Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty. By isaac Yue. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 199. $110 ; $40.

ZusammenfassungFür die mittelhochdeutschen Romane um 1200 läßt sich eine spezifische sozialgeschichtliche Einbettung annehmen, die Konsequenzen für ein Modell literarischer Kommunikation hat. Im Zusammenspiel von Verfassern, geistlichen Beratern – dem Hofklerus – und zunächst einmal adligen Damen entstehen die Texte, denen eine hofklerikale Perspektive auf Fragen feudaladliger Existenz eignet: Die ästhetisch komplexen volkssprachigen Texte lassen klare Problembezüge erkennen. Im Rahmen dieses Modells literarischer Kommunikation wird der Erec Hartmanns von Aue als Absage an Versuche ritterlicher Selbsterlösung gedeutet, denen der sich der göttlichen (...) Gnade öffnende Wille des demütig Gläubigen gegenübergestellt wird. Der Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg scheint mit Blick auf die Protagonisten ein Negativexempel zu entwickeln, wobei durch suggestive Gestaltungsdynamiken das Abrücken der edelen herzen von Tristan und Isolde zunächst verhindert und dann umso stärker forciert wird.A specific social-historical embedding can be assumed for the Middle High German novels around 1200, which has consequences for a model of literary communication: In the interplay of authors, spiritual advisers and first of all noble women, the texts are created for which a courtly-clerical perspective on questions of feudal noble existence is suitable. The aesthetically complex vernacular texts focus on certain problems. In the context of this model of literary communication, Hartmann of Aue’s Erec is interpreted as a rejection of attempts at knightly self-redemption, which are contrasted with the will of the humble believer, which opens up to divine grace. Gottfried of Strasbourg’s Tristan seems to tell of a negative example with regard to the protagonists, whereby the edele herzen move away from Tristan and Isolde only in an aesthetic process of reception. (shrink)

In the late first and early second millennia, mainland Southeast Asians created sophisticated techniques to accurately and efficiently render Pali into local vernaculars, including Burmese, Khmer, Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Mon, and Siamese. These techniques for vernacular reading, parallel to approaches for reading Latin in medieval Europe and Literary Sinitic in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, led to the development of bitexts that contained a mix of Pali and vernacular material. Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, (...) gradually allowed second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali. To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand and Northern Thailand. These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular. (shrink)

This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the "mother tongue" during a period of revolutionary change for the English (...) language. The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the "courtly" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. _The Idea of the Vernacular_ will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory. (shrink)

Language, vernacular and philosophy -- Sperone Speroni between language and logic -- Benedetto Varchi and the idea of a vernacular logic (1540) -- Antonio Tridapale and the first vernacular logic (1547) -- Nicolo Massa's logic for natural philosophy (1549) -- Alessandro Piccolomini's instrument of philosophy (1551).

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 143-160, May 2022. Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented amount of conflict around visual representations in India. The field of the visual is the new terrain for rumour mongering and for maiming uncomfortable oppositional voices. With the fast-spreading mobile culture, penetrating social media and continued legacy of the pictorial as an embodiment of the real, the visual has taken over both the oral as well as the written words in its usefulness (...) to serve the political. Can we simply comprehend such a visual aggression by taking recourse in the enhanced role of visual media in our everyday life, along the lines of a ‘visual turn’? Is the visual sphere another surface of politics? With these key questions, this article revisits certain contemporary visual events by focusing on words that float in public spaces from streets to television screens. On a broader terrain, with an emphasis on aesthetics, the article relooks at an often-settled equation between the visual and the political on the one hand and the question of the visual as an archive of the contemporary on the other. Following Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as a field of the distribution of the sensible, this article has tried to focus on vernacular words circulating outside the confines of the literature and create a domain of political communication hitherto ignored by scholars. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Latin Literature. A HistoryRichard F. ThomasGian Biagio Conte. Latin Literature. A History. Translated by Joseph B. Solodow. Revised by Don Fowler and Glenn W. Most. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xxxiii 1 827 pp. $65.00.The work under review is a translation of Gian Biagio Conte’s 1987 book Letteratura latina; Manuale storico dalle origini alla fine dell’ impero, a book whose title page (...) acknowledged the collaboration of Alessandro Barchiesi, Emanuele Narducci, Giovanni Polara, Giuliano Ranucci, and Gianpiero Rosati. In the translation these scholars have been moved into C.’s “Acknowledgements,” making room for the new group on the title page, as given above. Of these, Don Fowler provided a bibliography and “in a sense has helped to direct the whole editorial enterprise,” while Glenn Most (like Solodow, one of C.’s English translators), rewrote sections on reception. Elaine Fantham introduces the work with an encomiastic “blurb” and general appreciation of the scholarship of C. C.’s own preface adds to the “gang of five” original collaborators a new group of three (Mario Labate, Alessandro Schiesaro, Rolando Ferri) who “have freely given me the support of their attentive and considerate criticism.” One recent reviewer talks of “the thorough control of the material by the single mind of the original author” (Robert P. Sonkowsky, The Key Reporter 61.3 [1996] 13), as does another for whom “the book is the production of a single mind” (J. Griffin, “The Long Latin Line,” review in New York Review of Books [Oct. 6, 1994] 43); it therefore seems only right to register my dissent from such a judgment.Much in Latin studies right now seems to involve a pack mentality: teams toil away for their grex, writing encomiastic and disingenuously uncritical reviews, or footnotes acknowledging the help of other teammates, attending conferences, organizing group-solidifying essay collections, even new series and manifestoes promising a “New Latin”—a term that seems to have no particular theoretical or intellectual content, nor a purpose other than to appeal vaguely for some sort of postmodernist approval. Barbara F. McManus’ summary of a paper on the uses of e-mail for mobilizing interest groups, delivered at a conference on computers and the classics by the very editor of the book under review, Don Fowler (“The Scroll and the Screen: Computers and Classical Literary Criticism”), gives a clear account of procedure and techniques in use:Electronic communication allows small groups with strongly related interests to form, cohere, and influence the larger disciplinary community; because such groups start with fundamental agreement on intellectual frameworks and approaches, they can develop ideas rapidly and in depth.(2/8/97 )What happens when other, less organized and more individual, insights fail to coincide with the “fundamental agreement” of the “group,” and how, we might wonder, will such individualism hold up in the face of this mission to “influence the larger disciplinary community”? [End Page 471]Be all this as it may and whatever the realities of authorship, the achievement of Gian Biagio Conte’s volume is a signal one. Latin Literature is a work of considerable value, a work which I have already used with success in teaching the history of Latin literature. Whatever the state of its authorship, I would now move to a review of some of its merits, which are considerable, and in which C. himself is obviously a participant throughout. The book begins with the origins of Latin literature and extends to Bede and the national literatures that were to transmit Latin literature into the vernaculars, that would in turn connect the essential themes and fundamental concerns of classical Latin literature to the cognate and evolving experiences of later antiquity and the middle ages. The original authors worked to a formulaic scheme: generally “Life,” “Works,” some treatment of cultural/political/social context, “Literary Success” (for the Italian “Fortuna”—I would have preferred “Reception”), and bibliography. This latter, again by Fowler, is developed from the Italian version and is generally made more international, often with the result that it sits somewhat uneasily with the original articles, which are largely unchanged, and whose authors presumably made... (shrink)

