The normal sign for ń in Old French is ign. The consonantal portion of this trigraph represents the value of Latin gn as felt or pronounced in the Merovingian period in such words as magnus, agnellus, the sequence of development probably being gn > > > ń thru the fronting influence of n upon the preceding . That the vowel i should have been added to gn with this new palatal value will not appear strange to anyone familiar with the history of palatalized consonants in Old French. It represents the vowel glide which is potentially present whenever a palatalized consonant follows after a vowel. Its appearance in writing must therefore be due to a definite consciousness of its presence as a phonic element in the spoken syllable. In other words, the scribes who invented the trigraph ign must have heard and felt the vowel. And as a matter of fact, the modern pronunciation of this sound in final position and before consonant shows that this assumption is accurate; for gain, coin, juin presuppose an earlier pronunciation gãiń, kõiń, džỹiń, and plaindre and joindre must have passed thru plãindre, džõindre. However, if this evidence may be accepted as conclusive for the presence of the i under these conditions, there is equally strong evidence in the modern language that in medial position (montagne, gagner, besogne) the palatal glide did not develop into a full vowel.

Henry James’s late novels suggest a world of talk which is morally ambiguous because epistemologically unstable. James’s early and late dialogues are radically different: in the late fiction, talk becomes a process of imaginative collaboration, and language virtually creates the conditions under which perception is possible. In The Ambassadors, Parisian talk educates Strether even as it seems to dissemble. And in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, conversation shapes the terms in which certain actions will be possible; talking together, characters create a world that fits the shape of their desires. Jamesian talk is at once hypocrisy and art: lying becomes a mode of vision. But if James’s liars are artists, his artists are also liars. We prefer Maggie Verver to Charlotte Stant not because she is more honest, but because her language makes for the most harmonious and inclusive order.

About thirty-five years ago, my professor in a course on seventeenth-century english social history began with the following. “You may have heard,” he said, “that the reading list for this course has not changed since I took it here in 1924.” Here he paused. “But I can assure you that it has changed”—he paused again, and added, sotto voce—“however imperceptibly.” These words have long seemed emblematic for me of the pride felt by much of the historical profession in the continuity of its essential practices. I do not mean, of course, that historians have not embraced new groups of people, adopted a much wider array of ideological stances, and above all invented a researchable historicity for many things that had never before seemed to have a history. All this innovation is splendid, and the finest products of academic history constitute a rich and admirable body of work. But in the essential practices, especially the practice of reading—the basic relation of reader with language and imagination—change is, shall we say, hardly perceptible. It seems that the charge that historians are professionally taught not to read is almost as true now as it was two decades ago when Dominick LaCapra made it (339). But if we are to learn about the historical imagination, histories need to be read and academic historians need to be reminded from time to time that what they do is as subject to the formative pressures of discourse as any other precinct of the world of words.

In the landscape of Edith Wharton's life the figure of Henry James is of almost too-distracting importance. He was the greatest man she knew. James himself had many friends and acquaintances such as Howells and Stevenson who stood equal beside him—he moved accustomedly among his peers from youth to old age—tout Edith Wharton had few intimates who were her creative equals, and none who towered into that eminence where James stood. Consequently, no discussion of her work can avoid contemplating the effect of his example and association; the danger, really, is that we will assume more effect than is there.

A comparison of narrative and lyric conceptions of temporality in Dickinson's poetry sheds light on that group of her poems in which a story is begun only to be violently broken into and disrupted. Defining life as a series of alternatives, the poems establish a dialectic, but seemingly for the sake of dismissing it as inadequate. The dismissal is frequently one of rage at all that is temporal, all that has a history whose requirement is sacrifice and choice. Such Dickinson poems can end in disorder, and they are examined here in the context of other lyrics that equally seem to pin their hopes on the belief that a verbal sabotage of sequence will trigger a temporal one, that, grown sufficiently desperate, the maneuvers of speech can stop time dead.

