This work is a complete English translation of the Latin Etymologies of Isidore, Bishop of Seville (c.560–636). Isidore compiled the work between c.615 and the early 630s and it takes the form of an ...encyclopedia, arranged by subject matter. It contains much lore of the late classical world beginning with the Seven Liberal Arts, including Rhetoric, and touches on thousands of topics ranging from the names of God, the terminology of the Law, the technologies of fabrics, ships and agriculture to the names of cities and rivers, the theatrical arts, and cooking utensils. Isidore provides etymologies for most of the terms he explains, finding in the causes of words the underlying key to their meaning. This book offers a highly readable translation of the twenty books of the Etymologies, one of the most widely known texts for a thousand years from Isidore's time.
The term didaktikos, first used by the ancient Greeks, referred to someone who was able to teach. However, not only in the sense of providing information and knowledge, but effectively conveying them ...so that they serve practical purposes. The aim of the contribution is to find out whether the gnomes of Gregory of Nazianzus formally meet the basic standards of didactic literature and thus to point out whether it is appropriate to use them as an inspirational source for writing sermons. By means of analytical and comparative method, we assess the presence of the basic features of homilies as well as whether they can be identified in the gnomes of Gregory of Nazianzus. The analysis confirms that homiletic texts are compatible with the gnomes by Gregory of Nazianzus and can be thus used as an inspirational source for writing sermons. Nazianzus’ gnomes – the subject of our research – are also interesting for the readers today and have a lot to offer. Even if it is unlikely that the poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus attracts broad readership, the sermon can be the tool that conveys the author’s moral legacy.
Fictions of Advicehistoricizes the late medieval mirrors (or handbooks) for princes to reveal how the ambiguities and contradictions characteristic of the genre are responses to-as well as attempts ...to manage-the risks implicit in advising a king.
Often thought of as moralizing advice unable to engage political conflicts, the mirrors for princes have been taken for dull and conventionalized testimonies to the medieval taste for platitude. Judith Ferster maintains that advice was at the center of one of the important political debates in the late Middle Ages: how to constrain the king and allow for his subjects' participation.Fictions of Advicerereads the English mirrors for princes to show how their moralizing was often highly topical and even subversive. Although overtly deferential to the rulers they address, the mirrors' authors were surprisingly capable of criticism and opposition.
In putting the texts back into their historical contexts, Ferster reveals the vital cultural and political function they fulfilled in their societies.
This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar ...school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
This new series, launched by the Medievalists' Society in 2014, provides a forum for exceptional, topically focused anthologies and conference volumes as well as medievalist monographs. The journal ...accepts submissions in all disciplines represented by the Society, including Byzantine studies, Latin philology, modern language philologies, history, and theology.
Jennifer Phegley presents an examination of four mid-Victorian magazines that middle-class women read widely. Educating the Proper Woman Reader reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed ...relationship between nineteenth-century women readers and literary critics. While many scholars have explored the ways nineteenth-century critics expressed their anxiety about the dangers of women's unregulated and implicitly uncritical reading practices, which were believed to threaten the sanctity of the home and the cultural status of the nation, Phegley argues that family literary magazines revolutionized the position of women as consumers of print by characterizing them as educated readers and able critics. Her analysis of images of influential women readers (in Harper's), intellectual women readers (in The Cornhill), independent women readers (in Belgravia), and proto-feminist women readers/critics (in Victoria) indicates that women played a significant role in determining the boundaries of literary culture within these magazines. She argues that these publications supported women's reading choices, inviting them to define literary culture rather than to consume it passively. Not only does this book revise our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women readers but it also takes a fresh look at the transatlantic context of literary production. Further, Phegley demonstrates the role these publications played in improving cultural literacy among women of the middle classes as well as the interplay between fiction and essays of the time by writers such as Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, George Sala, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.
Literature’s Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries ...out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children’s literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.
El 'exemplum', durante siglos despreciado por los públicos más cultos, ha llamado en las últimas décadas la atención de los investigadores, como muestra el crecimiento espectacular de la ...bibliografía. No existe en la tradición hispánica nada similar al riquísimo panorama novohispano que se descubre en esta selección realizada por Manuel Pérez, una producción escrita siglos después de que ya se hubiera fijado, incluso, la defunción del género. Texto de la editorial.
