Reading Medieval Latin is an introduction to medieval Latin in its cultural and historical context and is designed to serve the needs of students who have completed the learning of basic classical Latin morphology and syntax. (Users of Reading Latin will find that it follows on after the end of section 5 of that course.) It is an anthology, organised chronologically and thematically in four parts. Each part is divided into chapters with introductory material, texts, and commentaries which give help with syntax, sentence-structure, and background. There are brief sections on medieval orthography and grammar, together with a vocabulary which includes words (or meanings) not found in standard classical dictionaries. The texts chosen cover areas of interest to students of medieval history, philosophy, theology, and literature.
To help place the selections within their wider historical, social, and political contexts, Pucci has written extensive introductory essays for each of the new edition's five parts. Headnotes to individual selections have been recast as interpretive essays, and the original bibliographic paragraphs have been expanded. Reprinted from the best modern editions, the selections have been extensively glossed with grammatical notes geared toward students of classical Latin who may be reading medieval Latin for the first time.
Organized with the assistance of an international advisory committee of medievalists from several disciplines, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide is a new standard guide to the Latin language and literature of the period from c. A.D. 200 to 1500. It promises to be indispensable as a handbook in university courses in Medieval Latin and as a point of departure for the study of Latin texts and documents in any of the fields of medieval studies. Comprehensive in scope, the guide provides introductions to, and bibliographic orientations in, all the main areas of Medieval Latin language, literature, and scholarship. Part One consists of an introduction and sizable listing of general print and electronic reference and research tools. Part Two focuses on issues of language, with introductions to such topics as Biblical and Christian Latin, and Medieval Latin pronunciation, orthography, morphology and syntax, word formation and lexicography, metrics, prose styles, and so on. There are chapters on the Latin used in administration, law, music, commerce, the liturgy, theology and philosophy, science and technology, and daily life. Part Three offers a systematic overview of Medieval Latin literature, with introductions to a wide range of genres and to translations from and into Latin. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography of fundamental works--texts, lexica, studies, and research aids. This guide satisfies a long-standing need for a reference tool in English that focuses on medieval latinity in all its specialized aspects. It will be welcomed by students, teachers, professional latinists, medievalists, humanists, and general readers interested in the role of Latin as the learned lingua franca of western Europe. It may also prove valuable to reference librarians assembling collections concerned with Latin authors and texts of the postclassical period. ABOUT THE EDITORS F. A. C. Mantello is professor of Medieval Latin at The Catholic University of America. A. G. Rigg is professor of English and medieval studies and chairman of the Medieval Latin Committee at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies. PRASIE FOR THE BOOK "This extraordinary volume, joint effort of dozens of scholars in eight countries, will be in constant use for research, for advising students and designing courses, and for answering the queries of nonmedievalist colleagues. . . . Medieval Latin provides a foundation for advances in research and teaching on a wide front. . . . Though Mantello and Rigg's Medieval Latin is a superb reference volume, I recommend that it also be read from beginning to end--in small increments, of course. The rewards will be sheaves of notes and an immensely enriched appreciation of Medieval Latin and its literature."--Janet M. Martin, Princeton University, Speculum "A remarkable achievement, and no one interested in medieval Latin can afford to be without it."--Journal of Ecclesiastical History "Everywhere there is clarity, conclusion, judicious illustration, and careful selection of what is central. This guide is a major achievement and will serve Medieval Latin studies extremely well for the foreseeable future."--The Classical Review
King Arthur is arguably the most recognizable literary hero of the European Middle Ages. His stories survive in many genres and many languages, but while scholars and enthusiasts alike know something of his roots in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain, most are unaware that there was a Latin Arthurian tradition which extended beyond Geoffrey. This collection of essays will highlight different aspects of that tradition, allowing readers to see the well-known and the obscure as part of a larger, often coherent whole. These Latin-literate scholars were as interested as their vernacular counterparts in the origins and stories of Britain's greatest heroes, and they made their own significant contributions to his myth.
