The "Alexandreis" of Walter of Châtilon

The Author:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512809470
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Written sometime in the 1170s, Walter of Chatillon's Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great loomed as large on literary horizons as the works on Jean de Meun, Dante, or Boccaccio. Within a few decades of its composition, the poem had become a standard text of the literary curriculum. Virtually all authors of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries knew the poem. And an extraordinary two hundred surviving manuscripts, elaborately annotated, attest both to the popularity of the Alexandreis and to the care with which it was read by its medieval audience.

The "Alexandreis" of Walter of Châtilon

The Author:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512809470
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book

Book Description
Written sometime in the 1170s, Walter of Chatillon's Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great loomed as large on literary horizons as the works on Jean de Meun, Dante, or Boccaccio. Within a few decades of its composition, the poem had become a standard text of the literary curriculum. Virtually all authors of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries knew the poem. And an extraordinary two hundred surviving manuscripts, elaborately annotated, attest both to the popularity of the Alexandreis and to the care with which it was read by its medieval audience.

The Alexandreis

The Alexandreis PDF Author: Walter (of Châtillon)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description


Walter of Châtillon's "Alexandreis" Book 10

Walter of Châtillon's Author: Glynn Meter
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The final and most important book of Walter of Ch'tillon's Alexandreis is examined as a paradigm for both the compositional techniques and the meaning of the whole poem. These techniques are shown as being reliant on the medieval arts of composition, the strategies inherited from the Biblical paraphrasts and the strict discipline of classical epic hexameter. The author shows that Walter of Ch'tillon is not simply a classicising epigone of Vergil, but a master poet refining contemporary epic techniques and incorporating scientific and philosophic materials into an elegant moral diatribe against arrogance.

The Alexandreis

The Alexandreis PDF Author: Walter (of Châtillon)
Publisher: Peterborough, Ont. : Broadview Editions
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Walter of Châtillon’s Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great was a twelfth- and thirteenth-century “best-seller:” scribes produced over two hundred manuscripts. The poem follows Alexander from his first successes in Asia Minor, through his conquest of Persia and India, to his progressive moral degeneration and his poisoning by a disaffected lieutenant. The Alexandreis exemplifies twelfth-century discourses of world domination and the exoticism of the East. But at the same time it calls such dreams of mastery into question, repeatedly undercutting as it does Alexander’s claims to heroism and virtue and by extension, similar claims by the great men of Walter’s own generation. This extraordinarily layered and subtle poem stands as a high-water mark of the medieval tradition of Latin narrative literature. Along with David Townsend’s revised translation, this edition provides a rich selection of historical documents, including other writings by Walter of Châtillon, excerpts from other medieval Latin epics, and contemporary accounts of the foreign and “exotic.”

An Epitome of Biblical History

An Epitome of Biblical History PDF Author: David Townsend
Publisher: PIMS
ISBN: 9780888444806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
An epic of some 5500 lines on the life of Alexander the Great, Walter of Chatillon's Alexandreis stood, from the late twelfth century till the close of the Middle Ages, among the most successful and widely read works of Latin literature. This volume presents one free-standing version of the more or less 'standard' commentary on a uniquely celebrated passage from the poem. The lines in question, 176-274 of Book 4, describe a tomb commissioned by Alexander for the wife of Darius, after her death in captivity to the Greek commander. The painter Apelles devises for the tomb an iconographical schema largely devoted to rehearsal of the Hebrew Scriptures. The commentary elucidates Walter's compressed biblical references to the fictive tomb's illustrative cycle through extensive paraphrase of episodes from the Hebrew Bible.

The Alexandreis

The Alexandreis PDF Author: Walter Chatillon
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770480676
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Walter of Châtillon’s Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great was a twelfth- and thirteenth-century “best-seller:” scribes produced over two hundred manuscripts. The poem follows Alexander from his first successes in Asia Minor, through his conquest of Persia and India, to his progressive moral degeneration and his poisoning by a disaffected lieutenant. The Alexandreis exemplifies twelfth-century discourses of world domination and the exoticism of the East. But at the same time it calls such dreams of mastery into question, repeatedly undercutting as it does Alexander’s claims to heroism and virtue and by extension, similar claims by the great men of Walter’s own generation. This extraordinarily layered and subtle poem stands as a high-water mark of the medieval tradition of Latin narrative literature. Along with David Townsend’s revised translation, this edition provides a rich selection of historical documents, including other writings by Walter of Châtillon, excerpts from other medieval Latin epics, and contemporary accounts of the foreign and “exotic.”

Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis

Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis PDF Author: Maura K. Lafferty
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Walter of Chatillon, the twelfth-century Latin poet now famed for his satirical lyrics, acquired international renown in the Middle Ages for his epic on Alexander the Great, the Alexandreis. This work did for the Middle Ages what Vergil had done for the Romans, proving the ability of the moderni to rival the ancients in learning and the arts. The Alexandreis immediately joined the Aeneid in the medieval paideia and was read in schoolrooms throughout Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Alexandreis enters into the twelfth-century debate about education. The intellectual world was rapidly changing, as the schools became specialized and professionalized, threatening the hitherto secure position of the liberal arts and Latin literature in the educational curriculum. At the same time, translations from Arabic and Greek, not only of the works of Aristotle, but also of Arabic philosophers, had begun to alter the concerns and methodologies of Western scholars. Theologians increasingly used Hebrew commentaries in their studies of the Hebrew Scriptures. The awareness of the intellectual achievements both of the ancients and of highly-civilized non-Christian contemporary cultures had reached a new peak. Twelfth-century intellectuals were presented with the challenge of assimilating the flow of new works and ideas into western historiography and the Latin world-view. Walter's exploration of the problems of interpretating not only languages, but also the texts, philosophies, religions and literatures of the past, is the subject of this study.

An Epitome of Biblical History

An Epitome of Biblical History PDF Author: David Townsend
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781771103374
Category : Epic poetry, Latin (Medieval and modern)
Languages : en
Pages : 93

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Book Description


A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages

A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages PDF Author: David Zuwiyya
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004211934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Drawing on decades of research on Alexander literature from all over the world, this book is bound to become a medievalist's best companion. It studies Alexander romances from the East and the West in literary form and content.

The Tongue of the Fathers

The Tongue of the Fathers PDF Author: David Townsend
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812234404
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Although historians and scholars of vernacular medieval literatures have increasingly focused on constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality, specialists in medieval Latin have been largely isolated from such developments. Much scholarship on medieval Latin has remained grounded in the methodologies of the "old" philology. When readers from other disciplines have looked to Latin texts they have, in turn, used them mostly as benchmarks against which to measure the innovations of the vernacular. The Tongue of the Fathers forges a stronger and more productive relationship between medieval Latin and gender studies. David Townsend, Andrew Taylor, and their collaborators focus on the representations and constructions of gender and sexual difference in a range of texts emerging from the centers of twelfth-century cultural prestige and power. In chapters on Abelard, Heloise, Bernard Silvestris, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Walter of Châtillon, they consider, on the one hand, the ways twelfth-century Latin texts constituted Latin as a monologic tongue in support of patriarchy, and, on the other, the sites of resistance offered by the texts to the very ideologies they ostensibly supported.