This collection of new essays locates Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae in the medieval context of Latin learning and vernacular translations. The first part is devoted to the Latin commentary tradition, while the other parts explore the vernacular traditions.

This study centers on a valuable specimen of the early vernacular Chinese novel, San Sui pingyao zhuan, to explore dynamic possibilities at the formative stage of the Chinese novel. Close inspection of the physical aspects of the extant edition of the work suggests it is a reprint bearing traces of multiple earlier editions. The analysis of the obscure chuanqi play Si xi ji shows that the story tradition of “Three Sui quelling the rebels” already existed in the mid-sixteenth century. (...) San Sui pingyao zhuan shares much common ground with early zaju drama, fifteenth-century cihua (chantefables), and pinghua (historical novels). Linking this novel with other early examples of popular literature that preceded or were contemporaneous with it, my study deepens our understanding of the formation of the early vernacular novel as well as the world of popular literature in which the novel was situated. (shrink)

In all European countries, the eighteenth century was characterised by efforts to improve the vernaculars. The Transylvanian case study shows how both codified medical language and ordinary language were constructed and enriched by a large number of medical books and brochures. The publication of medical literature in Central European vernacular languages in order to popularise new medical knowledge was a comprehensive programme, designed on the one hand by intellectual, political and religious elites who urged the improvement of the (...) fatherland and the promotion of the common good by perfecting the arts and sciences. On the other hand, the imperial administration’s initiatives affected local forms of medical knowledge and the construction of vernacular languages. In the eighteenth century, the construction of vernacular languages in the Habsburg Monarchy took on a significant political character. However, in the process of building of the scientific and medical vocabulary, the main preoccupation was precision, clarity and accessibility of the neologisms being invented to encompass the medical phenomena being described. In spite of political conflicts among the ‘nations’ living in Transylvania, physicians borrowed words from German, Hungarian and Romanian. Thus they elevated several words used in everyday language to the upper social stratum of language use, leading to the invention of new terms to describe particular medical practices or phenomena. (shrink)

The year 1400 is one of those loudly proclaimed milestones in English literary history in which the vagaries of human life and human chronological systems appear to come together with unusual appropriateness. The year not only of a new century's beginning but of the death of the old century's most important poet, 1400 has often been taken by Middle English scholars to mark one of those crucial transitions between an age of gold and one of brass: between the Age of (...) Chaucer and the glories of Ricardian literature, on the one hand, and that of what is persistently taken, on the other, as the dullness and all-too-proper humility of fifteenth-century writing—dedicated as so much of it seems to be to the sterile elevation and imitation of the beloved “father and master” Chaucer. So well naturalized has this model become, and so much has it consequently influenced the reading habits of Middle English scholars, that it is only now becoming possible to recognize the model as a construct inherited from the fifteenth century itself: a cultural formation, founded on half-truths, which deserves attention as an object, more than a tool, of critical analysis. Thus it has been only recently that serious reflection has begun both on the nature of the changes of which Chaucer's death has been taken as a symbol and on the ideological manipulations for which that year, as the sign of the end of an era, has been used as an only apparently natural substitute. (shrink)

Essays concerned with the transmission of Boethian philosophy and poetry also relate to medieval translation practice, the emergence of European literature, reception history, and manuscript studies. 'Knowledge of the understanding of Boethius inthe middle ages is considerably enhanced. 'REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES.

