Before the live-action Transformers films that began in 2007, The Transformers: The Movie (1986) was the brand's only foray to the box office, and it featured star-studded voice work by Leonard Nimoy, Judd Nelson, Eric Idle, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles. Explorations of medievalism in the Transformers have been few and brief, and none has yet explored Transformers: The Movie.

To say that Adalbert Stifter was born on October 23, 1805, and died on January 28, 1868, may be technically true, but as with so many aspects of his life and work, details of this sort are both murky and misleading. The Ordnung—whether ethical order or petty orderliness—that ruled his existence and dominate his oeuvre is often but a front concealing deeper unrest, including chronic melancholy, self-destructive passion, and existential despair. Thus, to rectify the ignominy of his premarital conception and restore some semblance of order to his very origins, Stifter often tweaked his professional résumés and autobiographical accounts by shifting his birth year to 1806. (His parents, Magdalena Friepes and Johann Stifter, were wedded on August 13, 1805, hence just over two months before his birth.) The circumstances surrounding his death were likewise disorderly, if not messy. Around 1:00 am during the night of January 25–26, 1868, Stifter slit his throat with a razorblade yet did not expire from this self-inflicted wound until two days later. This act of (attempted) suicide might be interpreted as the culmination of Stifter's tumultuous life as lived between the lines of his self-corrective fiction and well over a century's worth of largely reverent literary-historical scholarship. It is, at any rate, an eerie enactment of a lamentation expressed through his analogue Augustinus in the fourth version of Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (My Great-Grandfather's Notebook) which was written during the final years of his life and published posthumously in 1939.

This chapter examines the structure of Walter Map's De nugis curialium in order to ask how comparative approaches to a compiled book can inform comparative approaches to a compiled text. As we have seen, Part I of Bodley 851 preserves the sole surviving copy of Map's only life work (fols. 7ra–73v), a collection of historical accounts, folk tales, classical references, political jibes, and courtly witticisms (among other competing generic forms) in Latin prose, originally composed at the close of the twelfth century. Within Bodley 851, the De nugis is preserved in five distinctions, and each distinction is broken up into smaller chapters of disparate length. These textual divisions postdate Map's death. One section of the De nugis circulated widely as the Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum (4.2–5), a fervently hyperbolic antifeminist epistle commonly attributed in manuscript witnesses to authoritative sources such as St. Jerome and Valerius Maximus. In the version of the Dissuasio preserved within the De nugis, Map acknowledges the popularity of his epistle, noting that “it is snatched up greedily, copied passionately, and read with great delight” (“auide rapitur; transcribitur intente; plena iocunditate legitur;”; fol. 47r, 4.5). Immediately, he complains that “nevertheless, some people – vulgar people! – deny that it is mine” (“meam tamen esse quidam sed de plebe negant.”; fol.47r). Apart from the Dissuasio, Bodley 851 constitutes the only material evidence for any transmission of the De nugis – and so, too, for any possible medieval readership of Map's life work.

With the exception of the last work in the series, Beethoven's ten violin sonatas were all composed within the space of some six years, between 1798 and 1803. Of his chamber works in other forms, only the five string trios are more closely bunched together. Moreover, if that last sonata, op.96, occupies a lone position chronologically, then its predecessor – the ‘Kreutzer’ op.47 – stands apart stylistically: it is, as Beethoven was at pains to point out, less an intimate chamber work than a piece in concertante style. The Sonata op.30 no.1 to which its finale originally belonged is one of Beethoven's most subtly understated works, and perhaps for that reason one of the least performed of the series. But even among the remaining works, only the C minor op.30 no.2 and the ‘Spring’ op.24 appear with any regularity on concert programmes outside of a complete cycle of the sonatas.

There is no evidence to suggest that Beethoven himself was a string player of more than modest ability. Among his violin teachers in Bonn was Franz Georg Rovantini, a distant cousin of Beethoven on his mother's side, and a member of the Electoral orchestra. However, Rovantini died of dysentry in 1781, at the age of only twenty-five, and Beethoven received further tuition from the court orchestra's director, Franz Anton Ries, the father of his future pupil Ferdinand Ries.

With the difficulties caused by Hinck settled satisfactorily, Henry's business recovered and went from strength to strength. We are able to follow the family's fortunes through Eliza's diary, which she continued for the rest of her long life.

In June 1848 their last child, a daughter, Anna, was born and the older children began their schooling at Mrs Smallwood's Academy in North End.

Henry's reading rooms flourished, moving in 1849 to new and presumably larger premises in Heath Street, which they shared with the library. He kept on the old rooms at New End for the younger boys, many of whom came to him in the evenings at home, and he continued with the Latin classes. Their annual parties for the reading room members were a regular fixture.

Their social life was as lively as ever. Eliza records an amusing encounter at one of their dinner parties in October 1849: ‘Harriett Martineau with the Gibsons, Sam and Dan, dined here, a very pleasant dinner till HM got to clairvoyance, when finding we none of us agreed with her she got rather hot. Is not it incredible how clever people can believe such nonsense.’

THE 1850s – YEARS OF LOSS

The 1850s were years of bereavement. When the duke of Wellington died in 1852, Cockerell gave them tickets for the lying in state and Eliza went to see his funeral. On the domestic front, Samuel Rogers had a terrible accident in 1850, aged eighty-seven, being knocked down by a coach in Berkeley Square and breaking his hip.

Introduction

This manuscript is in the National Records of Scotland, among the papers of the Hume of Polwarth family, Berwickshire, the Earls of Marchmont. It is a satirical poem, date uncertain, but records accurately local events in Melrose in Roxburghshire in early 1682, and was probably written close to that time. Although a poem is highly unusual as a piece of historical evidence, this particular poem presents a vivid insight into the local community, and is both corroborated by more conventional historical documents and enhances the picture that they present.

