Prosimetrum
Prosimetrum

Author: Joseph Harris

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9780859914758

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In virtually all the literary traditions of the world there are works of verbal art that depend for part of their effect on the juxtaposition of prose and verse. This volume takes the first step towards a comparative study of prosimetrum', the mixture of prose and verse, with essays by leading linguists and literary scholars of a selection of prosimetrical traditions. The nature of what constitutes verse or prose is one underlying question addressed. An outline of historical developments emerges, especially for Europe and the Near East, with articles on classical, medieval and nineteenth-century literatures. Oriental prosimetrical literatures discussed include that of Vedic India and the old literary cultures of China and Japan; also represented are oral and oral-derived folk literatures of recent centuries in Africa, the West, and Inner Asia.(This volume takes the first step towards a comparative study of prosimetrum', the mixture of prose and verse, in a wide range of literarycultures. An outline of historical developments emerges, especially for Europe and the Near East, with articles on classical, medieval and nineteenth-century literatures. Oriental prosimetrical literatures discussed include that of Vedic India and the old literary cultures of China and Japan; also represented are oral and oral-derived folk literatures of recent centuries in Africa, the West, and Inner Asia.) Professor KARL REICHLteaches in the English Department at the University of Bonn; Professor JOSEPH HARRIS teaches in the English Department at Harvard University. Contributors: KRISTIN HANSON, PAUL KIPARSKY, JAN ZIOLKOWSKI, ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, PROINSIAS Mac CANA, JOSEPH HARRIS, JUDITH RYAN, W.F.H. NICOLAISEN, LEE HARING, STEVEN WEITZMAN, WOLFHART HEINRICHS, DWIGHT REYNOLDS, JULIE SCOTT MEISAMI, KARL REICHL, WALTHER HEISSIG

Authority and Imitation
Authority and Imitation

Author: Mark Kauntze

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-05-08

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 9004268359

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The Cosmographia is one of the most inventive and enigmatic works of medieval literature. Mark Kauntze argues that this allegory of creation is best understood as a product of the vibrant intellectual culture of twelfth-century France. Bernard Silvestris established the authority of his treatise by imitating those ancient philosophers and poets who were assiduously studied in the contemporary schools. But he also revised and updated them, to develop a compelling intervention into twelfth-century debates about man's place in nature and the relationship between theology and natural science. Using a wealth of manuscript evidence, Kauntze reconstructs the school context in which Bernard worked, and shows how the Cosmographia itself became an object of scholarly annotation and imitation in the later Middle Ages.

Medieval Music and the Art of Memory
Medieval Music and the Art of Memory

Author: Anna Maria Busse Berger

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0520314271

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Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and Society of Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations.

The Aesthetics of Nostalgia
The Aesthetics of Nostalgia

Author: Renee R. Trilling

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2017-01-06

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1487513518

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Heroic poetry was central to the construction of Anglo-Saxon values, beliefs, and community identity and its subject matter is often analyzed as a window into Anglo-Saxon life. However, these poems are works of art as well as vehicles for ideology. Aesthetics of Nostalgia reads Anglo-Saxon historical verse in terms of how its aesthetic form interacted with the culture and politics of the period. Examining the distinctive poetic techniques found in vernacular historic poetry, Renée R. Trilling argues that the literary construction of heroic poetry promoted specific kinds of historical understanding in early medieval England, distinct from linear and teleological perceptions of the past. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia surveys Anglo-Saxon literary culture from the age of Bede to the decades following the Norman Conquest in order to explore its cultural impact through both its content and its form.

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Author: Eleanor Johnson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-12-20

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 022652745X

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Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Manuscript Poetics
Manuscript Poetics

Author: Francesco Marco Aresu

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0268206473

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Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve. This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological neutrality and the modes of interfacing and reading. Manuscript Poetics investigates the correspondences between textuality and materiality, content and medium, and visual-verbal messages and their physical support through readings of Dante Alighieri’s Vita nova, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida, and Francesco Petrarca’s canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). Aresu shows that Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools of scribal culture to shape, signal, or layer meanings beyond those they conveyed in their written texts. Medieval texts, Aresu argues, are uniquely positioned to provide this perspective, and they are foundational to the theoretical understanding of new forms and materials in our media-saturated contemporary world.

In Search of the Culprit
In Search of the Culprit

Author: Lukas Rösli

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-12-06

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 3110725487

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Despite various poststructuralist rejections of the idea of a singular author-genius, the question of a textual archetype that can be assigned to a named author is still a common scholarly phantasm. The Romantic idea that an author created a text or even a work autonomously is transferred even to pre-modern literature today. This ignores the fact that the transmission of medieval and early modern literature creates variances that could not be justified by means of singular authorships. The present volume offers new theoretical approaches from English, German, and Scandinavian studies to provide a historically more adequate approach to the question of authorship in premodern literary cultures. Authorship is no longer equated with an extra-textual entity, but is instead considered a narratological, inner- and intertextual function that can be recognized in the retrospectively established beginnings of literature as well as in the medial transformation of texts during the early days of printing. The volume is aimed at interested scholars of all philologies, especially those dealing with the Middle Ages or Early Modern Period.

Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century
Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century

Author: Jacqueline M. Burek

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-01-10

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1914049101

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Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, this book traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians.

Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel
Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel

Author: S. J. Harrison

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780198721741

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"Those articles in the collection which concern Petronius' Satyrica include a general interpretation of this fragmentary and problematic text, an exploration of its narrative technique, its relationship to Menippean satire and to recently discovered Greek novel papyri, and the issue of its realism."--BOOK JACKET. "On Apuleius' Metamorphoses, the collection includes pieces on narrative and ideological unity, an exploration of its narrative technique, its relationship to religion and Platonism, to epic and to the Greek ass stories, and to historical realism."--Jacket.