When do people say that they are moved, and does this experience constitute a unique emotion? We review theory and empirical research on being moved across psychology and philosophy. We examine feeling labels, elicitors, valence, bodily sensations, and motivations. We find that the English lexeme being moved typically (but not always) refers to a distinct and potent emotion that results in social bonding; often includes tears, piloerection, chills, or a warm feeling in the chest; and is often described as pleasurable, (...) though sometimes as a mixed emotion. While we conclude that it is a distinct emotion, we also recommend studying it in a more comprehensive emotion framework, instead of using the ambiguous vernacular term being moved as a scientific term. (shrink)

Introduction: Teaching and misleading -- Ethical fables and antifeminist exempla -- From sermon story to novella -- Lives of saints; lives of sinners -- Classical and vernacular exempla -- Magister amoris -- Afterword in time of plague.

Discursive history of the English language has been vital to analysing ‘the postcolonial condition’ in the Indian subcontinent, with a broadly overarching emphasis on how English is a ‘usurper language’. Simultaneous to this, however, there exists a hitherto understudied history featuring subaltern, ‘organic intellectuals’ from the lower castes. Not only does this ‘subaltern history of English’ exhibit a more positive affect toward the English language – by invoking its emancipatory potential in an economy of deeply casteist vernacular languages – (...) but it also complicates multiple assertions that the postcolonial apparatus has so far held as a priori. Jotirao Phule’s Slavery/Gulamgiri (1873) is one of the foremost examples of such a position; its preface, which lucidly announces this seemingly unique position, is quite possibly the first explicitly political treatise written in the English language in the history of the subcontinent. This paper highlights the enormous shifts that take place in our understanding of the history of English – and (post)colonial modernity – if we were to (aptly) classify Phule’s preface as a key text in the history of ‘Indian writing in English’. Subsequently, it is argued that Phule’s work crystallizes into a radically alternate – and far more egalitarian – conception of ‘world literature’ contra Tagore’s well-known idea of visva sahitya. (shrink)

A vernacular fifteenth-century sermon tells us, in order to warn of the threats to spiritual welfare posed by dance, that cyclic motion and centering of sensory impressions – amongst them intimate conversation – are essential elements of dance. When blending out the parenesis, implicit poetics of medieval dance can be distilled from that sermon. The way how these essential elements of dance are used for generating disruptions within literary plots will be demonstrated in three literary texts dating from the (...) thirteenth to the fifteenth century: Disruptions in connection with dance occur when contrary concepts of motion clash with each other, for example the linearity of the chivalrous way through the Other World with the cyclicity of round dances. ‚Der Württemberger‘, however, collides two contrary concepts of time which can be paraphrased as spatial metaphors, namely the linearity of earthly life which collides with the cyclicity of eternal damnation, a collision symbolized by the expulsion of life out of the dance of the death. Finally in ‚Ritter Sociabilis‘, dance generates a virtual space which subverts the courtly society. The protagonists of all these texts differently manage to resolve disruptions, namely by redemption, by repentance, or by continuing disruptions which they have caused themselves. (shrink)

The article examines the developments that made the legend of an Asian migration into Europe part of mainstream historiography during the eighteenth century. It was believed that the Norse god Odin was in fact a historical person, who had migrated from Asia to with the north of Europe with his tribe. The significance of this legend to how medieval poetry was received and debated in England has received little attention. The study falls into three sections. The first will trace the (...) significance of the Odin migration legend in discovering Germanic cultural origins. The second section examines the impact of the legend on philological studies, primarily in establishing a new category: the Gothic (i.e. Teutonic/germanic) poetic tradition. The final section will focus on the debate between two of the most important eighteenth-century pioneers of vernacular poetic tradition: Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton. Their discussion over whether the Asian foundation of Germanic (and thereby English) tradition had paved the way for later Arabian influences is instructive, as it shows how Eastern “others” were negotiated in the discovery of cultural and national roots. (shrink)

The main theses advocated here run as follows: Medieval literature rests on ›Weltanschauung‹ and literary theory of Antiquity and Christianity, even when it is no longer Latin but vernacular literature. It adheres to tradition, not least by clinging to principal genres, especially to fabula and historia in the field of narrative. The modern ›willing suspension of disbelief‹ does not exist yet. Latin tradition influences Germanic literature either direct or via Romanic literatures. Research must take the same (...) way instead of analyzing old texts with the help of modern methods, which were successfully applied to modern texts. (shrink)

This article consists of three sections: the first sketches the development of calculating the timing of the New Moon from biblical times onward with special emphasis on the Byzantine/Romaniote communities; the second contains the critical edition of the announcement of the New Moon from four late medieval manuscripts, where the Judaeo-Greek text complements the Aramaic version of this announcement that was recited in Romaniote synagogues; and the third presents a philological commentary on the Judaeo-Greek version/versions of this announcement. Its main (...) goal is to place the language of the announcement, that is unique for its use of the vernacular, in the context of Byzantine vernacular literature, which has primarily been preserved in poetry. While substantial differences exist between the two versions identified by the authors, the Aramaic and the Greek texts both strive to create the impression of great antiquity through the use of images associated with the Temple and by linguistic means. Dating these texts earlier than the eighth century is unlikely, though, and the Greek text does not permit a terminus ante quem. Considering its thematic content and the use of archaic language(s) as constituens textus, which can run counter to a certain modernization, we may understand this decision as symbolic act by the Romaniotes to push their claim of diaspora ancestry reaching back to Late Antiquity or possibly the Second Temple Period. Another significant strand that can be discerned in the Greek version is the strong Byzantine background being evoked for its intended audience. Through their deliberate effort to archaise their origins, the Romaniote Jews, like their Christian neighbors, display Ancient Greek as a symbol of their identity. (shrink)