The poem is written on two folios made from folding one large sheet of paper, three sides used, each with double columns of tightly written text, 333 lines in total. The handwriting is sometimes difcult to read, though the rhyming nature of the poem (successive pairs of lines rhyming) is helpful when tackling mystery words. In structural terms the poem is split into sections, depending on whose account or viewpoint is being presented, for example ‘Earle of Roxburgh to Blindlie’, ‘John the Clerk to Bailzie Blindly’, and so on. The language used throughout is English with some Scots vocabulary, and Latin expressions are used occasionally.

The manuscript is attributed to ‘Vincent Winge’, not the name of any poet known today. Vincent Wing (1619–1668) created a well-known series of almanacs, which continued to be published long after his death. His name would have been familiar to many, and could easily have been adopted as a pseudonym.

In her last charter, dated sometime before her death on November 2, 1083, Mathilda of Flanders constructed something along the lines of a will.

By the divine clemency of the eternal father, I, William, the leader of the Normans, to the true of the most blessed of mother church wherever they are distributed, faithfully to be known to all who believe in Christ, grant them not to be deprived of the inheritance of blessedness, but to exist as worthy co-heirs of God, who are placed in the midst of this unstable life, those things which they seem to possess by hereditary right, in the places consecrated to God, in the necessary continuous prayers of those vacant there, fulflling their duty to charity, arrange to share them by hereditary emancipation. Faith, confrmed by the apostle's authority as well as by the promise of the Lord, is directed to that which must be undoubtedly believed. For the Apostle says, ‘Indeed you are heirs of God, but joint heirs with Christ.’ For in the gospel, when the Lord foretold the future reward of those who had performed good deeds, he designated those who persevered with a worthy army to be co-heirs of the heavenly joys, saying, ‘And they shall inherit eternal life.’ Terefore, we shall not consider those who write down their father Christ as heir to their earthly labors to be deprived of the eternal inheritance of the celestial kingdom.

Change Beckons in the Cathedrals

The immediate effect of the outbreak of the First World War on the daily round of cathedral life appears to have been minimal. Some lay clerks would have enrolled in the forces, but given that most were beyond call-up years, serious disruption to choral services was unlikely. The university choral foundations would have lost most of such choral scholars as they were accustomed to have, but all still relied mainly on lay clerks. It would be the aftermath of the war, with its economic and social upheavals, which ushered significant changes in the world of cathedral music, minor as these were in comparison with what would occur in the latter part of the century. Among the most important developments of the inter-war years was the gradual abandonment in most cathedrals of weekday choral Matins. Its continuation was becoming a major impediment to both the engagement of lay clerks and the education of the choristers. What had still been manageable in late Victorian Britain became increasingly anachronistic after the First World War. With the employment uncertainties of the period, the opportunities for lay clerks to find suitable work outside singing duties were far fewer than earlier – not many employers would now be prepared to allow an hour's absence in the middle of the morning – for Matins was still usually at 10 a.m. – as well as early release for a 3 p.m. Evensong. Work round the cathedral might be provided for a few, but some form of self-employment, which could be precarious, is likely to have been the most common way to supplement an average singing man's salary of ￡100–150 per year.

THE RING CYCLE takes between fourteen and fifteen hours to perform. Its length is its most obvious feature, something which seems to be both unnecessary to point out and unimportant to consider. As Tovey said, however, the scale of a work is by no means irrelevant: “Macaulay once shrewdly observed that the size of the Great Pyramid was essential to its sublimity, ‘for what could be more vile than a pyramid thirty feet high?’”1 The same is true of the Ring. Its sublimity is inseparable from its length and from the necessity of performing it over four successive days (or over a week, with days off in between each part). Attending a complete cycle usually requires something like a pilgrimage, which is exactly what Wagner intended, and its parallel and intersecting narratives, its allenveloping musical texture, and its constant linking of present moments to past moments contribute to the sense we often have that we are inhabiting the work rather than merely watching it. Characters and events are with us when we arise the morning after a performance and live with us until we rejoin them in the afternoon. The Ring becomes an experience, a period in one's life on which one can look back and contemplate.

The cycle is structured and coherent as life is not, but just as “life lessons” trivialize real life, the Ring is trivialized when it is reduced to morals or to lessons of varying banality about the values one should adopt. It is not hard to pick out plot points and dialogue to support the idea that it is about the superiority of love over power, but that opposition must be set among others—separation and self-surrender, individualism and community, finitude and infinitude, stasis and transformation, concept and reality—and all these must be understood as existing only provisionally, as artifacts of our self-separation within a world which is profoundly one. Whether or not we attain that understanding, in turn, defines two different worlds and the shapes of human life which are appropriate and possible within them.

Method is inextricable from meaning. How we go about describing a given manuscript object delimits how we can go about describing the literary relationships between its component texts. Indeed, the process by which an assortment of disparate manuscript elements becomes a collection of texts affords multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives on possible literary relationships among those texts. Manuscripts circulated “as objects within the cultural world, where people interact[ed] with them in meaningful, readable, ways” and modified them according to variable, competing cultural interests. Manuscript scholars, however, do not use a single well-defined term for the act of describing the production and modification of a handwritten codex over time. In this chapter, through “recomposing” BodL. MS Bodley 851, I aim to make evident some of the multiple and overlapping relations between texts materially embedded within its pages, according to the material processes by which they came to be included alongside one another. I ask, in brief, how did such a codex come to be, in which Walter Map meets Piers Plowman? For whom might this meeting have been evident? How might it have signified? Under what conditions and assumptions were the material texts of Bodley 851 collected together? To what literary effects?

Traditionally, the task of reconstructing a book's production would be understood to fall within the remit of bibliographical analysis (or “analytical bibliography”).