Ann Moss – författare

This is the first comprehensive study of the Renaissance commonplace-book.Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of leisure reading of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books, which formed an immensely important element of Renaissance education. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century. The book covers the Latin culture of Early Modern Europe and its vernacular counterparts and continuations, particularly in France.Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is much more than an account of humanist classroom practice: it is a major work of cultural history.

Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn provides an entirely new look at an era of radical change in the history of West European thought, the period between 1480 and 1540, mainly in France and Germany. The lens for this novel perspective is the Latin language shift, from the Latin idiom in which late medieval intellectual inquiry was conducted to the reinvented classical idiom aggressively promoted and finally imposed by the humanists. This is not a narrow philological study of language change. The book's main thesis is that the Latin language turn was not only concurrent with other aspects of change, but was a fundamental instrument in reconfiguring horizons of thought, reformulating paradigms of argument, and rearticulating the relationship between fiction and truth. The book examines particularly crucial documents by a few major figures (Erasmus, Lefèvre d'Étaples, Melanchthon), but it is original in the way it brings to the fore the contributions of secondary writers who rarely find their way into general histories of the period, but who are important markers of stages in the shift that the book is charting, and hence of the overall change that shift helped to engineer. The book is very wide-ranging in its scope. Many of its topics feature for the first time in a synthesizing account of the intellectual history of the period. They include the history of Latin dictionaries and phrase-books; discourses of theological debate and popular piety; the changing ground-rules for religious disputation; early ventures in literary criticism; the emergence of personal subjectivity and a new religious sensibility; and the posthumous fortunes and misfortunes of a major saint.

This book is a major study of the development of French poetry in the Renaissance, which examines changes in style and vision by looking both at how poetry was read in this period and how it was written. Dr Moss examines vernacular versions of fables from Ovid's Metamorphoses, published between the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century, which reveal fundamental changes both in reading habits and in assumptions about literary aesthetics and the relationship of literature to truth. Through detailed analysis of mythological narratives in the Ovidian tradition composed by Lemaire de Beiges, Francois Habert, Baif and Ronsard, among others, and by concentrating on a few specific mythological subjects Dr Moss is able to identify the salient features in these developments and so broaden our understanding of the aesthetic revolution which transformed the literature and mentality of France and Western Europe during the Renaissance.