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This book takes as its starting point a striking paradox: that the antique tradition of the art of memory -- created by an oral culture -- reached its moment of greatest diffusion during an age that saw the birth of the printed book.
Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacular literatures of later centuries. The result is nothing less than a masterful synthesis of European literature from Homer to Goethe. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a monumental work of literary scholarship. In a new introduction, Colin Burrow provides critical insights into Curtius's life and ideas and highlights the distinctive importance of this wonderful book.
Memory in the Middle Ages has received particular attention in recent decades; yet; the topic remains difficult to grasp and the research on it rather fragmented. This book gathers particular case studies on memory in different parts of medieval Europe and in a variety of fields including literatures, languages, manuscript studies, history, history of ideas, philosophy, social history and art history. The studies address, on the one hand, memory as means of storing and recuperating knowledge (arts of memory and memory aids), and, on the other hand, memory as remembering and constructing the past (including the subject of forgetting). It should be useful to all interested in medieval culture, literature and history. Contributors are Milena Bartlová, Bergsveinn Birgisson, Irene Bueno, Vincent Challet, Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Lucie Doležalová, Dávid Falvay, Carmen Florea, Cédric Giraud, Laura Iseppi de Filippis, Farkas Gábor Kiss, Rüdiger Lorenz, Else Mundal, Előd Nemerkényi, William J. Purkis, Slavica Ranković, Lucia Raspe, Kimberly Rivers, Victoria Smirnova, Francesco Stella, Péter Tóth, Tamás Visi, Jon Whitman and Rafał Wójcik.
Robin Raybould’s Hieroglyph, Emblem and Renaissance Pictography is the first English translation of Ludwig Volkmann’s Bilderschriften der Renaissance, the classic text which promoted the symbol as a defining cultural and literary characteristic of early modern Europe. Volkmann enumerates and describes many of the works which illustrated the contemporary obsession with hieroglyph, emblem and device, particularly those from France and Germany, thus complementing Karl Giehlow’s earlier Hieroglyphenkunde on the subject. Volkmann’s book highlights both Renaissance theories of the image as language and the symbol as an aid to an understanding of the meaning of life and the nature of God. Raybould’s translation has been described as elegant, admirable and impeccable and includes an introduction, extensive notes and several additional essays on topics relevant to the field.
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Since Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1869) rhetoric as a significant cultural factor of the renaissance has largely been neglected. The present study seeks to remedy this deficit regarding the arts by concentrating on literary theory and its aspects of imagination (inventio), genre (dispositio of the genera), style (elocutio), mnemonic architecture (memoria) and representation (actio), with illustrative examples taken from Shakespeare's works, but also on the intermedial rhetoric of painting and music. Particular attention is given to the rhetorical ideology of the Renaissance.
Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's "The Raven" serve as case studies that...
This volume provides the first full study of Sambucus' influential Neo-Latin emblem book. By analysing individual emblems and the historical contexts in which they were shaped, a new picture emerges of the use of the emblem for Renaissance humanists.