L’articolo offre un’analisi puntuale dei versi che Dante dedica a Maometto nel ventottesimo canto dell’Inferno, al fine di precisarne le finalità poetiche e ideologiche; il passo viene poi collocato nel contesto costituito dai numerosi riferimenti al profeta dell’Islam presenti nella letteratura italiana duecentesca e primo-trecentesca, qui raccolti, analizzati e organizzati in maniera puntuale. Gli elementi connotativi riconosciuti nell’episodio infernale e in altri riferimenti alla civiltà islamica che si leggono nel capolavoro dantesco, pur nella loro geniale eccezionalità artistica, risultano così coerentemente (...) inseribili in un più vasto e articolato panorama culturale che emerge dalla ricerca, nel quale, all’ostilità per l’Islam inteso come entità religiosa e politica, si affianca la curiosità per il mondo musulmano percepito invece come comunità culturale, rilevabile anche presso fasce inaspettate del pubblico medievale.This paper analyses the episode of Muhammad in Dante’s Inferno, recognizing its poetical and ideological features in order to proceed with its insertion in the survey of references to the prophet detectable in the Italian literature of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries. The study allows to identify the substantial coherence between Dante’s ideological opinions toward Islam and the positions about the same subject expressed in the other works of the vernacular literature of his time, showing a general rejection for religious and political Islam, but also the interest for Islam as cultural entity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s LegacyPaul Richard BlumChristopher S. Celenza. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 210. Cloth, $45.00This is a programmatic book about why and how philosophy should care about Renaissance texts. Celenza starts with an assessment of the neglect of the wealth of Latin Renaissance [End Page 485] sources by (...) nineteenth-century historiography, followed by portraits of two prototypal twentieth-century historians and their philosophical approach. He proposes a method of study for Renaissance thinkers and exemplifies it with two key figures and with the concept of honor. A survey of the field of study and an appendix concerning Renaissance research in the US conclude the book."The Renaissance" as a field of research between the Middle Ages and what is now cowardly called "Early Modern" became legitimate through the awakening of national consciousness in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the emphasis lay on vernacular language works in Italy and elsewhere. Latin Renaissance literature never was worthy of Grossforschung, i.e., of national projects like the academy enterprises concerning world history or classical studies, even though classical philology originated in the humanists' emulation of the ancients. This however would be absorbed by the nineteenth-century idea of national character (12).Italian Hegelianism of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century included Renaissance philosophy in the evolution of national spirit, and the late Eugenio Garin as its pupil spent his scholarly life portraying with astounding precision and detail Italian Humanism and Renaissance as a dialectic and rational development. Equally diligent was the German born Paul Oskar Kristeller, clinging, however, to a very different understanding of philosophy, which Celenza describes as rationalist in the Kantian and metaphysical in the Platonico-Aristotelian tradition (41). Here the author underestimates the influence of Heidegger on Kristeller: his dissertation was clearly an interpretation of Plotinus in the light of existentialism, which still transpires in his famous Ficino book and many later philosophical statements. The problem with both approaches, that of Garin and that of Kristeller, is that those philosophers who ignore history (deliberately or incidentally) and those who lost an understanding of metaphysics do not know how to read Renaissance thinkers.'Microhistory' is the formula Celenza proposes: Richard Rorty's abolishing the notion of 'representing' reality in favor of evocation and conversation—both for the interpretation of the past and the past itself—and Pierre Bourdieux's notions of 'field' and 'relational thinking' open the possibility of locating past thinkers in their community and, consequently, the meaning of their philosophical endeavor. What Celenza exercised with Garin and Kristeller applies also to Renaissance authors. Under the heading 'Orthodoxy,' Celenza shows that it is unfortunate to censure Lorenzo Valla (+ 1457) or Marsilio Ficino (+ 1499) as being unorthodox or as precursors to the Reformation, because this perspective misses the point of their lives' work—namely, to find out what makes Christian beliefs and their sources Christian. Valla's discoveries in Greek and Latin philology and Ficino's experiments with magic are part of their scrutiny of orthopraxy (my term), the right way of Christian life, and are embedded in their conversations with friend and foe, who in some cases still await discovery. The far-reaching message of these two samples is: reading their work and studying their conversations is the way to study philosophy in the fifteenth century.The same is proven by engaging in social concepts such as 'honor.' Starting with a surprising appreciation of gender studies, Celenza suggests taking a look at intellectual masculinity among courtiers and writers. Then it turns out that Machiavelli bequeathed to modernity—perhaps as a caricature—the structure of struggle for power, ideas, and provision in which humanists were engaged, being the first large generation of intellectuals outside the safe haven of cathedrals and convents."What is really there?" is the concluding question. A new canon, the prelude to early modern sociology of scholarship, and models of—presently highly acclaimed—contextualization of intellectual productivity. Returning to the Latinity of Renaissance sources Celenza shows that even the emergence of vernacular literature, which bewitched nationalist historiography, was by itself a fruit... (shrink)

