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Stanley (Toby) Levers (Comp Lit and Italian Studies Major)
"Voices of Authority and Divergence: Authorship in the Anglo-Saxon Period and in the Later Middle Ages"
Sponsor: Professor Albert Ascoli, Italian Studies
Project Description
Bringing together and expanding his research on Anglo-Saxon and later medieval literature, Toby will investigate the "author function" as it appears (and often disappears) in these two periods. The starting point for his study will be a broad dissimilarity: in one period (the later middle ages), the idea of authorship is constantly obsessed over and manipulated; in the other (the Anglo-Saxon), authors remain nameless, and the identification of the narrative subject is often avoided outright. The main focus of the study, however, will be examples that do not fit into this general pattern: texts in which these two periods correspond in their use of the author function, and in their presentation of the subjective "I." A double major in Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, Toby will travel to England and Italy to conduct original archival research. The resulting study, concerning both the words of the selected texts and their material presentation, will be presented as his Senior Honors Thesis in Comparative Literature.
Scholar's Photo
Scholar's Journal
I spent my research summer doing archival studies in Italy and England. Arriving in Rome in early June—days after spending my first week with the other scholars at the Haas retreat back in Berkeley—I promptly gained admission to the Biblioteca Apostolica in the Vatican, and was promptly told that among the thousands of manuscripts there the one I was interested in was unavailable (or unavailable to me). Since I had made the trip primarily to see manuscripts in Bologna, I chalked up the day at the Vatican as a learning experience, and began to meander north by train to Emilia-Romagna. I stayed in Pisa with a friend for a week and a half, taking the one hour train ride to Florence on four occasions where I tried my luck at another library, and was given a significantly kinder reception from the archivists, and access to photographs of the manuscript I was interested in (a step in the right direction, I suppose). Before leaving Pisa, I met with a very well known paleographer (Armando Petrucci) at the university, who prepared me for my manuscript research in Bologna, and told me that the notaries who wrote these documents 700 years ago were thieves and liars, just as are the notaries of modern Italy, apparently.
In the Bologna State Archive my previous frustrations were paid off by good karma; I struck up a long conversation with the curator about a mutual acquaintance from U.C. Berkeley, and soon after, I was flipping through the pages of the manuscripts I had come to see (the “Memoriali bolognesi”). The archive was well air-conditioned, so in the month and a half that I was there I had daily motivation to begin work early before the intense humidity settled in around the city. Half of my time there, in all honesty, was spent just trying to get some idea of what it is that paleographers do—I read as much as I could on my manuscripts and retraced the steps of those that had looked at them before me. When I started finding minor mistakes in their work and wondering why they hadn’t discussed other, more interesting things in the manuscripts, I felt that I was finally making independent progress, even if my findings seemed utterly insignificant at the time.
I spent a week and a half in England, where I found more good luck at the Parker Library of Cambridge. By then, the ideas for my thesis had undergone some drastic changes, and I knew that the documents I had originally hoped to see were not going to be of any use. At the Parker library, with the help of another friendly curator I was able to do some work on a manuscript that dealt with exactly the same issues I had become concerned with—vernacular writing in the margins and bodies of Latin manuscripts, and historiography in the Anglo-Saxon period. By the time I returned to Italy I had a very solid idea of what I would deal with in the “Anglo-Saxon” version of my thesis, but I was more baffled than ever as to how I would combine this with all the work I had done in Italy. After a few more weeks of good coffee and very good food in Bologna (and more time in the air-conditioned archive), I said my goodbyes, made my way back to Rome, and was on a plane to California.
The problem of reconciling the two parts of my research solved itself somewhat artificially. After taking a seminar on Old French literature in the fall, I decided to change a few texts around and do a very different treatment of an Old English poem along with one from Medieval France that would act as a segue into a final text from 14th century Italy. Rather than yoke all this to my work on the manuscripts in Bologna, I made the latter into a second thesis and presented it at a Paleography/Codicology conference a week before I presented my other research at the Haas conference. —Toby Levers
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