In 1958, Bible scholar Morton Smith announced the discovery of a sensational manuscript, a second-century letter written by St. Clement of Alexandria, who quotes an unknown, longer version of the "Gospel of Mark". When Smith published the letter in 1973, he set off a firestorm o…
The Crocker lab -- A world of painted books -- Early doubts -- Sotheby's of London -- The Getty -- Sloan ranger -- Nights in the gardens of Coyoacán -- A mysterious affidavit -- Seville -- Christie's of New York -- El Palacio del Marqués -- Librería Zócalo -- An Internet posting…
From the publisher. Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was o…
'Songbook' treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category 'poetry': that is, how vernacular songbooks of the 13th to 15th centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poe…