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Anthony Grafton, that nonpareil historian of the spread of reading and its associated technologies, reviews two books on Renaissance libraries for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 13 · 24 July 2025; archived); here are a few tasty (and in one case cheesy) excerpts to whet your appetite:

Humanists knew that they were imitating the ancients when they sat and talked in libraries. But they knew little about what these lost collections looked like or included. After all, as Andrew Hui points out, even library terminology was slippery. Bibliotheca could refer to anything from a single compendious book, such as the Scriptures, to a single cabinet or a whole collection. Monasteries had large, sunny scriptoria (‘writing rooms’) where the monks created splendid codices. But the books themselves were generally stored rather than displayed. Monks borrowed them for use in their cells. […]

In 1289, the Sorbonne officially founded a library that already possessed 1017 books; half a century later it had 1722. Size mattered, but not as much as organisation. The collection was divided into two rooms, a larger one for books of general importance and a smaller one for specialised texts. The librarians chained the general books to desks, which made it possible for students as well as lecturers to consult them. It was a working collection, designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite such menaces – as well as the worse ones of fire, damp and vermin – innovative libraries rapidly took root. They developed into two distinct forms, one private and one public.

The modern private library or study, as Hui tells it, was devised by a single person: Petrarch. True, Christian hermits and monks had read in their cells for centuries, seeking above all to form themselves as spiritual beings and fighting the distraction that always threatened. As Jamie Kreiner showed in The Wandering Mind (2023), though the manuscripts of religious texts were often laid out with helpful marginal notes and signs to promote meditative reading, even pious readers often found it difficult to concentrate on their contents. Petrarch experienced this traditional form of reading and knew its pitfalls. In one of his dialogues, the Secretum, Augustine berates Petrarch for his failure to internalise the lessons of his books. When Petrarch explains that he must struggle against distraction, Augustine recommends that he make notes in the margin.

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Somewhere I ran across a reference to olonkho, the Yakut epic tradition; I’ve been interested in such traditions ever since (as a wet-behind-the-ears college student) I learned of the existence of the South Slavic epics as described by Milman Parry and Albert Lord (and later of equivalents from Africa and elsewhere), to parallel the Homer I loved, so I did a little investigating. The Wikipedia article says:

Olonkho (Yakut: олоҥхо, romanized: oloñxo, Yakut pronunciation: [oloŋχo]; Dolgan: олоӈко, romanized: oloñko; Russian: Олонхо́) is a series of Yakut and Dolgan heroic epics. The term Olonkho is used to refer to the entire Yakut epic tradition as well as individual epic poems. An ancient oral tradition, it is thought that many of the poems predate the northwards migration of Yakuts in the 14th century, making Olonkho among the oldest epic arts of any Turkic peoples. There are over one hundred recorded Olonkhos, varying in length from a few thousand to tens of thousands of verses, with the most well-known poem Nyurgun Bootur the Swift containing over 36,000 verses. […]

The term olonkho is believed to be related to the Old Turkic word ölön that also means ‘saga’, (cognate of Uzbek o‘lan) and has been argued to be related to the Turkish copula ol- (olmak ‘to be).[citation needed] The Buryat epic ontkno is related to olonkho.

There is much more detail in Robin Harris, Storytelling in Siberia: The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World (University of Illinois Press, 2017); I’ll quote her useful section on defining “epic” (pp. 13-14):
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Lauren Collins is a good writer (which is why the New Yorker pays her), but also a supremely irritating one: her articles are frequently random riffs on some subject she feels like writing about, mingling personal experiences with what appear to be the results of a cursory Google search and with little concern for accuracy — they would never have gotten past the transom in the old New Yorker, with its famously picky editors and fact-checkers. I see from a site search that I was complaining about her as far back as 2008 (when she became a staff writer): “But some things are too much to be borne.”

