Brief bios of contributors

Review essay: Calvino

Review

Review

In his essay on the history of the Treaty of Waitangi, “The Sociology of a Text: Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand”, D. F. McKenzie invokes a markedly theological language, culminating in his claim that it is best to think about the Treaty of Waitangi using the concept of an ideal text — and in terms of what he intriguingly terms a “providential version” — rather than thinking about the Treaty of Waitangi as reducible to its various differing versions in circulation. McKenzie’s secular version of providence and transcendence offers an important corrective to narrow forms of historicism and materialism operating in textual studies. This article argues that the history of the Bible’s reception — informed by the tension between “the Bible” as a transcendent unity and as an indeterminate collection of individual texts — constitutes an important context for McKenzie’s “providential version” metaphor. The article contends that the idea of transhistorical and transcendent totality encompassing textual diversity exemplified by the history of the Bible’s reception plays a vital role in McKenzie’s essay.

This essay is concerned with the printed texts of two of Sir Philip Sidney’s books: the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella,published by the stationer Thomas Newman in 1591, and An Apologie for Poetrie, published by the stationer Henry Olney in 1595. While the current scholarly consensus is that Newman’s Astrophel and Stella was a “pirated” text, “suppressed” when the social elite (headed by Lord Burghley) intervened to prevent the book’s being read, the present essay challenges this interpretation through a new reading of the material record that offers a fuller account of the publication histories of both sets of sonnets, and of the origins of Olney’s publication. 
 

Book review.

This article proposes a reading of Dante’s treatment of the harmony of the spheres in the Paradiso, against the backdrop of classical and Christian views of the earlier Pythagorean notion. Rooted in textual evidence, the study highlights Dante’s subtlety in dealing with an extraordinarily evocative subject that had nevertheless been refuted by Aristotelian theologians and thus constituted a contentious issue in the acoustic physics and metaphysics of the late Middle Ages.

Modern Western musical notation is “efficient” in the sense that every element of a text corresponds to an essential element of the composition represented and to an essential element of every valid performance of that composition. Western notation became efficient only during the eighteenth century. Previously, much Western music — especially music for solo instrument and small ensemble — operated on pretextual, oral principles: it was performed in small communities dominated by celebrated performer/composers who re-created compositions with each performance; their students were taught to perform in this quasi-improvisational way. In such circumstances, a composition could be represented by many different texts. Notation became efficient when increasing numbers of recreational amateurs required music that did not have to be re-created with each performance and that could be learned by realizing texts literally. Printers and composers accommodated them. As texts became efficient, compositions became stable entities defined by texts established by their composers.


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