This article argues that Heine's 1851 poem "Jehuda ben Halevy" modifies Goethe's concept of world literature to make a place within it for the geographically dispersed, multilingual literature of the ...Jewish diaspora. Heine's efforts to imagine Jewish literature as world literature resemble those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which made explicit the political implications of Goethean world literature by likening the arrival of Jewish literature in a world literary canon to the achievement of civil rights for German Jews. The article argues, however, that Heine goes further than Jewish scholars like Michael Sachs and Leopold Zunz by suggesting that Jewish literature not only deserves attention as world literature, but that its transculturality and multilingualism anticipate it and provide a model for future thought on world literature. Heine's reflections in "Jehuda ben Halevy" indeed foreshadow contemporary interventions in the study of world literature regarding the status of medieval literature, untranslatability, and multilingualism.
...the battles with Grendel and Grendel's mother are now widely regarded as a variant of the northern folktale-type known as the Two Trolls or Bear's Son Tale attested in Greitis saga and other ...Scandinavian sources, though close parallels have also been detected with the Irish folktale known as The Hand and the Child.4 While Beowulf's third and final fight (with the dragon) has attracted considerably less attention than the first two, analogues have again been adduced in tales of Germanic and Norse dragon-slayers such as Sigurd, Frotho, and Thor, as well as classical figures such as Cadmus.5 However, Christine Rauer has shown that certain elements of Beowulf's dragon-fight absent from or rare in Germanic and Norse tradition have close parallels in the vitae of St Samson of Dol (contained in the ninth-century Vita II Samsonis) and St Michael (in the ninth- or tenth-century Homiliary of Saint-Pere).6 Complementing Rauer's work on the Christian resonance of the dragon-fight, this article identifies a new hagiographical analogue and possible source for Beowulf's fight with Grendel in Gregory the Great's Dialogi.7 The evidence presented below contributes to a growing body of scholarship highlighting the importance of hagiographical and homiletic materials to the poem's literary background.8 Gregorys Dialogi' in early medieval England As the instigator of the Augustinian mission of 597' Pope Gregory I occupied a special place in early medieval English spirituality.9 Hence, for example, the ninth-century Mercian author of The Old English Martyrology writes: ...several scholars have found echoes of Homiliae in Evangelia and Regula Pastoralis in Hrothgar's socalled 'sermon', in which the old Danish king warns the young Beowulf of the dangers of pride,13 while in 1977 Judson Boyce Allen argued that the tearing of Grendel's shoulder joint (lines 815b-18a) is indebted to a passage in Moralia in lob on the disordering of the social life.14 More recently, in an essay which bears directly on the discussion below, David E Johnson has proposed that the poet's characterization of Grendel is influenced by Gregorian demonology.15 Some modern scholars have recently cast doubt on the authenticity of the Dialogi, questioning whether the great theologian of the Moralia could have been responsible for this seemingly unsophisticated collection of miracle-tales and lives of Italian saints.16 Yet, while the Dialogi may not appeal to modern tastes, it proved immensely popular throughout early medieval Europe.17 Indeed, according to Michael Lapidge, the Dialogi was part of 'the small core of staple patristic texts, scarcely exceeding twenty titles' that constituted the 'typical Anglo- Saxon library,18 while the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici database lists citations from the work in a range of Anglo-Latin and Old English sources from the eighth to eleventh centuries.19 A large part of the texts appeal stems from the fact that Book II contains the most substantial account of the life of St Benedict, though there can be no doubt that medieval readers found inspiration and solace in the works diverse tapestry of miracles and holy lives. According to King Alfreds biographer, Asser, the West Saxon ruler instructed Bishop Wærferth of Worcester to translate the Dialogi into English for him, making it perhaps the first of the Alfredian translations.20 Wærferths Old English Dialogues survives today in several manuscript witnesses dating from the late tenth and eleventh centuries, though it remains the least studied of the works associated with Alfred.21 A prose preface accompanies the text of Wærferths Dialogues in an eleventh-century manuscript, Cambridge Corpus Christi 322. ...forþan ic sohte and wilnade to minum getreowum freondum, þæt hi me of Godes bocum be haligra manna þeawum and wundrum awriten þas æfterfylgendan lare, þæt ic þurh þa mynegunge and lufe gescyrped on minum mode betwih þas eorðlican gedrefednese hwilum gehiege þa heofonlican.22 (I Alfred, honoured by the gift of Christ with the glory of kingship, have clearly perceived and often heard through the testimony of holy books, that for us, to whom God has granted such heights of worldly distinction, there is the greatest need that amid these earthly anxieties we should bend and turn our minds to the divine and spiritual duties. ...I required and asked of my loyal friends that they would write for me, out of God's books, the following information concerning the virtues and miracles of holy people, so that I, strengthened through the exhortation and love amid these earthly tribulations, might from time to time think of heavenly things.)23 In addition to Wærfeth's translation, other Old English versions of the text were evidently in circulation: A Gregorian haunting-tale In Book III.4 of the Dialogi, Gregory relates to Peter the Deacon how Bishop Datius of Milan (d. 552) cast out the devil from an abandoned house in Corinth: Eiusdem quoque principis tempore, cum Datius Mediolanensis urbis episcopus, causa fidei exactus, ad Constantinopolitanam urbem pergeret, Corinthi deuenit.
