Medieval Women Visionaries in the Renaissance: Jacque Lefèvre d’Etaples’ Liber trium virorum et trium spiritualium virginum (original) (raw)
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Feminist study of Middle English religious writings is a relatively new field, but it is a rich and well-developed one. Although the work of such pioneers as Eileen Edna Power set the stage in the early twentieth century, feminist scholarship of the corpus of medieval religious texts in English only emerged as a truly vibrant area of inquiry in the past twenty years. Indeed, the entry of such figures as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich into the canon, marked iconically by their entries into the Norton Anthology of British Literature in 1986 and 1993 respectively, suggests at once how recent a scholarly development such work is and how strong an influence such scholarship has had on the study of Middle English literature. Using the cases of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as test cases, this essay explores the key debates that have driven and shaped feminist scholarship on Middle English religious texts over the past two decades, and it explores newly emergent trends. It examines the impact of psychoanalytic criticism on medieval feminist scholarship and interrogates the contributions made by scholars who embrace French feminist approaches. It addresses the paradigm shifts enacted by the groundbreaking work of Caroline Walker Bynum as well as the questions concerning gender and essentialism raised by her work. The importance of New Historicism in the field is also a key concern in the essay, as are new takes on historicist research, especially the work of scholars who are rethinking questions of historical periodization. Feminist approaches to medieval religious writing are not limited to scholarship focusing on texts by and for women. However, widespread assumptions about medieval women's incapacity to produce or comprehend texts worthy of serious scholarly consideration meant that for much of the twentieth century, Middle English religious texts by women, or primarily directed toward a female readership, were ignored. Accordingly, among the primary tasks of feminist scholars were overcoming the perception that such texts were not worthwhile objects of study and, concomitantly, making these texts readily available to scholars and students.
Este artículo pretende estudiar cuatro traducciones francesas de las Escrituras, ubicadas en el periodo del Renacimiento, por intermedio del análisis de la Segunda Epístola de Juan, perteneciente al Nuevo Testamento. Su principal objetivo es investigar la Bible d'Olivétan o de Serrières de manera crítica comparando las técnicas ahí empleadas al texto original griego, del cual fue presumiblemente traducida y, en un segundo momento, contrastarla con tres versiones francesas contemporáneas: Las traducciones católicas de Lefêvre d'Étaples y Lovaina y la edición protestante de Calvino, de 1561. Una investigación comparativa intentará, por tanto, determinar las principales similitudes y diferencias traductológicas existientes entre estas versiones y si éstas proceden de factores ideológicos o puramente estilísticos. Palabras clave: Bible de Serrières, Nuevo Testamento griego, traducciones bíblicas del siglo XVI. ABSTRACT This article aims to study four French Renaissance translations of the Scriptures through the analysis of New Testament's Second epistle of John. Its main purpose is to examine the Bible d'Olivétan or de Serrières translation critically comparing its 474 ORNELLA CATTAI CAURIENSIA, Vol. XI (2016) 473-506, ISSN: 1886-4945
GENDER READING, AND TRUTH IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY: THE WOMAN IN THE MIRROR
SAME, 2020
The twelfth century witnessed the birth of modern western European literary tradition: major narrative works appeared in both French and in German, founding a literary culture independent of the Latin tradition of the church and Roman Antiquity. But what triggered the sudden interest in and new legitimization of written literature in these “vulgar tongues”? Does the explanation lie, as often claimed, in the interest of new female vernacular readers? Powell argues that a different appraisal of the evidence offers a window onto something more momentous and reaching well beyond the literary: not “women readers” but instead a reading act conceived of as female lies behind the polysemic identification of women as the audience of new media in the twelfth century. This woman is at the centre of a re-conception of Christian knowing, a veritable revolution in the mediation of knowledge and truth. By following this figure through detailed readings of key early works, Powell unveils a surprise, a new poetics of the body meant to embrace the capacities of new audiences and viewers of medieval literature and visual art.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2019
part of Castrodardo's rendition of the biography of Muhammad. The close reading of the oration by Muhammad's mentor, the monk Sergius, reveals deep Machiavellian undertones. The final three chapters narrate the stories of the readers of the Alcorano di Macometto. The most striking cases are probably those of the prophet Scolio and the miller Menocchio, studied by Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms [1976]), and revisited by Tommasino in chapter 9. In sum, The Venetian Qur'an is an inspiring example of how to conduct research on a seventeenth-century book. Alcorano di Macometto is studied from various angles and using different methods and disciplinary approaches, as the author himself admits (23). I have encountered a couple of slips, perhaps inevitable in a project that covers such a range of fields and immense secondary bibliography. First, Egidio da Viterbo (quoted in this study as Giles of Viterbo) did not translate the Qur'an (125, 126); rather he commissioned its translation to two different converts from Islam. Second, according to the most recent studies (García-Arenal and Starczewska; García-Arenal, Szpiech, and Starczewska), Juan Martín de Figuerola probably did not know Arabic but relied on Arabic-speaking intermediaries. Regardless of these minor slips, The Venetian Qur'an is a rich, carefully written, and attentively translated monograph that will surely be enjoyed by historians and philologists alike.