In “The Case for Lunch” (archived), she opens with a section about the remarkable Roxane Debuisson, who would have been worth an article on her own (but apparently is not worth a Wikipedia page); she had “an exceptional collection of Paris ephemera”:

“The collection began out of my love for Paris and my love of the street,” Debuisson later said. For decades, she conducted a one-woman salvage operation, scooping up rating plates, bench marks, pieces of bridges, tree corsets, street signs, fountains, gallows, Métro seats, mailboxes, and some seventy thousand commercial invoices. A 1970 photograph by her friend Robert Doisneau shows her in a coat and kerchief, crouching on the pavement to examine a dilapidated bust of Molière, rescued from a bakery near the Pont Neuf.

(I don’t know what a “tree corset” is — Google gives me only actual corsets made of bark.) But she was also a devout restaurant-goer:
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A reader wrote me:

My friend came across the following song while doing some background research for his dissertation, and there’s a word that escapes us in the lyrics: in https://youtu.be/qm8vgld7QOs it’s audible around 0:36 (“less than sixty percent go for a ???”) My suspicion is that it’s a contemporary-to-Ms.-Raye term I’m simply not familiar with, but perhaps you or others in the Hattery know the word?

(We’re also left uncertain about the force of being from the sticks here – a whiff of provinciality about the straight-and-narrow? – but that is beyond the scope, I think, of the Hattery.)

The mysterious word was evident to me as soon as I lent an ear, but since it escaped even the geniuses at Genius.com (“Now I find that less than sixty percent go for a [?]”) and it’s probably unknown to most denizens of the twenty-first century who didn’t fritter away their youth on pulp fiction of the mid-twentieth, I figure it’s worth a post. Ms. Raye is complaining that men don’t go for a frail, which is, to quote Green’s Dictionary of Slang, “(orig. US, also phrail) a girl, a woman.” I hadn’t seen the “phrail” version (which only shows up in the 1929 citation); I had also not been aware that it derives from an earlier sense ‘a prostitute, a mistress,’ which goes back to the eighteenth century. The citations for the more recent/general sense start in 1900 ([US] A.H. Lewis ‘Mulberry Mary’ in Sandburrs 11: She d’ soonest frail that ever walks in d’ Bend) and are most common in the period 1920-60; they’re all pretty lively, and I recommend visiting the link.

I’m disappointed in the OED (entry revised 2023), which lumps both senses together:

2. Chiefly U.S. Usually disparaging. A sexually promiscuous woman; (also) a prostitute; a mistress. Later also: a girl or woman, esp. considered sexually. Now chiefly historical and likely to be regarded as offensive.

In early use often in fair frail.

1782 Scorning to enter the dwelling of her seducer, he traced her to the opera… Early on Sunday morning he put the fair frail into a chaise, and set off for their native town.
Pennsylvania Packet 23 May

1790 From his general acquaintance with the fair frail—people began to consider him as—a buck.
Pennsylvania Packet 7 April
[…]

1908 Aw, the frails is all the same… A guy comes along and shoots that old con about how he’s the grandest thing on earth, an’ the wisest of ’em fall.
H. Green, Maison de Shine 50

1924 Those frails down at the Falls that earn their leeving every night with a deeferent lumberjack—those women are better than you.
E. Robinson in Cosmopolitan June 166/3
[…]

As for “the sticks,” it goes without saying that nothing is beyond the scope of the Hattery.

My wife was muttering that the mail consisted mostly of bills when I wondered where that sense of bill came from, and a visit to the OED (entry revised 2024!) showed me that it’s complicated. The original sense was “A formal document containing a petition to a person in authority; a written petition” (1384 “A bille sholde be put vp be the comunes conseyl, to aske of the forseyde Sir John the mone that he had borwed in tyme of hys mairalte”); it quickly came to mean “A proposed law presented to a legislative body for enactment” (1411 “Lord the Roos, at the last parlement of oure sayd liege lord..compleyneth hym by a bille”) and other sorts of documents, legal and otherwise, in particular:

5.a. A printed or written statement listing goods or services supplied and the amount of money owed; an invoice.

