Gilliland Press is designed to publish, in the main, translations and editions, with commentary, of scholarly tracts from the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We expect to publish at the rate of about one small volume per year.
Publications
An admonition to the students of Wittenberg is a supplement to Clive Hart's
Disputatio nova contra mulieres/A new argument against women: a critical
translation from the Latin with commentary, together with the original Latin
text of 1595, published by The Mellen Press in 1998 (ISBN 0-7734-8280-6).
Although the Disputatio nova is a satire aimed at the Anabaptists, the
professors of the Theological Faculty in the University of Wittenberg were
greatly disturbed by its blasphemous arguments. Within a few weeks of its
appearance in print they issued a pamphlet warning students that they
"should neither buy this more than infamous and wholly diabolical book, nor
read it, nor communicate it to others to read, but should rather suppress
and destroy copies, if they have any such." This supplementary volume
offers a translation of the Admonitio, with brief introduction, followed by
an appendix including a further selection of references to the Disputatio
nova and to the idea that women have no souls.
In Germany in the early eighteenth century the thoughts and attitudes of scholars were popular subjects for academic debate. In university cities numerous dissertations evaluating academic life were defended, a large proportion of them making adversely critical judgements. On 25 September 1717, Gottlieb Siegfried Holtzmüller defended his Dissertatio historico-moralis de misogynia eruditorum. Defences of women are commonplace in the renaissance and the eighteenth century, almost equalling the number of attacks. Holtzmüller is exceptional in focusing most often on domestic matters: the injustice of preoccupied scholarly husbands, the tendency of men to blame their wives for all local misfortunes, the absence from most written documents of any confession that husbands might be at fault. Learned men are, he believes, especially likely to infuriate their wives by neglect, making a potentially good wife evil and an evil one worse. The misogyny of scholars is a second supplement to Clive Hart's edition of Disputatio nova contra mulieres. (1595).
The anatomists and doctors of the early modern period who wrote or compiled medical textbooks were often disturbed when, as a result of their desire to cover all aspects of the human body, they needed to give full attention to the genital organs. Their emotional unease had rhetorical consequences as they strove to make their prose acceptable both to fastidious scholars and to the general literate public. Most of the writers were men who commonly gave the bulk of their attention to the female organs - organs less familiar than their own and more intriguingly complex. Their unease was mixed with evident fascination as they embarked on detailed analyses and taxonomies. Some of them listed scores of synonymseuphemistic, jocular, titillating - while others made strenuous efforts to be either emotionally neutral or solemn.
This study, based on a selection of the many hundreds of such books, shows how the tensions are revealed in the work of writers in both English and Latin.
The Russian writer Andrei Platonov, now celebrated as one of the great prose writers of the twentieth century, is especially known for his 1928 novel Chevengur, the subject of which is longings for, and searches for, communism, with a naively utopian attempt by a few men to establish it in an isolated provincial town in the Russian steppelands. The prose of this novel is unique for its untranslatable strangeness, an uncannily elusive lyricism. This enigmatic style is what drew Angela Livingstone to re-write fifty passages from it as poems in English, many of them expressing not only the hope but also the sadness of early Soviet believers in communism.
In March 2003, Ellina Konovalova, an English language and literature Lecturer at the University of Voronezh (Platonov's city) wrote: "These English poems convey the unusual Russianness of Platonov's prose . . . Some of them seem to echo Russian folksong or folk epic; a typical one (no. 48) contains the joyful motif of labouring not for oneself but for the sake of the Tomorrow which we all then believed in so strongly; many of them give voice to the eternal Russian expectation of miracle." The poems are in part translation, in part "transposition," in part original composition.
An outline of the narrative of Chevengur is appended, along with samples of the Russian text on which the poems are based.
Aesop, according to legend, was a tongue-tied slave living on the Greek island of Samos who miraculously received the power of speech and subsequently won his freedom, only to be thrown to his death by the citizens of Delphi for insulting their oracle. Philip Terry's unique Fables of Aesop picks up the story in media res, as we witness Aesop emerging from myth to observe wildlife from the safety of his hideout, to go shopping, to quarrel with his wife Posea. Alongside fables giving a window on Aesop's life, there are traditional beast fables as well as numerous apocryphal writings here published for the first time: aphorisms, jokes, notebook entries, a bestiary, an interview.