The written word as remix material and (cut-ups)
The Gutenberg Press, pioneered by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439
Illuminated Manuscripts
John Hus was burned at the stake in 1415, with English manuscript Bibles used as kindling for the fire.
The last words of John Hus were that, “in 100 years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.”
Almost exactly 100 years later, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses of Contention (a list of 95 issues of heretical theology and crimes of the Roman Catholic Church) into the church door at Wittenberg.
Martin Luther went on to be the first person to translate and publish the Bible in the commonly-spoken dialect of the German people; a translation more appealing than previous German Biblical translations.
Two hundred copies of the two-volume Gutenberg Bible were printed, a small number of which were printed on vellum. The expensive and beautiful Bibles were completed and sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, and cost the equivalent of three years' pay for the average clerk.
Erasmus was so moved to correct the corrupt Latin Vulgate, that in 1516, with the help of printer John Froben, he published a Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament.
The Latin secction was not the corrupt Vulgate, but his own fresh rendering of the text from the more accurate and reliable Greek, which he had managed to collate from a half-dozen partial old Greek New Testament manuscripts he had acquired. This milestone was the first non-Latin Vulgate text of the scripture ever to come off a printing press.
In 1517, seven people were burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church for the crime of teaching their children to say the Lord’s Prayer in English rather than Latin.
King James Bible - 1611
Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1350-1353
The Cantebury Tales, 1368-1400"Clerk's Tale" of Griselda her children is derived from The Decameron's tale of patient Griselda (Night X, Chapeter10)
John Keats
From "Isabella or The Pot of Basil."
FAIR Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.From the Decameron:
. . . .and they had a sister, Lisabetta by name, a girl fair enough, and no less debonair, but whom, for some reason or another, they had not as yet bestowed in marriage. The three brothers had also in their shop a young Pisan, Lorenzo by name, who managed all their affairs, and who was so goodly of person and gallant, that Lisabetta bestowed many a glance upon him, and began to regard him with extraordinary favour; which Lorenzo marking from time to time, gave up all his other amours, and in like manner began to affect her, and so, their loves being equal, 'twas not long before they took heart of grace, and did that which each most desired
From "Isabella or The Pot of Basil."
And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,
Imploring for her Basil to the last.
No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
In pity of her love, so overcast.
And a sad ditty of this story born
From mouth to mouth through all the country pass’d:
Still is the burthen sung - «O cruelty,
«To steal my Basil-pot away from me!»
From the Decameron:
Whereat the young men, marvelling mightily, resolved to see what the pot might contain; and having removed the earth they espied the cloth, and therein the head, which was not yet so decayed, but that by the curled locks they knew it for Lorenzo's head. Passing strange they found it, and fearing lest it should be bruited abroad, they buried the head, and, with as little said as might be, took order for their privy departure from Messina, and hied them thence to Naples.The girl ceased not to weep and crave her pot, and, so weeping, died. Such was the end of her disastrous love; but not a few in course of time coming to know the truth of the affair, there was one that made the song that is still sung: to wit:
A thief he was, I swear / A sorry Christian he, / That took my basil of Salerno fair, etc.
Adapted from the Decameron's Tale III, chapter 9
CUT UP TEXT
William Burroughs
William Burroughs CUT-UP video
Bowie cut-up technique (1997)
Cut-up lyric example from "Hallo Spaceboy" (1995)
Cut-up lyric example from "Seven Years in Tibet" (1997)
CUT UP - BIBLE REMIXES (21st Century)
Brendan Lott, Alphabetized Bible (2001)
Tara Auerbach, Alphabetized Bible (2006)