Not common in North American use in the context of restaurants or bars, where check is the usual term.

Though often used interchangeably with invoice, bill is more commonly used for retail goods or services requiring immediate payment, whereas invoice often denotes a more detailed statement used especially in trade contexts for transactions having longer payment terms.

See also electricity bill, gas bill n. (b), tax bill n., telephone bill n., water bill n. (b), etc.

I like the careful semantic disentanglement; the first citation is:

1420 I will þat William Tropmell, taillour,..and Hunt, brouderere, be paied of their billes for makyng off a liuerey.
in F. J. Furnivall, Fifty Earliest English Wills (1882) 53

But it’s the messy etymology I especially want to share:
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Uniomachia: a digital edition is a splendid scholarly presentation of a text so obscure it doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page (as yet). I’ll quote the introduction (the right-hand column at the linked webpage):

Uniomachia was composed in 1833 as a response to a schism in the history of the Oxford Union Society, Oxford University’s famous affiliated debating society and members’ club. In protest at the election of a Liberal Standing Committee, the Society’s executive body, several Tory ex-committee members formed a new debating club which they named the Ramblers. Concerned that the latter was drawing away Union members, the incumbent committee motioned to expel all Ramblers from the Oxford Union in an acrimonious debate.

Concerned that this schism would tear both the Society and their friendships apart, two undergraduates of St Mary Hall, Thomas Jackson and William Sinclair, decided that the best way to heal the rift would be to immortalise the debate in poetry. The resulting work, Uniomachia or ‘Battle at the Union’ is a pastiche of Homeric epic, composed in Homeric hexameters and an absurd macaronic Anglo-Greek; the poem’s name recalls discrete battle episodes or -machies in early Greek hexameter poetry (such as the ‘Theomachy’ of Iliad Book 20 or the ‘Titanomachy’ of Hesiod’s Theogony 664-728) as well as ancient satires of the Homeric poems such as the Classical Batrakhomyomakhia or ‘Battle of the Frogs and Mice’. The text quotes liberally from Homer’s Iliad, equates its protagonists – various Union committee members – with Homeric heroes, and satirises Homeric style and narrative features for comic effect to turn what must have been a fairly unpleasant and petty argument into an honour-dispute between mighty warriors. The result lionises and legitimises both sides of the schism while exposing the fundamental triviality of the disagreement by contrast with the real tragedy and pathos of the Homeric original.

Upon its publication Uniomachia was an instant hit, with several improved editions published in the same year and a Popean translation following thereafter, which has been published on Taylor Editions by Dr Laura Johnson. Indeed, the poem as a whole owes much to Pope’s Dunciad (1728-43). Posing as a scholarly edition of an antiquissimum poema or ‘most ancient poem’, the Greek text is supplemented by a line-by-line translation into dog-Latin prose and a set of critical notes in which Jackson and Sinclair, as ‘editors’ under the pseudonyms Habbakukius Dunderheadius and Heavysternius respectively, puzzle over aspects of their text; this fourth and most complete edition was supplemented by a set of additional notes produced by Robert Scott (of the later Liddle and Scott Greek Lexicon) under the pseudonym Slawkenbergius. Intended partly to satirise contemporary textual and literary-historical scholarship, the notes provided by Jackson, Sinclair and Scott give the impression of a pretentious faux-erudition, with recondite Latin vocabulary, strong personal opinions unsupported by evidence, frequent insults directed at the intelligence of editorial ‘predecessors’, and shoehorned references to Classical sources.

There are obvious barriers to reading and enjoying the humour of Uniomachia. It is written in two ancient languages, and many of the jokes contained within it depend either on a knowledge of Classical philology or of the Oxford Union and city of Oxford in the 1830s. This edition attempts to surmount these barriers by offering a critical transcription of the text alongside a translation into modern English prose, both of which have been encoded with a high level of functionality to allow access by classicists and non-classicists alike.

