Poetry And Philosophy In The Middle Ages

A collection of essays written by pupils, friends and colleagues of Professor Peter Dronke, to honour him on his retirement. The essays address the question of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in the Middle Ages. Contributors include Walter Berschin, Charles Burnett, Stephen Gersh, Michael Herren, Edouard Jeauneau, David Luscombe, Paul Gerhardt Schmidt, Joe Trapp, Jill Mann, Claudio Orlandi and John Marenbon. It is an important collection for both philosophical and literary specialists; scholars, graduate students and under-graduates in Medieval Literature and in Medieval Philosophy.

In the High Middle Ages, the dream narrative was an enormously popular and influential form. Along with the romance, it was perhaps the genre of the age. It has come down to us in such classics twelfth to fourteenth-century classics as The Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's early poetry, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. This book redefines the dream vision by attending to its role in philosophical debate of the time, a conservative role in defense of the high medieval synthesis of reason and revelation. Lynch shows how the epistemological basis of this synthesis and the theories of visions that emerged from it drew on Arabic commentaries of Aristotle. These theories informed poetic visions modeled on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work she discusses in detail before turning to Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Dante. A final section, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis shows how fourteenth and fifteenth-century writers extended and finally moved beyond the conventional form of the dream vision.

Contents: Early Mediaeval Christian Philosophy. Augustine, Boethius, John Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abailard and John of Salisbury. Islamic Philosophy. Alfarabi, Avicenna, Algazali, Averroes. Jewish Philosophy. Saddia, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Moses Maimonides, Levi Ben Gerson (Gersonides), Hasdai Crescas. Latin Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century. Bonaventure, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, Siger of Brabant, Thomas Aquinas, the Condemnation of 1277. Latin Philosophy in the Fourteenth Century. John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Marsilius of Padua, John Buridan. Selected Bibliography. Index.

Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages offers scholars of Dante's Divine Comedy an integral understanding of the political, philosophical, and religious context of the medieval masterwork. First penned in French by Ernest L. Fortin, one of America's foremost thinkers in the fields of philosophy and theology, Dissidence et philosophie au moyen-%ge brings to light the complexity of Dante's thought and art, and its relation to the central themes of Western civilization. Available in English for the first time through this superb translation by Marc A. LePain, Dissent and Philosophy will make a supremely important contribution to the discussion of Dante as poet, theologian, and philosopher.

In the later Middle Ages, many writers claimed that prose is superior to verse as a vehicle of knowledge because it presents the truth in an unvarnished form, without the distortions of meter and rhyme. Beginning in the thirteenth century, works of verse narrative from the early Middle Ages were recast in prose, as if prose had become the literary norm. Instead of dying out, however, verse took on new vitality. In France verse texts were produced, in both French and Occitan, with the explicit intention of transmitting encyclopedic, political, philosophical, moral, historical, and other forms of knowledge. In Knowing Poetry, Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay explore why and how verse continued to be used to transmit and shape knowledge in France. They cover the period between Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose (c. 1270) and the major work of Jean Bouchet, the last of the grands rhétoriqueurs (c. 1530). The authors find that the advent of prose led to a new relationship between poetry and knowledge in which poetry serves as a medium for serious reflection and self-reflection on subjectivity, embodiment, and time. They propose that three major works—the Roman de la rose, the Ovide moralisé, and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy—form a single influential matrix linking poetry and intellectual inquiry, metaphysical insights, and eroticized knowledge. The trio of thought-world-contingency, poetically represented by Philosophy, Nature, and Fortune, grounds poetic exploration of reality, poetry, and community.

In the High Middle Ages, the dream narrative was an enormously popular and influential form. Along with the romance, it was perhaps the genre of the age. It has come down to us in such classics twelfth to fourteenth-century classics as The Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's early poetry, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. This book redefines the dream vision by attending to its role in philosophical debate of the time, a conservative role in defense of the high medieval synthesis of reason and revelation. Lynch shows how the epistemological basis of this synthesis and the theories of visions that emerged from it drew on Arabic commentaries of Aristotle. These theories informed poetic visions modeled on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work she discusses in detail before turning to Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Dante. A final section, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis shows how fourteenth and fifteenth-century writers extended and finally moved beyond the conventional form of the dream vision.

Throughout the Middle Ages, fictional frameworks could be used as imaginative spaces in which to test or play with ideas without asserting their truth. The aim of this volume is to consider how intellectual problems were approached--if not necessarily resolved--through the kinds of hypothetical enquiry found in poetry and in other texts that employ fictional or imaginative strategies. Scholars working across the spectrum of medieval languages and academic disciplines consider why a writer might choose a fictional or hypothetical frame to discuss theoretical questions, how a work's truth content is affected and shaped by its fictive nature, or what kinds of affective or intellectual work its reading demands. By reading literary, philosophical, and spiritual texts from England, France, and Italy alongside each other, this collection offers a new interdisciplinary approach to the history of medieval thought.

Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays, dedicated to her work, examines gender as a construct of language, a mode of embodiment, and a critical framework for thinking about the past. Its eleven contributors approach the figure of the gendered body in medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, material-textual, and historical. The volume focuses on the ways that the medieval body becomes a site of inquiry and agency, whether in the form of the idealized feminine body of secular and religious lyric, the sexually permissive and permeable body of fabliau, or the intercessory body of religious devotional writing. The essays span a broad range of medieval literary works, from the lais of Marie de France to Pearl to Piers Plowman and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and a broad range of methodological approaches, from philosophy to affect and manuscript studies. Taken together, they celebrate the scholarly career of Elizabeth Robertson while also presenting a coherent and multifaceted investigation of the intersections of gender and medieval literary practice.

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.