BiblioVault - Books about 500-1400

Archives in the Ancient World

Ernst Posner

Harvard University Press, 1972

Bulbs for Warm Climates

By Thad M. Howard

University of Texas Press, 2001

Bulb gardening in the southwestern and southern United States presents challenges unknown in cooler climates. Bulbs that turn Holland into a kaleidoscope of color droop and fade in our mild winters, hot summers, and uncertain rainfall. Yet hundreds of native and naturalized species of bulbs thrive in these same conditions and offer as many colors, shapes, and fragrances as even the most demanding gardener desires. These are the bulbs that Thad Howard describes in this comprehensive guide to bulbs that will grow in USDA gardening zones 8 and 9.

Writing from more than forty-five years' experience in collecting and cultivating bulbs, Howard offers expert advice about hundreds of little-known, hybrid, and common species and varieties that grow well in warm climates. His species accounts, which are grouped by family, describe each plant and its growing requirements and often include interesting stories from his collecting expeditions. Lovely color photos illustrate many of the species.

Howard also gives reliable information about refrigerating bulbs, using them in the landscape and in containers, choosing scented ones, making potpourri, buying, collecting, cultivating, and hybridizing bulbs, and dealing with pests and diseases. He concludes with lists of plant societies and suppliers and a helpful glossary and bibliography.

[more]

Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes

Graeme Boone

Harvard University Press, 1995

This collection of nineteen essays presents a broad spectrum of current research that will interest students of medieval music, history, or culture. Topics include a comparison of early chant transmission in Rome and Jerusalem; the relationship between the earliest chant notation and prosodic accents; conceptualizing rhythm in medieval music and poetry; the persistence of Guidonian organum in the later Middle Ages; a connection between Dante and St. Cecilia; and the development of the trecento madrigal. The essays, written by distinguished scholars, stem from a conference in honor of David G. Hughes, professor of medieval music at Harvard University and noted specialist of chant.

[more]

The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua

A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary

Edited by Jan W. Herlinger

University of Chicago Press, 1985

"Herlinger deserves the thanks of the scholarly community for having prepared both edition and translation with the most meticulous of critical methods and the greatest of care."—Leeman L. Perkins, Renaissance Quarterly

"An almost archetypal example of unpretentious and honest scholarship."—Alejandro Enrique Planchart, Journal of the American Musicological Society

[more]

Music in the Castle

Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries

F. Alberto Gallo

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Written by one of Italy's most eminent scholars of music, this book explores music's place in the cultural, artistic, and literary life of medieval Italian courts, paying particular attention to the influence of French culture on Italian artistic and musical traditions.

In the first of three elegant essays, Gallo examines the troubadours who traveled to northern Italian courts from Provence during the thirteenth century. He discusses their performance practices, the verbal and musical sophistication of their songs, and their role in the daily life of courtiers at Genoa, Ferrara, and Monferrato. The second essay concerns the now dispersed collection of the Visconti library at Pavia. Here, Gallo examines how this collection expressed the tastes of the fourteenth-century court of Giangaleazzo Visconti, how French arts were imported and imitated at Pavia, and the effects this had on music heard at the court. In the final essay, Gallo looks at the fifteenth-century tradition of improvised music, and especially the virtuoso lute player Pietrobono. Mythologized in literary circles of his day, Pietrobono becomes a point of departure for a discussion of the entire vision of music of Italian humanists, from Guarino Veronese to Aurelio Brandolini.

[more]