I note with displeasure the misspelling of Liddell as “Liddle” (which is, of course, how it’s pronounced), but otherwise I am impressed. The first line is “ἩΥΤΕ τομκάττων κλαγγὴ περὶ γάρρετα σούνδει,” translated as “As around the garret sounds the screeching of tomcats,” which should give you an idea of the epic silliness of the thing. If only all our controversies could be resolved by Homeric hexameters and absurd macaronic Anglo-Greek!

I shortened the title of David Bowles’ thorough and groundbreaking post, figuring that “romance” was sort of implicit. In any case, here’s his intro:

When I started studying Nahuatl almost twenty years ago, I noticed—as a queer man—that most analyses of Nahuatl vocabulary concerning LGBTQIA2s+ identities and practices suffered greatly because they had been carried out first by bigoted Catholics (often informed by converted Nahuas trying to make their ancestors’ culture align better with Christian morality), then by straight white men, and then by [mostly] straight “well-meaning” liberal allies who didn’t / don’t really know much at all about how queer people live and love. Horribly insulting glosses in Spanish and English exist of practices and identities that were accepted in most Nahua city-states. And where experts have tried to improve on those, they have still failed to use the language preferred by present-day queer people.

You may have read some of these folks say that there are just a handful of words about “homosexuals” in Nahuatl. But that’s foolishness. People have also denied the existence of romantic love and other such outlandish ideas.

Over the years, I have collected loads and loads of Classical Nahuatl words that surely had particular relevance for the queer individuals of pre-Spanish-Invasion Anahuac (the Basin of Mexico). Thinking about them, both in their written context and as individual markers of cultural behaviors, has helped me immensely with projects like my present series of queer historical romances set in early 15th-century Anahuac.

Note that I don’t use a bunch of euphemisms and scientific language, except where it is clear in the primary sources that the term in question was used euphemistically or for more clinical conversation. That means that to define them, I use the sort of English words that queer adults (in real life and in romance novels) use, which overly conservative or sex-shaming people may consider vulgar.

The de-Victorianizing of scholarship has been going on for a while now in classical studies (though I’m sure there’s still a long way to go), and I’m glad to see it spreading to Nahuatl. More like this, please!

Seb Falk and James Wade (no relation) have published an open-access paper in the Review of English Studies, The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited, that is usefully summarized in Stephen Castle’s NY Times article (archived):

Geoffrey Chaucer, often regarded as the first great poet in English, drops references at two points in his works to an older poem or story, the Tale of Wade, that seems to have needed no explanation in his own time but has since all but disappeared. The one surviving fragment — a few lines of verse quoted in a 12th-century sermon and rediscovered in the 1890s — only left scholars more puzzled.

Now, two Cambridge University academics, James Wade (whose family name is coincidentally shared with the tale) and Seb Falk, believe they may have unlocked the riddle by correcting a mishap that remains familiar to publishers almost a millennium later. Call it a medieval typo. The fragment seemed to refer to a man alone among elves and other eerie creatures — something from the story of a mythological giant, or of a heroic character like Beowulf who battled supernatural monsters. […]

The new research, published on Wednesday in Britain in “The Review of English Studies,” suggests that the “elves” sprang from a linguistic error by a scribe, who miscopied a word that should have meant “wolves,” and that Wade in fact belonged to a chivalric world of knights and courtly love — much more relevant to Chaucerian verse. […]

Richard North, a professor of English language and literature at University College London, said the authors’ analysis of the 12th-century verse made a good case about the nature of Wade. “I think they are right that he must be a knight from a lost romance rather than a giant from English folklore,” he said.