Tim Blanning & Hagen Schulze: IntroductionJames Sheehan: Art and its Publics, c. 1800Silke Leopold: The Idea of National Opera around 1800John Deathridge: The Invention of German Music, c. 1800Peter Alter: Playing with the Nation: Napoleon and the Culture of NationalismSiegfried Weichlein: Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, NationalismPeter Mandler: Art in a Cool Climate: The Cultural Policy of the British State in European Context, c. 1780- c. 1850Otto Dann: The Invention of National LanguagesHans-Erich Bödeker: The Debates about Universal History and National History around 1800: (...) A Problem-oriented Historical AttemptVincent Morley: Views of the Past in Irish Vernacular Literature, 1650-1850. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Tibullus: Elegies II. With introduction and commentaryThomas A. SuitsPaul Murgatroyd, ed. Tibullus: Elegies II. With introduction and commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xx + 305 pp. Cloth, $65.00.This is the companion volume to Murgatroyd’s Tibullus I (Pietermaritzburg, 1980) and with it forms the first detailed commentary on the poet since Kirby Flower Smith’s 1913 edition. The editor has been better served by the Clarendon than the University of (...) Natal Press in that the quality of production is superior and the layout less huddled. Users will want to have access to Tibullus I, however, since Murgatroyd makes regular reference to it. In the main, the new volume follows the pattern of its predecessor; but since the latter received relatively little critical notice in English-language periodicals, it seems appropriate to describe principal features, especially where they represent a change from Murgatroyd’s previous practice.General matters received attention in the introduction to Tibullus I, and so the introduction here is brief, addressing the question of the completeness of this extraordinarily short libellus, its structure, and its main characters. The text is essentially Postgate’s 1915 OCT, without apparatus but rather with the handful of departures discussed in a critical appendix.The commentary itself is bulky—254 pages on only 430 verses, or an average of more than a page per distich. (By way of comparison, the commentary in Tibullus I averages just over half a page per distich.) Each elegy has an introductory essay; each of the five to nine sections into which Murgatroyd divides a poem receives its own introduction; and each distich is discussed separately in detail. All this is rather daunting, and few, other than reviewers, are likely to work through the whole, but there is something to engage readers wherever they decide to dip into it. As befits a commentary on a poet whose Alexandrianism is becoming ever more appreciated, Murgatroyd’s work exhibits both sensitivity [End Page 498] and sophistication. In what follows I touch on some of the book’s leitmotifs, in an attempt to convey its general character.There is naturally a vast store of material illustrative of both language and subject matter, selected from predecessors (the debt to Smith is considerable, though he is not followed in his predilection for copious parallels from modern vernacular literatures) and augmented by the editor, in part through diligent use of the TLL and OLD. Unlike Tibullus I, this volume provides English translations for the relatively few Greek quotations. My extensive samplings suggest a rare degree of accuracy in the citations.In his interpretations, Murgatroyd will often leave open a number of possibilities: e.g., “may refer to... or... or... may denote... or... could be... or... may mean... or... if...” is the wording in one short paragraph on 2.3.1–2. Again, he will lay before the reader a whole menu of possible senses, as he does for nubilus (on 2.5.75–76); it is salutary to be reminded of the wide range of possible connotations, even where one seems to deserve clear preference.A similar lack of dogmatism characterizes Murgatroyd’s many attempts to describe rhythmic and sound effects. Conscious of how subjective these can be, he always couches them guardedly, as (on 2.4.7–10), “the sudden preponderance of spondees and assonance involving long vowels seem to me to have an air of dejection and weariness.” Likewise, he is appropriately cautious in his frequent suggestions of possible etymological plays (here building on F. Cairns, Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome [Cambridge 1979] 90–99); the general phenomenon, in any case, is clearly established, even if particular instances may be in doubt.Another recurrent type of note seeks to establish instances where Tibullus was the first to use a word in a new sense or to use a particular word combination (iunctura). Although the accidents of preservation make absolute claims in this area impossible, Murgatroyd makes an impressive case for Tibullus’ inventiveness. He is on more solid ground in his analyses of artistry in the word arrangement in individual lines and distichs. He has a very keen sense for this and demonstrates an impressive variety of... (shrink)

Sixteenth‐century Germany witnessed a tremendous flourishing of vernacular literature. An unprecedented number and variety of texts were produced for new groups of readers. This essay analyzes one underexplored genre of this vernacular literature: texts on the natural world. Numerous books on animals, plants, minerals, and natural marvels rolled off the German presses in this period, indicating a widespread curiosity about the natural world. These texts give valuable insight into the views of nature available to a broad (...) lay audience, literate in German but not necessarily in Latin. They reveal a pervasive sense of nature as divinely created and a deep conviction that contemplation of the natural world would lead to greater piety. The divine and the mundane were thoroughly intertwined in vernacular natural histories. While other historians of science have seen the sixteenth century as a period of increasingly secular ways of thinking about nature, I argue for the persistence, and even the intensification, of profoundly religious attitudes toward the natural world. (shrink)

Arguably, the modern missionary movement’s foundational text, the ‘Great Commission’ of Matthew 28:18–20 has been criticized for its use in legitimizing colonial oppression. Focusing on reception history in South Asian polycolonial contexts, this article uses ‘Saidian’ contrapuntal reading to explore whether and for whom the commission is ‘great’? William Carey used it as a proof-text in his ‘Enquiry’ for Christians to engage in foreign mission. RS Sugirtharajah brings a postcolonial critique to Carey, but Saugata Bhaduri appreciates the unintended de-colonizing consequences (...) of Carey’s vernacular literature. Jayachitra Lalitha questions why women were absent in Matthew 28:18–20 and why Dalit women still struggle. George Soares-Prabhu’s reading alongside a Buddhist text suggests more integral mission and liberation. Despite colonialism’s distorting affect, there is historical irony in Matthew 28’s influence in South India. Contrapuntal conversations helpfully focus on the well-being of overlooked groups and recover some of the resistance implicit in Matthew’s composition. (shrink)