One of Shakespeare's first and most formative intellectual legacies, with major influence on his shaping of sources in the historical tetralogies, was Elizabethan thought on the relationship of God, Fortune, and war. For the Henry vi plays, the legacy offered a thematically appropriate concept of Fortune, with humanly meaningless skirmishes and futile stratagems, pointing nevertheless toward the ultimate control of God over Fortune. For Richard iii Shakespeare chose a divinely governed war, with Richmond as a passive instrument having little character. The second tetralogy employs the most dramatically advantageous stage of the legacy: a transitional, confused period when necessity for human responsibility in war becomes first, and somewhat ambiguously, recognized (Richard iii) and then disturbingly, though covertly, prominent and Machiavellian (Henry iv and Henry v). The experience in these formative plays of trying to resolve the conflicting demands of supernatural control and human resourcefulness helped prepare Shakespeare for tragic resolutions deeper than those of military victory or defeat.

The mode of imitatio enhances the persistence and evolution of genres over time, contrary to the implications of Foucault's concept of epistemes (the idea of discontinuous historical eras). Imitatio, well practiced, awakens extraordinary commonalities of sensibility among poets of different periods (classical, Renaissance, contemporary), including how they understand and manipulate genres, and so raises the possibility of a more unitive view of history, culture, and time. Ben Jonson, with his coherent theoretical view of imitatio, was a crucial poet for Thom Gunn, who self-consciously imitated the mode of imitation, producing in “An Invitation” a re-creation of the country-house poem as embodied by Jonson's “To Sir Robert Wroth” and in “Lament” (his great AIDS elegy) a response to seventeenth-century funeral elegy, in particular Jonson's “Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet.”

Patrick Süskind's best-selling novel Das Parfum applies the postmodern literary practice of pastiche and playful allusion to pursue a critical purpose: an adumbration of the destructive logic that underpins the instrumental reason of Enlightenment culture. Süskind's critique is informed by ideas put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialektik der Aufklärung and by the sociohistorical methodology of the Annales historiographers. In the Active history of Grenouille, the monstrous master perfumer who murders young women to capture and exploit their aromatic “essences,” Süskind depicts the will to power and overpowering fundamental to enlightened reason. This parabolic histoire des mentalités of Enlightenment culture is thrown into relief by two strategic moves: the transposition of the Enlightenment's visual prejudices into the olfactory domain and the contextualization of Grenouille's development as perfumer in the history of Western aesthetics. Süskind thereby implicates modernist aesthetic sensibilities in the dialectic of Enlightenment.

Although Wordsworth professed contempt for Macpherson's “translation” as a worthless forgery, it can be shown that he was familiar with the subject-matter, the spirit, and, in places, with the exact phraseology of Ossian; that he borrowed an Ossianic word or two when he needed it; that many of his poems deal with themes relating to the Ossianic poems, or present images or lines to which parallels may be found in Ossian; and that in his passionate love of the mountain wilderness he came very near the spirit of the blind bard of Selma.

The earlier poets in the English meditative tradition, Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, were all poets of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tendency, where the Continental art of meditation found a fertile ground in which to develop an English counterpart. It is significant that all five of these earlier poets became priests: Southwell, bred and executed as a Catholic; Alabaster, shifting from Anglican to Catholic to Anglican; Donne, born and bred a Catholic, but turning finally to the English Church; Crashaw, born and bred a Protestant, but turning finally to the Roman Church; and Herbert, happy all his life within the English communion. They had their doctrinal differences, and I do not wish to minimize those differences; but they had something more in common: a devotion to the central mysteries of the Passion, a devotion to the symbols and a liturgy that served to celebrate those mysteries. All would have agreed with George Herbert's vision of “The Agonie”: Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

The standard charge activists and scholars make against disability autobiographies is that they reinforce cultural stereotypes and hinder social change. These texts, such critics argue, perpetuate the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that happens to an individual rather than a set of cultural structures and practices that affect many individuals. As a writer and reader of disability autobiography, I believe it is possible to use one's personal experiences to comment on the culture one inhabits. I do not intend here, however, to defend or condemn specific authors or works or to debate the value of these texts as a facet of a social-change movement. I offer instead an impressionistic account of a course on disability autobiography that I taught at Berkeley recently. What stands out in my memory of the course has to do less with students' responses to particular texts and more with interactions among the students or between the students and me that often seemed peripheral to the topic at hand. This is, then, an autobiographical essay, a series of vignettes and portraits, rendered in all the randomness of lived experience. But it will, I hope, raise issues that are central to disability activism and disability studies.