Others were more circumspect about the implications of the study. Stephanie Trigg, a professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne, Australia, said she was “persuaded by the reading of wolves (not elves)” and said the analysis contained “lots and lots of fascinating details and contexts,” but said: “I’d be cautious about claiming this is a revolutionary way of understanding Chaucer.”

The verses were discovered in 1896 by M. R. James, author of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad” (see this LH post, wherein I report my discovery of the word ontography); he put elves and adders into the translated version, but:
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I love translation comparisons, and Erik McDonald’s XIX век has another one (cf. last year’s Translation Comparison: Fathers and Sons), confronting the three English translations of Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard): those by Michael Glenny (1971), Marian Schwartz (2008), and Roger Cockrell (2012). He breaks his post into sections titled Medieval Kyivan allusions, How Nai-Turs and Talberg speak, Ukrainian speech in the Russian text, Characters trying to Ukrainianize themselves, Things doing things, Dividing the novel into parts, and Shattering the City; most of them are self-explanatory, but the fourth one focuses on the “whale” (кит/кіт) passage I mention at the end of my own post on the novel, and the last is about allusions to the Book of Revelation — he links to “Is Apocalyptic Kiev Still Apocalyptic Kiev in English Translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel The White Guard?” (Sic 10.2 [April 2020], open access) by Petra Žagar-Šoštarić and Natalia Kaloh Vid, which I found extremely interesting:

Our analysis of allusions in The White Guard is based on allusions to the apocalyptic prophecy as presented in the Book of Revelation[7] and, more precisely, to the parts relating to the depiction of New Jerusalem and Babylon. In what follows, we will examine thematic key-phrase allusions to the Book of Revelation[8] that contextualize the City and discuss how and if these allusions have been rendered in the translations. We will also consider whether the preferred strategy makes it possible for readers to identify the connotations of the allusions. The first question that naturally arises is that it is debatable how familiar the Book of Revelation is to present-day readers. Presumably, cultural products (e.g. films, songs, and paintings) embedded certain key elements such as the Whore of Babylon, Apocalyptic Beast, The Day of Judgement, or Apocalyptic Horses in the public consciousness, and these are hence often used allusively. However, we assume that there are less familiar textual elements such as details of New Jerusalem. It is impossible to speculate about how familiar English readers are with the Book of Revelation or to what extent the translators recognized apocalyptic allusions in the text. Hence, we suppose that some key-phrase allusions, such as the reference to the number of the apocalyptic beast, the Red star, sharp sword, gardens, and Judgement day are more familiar and evoke immediate association in the translators and readers, while others, such as precious stones, pearls, light, glass, and other features of New Jerusalem may be less obvious. In our opinion, the latter group of allusions would pose more problems for translators.

Erik singles out a passage that I too found striking:
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I was reading Daniella Shreir’s LRB Diary: What happens at Cannes (10 Jul 2025; archived) when I was struck by a turn of French phrase in this passage:

Some form of disruption looms over the festival every year. Unionised electricity workers, reacting to Macron’s proposed pension reforms, threatened to cut power to venues in 2023, and last year festival workers, organising under the banner of Sous les écrans la dèche (Broke behind the Screens), threatened to withhold their labour until they were given the same rights as other culture workers.

“Sous les écrans la dèche” literally means ‘Under the screens, poverty’ (dèche ‘being broke’ is apparently a clipping of déchéance ‘decay,’ from the same Latin word as decadence), but to me it irresistibly called to mind the famous 1968 slogan « Sous les pavés, la plage ! » ‘Under the paving stones, the beach!’ (Although I learn from the French Wikipedia article that that phrase has a complicated and disputed history which depresses me too much to try to disentangle.) What I want to know is this: is that relationship a product of my particular intellectual formation, or would any Frenchperson make the connection? Is it a template, or just a similarly constructed phrase?

Incidentally, it’s always a shock to be reminded that the inaugural Festival de Cannes was supposed to happen in 1939, but it “was cancelled after only one screening (William Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame): Hitler had just invaded Poland.”