In the pages of the Latin chroniclers writing around 1200 the jongleur appears as a gray, furtive shadow. His existence was acknowledged by the broad term joculator, but his functions were too suspect to deserve further comment. The clerical chroniclers associated jongleurs with other lay activities, such as making love, admiring feminine beauty, holding festivities, and fighting in tournaments, about which the less said, the better. In contemporary vernacular literature, however, the jongleur's image springs into sharp focus and (...) takes on vivid colors. (shrink)

In Making Sex (1990), Thomas Laqueur argued for a dramatic shift in Western medical understandings of sex difference circa 1800, falsely claiming that before then women were generally understood as imperfect men, their genitals trapped inside their bodies by their lack of complexional heat. In fact, the period before 1800 saw the coexistence of competing traditions relating to genital anatomy and function, in which Arabic medical compendia, largely ignored by Laqueur, played an important role. European interest in the inside/out model (...) of the genitals was initially specific to the late medieval Latin surgical tradition. Later elaborated by several sixteenth-century medical writers, including the surgeons Jacopo Berengario of Carpi and Ambroise Paré, it was moribund in learned European medicine by 1600, though it continued to flourish for several decades in vernacular literature, medical and nonmedical, in large part because it invited an explicit discussion of sexual practices. (shrink)

French culture is unique in that philosophy has played a significant role from the early-modern period onwards, intimately associated with political, religious, and literary debates, as well as with epistemological and scientific ones. While Latin was the language of learning there was a universal philosophical literature, but with the rise of vernacular literatures things changed and a distinctive national form of philosophy arose in France. This Very Short Introduction covers French philosophy from its origins in the sixteenth century (...) up to the present, analysing it within its social, political, and cultural context. Beginning with psychology and epistemology, Stephen Gaukroger and Knox Peden then move onto the emergence of radical philosophy in the eighteenth century, before considering post-revolutionary philosophy in the nineteenth century, philosophy in the world wars, the radical thought of the 1960s, and finally French philosophy today. Throughout, they explore the dilemma sustained by the markedly national conception of French philosophy, and its history of speaking out on matters of universal concern. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle AgesMichael CalabreseRhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, by Rita Copeland; xiv & 295 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, $64.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.In this deeply learned book, Rita Copeland studies the history of rhetoric and grammar and their shifting roles in the history of translation, commentary, and interpretation from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages. Copeland examines the ideological (...) nexus of history, authority, and power in which commentary and vernacular translation function. “Vernacular writing,” she says, can “authorize itself by taking over the function of academic discourse” (p. 8). Her book then traces the history of this “authorization” and this “dis-placement” of Latin sources by the increasingly academically privileged vernacular. All in all, Copeland tells the story of how medieval literary culture articulated its translatio studii by confronting and preserving its Classical inheritance and also developing a role for the vernacular as an active, creative agent in the production of authoritative works. [End Page 413]Ultimately “rhetoric” is the star of Copeland’s book, and in essence she is telling its Roman and medieval life stories. By “rhetoric” we are to understand critical academic language that points toward ethics and practical action. Throughout the Middle Ages every modification or appropriation of critical tools expands the role of commentary and adds new forms of interpretive invention to the translation process. As Copeland puts it, “The medieval practice of translation as a form of appropriation and substitution will be conditioned, as in Roman contexts, by rhetorical theories of invention” (p. 36).The hermeneutical costar is grammar, for as part of the complex appropriation of classical practice, medieval readers recoup the “debased” Roman category of grammar, so that by the time of Martianus Capella it can “claim for itself the whole compass of literary activity” (p. 56). As grammar expands its power, so does rhetoric, a civic Roman art which gets “revalued in terms of service to theology” (p. 59). Medieval commentary now “assumes the character of rhetorical performance” (p. 86) and takes on a “primary productive character,” as it “continually refashions the [studied] text for changing conditions of understanding” (p. 64). What is emerging from all these developments is a medieval translation theory—and practice—which is informed by both academic and practical, ethical goals, that is, a hermeneutics forged by the link of grammar and rhetoric.The rest of the book studies the shifting status and the evolving role of the vernacular in this medieval hermeneutical drama. Copeland addresses the Ovide moralisé and the French translations of the Consolatio, and then Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. We witness here how vernacular products take on authority by “inventing themselves” through authoritative discourse. In Gower’s Confessio we see the fusion of hermeneutics and rhetoric; the poem uses academic modes of discourse in the service of ethics or action. We thus see that by the late Middle Ages vernacular literature plays an authoritative role in the medieval translatio studii, as Gower seeks to “open the institution of learning to the widest possible audience and thereby empower it as a persuasive tool, leading to knowledge of the good” (p. 220). Overall, Copeland has told the story of the “leveling” of academic and vernacular discourse, so that the later, while not dispelling or overthrowing the former, can claim access to its traditional authority.Copeland’s prose is Latinate, at times pedantic and, at times, just plain Latin; reading the book can be a wearing experience. But it is all part of a history she knows in remarkable detail, a history that lies behind many assumptions we have about medieval ethical poetics. To have presented this history is a major scholarly feat. Copeland allows us to see medieval authors as both products and producers of methods of appropriation, imitation, conquest, and preservation—all strategies for “translating” the past and creating a present that can leave its intellectual mark on the future. One might now want to employ Copeland’s history of classical and medieval hermeneutics as a tool for [End Page 414] examining our own, contemporary academic rhetorics and for analyzing the “state of... (shrink)

Detailed summary in vernacular field only.

