Latin Composition Textbooks and Ad Herennium Glossing: The Missing Link?

Camargo, Martin

doi:10.1163/9789047404644_010

Cited by 5 publications

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“…However, the two in combination imply a concept more typical of twelfth-century European thought. To identify the image as a 'comparison of meaning' is to classify it as a particular type of metaphor or allegory that needs to be considered intellectually if it is to 101 Martin Camargo in an important study of these texts has assembled a list of such terms from eleventh-century and later handbooks, among them contentio, similitudo, exemplum, imago, effictio, notatio, sermonicatio, significatio. 102 It is possible that intamlugud intliuchta was coined as a calque on a term from a source of this kind; alternatively, it may be an attempt to render into Irish the very concept 'figure of thought' itself, perhaps drawing ultimately on the terminology used by Donatus or Quintilian, mediated through an intermediate source that cannot now be identified.…”

Section: Intamlugud Intliuchta: the Figure Of Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ages of the World and the Ages of Man: Irish and European Learning in the Twelfth Century

Clarke¹,

Mhaonaigh²

2020

Speculum

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In the grand narrative of renewal and creativity in the Europe of the 'long twelfth century', 2 it has been easy to assume that Ireland was marginal and backward-looking, with the energy of its thinkers and writers concentrated on preserving and continuing the cultural forms of the national past. In recent scholarship, however, it has become clear that Irish intellectual life in this period was much closer to the European mainstream than was once believed. This article presents a case study in this area, concerned with the schematisation of historical time and the course of human life in parallel systems of six ages. Two examples of Irish textproduction from the early twelfth century-an extended marginal gloss of some theological subtlety, and a complex heroic image in a narrative eulogy-will be compared with parallel manifestations in three sources from the heart of mainstream European creativity in the period: an encyclopaedic compilation of history and theology, a sequence of newlycomposed hymns for the Divine Office, and the iconographic programme of stained-glass windows in a newly rebuilt cathedral. 3 The parallels will underline the fact that, despite the obvious differences in outer form, the modes of learned creativity reflected in Irish manuscript culture were closely aligned with international trends across Europe in the same period. To set this material in context, we preface our discussion with some general remarks on medieval Irish writing, before proceeding to the details of the chosen examples. 2 MEDIEVAL IRISH NARRATIVE: CONTEXT AND CONTACTS Medieval Ireland boasts a rich and varied textual corpus both in Latin and the vernacular. Latin literacy acquired through Christianity was adapted and applied to Old Irish, the term applied to the language written c. 600-c. 900 CE. 4 The use of the vernacular as a written medium at this early date makes Ireland an unusual case, and in a western European context only Anglo-Saxon England bears comparison for the scale and ambition of the vernacular project. From these beginnings, on both sides of the Irish Sea a further shift towards composition in both English and Irish is perceptible in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the Old English context, this has been associated with the court culture of the reign of Alfred the Great; 5 the context for its development in Ireland appears more varied, but the evidence suggests that the bilingual learned culture of the monasteries was the setting for the emergence of the literary corpus in Old and later in Middle Irish, which embraced a wide range of genres from chronicles and hagiography to genealogy and law. 6 Material from the earlier of these phases is only sparsely represented in early manuscripts preserved in Ireland itself. More manuscripts have survived because they became part of institutional libraries in continental Europe. 7 In such circumstances, not surprisingly, manuscripts in Latin predominate, though vernacular glosses and commentary, as well as more extended pieces of poetry and prose, are also found am...

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Section: Intamlugud Intliuchta: the Figure Of Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ages of the World and the Ages of Man: Irish and European Learning in the Twelfth Century

Clarke¹,

Mhaonaigh²

2020

Speculum

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Rikhardsdottir

2023

The Chaucer Encyclopedia

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Chapter 30. Ecologies of medieval Latin poetics

Cornelius

2024

Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages

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The concept of literary ecology is developed as an instrument for large-scale literary study by Alexander Beecroft (2015), for whom the metaphor emphasizes the great diversity of world literatures and the possibility of organizing this diversity into cultural types, analogous to the biologist’s ecotypes. For a study of Latin poetics, the most important typological distinction is between cosmopolitan and vernacular languages. Latin acquired an articulated body of stylistic norms (“poetics”) in antiquity as a vernacular language; subsequent developments in Latin poetics were conditioned by the language’s acquisition of cosmopolitan characteristics. I explore the consequences of that shift; texts discussed include Donatus’s Ars maior, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century arts of poetry and prose, Óláfr Þórðarson’s treatise on Icelandic poetics, and Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia.

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Latin Composition Textbooks and Ad Herennium Glossing: The Missing Link?

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

The Ages of the World and the Ages of Man: Irish and European Learning in the Twelfth Century

The Ages of the World and the Ages of Man: Irish and European Learning in the Twelfth Century

C

Chapter 30. Ecologies of medieval Latin poetics

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