On Waterloo Day, 18 June 1875, the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy visited Chelsea Hospital to speak with the survivors of a battle that predated his birth by a quarter of a century. As the author’s second wife Florence Emily Hardy records, the veterans’ recollections of the conflict were captured in striking, imagistic fragments, reminiscent of the ‘sensory, perceptual and emotional components’ associated with traumatic memory:1 the sight of ‘bayonets, helmets and swords’ glinting through ‘the haze of smoke’; a sense impression of lying uncovered on ‘the wet eve of battle’, as if the man were ‘speaking on the actual day’.2 While for Hardy, Waterloo represented the climax of a ‘Great Historical Calamity’,3 far removed from the relative peace and security of his own times, for these war-torn veterans the battle was an all-too-present event that refused to lend itself fully to narrative coherence.

One winter evening in Somerset, in the early months of 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth observes ‘the moon and two planets; sharp and frosty … The sea very black, and making a loud noise as we came through the wood, loud as if disturbed, and the wind was silent’ (DWJ 147). In between these descriptions of natural phenomena she records, as if in parentheses: ‘Met a razor-grinder with a soldier’s jacket on, a Knapsack upon his back, and a boy to drag his wheel’ (DWJ 147). Unlike the lyrically suggestive accounts of sea, wind and sky, this human encounter is pared to a sequence of bare facts and, while we may deduce that the man is an army veteran now making a living as an itinerant laborer, no attempt is made to derive any further significance from the incident. In the Alfoxden Journal this entry marks the only meeting with a stranger encountered on the roads. By contrast, in the 1800–1803 Grasmere Journal Dorothy records numerous meetings with men, women and children on the public highway and, more often than not, these meetings yield insights into the consequences for the rural poor of the British involvement in the war against revolutionary France, and of the Pitt government’s relentless pursuit of socio-economic ‘improvements’ to support this involvement. Many of these meetings were subsequently developed in poems written by Wordsworth. But, whether written as poetry or in prose, the stories of these outcast and denuded figures, striking in their mundanity, were to cast a searching light on the iniquities of the times.

A SOPHISTICATED MARKET for the production and circulation of written texts, a concern with the establishment of national vernaculars as well as a forum for the exchange of religious, philosophical and literary ideas characterised medieval Europe. Explorations of this textual culture can fruitfully elucidate the prolonged and varied processes through which Europe and its constituent localities entered into modern reading, writing and communicative practices. Europe here is intended as an ideological concept which, despite present concerns and worries, does persist; indeed, the worries attest to the persistence of Europe's existence. To debate and consider the coherence of medieval Europe is important. It matters because it shows the tension between the unity and the diversity which still define Europe. The summer of 2015 will see the publication of a major literary history under the general editorship of David Wallace; this project is

As Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418 takes its reader on journeys through the literary encounters of Europe, Writing Europe 500–1450: Texts and Contexts brings together papers on a range of topics in medieval manuscript studies and textual criticism, seeking to explore these issues from a pan-European perspective.

The focus on writing, which implicitly considers readers, is roughly chronologically defined between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the introduction of printing in Europe. These two events had profound influences in defining pre-modern Europe and its global cultural, social and political influences – of which writing is a constituent paradigm. Thus this volume draws on a range of approaches and perspectives to manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the medieval period in Europe.

From its inception, the discourse of the sublime has placed emphasis on the failure of the mind to comprehend the grand, the vast and the terrifying. At its most radical, in the neo-lacanian revision of the Kantian sublime proposed by Slavoj Žižek, the connection between sublimity and reason is brought to an absolute, nihilistic conclusion. For Žižek, since representations are always lacking – formed, that is, on the basis of their exclusion of some contradictory, impossible object, otherwise known as the Real – the truth is no longer a noumenal, freely indeterminate beyond, but rather ‘the ultimate emptiness of all our gestures’. In this essay, I seek to explore the relation between emptiness, negation and the sublime as presented by Byron in the closing cantos of Don Juan. I want to suggest that while Byron appears to share Žižek's suspicion of the transcendental aspirations of the sublime, his particular critique is not directed against transcendentalism per se but rather against the ambitions of the sublime to take the place of religion. In essence, this essay will claim that for Byron the encounter with the sublime leads not to the triumph of Reason, nor to its nihilistic voiding, but results, rather, in the opening out of consciousness to the haunting of the divine.

As David L. Sedley has argued, the emphasis in discourses of the sublime on cognitive failure originates in the sceptical tradition. Sedley's argument, which focuses on the development of the sublime in Montaigne and Milton, relates the destructive tendencies of the concept to its origins in early modern doubt. In Montaigne's Journal de Voyage (1580–1581), for instance, a sceptical attitude to historical accuracy leads to the creation of a grand or sublime style, which stems ‘not from coherence but from fragmentation […] not from the success of cognition but from cognition's collapse’. The object of Montaigne's attention is the ruins of Imperial Rome. Whereas previous scholars invoked the Aristotelian category of admiratio to convey a passage from bewilderment to coherence, so that ancient ruins can become, after all, objects of knowledge, for Montaigne the idea that Rome cannot be known as a thing-in-itself precipitates a sense of cognitive failure, which fosters, in turn, a feeling for that which lies beyond the realms of representation.