Ranging from music to astronomy, gardening to the Bible, this essay collection is the first multi-disciplinary volume to examine a kind of text that was a staple of early modern English publishing: ...the how-to book. It tackles a wide range of subjects - grammars, music books, gardening manuals, teach-yourself book-keeping - while highlighting the commonalities of diverse texts as didactic works, and situating this material in wider intellectual and material contexts. An introductory essay explores the uses of didactic texts in early modern culture, evaluates their relationships with other literary forms, and establishes the significance of such texts within the cultural history of the period. There follow contributions by an international group of scholars from a broad range of disciplines, including the history of science, literature, lingustics, and musicology. The volume addresses the important issue of how texts that tend to be regarded today as 'non-literary' functioned within early modern literature. It also evaluates relationships between textual prescription and actual practices, and the early modern conception of experience as opposed to knowledge, that presently concern social and cultural historians and historians of science. Drawing attention to non-fictional, didactic texts as opposed to the imaginative and political writings that have been its focus until now, Didactic Literature in England 1500-1800 adds a new dimension to the study of reading, readership and publishing. All in all, it constitutes a substantial contribution to histories of knowledge, of educational processes and practices, and to the history of the book in early modern England.
Contents: Introduction, Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell; The Bible and didactic literature in early modern England, Scott Mandelbrote; Didactic sources of musical learning in early modern England, Susan Forscher Weiss; 17th-century didactic readers, their literature and ours, Randall Ingram; Polite society and perceptions of the sun and the moon in the Athenian Mercury and the British Apollo, 1691-1711, Anna Marie E. Roos; French conversation or 'glittering gibberish'? Learning French in 18th-century England, Michèle Cohen; The gardener and the book, Rebecca Bushnell; Deformity's filthy fingers: cosmetics and the plague in Artificiall Embellishments, or Arts best Directions how to preserve Beauty or procure it (Oxford, 1665), Christoph Heyl; Richardson's barometer: colonial representation in grammatical texts, Richard Steadman-Jones; Containing the marvellous: instructions to buyers and sellers, Phyllis Whitman Hunter; Bibliography; Index.
Natasha Glaisyer, Department of History, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at The University of York, UK and Sara Pennell, Independent Scholar
Introduction Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) is a Japanese didactic book written in the 14th century, 80 years, after appearance of Gulistan, (Rose Garden), the masterpiece of Iranian poet and ...writer, Muslihaldin Sa’adi Shirazi, and has a strong resemblance both in content and structure with Gulistan. Kenko Yoshida , the author of Essays in Idleness, was a poet and writer who unlike Sa’adi, had the life of a recluse, and retired himself as a Buddhist monk, from the public life. Although Sa’adi was a writer and poet who had trained in the School of Quran and Islamic wisdom and Yoshida was a believer of Buddhist mysticism, their attitude toward the world was quite similar. Even so, Sa’adi’ s work, is far superior to Yoshida’s, from an aesthetic and rhetorical point of view. Warning about the instability of the world, the preciousness of contentment and importance of dignity in the old age are the common themes of two books. From a structural point of view, they are also similar; for example, both have used poems within prose as a structural feature and both consist of narrative pieces. 2.Methodology This paper is based on the comparative study method in order to evaluate the content and aesthetic features of the two mentioned books and to determine the similarities and differences between elements within them. for this purpose, the researchers have tried, at first, to find elements within the two books that have some type of similarity, such as common themes. Then, the researchers have attempted to answer the following questions: 1) Had Yoshida been familiar with Sa’adi ‘s book and inspired by it? 2) Are the similarities between the two books made completely by coincidence? Discussion Gulistan (Rose Garden) is widely regarded as a landmark of Persian literature and one of its most influential prose works. Written in 1258, it is one of the two of Saadi’s major works, which has been proved deeply influential in both the West and the East. Structured as a collection of poems and stories (metaphorically as different types of roses), the text features minimalist plots, expressed with precise language and psychological insight. It explores the many issues and tribulations faced by humankind, employing both an optimistic and a subtly satirical tone. The book is divided into an introduction and eight chapters, each dealing with a specific subject: chapter 1: Of the Customs of Kings chapter 2: Of the Morals of Dervishes chapter3: On the Preciousness of Contentment chapter 4: On the Benefit of Being Silent chapter5 : On Love and Youth chapter 6: Of Imbecility and Old Age chapter 7: Of the Impressions of Education chapter 8: Of the Duties of Society These chapters are composed of disjointed paragraphs, generally beginning with an aphorism or an anecdote and closing with an original poem of a few lines. Sometimes, these paragraphs are altogether lyrical. We are struck, first of all, by the