.
A94 / LITERARY TERMINOLOGY
institutions or individuals offered material support, or patronage, to authors. Thu s in Anglo-Saxon England, monasteries afforded the conditions of writing to monastic authors. Between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries, the main source of patronage was the royal court. Authors offered patrons prestige and ideological support in return for financial support. Even as the conditions of professional authorship came into being at the beginning of the eighteenth century, older forms of direct patronage were not altogether displaced until the middle of the century.
Periodicaclass="underline" Whereas journalism, strictly, applies to daily writing (from French "jour," day), periodical writing appears at larger, but still frequent, intervals, characteristically in the form of the essay. Periodicals were developed especially in the eighteenth century.
Printing: Printing, or the mechanical reproduction of books using moveable type, was invented in German y in the mid-fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg; it quickly spread throughout Europe. William Caxton brought printing into England from the Low Countries in 1476. Much greater powers of reproduction at muc h lower prices transformed every aspect of literary culture.
Publisher: the person or company responsible for the commissioning and publicizing of printed matter. In the early period of printing, publisher, printer, and bookseller were often the same person. This trend continued in the ascendancy of the Stationers' Company, between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth centuries. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, these three functions began to separate, leading to their modern distinctions. Royalties: an agreed-upon proportion of the price of each copy of a work sold, paid by the publisher to the author, or an agreed-upon fee paid to the playwright for each performance of a play. Scribe: in manuscript culture, the scribe is the copyist who reproduces a text by hand. Stationers' Company: Th e Stationers' Compan y was an English guild incorporating various tradesmen, including printers, publishers, and booksellers, skilled in the production and selling of books. It was formed in 1403, received its royal charter in 1557, and served as a means both of producing and of regulating books. Authors would sell the manuscripts of their books to individual stationers, who incurred the risks and took the profits of producing and selling the books. Th e stationers entered their rights over given books in the Stationers' Register. They also regulated the book trade and held their monopoly by licensing books and by being empowered to seize unauthorized books and imprison resisters. This system of licensing broke down in the social unrest of the Civil Wa r and Interregnum (1640�60), and it ended in 1695. Even after the end of licensing, the Stationers' Com pany continued to be an intrinsic part of the copyright process, since the 171 0 copyright statute directed that copyright had to be registered at Stationers' Hall. Subscription: A n eighteenth-century system of bookselling somewhere between direct patronage and impersonal sales. A subscriber paid half the cost of a book before publication and half on delivery. Th e author received these payments directly. The subscriber's name appeared in the prefatory pages. Textual criticism: works in all periods often exist in many subtly or not so
.
LITERARY TERMINOLOGY / A9 5
subtly different forms. This is especially true with regard to manuscript textual reproduction, but it also applies to printed texts. Textual criticism is the art, developed from the fifteenth century in Italy but raised to new levels of sophistication from the eighteenth century, of deciphering different historical states of texts. This art involves the analysis of textual variants, often with the aim of distinguishing authorial from scribal forms.
.
Geograpkic Nomenclature
The British Isles refers to the prominent group of islands off the northwest coast of Europe, especially to the two largest, Great Britain and Ireland. At present these comprise two sovereign states: the Republic of Ireland, or Eire, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland�known for short as the United Kingdom or the U.K. Most of the smaller islands are part of the U.K. but a few, like the Isle of Man and the tiny Channel Islands, are largely independent. The U.K. is often loosely referred to as "Britain" or "Great Britain" and is sometimes called simply, if inaccurately, "England." For obvious reasons, the latter usage is rarely heard among the inhabitants of the other countries of the U.K.�Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (sometimes called Ulster). England is by far the most populous part of the kingdom, as well as the seat of its capital, London.
From the first to the fifth century c.E. most of what is now England and Wales was a province of the Boman Empire called Britain (in Latin, Britannia). After the fall of Borne, much of the island was invaded and settled by peoples from northern Germany and Denmark speaking what we now call Old English. These peoples are collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons, and the word England is related to the first element of their name. By the time of the Norman Conquest (1066) most of the kingdoms founded by the Anglo-Saxons and subsequent Viking invaders had coalesced into the kingdom of England, which, in the latter Middle Ages, conquered and largely absorbed the neighboring Celtic kingdom of Wales. In 1603 James VI of Scotland inherited the island's other throne as James I of England, and for the next hundred years�except for the brief period of Puritan rule�Scotland (both its English-speaking Lowlands and its Gaelic-speaking Highlands) and England (with Wales) were two kingdoms under a single king. Jn 1707 the Act of Union welded them together as the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Ireland, where English rule had begun in the twelfth century and been tightened in the sixteenth, was incorporated by the 1800-1801 Act of Union into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. With the division of Ireland and the establishment of the Irish Free State after World War I, this name was modified to its present form, and in 1949 the Irish Free State became the Republic of Ireland. In 1999 Scotland elected a separate parliament it had relinquished in 1707, and Wales elected an assembly it lost in 1409; neither Scotland nor Wales ceased to be part of the United Kingdom.
The British Isles are further divided into counties, which in Great Britain are also known as shires. This word, with its vowel shortened in pronunciation, forms the suffix in the names of many counties, such as Yorkshire, Wiltshire, Somersetshire.
The Latin names Britannia (Britain), Caledonia (Scotland), and Hibernia (Ireland) are sometimes used in poetic diction; so too is Britain's ancient Celtic name, Albion. Because of its accidental resemblance to albtis (Latin for "white"), Albion is especially associated with the chalk cliffs that seem to gird much of the English coast like defensive walls.