Joseph Pucci - Böcker

A completely revised and updated edition of this standard anthology of medieval Latin, this work has been provided with 14 new selections, doubling the coverage of women writers, expanding a quarter of the original selections, and including a substantive grammatical introduction. The help place the selcetions within their wider, historical, social and political contexts, extensive introductory essays have been provided for each of the anthology's five parts. Headnotes to individual selections have been recast as interpretive essays, and the original bibliographical paragraphs have been expanded. The selections have been extensively glossed with grammatical notes geared toeards students of classical Latin who may be reading medieval Latin for the first time.

Literary allusions abound in Western literature, and those who study them tend to focus on the author’s intentions to demonstrate erudition, embellish meaning, or exert control over tradition. In this original and illuminating book—the first full-scale consideration of literary allusion in any language—Joseph Pucci contends that the key to grasping the meaning of an allusive text is in the hands of the "full-knowing" reader. Pucci shows how allusion authorizes the desires of such a reader—one who is active, engaged, and historically sensitive—at the expense of the author. He considers allusiveness in an array of ancient, medieval, and modern texts by authors as diverse as Homer, Virgil, Catullus, Augustine, Abelard, Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, and Pound. Pucci begins with a discussion of modern and contemporary debates about allusion’s function; offers a fresh definition of allusion that emphasizes readerly desire and the manifold meanings occasioned in allusion’s best function; and considers ancient and medieval evidence of readerly power. Although Greeks and Romans described allusion in the context of a powerful reader, Pucci finds that allusion became a legitimated mode of literary discourse only after early Christian readers became meaning- makers, empowered to make sense of dissonant passages of Scripture. In a concluding chapter the author contemplates hypertext and allusion in other media.

This volume offers for the first time in any language a translation of the poetic corpus of Alcuin of York (c. 735–804), numbering some 339 individual pieces and nearly 7,000 lines.An introduction touches on Alcuin’s life, his writings (including doubtful works and pseudepigrapha), his Latinity, his place in the Latin literary tradition, and the manuscripts, textual history, and editions of his poetry. The translations follow Dümmler’s Latin text, with each poem controlled by a headnote that places the piece in its historical and literary contexts. A series of appendices offers translations of selected letters, a register of the poems by meter, a census of nearly 200 manuscripts with digital links, and a prolegomenon to a new edition.The Poetry of Alcuin of York is a stimulating resource for anyone working on later Latin poetry, and late ancient literature more broadly. The poems also offer fascinating insights into life and scholarship in Anglo-Saxon England and in the Carolingian empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and so will also be of interest to students of medieval history.