Jonathan Beck

Theater & propaganda in early modern France

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Politics & Religion. This work is about mass media 500-600 years ago, before books and newspapers, and how mass media influence and even shape what we believe, and how we think. It’s about guerilla theater, religion and politics in late-medieval, early-modern France. Culture wars, information, satire, morality.
Wars waged in the name of religion have seen incredible changes over the past 600 years in the technologies of warfare and communication - the ways of war. But the why has not changed much. The motivating behavior, the reasons and reasoning behind these wars have not changed.
That is what these books are about: politics & religion; culture wars; fear belief hope persuasion conflict coercion; confident ignorance & ineffectual wisdom.
Click here for details ("What these books are about" / «De quoi s'agit-il dans ces livres?»).

The work of editing texts from old manuscripts. Dechiper & Elucidate. Repair & Restore.

In addition to political and religious history - determining what happened and how to interpret it - these books are about how we can even read antiquated source material in the first place, a task that takes the editor into paleography (how to decipher stylized medieval handwriting in faded and damaged manuscripts) and historical linguistics: how to make sense of words that have changed meaning over the centuries (including words that are not in any dictionaries); colloquial phrases in dialects of Old and Middle French, a language not yet standardized; usage across all styles and registers, from pompous Latinate laced with learnèd classical and biblical allusions, to coarse colloquial spiced with obscure obscenities. The editor must elucidate all that. But the most delicate problems in editing old texts require tools and techniques for repair and restoration. Sometimes the manuscript is damaged and all but unreadable; it has to be emended and annotated based on textual evidence or informed conjecture. Sometimes the text on the page is readable but clearly erroneous - the copyist repeated or omitted something, or simply misread what he was trying to copy. For all such lapses the editor must provide corrections and say why, with concision and apposite evidence, the correction is possible, plausible, probable, or unquestionable. See below for sample images of my transcriptions from manuscripts and early printed texts.