Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts – serie

From c. 1100 until c. 1170, Latin prosimetrical texts characterized by dialogue, allegory, and philosophical speculation enjoyed a notable popularity within the cultural ambit of the French cathedral schools. Inspired by Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, the prosimetrum writers applied his literary techniques to the ethical and anthropological concerns of their own era, producing texts of great artistry in the process. This book investigates the rise of the Boethian impulse in Latin, the innovations of the twelfth-century writers, the difficulties that arose when they attempted to recapture the certainty that characterized the Consolation, and the survival of aspects of this literary mode in later Latin and vernacular literature.

The decapitation motif recurs in nearly all medieval and early modern genres, from saints' lives and epics to comedies and romances, yet decollation is often little regarded, save as a marker of humanity (that is, as the moment mortality exits) or inhumanity (that is, as the moment the supernatural enters). However, as a seat of reason, wisdom, and even the soul, the head has long been afforded a special place in the body politic, even when separated from its body proper. Capitalizing upon the enduring fascination with decapitation in European culture, this collection examines--through a variety of critical lenses--the recurring "roles/rolls" of severed human heads in the medieval and early modern imagination.Contributors are Nicola Masciandaro, Mark Faulkner, Jay Paul Gates, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Dwayne Coleman, Mary Leech, Tina Boyer, Renée Ward, Andrew Fleck, Thomas Herron, Thea Cervone, and Asa Simon Mittman. Preface by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

Les Eschéz d’Amours may be the last great medieval allegory to find its way into a modern edition. In the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, the Eschéz surveys matters of love, politics, economics, music, medicine, and chess through the lens of classical and Scholastic learning. In addition to the first 16,293 (of over 30,000) verses newly edited out of the manuscripts, the editors present a complete apparatus of literary, historical and linguistic essays that place the poem in the context of the scholarly and courtly life of late 14th century Paris. The important Latin glosses of the Venice manuscript of the Eschéz follow in an edition of their own, with critical notes and translation.

The present volume has grown out of the conference held at Princeton University on November 12-14, 2009. Its essays explore a coherent, interrelated nexus of topics that illuminate our understanding of the cultural transactions (social, political, economic, religious and artistic) of the Greek East and Latin West: unexpected cultural appropriations and forms of resistance, continuity and change, the construction and hybridization of traditions in a wide expanse of the eastern Mediterranean. Areas that the volume addresses include the benefits and liabilities of periodization, philosophical and political exchanges, monastic syncretism between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths, issues of romance composition, and economic currency and the currency of fashion as East and West interact.Contributors are Roderick Beaton, Peter Brown, Marina S. Brownlee, Giles Constable, Maria Evangelatou, Dimitri Gondicas, Judith Herrin, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Marc D. Lauxtermann, Stuart M. McManus, John Monfasani, Maria G. Parani, Linda Safran, Teresa Shawcross and Alan M. Stahl.

In Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance: Stories of Later Life from Petrarch to Montaigne Cynthia Skenazi explores a shift in attitudes towards aging and provides a historical perspective on a crucial problem of our time.From the late fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, the elderly subject became a point of new social, medical, political, and literary attention on both sides of the Alps. A movement of secularization tended to dissociate old age from the Christian preparation for death, re-orienting the concept of aging around pragmatic matters such as health care, intergenerational relationships, and accrued insights one might wish to pass along. Such changes were accompanied by an increasing number of personal accounts of later life.Listed by Choice magazine as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2014This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access

Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular offers a collection of studies that deal with the cultural exchange between Neo-Latin and the vernacular, and with the very cultural mobility that allowed for the successful development of Renaissance bilingual culture. Studying a variety of multilingual issues of language and poetics, of translation and transfer, its authors interpret Renaissance cross-cultural contact as a radically dynamic, ever-shifting process of making cultural meaning. With renewed attention for suitable theoretical and methodological frames of reference, Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular firmly resists literary history’s temptation to pin down the Early Modern relationship between languages, literatures and cultures, in favour of stressing the sheer variety and variability of that relationship itself.Contributors are Jan Bloemendal, Ingrid De Smet, Annet den Haan, Tom Deneire, Beate Hintzen, David Kromhout, Bettina Noak, Ingrid Rowland, Johanna Svensson, Harm-Jan van Dam, Guillaume van Gemert, Eva van Hooijdonk, and Ümmü Yüksel.

Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women’s voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped speech; the oral and the written zones had a porous, busy boundary. Cross-border traffic is central to this study, as is the power, range, utility, and suppleness of speech.Contributors are Matthias Bähr, Richard Blakemore, Michael Braddick, Rosanna Cantavella, Thomas V. Cohen, Gillian Colclough, Jan Dumolyn, Susana Gala Pellicer, Jelle Haemers, Marcus Harmes, Elizabeth Horodowich, Carolina Losada, Virginia Reinburg, Anne Regent-Susini, Joseph T. Snow, Sonia Suman, Lesley K. Twomey and Liv Helene Willumsen.