Marriage and the relationship between husband and wife in medieval literature have often been analyzed from many different points of view. However, there is an aspect which remains unexplored and ...this is the analysis from a discursive perspective of the conversation between the knight and his lady before he departs in search of adventures, war or whatever other reason. This study aims to verify if there is any kind of coincidence or similarity in the arguments used by the lady in different texts, when she tries to stop her husband from leaving. Therefore, in the present study conversations concerning the departing of a knight from his lady shall be analyzed in Icelandic, German, French, Catalan and Spanish chivalric texts of the Middle Ages, taking into account the consequences of the knight’s departure for the lady, for the knight and for the marriage bond itself. A detailed analysis of the lady’s arguments intending to keep the knight by her side seems to lead to a hypothesis concerning the existence of similar arguments across literary texts in different languages.
The revision of the four-position theory of Old English metre by Yakovlev (
2008
) has had a considerable impact, both for its simplification of Sievers’ (
1893
) metrical principles, and for its ...supposed shift to a “morphological” rather than an “accentual” metrical type. I contextualize Yakovlev’s important contribution to metrical theory, highlighting that his main innovations are to eliminate the principle that every verse should have two lifts, and to collapse the metrical notions of “lift” and of “half-lift” into a single type of unit, the “strong position”. These major and thoughtful innovations are unconnected to the supposed “morphological” aspect of Yakovlev’s system, which consists of arbitrary and unmotivated stipulations of certain classes of syllables as inherently strong or weak. Calling the metre “morphological” on this basis is at best misleading, placing too much emphasis on a marginal component of the system. Moreover, the definitions of strong and weak positions are better explained with reference to linguistic stress: elements bearing some degree of stress (primary or secondary) are strong, while those bearing no stress are weak. Such a reframing leads to a slight revision of Yakovlev’s theory to incorporate the “rule of the coda” (Fulk,
1992
). The result is a version of Yakovlev’s theory which is both theoretically simpler and more descriptively adequate, but in which the label “morphological” lacks even the limited and inapt validity of the original version. This reintroduction of stress into the system does not, however, make the theory “accentual”, and it remains better characterized as an “alliterative-syllabic” view of the metre (Cable,
1991
).
The Old English poem
The Phoenix
is often read as a straight-forward allegory for the eternal life that awaits Christians. There has been some recent interest in the poem from scholars working on ...landscape and animal studies; the poem is frequently put in conversation with the Old English
Physiologus
because it is also an “animal poem.” This article argues that returning
The Phoenix
to its manuscript context within the Exeter Book, between the poems
Azarias
and
Juliana
, highlights the phoenix’s function as an allegory for explaining complicated issues surrounding sainthood, particularly concerning the body. The phoenix demonstrates virginity and continued chastity, enclosure, and the ability to live in both earthly and divine time, all of which are frequent pillars of holiness in early medieval English hagiography. This study suggests that the grouping of
Azarias
,
The Phoenix
, and
Juliana
within the Exeter Book was an intentional editorial decision made on the basis of shared purpose and theme, and offers a new reading for
The Phoenix
that forefronts the hagiographical features and didactic interests at play within.
In Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance, Andrea Louise Young reconstructs the dynamic visual miseen-scene that underlies The Castle of Perseverance, ...identifying cues for live performance and stage design during a sustained beginning-to-end close reading, which emphasizes references to vision across the play. Young then offers a Castle staging diagram of her own (35), this one drawn to scale with crisp clarity by Phil Kiel, dotted with numbered points that correspond to Youngs Appendix A, a systematic scene-by-scene collation of apparent visual cues in the text -thus mapping out the reconstructed staging to which she refers throughout the remainder of the book. Chapter 3, "Angelic Visions," covering Castle lines 275-1237, identifies positive lessons in how to see (against the negative examples from the first three scenes) and in how to participate in the "communal vision" (66) of good society, of which the real gazes of fellow spectators become the most prominent symbol (Prides directive for Humanum Genus to "se thiself on every syde" 69, is a rejection of that communality). The book glosses over potentially productive contradictions at the heart of the plays (and Youngs) visual logic, leaving many of the most provocative ramifications of its fascinating argument unexamined (a hint of anti-Tollard violence at 127, for instance, enacted by a fallen angel at the foot of the "castle as church," 127-28).
This article draws on studies of medieval monasticism and northern indigenous ontologies to show how we might heal the rupture between the real world and our imagination of it, which underpins the ...official procedures of modern science. Though science is not averse to dreams of the imagination as potential sources of novel insight, they are banished from the reality it seeks to uncover. Ever since Bacon and Galileo, nature has been thought of as a book that will not willingly give up its secrets to human readers. The idea of the book of nature, however, dates from medieval times. For medieval readers as for indigenous hunters, creatures would speak and offer counsel. But in the transition to modernity the book was silenced. This article suggests that by acknowledging our imaginative participation in a more-than-human world, and the commitments this entails, we can reconcile scientific inquiry with religious sensibility as ways of knowing in being. Le présent article s'appuie sur des études du monasticisme médiéval et des ontologies indigènes du Nord pour montrer comment on pourrait guérir la fracture entre le monde réel et son reflet dans notre imaginaire, qui sous-tend les procédures officielles de la science moderne. Bien que la science n'exclue pas que les rêveries de l'imagination puissent apporter des points de vue nouveaux, elles les bannit néanmoins de la réalité qu'elle cherche à découvrir. Depuis Bacon et Galilée, on considère la nature comme un livre, mais un livre réticent à divulguer ses secrets à ses lecteurs humains. L'idée d'un livre de la nature remonte néanmoins au Moyen Âge. Pour les lecteurs médiévaux, comme pour les chasseurs indigènes, les créatures étaient douées de la parole et pouvaient donner des conseils. Les temps modernes ont réduit le livre au silence. L'auteur suggère ici qu'en reconnaissant la participation de notre imaginaire à un monde plus qu'humain et les obligations qu'elle suppose, nous pourrions concilier investigation scientifique et sensibilité religieuse comme des modes de savoir dans l'être.
En este artículo se analiza la escritura de las oficinas notariales en las jurisdicciones episco-pales ovetenses en el centro del territorio asturiano durante parte de la Baja Edad Media. Con ello se ...pretende contribuir al estudio de la evolución de los tipos gráficos góticos en la Asturias bajomedieval en un entorno rural, pero también conocer cómo y dónde se produce el aprendizaje de la escritura, así como las posibles relaciones de escuela entre el notario titular y el personal que trabaja a su servicio. Nos servirá para determinar si en las notarías, además de transmitirse los conocimientos teóricos jurí-dicos y prácticos para el desempeño del oficio y la redacción de los documentos públicos, se ocupa de enseñar los rudimentos gráficos, esto es, si se da también una formación inicial escrituraria. Para ello se realiza el análisis paleográfico de la escritura utilizada en estos despachos notariales rurales a través de los instrumentos públicos originales conservados de la época de la implantación y consolidación del notariado. Por su volumen, destaca la producción documental de Nicolás Pascual, notario público en Las Regueras y Peñaflor, de la que extraeremos gran parte de nuestras conclusiones al ofrecer el resto de las notarías una imagen muy fragmentaria por la escasez de las escrituras localizadas para otros escribanos públicos.
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