personal characteristics of these paragraphs; many of them relate to the experience of the poet in some part of his travels, expressing his comment upon what he had seen and heard. His comments generally take the form of practical wisdom, or religious suggestion. He gives us the impression that he knows life and the human heart thoroughly. On the other hand, Essays in Idleness is one of the classics in Japanese Literature, and is much read as a text book in Japanese schools. The original title of the book is derived from the opening word of the text ,Tsurezure (leisure) and Gusa, a compound variant of kusa, which means “grass”, a word sometimes used to designate anything not quite finished up, raw and rough as it were. Contrary to Sa’adi’s Gulistan, Tsurezuregusa does not have a precise order, although Yoshida had tried to separate the subjects of his book into sections, the book is, in fact, a collection of treatises on miscellaneous subjects written by a fourteenth century priest. these subjects are, of course, very similar to Sa’adi’s Gulistan; for example, in section 18 of the book, Yoshida notes: “It is best for a man to be thrifty, to shrink from luxuries, not to accumulate great wealth, and not to covet the whole world. The great men of ancient times were seldom rich” (Yoshida, 1914, pp. 20-21). “In China once there was a man named Xu You, who owned nothing and even drank directly from his cupped hands. Seeing this, someone gave him a ‘singing gourd’ to use as a cup; he hung it in a tree, but when he heard it singing in the wind one day he threw it away, annoyed by the noise it made, and went back to drinking his water from his hands. What a free, pure spirit!” (Yoshida, 2001). Sa’adi in chapter 3 of Gulistan (On the Preciousness of Contentment) narrates a story with a similar theme as below: “A mendicant from the west of Africa had taken his station amidst a group of shopkeepers at Aleppo, and was saying: “O lords of plenty! had ye a just sense of equity, and we of contentment, all manner of importunity would cease in this world!” O contentment! do thou make me rich, for without thee there is no wealth. The treasure of patience was the choice of Lucman. Whoever has no patience has no wisdom ” (Sa’adi, 2019). On the Morals of Dervishes, Yoshida says: “Commendable is the man who, overwhelmed by calamity and sorrow, shaves his head but not because of some silly whim of his own. shuts his door so that none may know whether he is within or not, and lives from break of day to set of sun without any human desires ” ( Yoshida, 1914, p. 12). Similar to this, is the following story in Gulistan: “They tell a story of an abid, who in the course of a night would eat ten mans, or pounds, of food, and in his devotions repeat the whole Koran before morning. A good and holy man heard this, and said, “Had he eaten half a loaf of bread, and gone to sleep, he would have done a more meritorious act.” Keep thy inside unencumbered with victuals, that the light of good works may shine within thee; but thou art void of wisdom and knowledge, because thou art filled up to the nose with food” (Sa’adi, 2019). In section 51, Yoshida emphasizes the importance of hiring skilled persons for momentous jobs “A farmer of Oi was order to arrange a water – supply from the Oi River for the pond of the Kameyama Palace; so he constructed a water-wheel. He spend much money and worked hard for several at it, but there was something wrong with it and it would not go round. He tried all sorts of alterations, but as it still would not revolve he had at last to give it up. Thereupon a villager from Uji was sent for, who easily fastened it and put it right, so that it revolved as it should have done and delivered the water satisfactorily. It is best in every case to employ those who are proficient at the business” (Yoshida, 1914, pp. 44-45). There is a similar story in Gulistan: “A fellow had a complaint in his eyes, and went to a horse-doctor, saying: “Prescribe something for me.” The doctor of horses applied to his eyes what he was in the habit of applying to the eyes of quadrupeds, and the man got blind. They carried their complaint before the hakim, or judge. He decreed: “This man has no redress, for had he not been an ass he would not have applied to a horse or ass doctor!” The moral of this apologue is, that whoever doth employ an inexperienced person on an affair of importance, besides being brought to shame, he will incur from the wise the imputation of a weak mind. A prudent man, with an enlightened understanding, entrusts not affairs of consequence to one of mean capacity. The plaiter of mats, notwithstanding he be a weaver, they would not employ in a silk manufactory” (Sa’adi). Regardless of the thematic similarities, Sa’adi has used a better artistic form for his stories. The plots of his stories are subtly and skillfully and fascinate the readers completely.in contrast, most of Yoshida’s stories, have poor plots. Employing an optimistic and a subtly satirical tone are the other valuable features of Sa’adi’s stories. Conclusion Gulistan (Rose Garden), the masterpiece of the great Iranian poet and writer , Saadi Shirazi, has an astonishing resemblance to Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness). In our view, Yoshida, as a reclusive Buddhist monk, had not been familiar with Gulistan, and so the issue of plagiarism or adaptation is completely ruled out. Then, why these two books are so similar? And because of this amazing similarity, it called “Japanese Gulistan”. This study denotes that this similarity is based on three factors: 1) Sa’adi and Yoshida, lived nearly in the same era; 2) Both were the wise men and Sufis of their time; with the difference that Yoshida was a recluse monk and Sa
