Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy PDF Author: Virginie Greene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316195104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new ways of storytelling and inventing fictions appeared in the French-speaking areas of Europe. This new art still influences our global culture of fiction. Virginie Greene explores the relationship between fiction and the development of neo-Aristotelian logic during this period through a close examination of seminal literary and philosophical texts by major medieval authors, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Abélard, and Chrétien de Troyes. This study of Old French logical fictions encourages a broader theoretical reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy and literature. Additional close readings of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and modern analytic philosophy including the work of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, demonstrate peculiar traits of Western rationalism and expose its ambivalent relationship to fiction.

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy PDF Author: Virginie Greene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316195104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new ways of storytelling and inventing fictions appeared in the French-speaking areas of Europe. This new art still influences our global culture of fiction. Virginie Greene explores the relationship between fiction and the development of neo-Aristotelian logic during this period through a close examination of seminal literary and philosophical texts by major medieval authors, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Abélard, and Chrétien de Troyes. This study of Old French logical fictions encourages a broader theoretical reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy and literature. Additional close readings of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and modern analytic philosophy including the work of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, demonstrate peculiar traits of Western rationalism and expose its ambivalent relationship to fiction.

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy PDF Author: Virginie Greene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107068746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This book examines the ways in which traditions of philosophy and logic are reflected in major works of medieval literature.

Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination

Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination PDF Author: Emma O. Bérat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009434756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Emma O. Bérat shows the centrality of women's legacies to medieval political and literary thought in chronicles, hagiography, and genealogy.

The Life Course in Old English Poetry

The Life Course in Old English Poetry PDF Author: Harriet Soper
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009315137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In the first book-length study of the whole lifespan in Old English verse, Harriet Soper reveals how poets depicted varied paths through life, including their staging of entanglements between human life courses and those of the nonhuman or more-than-human. While Old English poetry sometimes suggests that uniform patterns shape each life, paralleling patristic traditions of the ages of man, it also frequently disrupts a sense of steady linearity through the life course in striking ways, foregrounding moments of sudden upheaval over smooth continuity, contingency over predictability, and idiosyncrasy over regularity. Advancing new readings of a diverse range of Old English poems, Soper draws on an array of supporting contexts and theories to illuminate these texts, unearthing their complex and fascinating depictions of ageing through life. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia PDF Author: Jonas Wellendorf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108680410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
The coming of Christianity to Northern Europe resulted in profound cultural changes. In the course of a few generations, new answers were given to fundamental existential questions and older notions were invalidated. Jonas Wellendorf's study, the first monograph in English on this subject, explores the medieval Scandinavian reception and re-interpretation of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. This original work draws on a range of primary sources ranging from Prose Edda and Saxo Grammaticus' History of the Danes to less well known literary works including the Saga of Barlaam and the Hauksbók manuscript (c.1300). By providing an in-depth analysis of often overlooked mythological materials, along with translations of all textual passages, Wellendorf delivers an accessible work that sheds new light on the ways in which the old gods were integrated into the Christian worldview of medieval Scandinavia.

Chaucer's Scribes

Chaucer's Scribes PDF Author: Lawrence Warner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Important intervention in Middle English studies that challenges widely accepted narratives on the identities of Chaucer's scribes.

Chaucer and the Subversion of Form

Chaucer and the Subversion of Form PDF Author: Thomas A. Prendergast
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107192846
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Brings 'new formalist' approaches to Chaucer, focusing on formal agency, bodies, disability, ethics, poetics, reception, and scale.

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert PDF Author: Christiania Whitehead
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108802613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces, and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of his ascetic lifestyle and environment - frequently constituted as a nature sanctuary - interrogating its relation to his other jurisdictions.

The Roman de la rose in its Philosophical Context

The Roman de la rose in its Philosophical Context PDF Author: Jonathan Morton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192548611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The Roman de la rose in its Philosophical Context offers a new interpretation of the long and complex medieval allegorical poem written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century, a work that became one of the most influential works of vernacular literature in the European Middle Ages. The scope and sophistication of the poem's content, especially in Jean's continuation, has long been acknowledged, but this is the first book-length study to offer an in-depth analysis of how the Rose draws on, and engages with, medieval philosophy, in particular with the Aristotelianism that dominated universities in the thirteenth century. It considers the limitations and possibilities of approaching ideas through the medium of poetic fiction, whose lies paradoxically promise truth and whose ambiguities and self-contradiction make it hard to discern its positions. This indeterminacy allows poetry to investigate the world and the self in ways not available to texts produced in the Scholastic context of universities, especially those of the University of Paris, whose philosophical controversies in the 1270s form the backdrop against which the poem is analysed. At the heart of the Rose are the three ideas of art, nature, and ethics, which cluster around its central subject: love. While the book offers larger claims about the Rose's philosophical agenda, different chapters consider the specifics of how it draws on, and responds to, Roman poetry, twelfth-century Neoplatonism, and thirteenth-century Aristotelianism in broaching questions about desire, epistemology, human nature, the imagination, primitivism, the philosophy of art, and the ethics of money.

Middle English Mouths

Middle English Mouths PDF Author: Katie L. Walter
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108426611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.