In the formation of vernacular North Indian literature in “Hindavī,” an important role is played by “Sufi romance” (premākhyān). The earliest love narrative known as Cāndāyan, written in 1379–80, by Maulānā Dāūd has been cited as evidence supporting arguments about the rise of literary vernaculars by scholars foregrounding religious and political factors in that process. The purpose of this article is to rethink the broader arguments by revisiting the historical circumstances at the time and through a close reading (...) for affect. It invites a shift in perception by demonstrating Cāndāyan’s roots in folk narrative performativity. Concurrent with that, it is a revision of the view that the author, Dāūd, was a member of the sultanate elite. Closely reading the text’s aesthetic elements also creates a new perspective regarding who its audience was. Finally, the article explores what constitutes a vernacular emotional regime and the role of emotional communities in the emergence of Hindavī. It goes beyond the specific case study in looking for new ways to conceptualize the connections between regional centers of power and early devotional communities, highlighting their deployment of interlinkages through multiple networks of cultural production. (shrink)

Samuel Lebens takes the three principles of Jewish faith, as proposed by Rabbi Joseph Albo (1380-1444), in order to scrutinize and refine them with the toolkit of contemporary analytic philosophy. What could it mean for a perfect being to create a world from nothing? Could our world be anything more than a figment of God's imagination? What is the Torah? What does Judaism expect from a Messiah, and what would it mean for a world to be redeemed? These questions are (...) explored in conversation with a wide array of Jewish sources and with an eye towards diverse fields of contemporary research, such as cosmology, philosophical logic, the ontology of literature, and the metaphysics of time. The Principles of Judaism articulates the most fundamental axioms of Orthodox Judaism in the vernacular of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The paper examines the problematic understanding of “risk” in entrepreneurial literature that locates courage in either the loss orgain of having or in the difficulty and hardship of the doing. We argue in this paper that what is lost in this vernacular view of courage is a deeper notion of the subjective dimension of work and the social need of society. Grounded within the Catholic social and moral tradition, we find a richer notion of courage, which in part (...) corrects and rounds out the insufficient description of the vernacular understanding of courage in entrepreneurship. What we also find in this account of the virtues and subjective dimension of work is greater explanatory power of what happens to the entrepreneur in the work that he or she does. The end result of this analysis is a more spiritual, ethical and social understanding of entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such as spelling, script and font, and punctuation - often neglected in critical engagement with past texts - relate closely to dynamic, shifting socio-cultural processes, imperatives and functions. This theme is illustrated through numerous case-studies in textual recuperation, ranging from the reinvention of Old (...) English poetry and prose in the later medieval and early modern periods, to the eighteenth-century 'vernacular revival' of literature in Older Scots. (shrink)