This book is about philology and its relevance over time. The compilation foregrounds a multi-faceted field of research that has dealt with the relationship between language, literature and culture for over 2,000 years. The main thread of this volume, comprising ten scholarly essays, is to show that philology as an academic field and a scholarly perspective―understood in its widest sense as the profound understanding of language, literature and culture―does matter in the twenty-first century, that is to say, in our own time characterized by globalization and digitalization. The contributions reflect the many dimensions of philology and its plurality, interdisciplinarity and the humanities. The volume seeks to illustrate various ways of engaging with philology. Here lies the true nature of philology, and this is why it still matters.Contributors are Massimiliano Bampi, Maja Bäckvall, Jonas Carlquist, Odd Einar Haugen, Helge Jordheim, Karl G. Johansson, Lino Leonardi, Harry Lönnroth, Outi Merisalo, Marita Akhøj Nielsen and Nestori Siponkoski.

The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation brings together contributions by leading scholars on different aspects of the first complete translation of the Bible into English, produced at the end of the 14th century by the followers of the Oxford theologian John Wyclif. Though learned and accurate, the translation was condemned and banned within twenty-five years of its appearance. In spite of this it became the most widely disseminated medieval English work that profoundly influenced the development of vernacular theology, religious writing, contemporary and later literature, and the English language. Its comprehensive study is long overdue and the current collection offers new perspectives and research on this, the most learned and widely evidenced of the European translations of the Vulgate.Contributors are Jeremy Catto‎, Lynda Dennison, Kantik Ghosh, Ralph Hanna, Anne Hudson, Maureen Jurkowski, Michael Kuczynski, Ian Christopher Levy, James Morey, Nigel Morgan, Stephen Morrison, Mark Rankin, Delbert Russell, Michael Sargent, Jakub Sichalek, Elizabeth Solopova, and Annie Sutherland‎.

The Anonymous Old English Homily: Sources, Composition, and Variation offers important essays on the origins, textual transmission, and (re)use of early English preaching texts between the ninth and the late twelfth centuries. Associated with the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English project, these studies provide fresh insights into one of the most complex textual genres of early medieval literature. Contributions deal with the definition of the anonymous homiletic corpus in Old English, the history of scholarship on its Latin sources, and the important unedited Pembroke and Angers Latin homiliaries. They also include new source and manuscript identifications, and in-depth studies of a number of popular Old English homilies, their themes, revisions, and textual relations. Contributors are: Aidan Conti, Robert Getz, Thomas N. Hall, Susan Irvine, Esther Lemmerz, Stephen Pelle, Thijs Porck, Winfried Rudolf, Donald G. Scragg, Robert K. Upchurch, Jonathan Wilcox, Charles D. Wright, Samantha Zacher. See inside the book.

Focusing on literary and non-literary works alike, Interpretation and Visual Poetics in Medieval and Early Modern Texts places visual and material aspects of literary study at the center of the interpretive process. The essays in this collection explore new and traditional areas of research from hermeneutics, to codicology and history of the book, to cultures of sound and the digital humanities. They address the texts themselves, as well as their early manuscripts and subsequent printed and digital editions. The contributors collectively cover a time span of over 1000 years, and begin with the Mediterranean, focusing on texts produced in Italy and the Languedoc regions, then radiate outward to analyse the texts’ material containers (manuscripts, print, and digital editions) that are now housed worldwide. Contributors are: Michelangelo Zaccarello, Daniel O’Sullivan, Valerio Cappozzo, Jelena Todorović, Christopher Kleinhenz, Mirko Tavoni, Isabella Magni, Francesco Marco Aresu, Dario Del Puppo, Beatrice Arduini, Giovanni Spani, Furio Brugnolo, Teodolinda Barolini, Alessandro Vettori, Marcello Ciccuto, Marco Veglia, Michael Papio, and Anthony Nussmeier.

In this book, Katie Reid argues that the fifth-century author Martianus Capella was a significant influence in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. His poetic encyclopaedia, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, was a source for writing on the liberal arts, allegory and classical mythology from 1300 to 1650. In fact, writers of this period had much more in common with Martianus Capella than they did with older ancients like Homer and Virgil. As such, we must reshape our understanding of late medieval and Renaissance encounters with the classical world by exploring their roots in Late Antiquity.

Aphrodite’s famous ribbon known as the cestus, the irresistible love charm that she loaned to Hera in the Iliad, was, thanks to a fruitful early misreading, transformed by ancient, medieval, and Renaissance authors into a symbol of honorable feminine chastity: in Maurice Scève’s 1560 Microcosme, an epic rewriting of Genesis, Eve first appears before an astonished Adam wearing the virginal cestus as a symbolic guarantee of her sexual innocence. This book traces the history of this curious development from Homer to the end of the sixteenth century in France. Through analyses of both famous and little-known texts, it illustrates the complexity and fecund liberty of Homeric reception.

This volume explores the treatise Giuochi mathematici, which is only the second known collection of mathematical riddles written in Italian. This treatise was written by Piero d'Antonio di Nicolao da Filicaia between 1515 and 1516, but was not published at the time. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the minds of the people of the Renaissance and is a valuable resource for historians of mathematics and enthusiasts of Florentine Renaissance culture. This edition, based on the two extant manuscripts of this work, brings this intriguing text to light for the first time and allows you to explore the rich tradition of mathematical riddles.