‘Latin Literature and Material Culture’ by Michael Squire and Jaś Elsner, in R. Gibson and C. Whitton (eds), Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature, Cambridge (CUP), 2023, 613-699 (original) (raw)
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International Medieval Congress, Leeds University, 1-4 July 2019
The material accidents affecting manuscripts, which are frequently dismembered and recomposed in multiple ways, can have a substantial influence on the transmission of medieval texts. This session explores the manuscript tradition of selected works, in order to shed light on the material aspects of various transmission issues including the genesis of miscellaneous codices, the gathering of heterogeneous materials, or particularly complex and contaminated stemmas. Sometimes, the examination of manuscripts' physical features allows us to formulate hypotheses concerning their origin and the strategies employed by their compilers, or to postulate antigraphs that do not take the usual 'codex' form. Such matters are of great interest to scholars working on philological investigations and transmission histories. Paper a: 'Scheda est quod adhuc emendatur et necdum in libris redactum est': Material Philology and the Liber Glossarum PreHistory
Towards a History of Medieval Latin Literature
Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, 1996
Organized with the assistance of an international advisory committee of medievalists from several disciplines, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide is a new standard guide to the Latin language and literature of the period from c. A.D. 200 to 1500. It promises to be indispensable as a handbook in university courses in Medieval Latin and as a point of departure for the study of Latin texts and documents in any of the fields of medieval studies. Comprehensive in scope, the guide provides introductions to, and bibliographic orientations in, all the main areas of Medieval Latin language, literature, and scholarship. Part One consists of an introduction and sizable listing of general print and electronic reference and research tools. Part Two focuses on issues of language, with introductions to such topics as Biblical and Christian Latin, and Medieval Latin pronunciation, orthography, morphology and syntax, word formation and lexicography, metrics, prose styles, and so on. There are chapters on the Latin used in administration, law, music, commerce, the liturgy, theology and philosophy, science and technology, and daily life. Part Three offers a systematic overview of Medieval Latin literature, with introductions to a wide range of genres and to translations from and into Latin. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography of fundamental works--texts, lexica, studies, and research aids. This guide satisfies a long-standing need for a reference tool in English that focuses on medieval latinity in all its specialized aspects. It will be welcomed by students, teachers, professional latinists, medievalists, humanists, and general readers interested in the role of Latin as the learned lingua franca of western Europe. It may also prove valuable to reference librarians assembling collections concerned with Latin authors and texts of the postclassical period.
The Materiality of the Text and Manuscript Culture
The Oxford Handbook of Dante, Edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, 2021
This article investigates the significance of the manuscripts of Virgil and other classical poets that Dante might have read. Calling attention to the presence of musical notation (neumes) in copies that share the particular Virgilian readings Dante quotes, this essay explores the resonance of one of those passages (Aeneas' dream of Hector) in Dante's po em. It shows how Dante uses this Virgilian episode to craft his encounter with Manfred where he considers the relationship of body and soul that constitutes one of the major dif ferences between classical and Christian thought, as Augustine frequently noted. Just as Christian anthropology maintains that the body constitutes an essential element of the human person, this essay argues that the materiality of the texts Dante read constitutes a crucial source for understanding how Dante interpreted these texts.
Obscurity and Memory in Late Medieval Latin Manuscript Culture: The Case of the Summarium Biblie
Any enquiry concerned with the past sets a challenge of distin-guishing the special from the normal, the extraordinary from the everyday, the unique from the pattern. This is problematic not only due to our distance in time (a fact that we simply have to take into account) but also due to the character of our sources: what we have to work with are generally specific fragments, we are never getting the whole picture. Our grasp and understanding of the past is unavoidably a con¬struct. With the subject of obscurity, we are entering an especially fragile world where the lack of evidence is particularly painful and it is hard not to mix our present day ideas of the obscure with the medieval ones. For this reason, before moving to the discussion of the active application of obscurity within the late medieval culture of memory, this volume opens with an overview of the two explicit medieval discourses on the sub¬ject of obscurity, the scriptural and rhetoric-poetical discourse. The actual focus of this study, the case of the biblical mnemonic aid Summarium Biblie, is emblematic: during the Middle Ages it was an extremely popular (even omnipresent) text which is, at the same time, very obscure to us, making its practical usability al¬ready in the Middle Ages questionable today. The tension between its assumed limits as a textual tool, and its actual most favorable medieval reception is precisely what leads to a careful re-consideration of the medieval approach to obscurity, which is the subject of this book. As with any manuscript study, and especially with a study of manu¬scripts of widely diffused texts, the picture presented here is not complete: some codices remain to be consulted and many others undoubt¬edly wait to be discovered. While this book is in this respect unavoid¬ably still a work in progress, it presents and discusses patterns not likely to be affected by further findings. Not offering exhaustive treat¬ment and final answers, it hopes to contribute to the dynamic dis¬course on the fascinating textual and manuscript culture of the Latin Middle Ages.