A translation of the 1972 French analysis of the dynamics of textual production in the Middle Ages that marked a major shift in scholarly discourse about medieval literature. Integrating the tools of linguistics and textual criticism, does not come to conclusions, but proposes approaches and methods for investigation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya. Its contributors investigate how medieval poetic language reflects and shapes social, political, and religious worlds. In addition to new readings of canonical poetic texts, it includes readings of texts that have previously not held a central place in critical attention.
How can historical sociolinguistic analyses of Medieval Greek aid the interpretation of Medieval Greek texts? This is the main question that the papers collected in this volume aim to address. The term historical sociolinguistics (HSL), a discipline that combines linguistic, social, historical, and philological sciences, suggests that a language cannot be studied without its social dimension. Similarly, the study of a language in its social dimension is nothing else than the study of the communication which takes place between members of a given speech community by the means of written texts. These are seen as sets of shared signs used by authors to communicate to their audiences. This volume is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, Cuomo's and Bentein's papers aim to offer an overview on the discipline and examples of applied HSL. Valente's, Bianconi's, and Perez-Martin's papers will then show how to study the context of production and reception of Byzantine texts. These are followed by Horrocks' study on some features of Atticized Medieval Greek. In the second part, the contributions by Telelis, Odorico, and Manolova focus on the context of reception of the texts by Georgios Pachymeres, Theodoros Pediasimos, and Nikephoros Gregoras respectively.
A biography of the British boy, captured by raiding Irish warriors at age sixteen, who performed miracles, ended the power of the Druid priests over the Irish people, and converted the Irish kings and their people to Christianity.
This volume examines the treatment and expression of love in medieval literature and art. These nineteen essays, contributed by recognized authorities on medieval romantic expression, consider a wide variety of texts from the following cultures: French, Arabic, Latin, Hispanic, Hebrew, Provencal, and German. Teachers and students of medieval literature will find in this well-researched book cogent, contemporary analyses of written expressions of love in the Middle Ages.
This study of the definition of literature in the late medieval period is based on manuals of writing and on literary commentary and glosses. It defines a method of reading which may now profitably explain medieval texts, and identifies new primary medieval evidence which may ground and guide new reading. Allen chooses texts whose commentary tradition provides the greatest opportunity for completeness. The most important of these is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Medieval readings of Ovid bring into focus a number of major literary questions—the problems of fable and fiction, of unity imposed by miscellany poetry, of allegorical commentary, and of Christian use of pagan culture—all in connection with text which furnished medieval authors with more stories than any other single source except possibly the Bible. Allen also studies commentaries on the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, the Thebaid of Statius, the De nuptiis of Martianus Capella, the medieval Christian hymn-book, and the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Together these texts represent the range of medieval literature—a literature which, Allen concludes, was taken as direct ethical discourse, logically conducted and artfully organized within a system of language that also assimilated the natural world and sought to absorb its audience.
Distinguished theologians and literary scholars explore the workings of the sacred and the sacramental in language and literature. What does a sacramental poetics offer that secular cultural theory, for all of its advances, may have missed? How does a sacred understanding of the world differ from a strictly secular one? This volume develops the theory of “sacramental poetics” advanced by Regina Schwartz in her 2008 book on English Reformation writers, taking the theory in new directions while demonstrating how enduring and widespread this poetics is. Toward a Sacramental Poetics addresses two urgent questions we have inherited from a half century of secular critical thought. First, how do we understand the relationship between word and thing, sign and signified, other than as some naive direct representation or as a completely arbitrary language game? And, second, how can the subject experience the world beyond instrumentalizing it? The contributors conclude that a sacramental poetics responds to both questions, offering an understanding of the sign that, by pointing beyond itself, suggests wonder. The contributors explore a variety of topics in relation to sacramental poetics, including political theology, miracles, modernity, translation and transformation, and the metaphysics of love. They draw from diverse resources, from Dante to Hopkins, from Richard Hooker to Stoker's Dracula, from the King James Bible to Wallace Stevens. Toward a Sacramental Poetics is an important contribution to studies of religion and literature, the sacred and the secular, literary theory, and theologies of aesthetics. Contributors: Regina M. Schwartz, Patrick J. McGrath, Rowan Williams, Subha Mukherji, Stephen Little, Kevin Hart, John Milbank, Hent de Vries, Jean-Luc Marion, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Lori Branch, and Paul Mariani.
"This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya, the recently retired former chair of Georgetown University's English Department. Inspired by Georgetown's Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and its statement that poetry "traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought," this work investigates how medieval poetic language reflects and also shapes social, political, and religious worlds. At a moment in contemporary culture when poetry finds its value increasingly challenged, Medieval Poetics and Social Practice looks to the late Middle Ages to assert the indispensability of poetry and poetics in the formation of social structures, actions, and utterances. The contributors offer new readings of canonical late-medieval English poetic texts, such as Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and, of equal importance, explore texts that have hitherto not held a central place in criticism but make important contributions to the literary culture of the period. Introduced by Seeta Chaganti, the collection includes essays by Richard K. Emmerson, J. Patrick Hornbeck, John C. Hirsh, Moira Fitzgibbons, John T. Sebastian, Nicholas R. Havely, Kara Doyle, Anne Middleton, Jo Ann Moran Cruz, and Mark McMorris."--Project Muse.
This volume examines the treatment and expression of love in medieval literature and art. These nineteen essays, contributed by recognized authorities on medieval romantic expression, consider a wide variety of texts from the following cultures: French, Arabic, Latin, Hispanic, Hebrew, Provencal, and German. Teachers and students of medieval literature will find in this well-researched book cogent, contemporary analyses of written expressions of love in the Middle Ages.