By some of the top philosophers in the field of aesthetics as well as those in the architectural profession, essays in this book related architecture to other artforms such as photography. literature and painting. relates architecture to other artforms such as photography, literature and painting contains essays by some of the world's top philosophers works with a diversity of architectural concepts and issues philosophical discussions are generated by professionally designed architectural projects as well as vernacular ones extends (...) the bounds of architectural issues presently discussed by philosophers. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno’s Cabala del cavallo pegaseo _ _grew out of the great Italian philosopher’s experiences lecturing and debating at Oxford in early 1584. Having received a cold reception there because of his viewpoints, Bruno went on in the Cabala to attack the narrow-mindedness of the university--and by extension, all universities that resisted his advocacy of intellectual freethinking. _The Cabala of Pegasus _consists_ _of vernacular dialogues that turn on the identification of the noble Pegasus and the humble ass. In the (...) interplay of these ideas, Bruno explores the nature of poetry, divine authority, secular learning, and Pythagorean metempsychosis, which had great influence on James Joyce and many other writers and artists from the Renaissance to the modern period. This book, the first English translation of _The Cabala of Pegasus, _contains both the English and Italian versions as well as helpful annotations. It will have particular appeal to all Renaissance scholars and those interested in the Renaissance cabalistic underpinnings of modern literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seventeenth-Century Catholic Polemic and the Rise of Cultural Rationalism: An Example from the EmpireSusan RosaIn Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Sagre-do, an intelligent, cultivated, and well-traveled young man who is persuaded of the truth of arguments in favor of the Copernican opinion presented by the philosopher Salviati, dismisses the counter-arguments of the Aristotelian Simplicio with sympathetic condescension: “I pity him,” he proclaims,no less than I should (...) some fine gentleman who, having built a magnificent palace at great trouble and expense, employing hundreds and hundreds of artisans, and then beholding it threatened with ruin because of poor foundations, should attempt, in order to avoid the grief of seeing the walls destroyed, adorned as they are with so many lovely murals; or the columns fall, which sustain the superb galleries, or the gilded beams, or the doors spoiled, or the pediments and the marble cornices, brought in at so much cost—should attempt, I say, to prevent the collapse with chains, props, iron buttresses, and shores. 1 [End Page 87]This elegant simile, which suggests that the fine gentleman can only preserve his palace by destroying its beauty, is meant to evoke the dilemma of the scholastic philosopher who is confronted by the evident disintegration of his intellectual home. Like the desperate owner who seeks to shore up his real palace, he must rebuild a philosophical edifice whose apparent beauty and coherence have been achieved at the expense of substance and can only be preserved by recourse to means so ugly and inadequate that they destroy even the illusion of credibility.Such a dilemma, I would argue, was the legacy bequeathed to many defenders of traditional religion in the seventeenth century by more than one hundred years of confessional rivalry. To simplify a complex process, this lengthy period of controversy and apologetic, to say nothing of warfare and mutual persecution, had generated a discourse which objectified and prob-lematized religion, making it something to think about rather than to think with. 2 In other words, the formal statements of conviction issued in the wake of the Reformation by competing denominations within Christendom, like the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Augsburg Confession, the Genevan Confession, or the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England had encouraged the development of the notion of religion as adherence to a set of propositions. As Peter Harrison has explained, this creation of a propositional religion in turnenabled discussion of the merits of other “religions” conceived to exist similarly as sets of beliefs. The truth or falsity of a religion had become a function of the truth or falsity of the propositions which constituted it. True religion... [had become]... a body of certain knowledge. 3Harrison’s remarks are significant because they suggest that the origins of rationalized discourse about religion and its consequent transformation from a way of thinking to an object of thought are to be found squarely within orthodoxy itself. 4To be specific, the competing content of official doctrinal pronouncements led not only to the comparison of the religions but implicitly to their emergence as subjects of a discourse which proposed reason as the norm, a [End Page 88] development clearly reflected in the wave of pamphlets, broadsides, printed disputations, and formal polemical treatises written in both Latin and the vernacular languages which poured from the presses of Catholic and mainstream Protestant denominations in England and on the continent throughout the seventeenth century. In this literature, Protestants accused Catholics of “superstition” and “idolatry,” while Catholics urged potential converts to compare the religions with a view to discovering their “marks of truth,” argued for the compatibility of Catholic faith and “natural light,” and identified heresy, on the contrary, with unreason, passion, lust, and self-contradiction. On both sides of the confessional fence, polemicists frequently insisted that religious discussion conform to the rules of logic, accusing one another of failing to argue from incontrovertible first principles, and of succumbing to the fatal dangers of petitio principii and circular reasoning. In other words, they claimed that in religious matters poor argumentation is a sure sign of error, and it would not be... (shrink)

“Mansplaining” is by now part of the common cultural vernacular. Yet, academic analyses of it—specifically, philosophical ones—are missing. This paper sets out to address just that problem. Analyzed through a lens of epistemic injustice, the focus of the analysis concerns both what it is, and what its harms are. I argue it is a form of epistemic injustice distinct from testimonial injustice wherein there is a dysfunctional subversion of the epistemic roles of hearer and speaker in a testimonial exchange. (...) As these are roles of power and are crucial to our existence and functioning within epistemic communities, the wrong and harms suffered from this injustice are serious and, I argue, distinct from other types already discussed in the literature. I close by considering an alternative model of mansplaining as a form of silencing, as well as briefly diagnosing its general underlying cause and possible solutions. (shrink)

This study questions the common premise that individualism was lacking in premodern China and contends that not only was the concept of the individual important in traditional China, but that it existed in interesting ways that are different from modes of individualism in the West. Key terms such as xing ("human nature"), xin ("heart-mind"), and ji ("self") are used to analyze various texts. In addition to weaving together ideas from history, philosophy, art, and literature, especially the literary dimensions of (...) late imperial history (both classical and vernacular), this study also incorporates Western intellectual tradition, including the ideas of thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and the Romantics. This inquiry into the moral philosophy and ethics of the self-seen in both its public and private dimensions in late imperial China is an important resource for scholars and students in many subfields of Chinese studies, such as history, intellectual history, art history, history of literature, and history of religion. (shrink)

A term of art, originally Italian, becoming common usage in other European vernaculars in the late sixteenth century. It meant practical reflection, albeit in writing and general in form, about all aspects of statecraft . It claimed practical usefulness in virtue of its grounding in experience and history, contrasting itself with “mirrors of princes,” which were supposedly ignorant of the realities of politics. More narrowly, reason of state meant a “Machiavellian” disregard for legal, moral, and religious considerations when the “interests (...) of the state” or “necessity” required it. Particularly contentious were the justifiability of dishonesty, duplicity, breach of faith and even treaty obligations, violence against opponents and competitors, illegal taxation, disregard of the claims of traditional institutions and officeholders, and the practice of religious toleration. Opponents of “reason of state” attempted to demonstrate that, on the contrary, adherence to religion, morality, and legality was the best policy, in that it earned providential rewards, but also that in strictly pragmatic terms it was most likely to bring political success. However, these proponents of “true reason of state” acknowledged that strict adherence to these norms was sometimes impossible, and when it was, statesmen must attempt to avoid the greater evil. Having become the subject of a vast literature and even a standard university topic, reason of state faded as an issue in the later seventeenth century. Realpolitik from the nineteenth century onwards resembles it, with the state representing a morality superior to the norms of legality and private morality, a view in turn contested by advocates of human rights and international morality. (shrink)