date a second midden area at this site. For Lyon's Bluff; fluoride dates did not correspond with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS)-dated burials and midden strata. In contrast, fluoride dating proved very useful in determining chronological placement of midden levels and dating other areas at Pocahontas Mound A. Sample age, site location, soil, and bone preservation are considered as possible causes for the negative results at Lyon's Bluff.     

LASER ARGON DATING AND GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCING OF A STONE AXE FROM THE STONEHENGE ENVIRONS*

The recently-developed laser microprobe ⁴⁰argon-³⁹ argon technique has been used to give a geological date for a rhyolitic tuff stone axe fragment from the Stonehenge environs. The method requires only milligramme-sized samples and gives dates of sufficient accuracy to aid in provenancing artefacts to sources, as well as information on the heating history of samples. The axe sample is of Lower Carboniferous date (341 ± 5 Ma) and this limits possible sources to outcrops within the Scottish Midland Valley and small altered exposures in Dartmoor. X-ray fluorescence analysis of the axe suggests the Scottish Midland Valley as the more likely source. The laser argon analysis also shows that the implement had not been heated in antiquity. Laser argon-argon dating can, therefore, be a useful tool in artefact study.