Among mediaeval compendiums of devotion one of the most widely known—in England at least—was the Speculum Ecclesie, written about 1240 by Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury. The extent of its popularity is indicated by the fact that it occurs in Latin, French and English versions and that nearly sixty MSS. are still preserved which contain this treatise either as a whole or in part—twenty-nine in Latin, seventeen in French, and the others in English.

When we remember the subtle irregularity of Milton's rhymes in Lycidas, and the frequency with which he introduces rhyme into the blank verse of Comus and Samson Agonistes, it is less surprising that there should be rhymes in Paradise Lost than that they should not have been noticed. That they are deliberate rhymes needs little proof, for it is obvious that an ear as fine as Milton's must have heard any rhyme which can be heard by the ordinary reader, and this examination grew out of the vague impression of rhyme given by certain passages in Paradise Lost, and the presence of a few obvious rhymes, such as:

Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round (i. 711–713)
This horror will grow milde, this darkness light,
Besides what hope the never-ending flight (ii. 220–221)
Allegeance to th'acknowledg'd Power supream?
And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seam, (iv. 956–957)
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.
Some times towards Eden which now in his view (iv. 24–27)

In this article I consider the possibility of using vocabulary to determine the original dialect of Old English poems later than Cynewulf and choose two poems on the same theme, Judgment Day I, reputedly Anglian, in the Exeter Book, and Judgment Day II, reputedly West Saxon, in order to illustrate the application of this method and test its validity.

The reception of Aby Warburg's first published work, his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli, has overlooked layers of meaning implicit in Warburg's word choice. His study of the afterlife of antiquity relies on the activation of the semantic afterlives of words such as Inspirator (“inspirer”), Stimmung (“mood,” “atmosphere”), and Milieu (“milieu”). Warburg brings out the reference to air in these words, invoking their philological nuances and physiological contexts. The air designated is not only the physical medium in which Botticelli's windblown accessories move but also the quattrocento's cultural atmosphere in which Botticelli's creativity thrives. In addition, air implicitly functions as a disciplinary trope for the cultural history into which Warburg aimed to extend traditional art history.

In a recently published article, Mr. J. R. MacGillivray has announced the necessity for redating Wordsworth's play. By closely checking allusions in Wordworth's letters, he is able to show that it could not have been begun before March 7, 1796, and that the letter in which the poet tells Wrangham that the first draft of it is nearly finished must have been written “some time between the beginning of December 1796 and the end of February 1797.” The play, MacGillivray feels, would have been begun not long before October 24, when Dorothy reported her brother “now ardent in the composition of a tragedy.”

In an essay on Sophocles and Shakespeare, the late Professor John Churton Collins makes, about the latter's use of the motive of suicide, some striking remarks which have hitherto, I believe, been allowed to pass unchallenged. The attitude of the two dramatists toward the crime is, he says, exactly similar:

It seems to me one of the most exciting and baffling characteristics of Eichendorff's art that, if I may use this paradox, his most profound insights are hidden on the surface. They travel, a strangely elusive contraband, in the full light of day, so that the last truths of his poetic vision, the whole web of his religious beliefs, his intellectual conceptions, his socio-ethical postulates transform themselves into the most deceptively simple folktunes, sung by his people with an ease and unconcern usually assigned in the secular psalter of a nation to that section which is headed “folk song, author unknown.” Goethe's solemn warning with regard to the ultimate secret and mystery of life, his injunction “Tell it no one but the sages,” was utterly lost on Eichendorff. He told it to every listening ear; and so it could happen that what in reality was an exploration and manifestation of truth, the poetic transmission of knowledge, was taken—or mistaken—as a bewitching play of lyrical mood and atmosphere. A comprehensive and integrated view of life thus turned in the public's hand into a picture book, lovely and self-contained, easy to peruse; and for the reader it was easy to absorb its sensuous refulgence without comprehending the meaning of design, color, and composition.