Medieval commentaries typically included an accessus, a standardized introduction to an author or book. In the twelfth century these introductions were anthologised, referred to now as Accessus ad auctores. They served as the first handbooks of literary criticism. The earliest and most comprehensive example, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 19475, saec. XII,is presented here for the first time in a faithful critical edition, with a new translation and explanatory notes addressing different aspects of the text. This book's aim is to present an accurate version of the text while respecting the arrangement and integrity of the anthology as a whole, and includes previously unpublished material from the anthology.
Medieval commentaries typically included an accessus, a standardized introduction to an author or book. In the twelfth century these introductions were anthologised, referred to now as Accessus ad auctores. They served as the first handbooks of literary criticism. The earliest and most comprehensive example, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 19475, saec. XII, is presented here for the first time in a faithful critical edition, with a new translation and explanatory notes addressing different aspects of the text. This book's aim is to present an accurate version of the text while respecting the arrangement and integrity of the anthology as a whole, and includes previously unpublished material from the anthology
This book poses an eloquent challenge to the common conception of the hermeneutical tradition as a purely modern German specialty. Kathy Eden traces a continuous tradition of interpretation from Republican Rome to Reformation Europe, arguing that the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is in the ancient tradition of rhetoric.
A formidable challenge to the study of Roma (Gypsy) music is the muddle of fact and fiction in determining identity. This book investigates "Gypsy music" as a marked and marketable exotic substance, and as a site of active cultural negotiation and appropriation between the real Roma and the idealized Gypsies of the Western imagination. David Malvinni studies specific composers-including Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Janacek, and Bartók-whose work takes up contested and varied configurations of Gypsy music. The music of these composers is considered alongside contemporary debates over popular music and film, as Malvinni argues that Gypsiness remains impervious to empirical revelations about the "real" Roma.
A survey of the use of the refrain in thirteenth and fourteenth-century French music and poetry, showing how it was skilfully deployed to assert the validity of the vernacular. The relationship between song quotation and the elevation of French as a literary language that could challenge the cultural authority of Latin is the focus of this book. It approaches this phenomenon through a close examination of the refrain, a short phrase of music and text quoted intertextually across thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century musical and poetic genres. The author draws on a wide range of case studies, from motets, trouvère song, plays, romance, vernacular translations, and proverb collections, to show that medieval composers quoted refrains as vernacular auctoritates; she argues that their appropriation of scholastic, Latinate writing techniques workedto authorize Old French music and poetry as media suitable for the transmission of knowledge. Beginning with an exploration of the quasi-scholastic usage of refrains in anonymous and less familiar clerical contexts, the book goeson to articulate a new framework for understanding the emergence of the first two named authors of vernacular polyphonic music, the cleric-trouvères Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut. It shows how, by blending their craftwith the writing practices of the universities, composers could use refrain quotation to assert their status as authors with a new self-consciousness, and to position works in the vernacular as worthy of study and interpretation. Jennifer Saltzstein is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma.
This book studies attitudes toward secular literature during the later Middle Ages. Exploring two related medieval justifications of literary pleasure—one finding hygienic or therapeutic value in entertainment, and another stressing the psychological and ethical rewards of taking time out from work in order to refresh oneself—Glending Olson reveals that, contrary to much recent opinion, many medieval writers and thinkers accepted delight and enjoyment as valid goals of literature without always demanding moral profit as well. Drawing on a vast amount of primary material, including contemporary medical manuscripts and printed texts, Olson discusses theatrics, humanist literary criticism, prologues to romances and fabliaux, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He offers an extended examination of the framing story of Boccaccio's Decameron. Although intended principally as a contribution to the history of medieval literary theory and criticism, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages makes use of medical, psychological, and sociological insights that lead to a fuller understanding of late medieval secular culture.