Dag Norberg's analysis and interpretation of Medieval Latin versification, which was published in French in 1958 and remains the standard work on the subject, appears here for the first time in English with a detailed, scholarly introduction by Jan Ziolkowski that reviews the developments of the past fifty years.
Part I: Group Portrait with Language -- Chapter 1: A Poetics of the Cosmopolitan Language -- Chapter 2: My Tongue -- Chapter 3: A Cat May Look at a King -- Part II: Space, Place, and the Cosmopolitan Language -- Chapter 4: Territory / Frontiers / Routes -- Chapter 5: Tracks -- Chapter 6: Tribal Rugs -- Part III: Translation and Time -- Chapter 7: The Soul of a New Language -- Chapter 8: On First Looking into Mattā's Aristotle -- Chapter 9: "I Became a Fable" -- Chapter 10: A Spy in the House of Language -- Part IV: Beyond the Cosmopolitan Language -- Chapter 11: Silence -- Chapter 12: The Shadow of Latinity -- Chapter 13: Life Writing.
This work, by the greatest living authority on medieval palaeography, offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account in any language of the history of Latin script. It also contains a detailed account of the role of the book in cultural history from antiquity to the Renaissance, which outlines the history of book illumination. Designed as a textbook, it contains a full and updated bibliography. Because the volume sets the development of Latin script in its cultural context, it also provides an unrivalled introduction to the nature of medieval Latin culture. It will be used extensively in the teaching of latin palaeography, and is unlikely to be superseded.
Much of what is known about the past often rests upon the chance survival of objects and texts. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the fragments of medieval manuscripts re-used as bookbindings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such fragments provide a tantalizing, yet often problematic glimpse into the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages. Exploring the opportunities and difficulties such documents provide, this volume concentrates on the c. 50,000 fragments of medieval Latin manuscripts stored in archives across the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. This large collection of fragments (mostly from liturgical works) provides rich evidence about European Latin book culture, both in general and in specific relation to the far north of Europe, one of the last areas of Europe to be converted to Christianity. As the essays in this volume reveal, individual and groups of fragments can play a key role in increasing and advancing knowledge about the acquisition and production of medieval books, and in helping to distinguish locally made books from imported ones. Taking an imaginative approach to the source material, the volume goes beyond a strictly medieval context to integrate early modern perspectives that help illuminate the pattern of survival and loss of Latin manuscripts through post-Reformation practices concerning reuse of parchment. In so doing it demonstrates how the use of what might at first appear to be unpromising source material can offer unexpected and rewarding insights into diverse areas of European history and the history of the medieval book.
Fresh and provocative approaches to the literature of the middle ages, offering close readings of texts from Chaucer to Henryson, and beast fable to devotional works. Jill Mann's writing, teaching, and scholarship have transformed our understanding of two distinct fields, medieval Latin and Middle English literature, as well as their intersection. Essays in this volume seek to honour this achievement by looking at entirely new aspects of these fields (the relationship of song to affect, the political valence of classical allusion, the Latin background of Middle English devotional texts). Others look again at the literary kinds and ideas most important in Mann's own work (beast fable, the nature of allegory, the nature of "nature", the relationship of economic thought and literature, satire, language as a subject for poetry) in the poets she hasbeen most drawn to (Chaucer, Langland, Henryson). All of the essays involve close readings of the most careful kind, taking as their primary method Professor Mann's repeated injunction to attend, above all, to the"words on the page". Christopher Cannon is Professor of English, New York University; Maura Nolan is Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. Contributors: Siobhain Bly Calkin, Christopher Cannon, Rebecca Davis, Peter Dronke, A.S.G. Edwards, Elizabeth B. Edwards, Maura Nolan, Paul J. Patterson, Derek Pearsall, Ad Putter, Paul Gerhard Schmidt, James Simpson, Barry Windeatt, Nicolette Zeeman
