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John of Salisbury (c. 1120–80) is a key figure of the twelfth-century renaissance. A student at the cosmopolitan schools of medieval Paris, an associate of Thomas Becket and an acute commentator on society and rulership, his works and letters give unique insights into the political culture of this period. This volume reassesses the influence of classical sources on John’s political writings, investigating how he accessed and used the ideas of his ancient predecessors.
By looking at his quotations from and allusions to classical works, O’Daly shows that John not only borrowed the vocabulary of his classical forbears, but explicitly aligned himself with their philosophical positions. She illustrates John’s profound debt to Roman Stoicism, derived from the writings of Seneca and Cicero, and shows how he made Stoic theories on duties, virtuous rulership and moderation relevant to the medieval context. She also examines how John’s classical learning was filtered through patristic sources, arguing that this led to a unique synthesis between his political and theological views.
The book places famous elements of John’s political theory - such as his model of the body-politic, his views on tyranny - in the context of the intellectual foment of the classical revival and the dramatic social changes afoot in Europe in the twelfth century. In so doing, it offers students and researchers of this period a novel investigation of how Stoicism comprises a ‘third way’ for medieval political philosophy, interacting with – and at times dominating – neo-Platonism and proto-Aristotelianism.
household audience, Harley 2253 also demonstrates the connections between these West Midlands elements and a pan-European network of textual transmission. The broad currency of French and Latin facilitates the book’s participation in this network, which put its Ludlow audience into contact with a range of writings shaping the household experience throughout the medieval West. In what follows, I explore the relative connotations of Latin, French, and English across the texts compiled in Harley 2253 and demonstrate that the shifting associations of French in particular
second group of chapters (‘The Bible in transit and translation’) engages with questions about language, translation and textual transmission of the Word. It is especially interested in the production of ‘cultural Bibles’, investigating the local politics of translation and reception against a background of mass global circulation of texts, ideas and people in the nineteenth century. Central to this section is the idea of textual and scholarly encounter, as the Bible was contrasted with Hindu and Islamic religio-linguistic traditions by missionaries but also placed
a first reconstruction by Paul Fridolin Kehr and a later one by the undersigned, the Ferrariense monk would have had to draw from the ChBen not only for the years 1102–40 but also for 1099–1101 and 1141–44. 6 Falco’s text, even with the characteristics of the manuscript tradition described above, does not pose particularly weighty problems of textual transmission. It seems reasonable to believe that, if there had been incongruities or complexities in the original, they were normalised in del Sindico’s humanist-era copy, notwithstanding the Beneventan physician
Building on the way in which intertextuality problematises the concept of linearity in relation to textual transmission, this chapter interrogates the tendency in Bullough-derived critical discourse to distinguish between text and ‘background’. The argument builds on Hulme and Barker’s conceptualisation of ‘con-text’ as part of a constellation of active textual components that are in constant dialogue with each other, rather than as texts that are hierarchically arranged.
Staging the Revolution offers a reassessment of drama that was produced during the commonwealth and the first decade of the Restoration. It complements the focus of recent studies, which have addressed textual exchange and royalist and republican discourse. Not all parliamentarians were opposed to the theatre, and not all theatre was illegal under the commonwealth regimes. Equally, not all theatrical experience was royalist in focus. Staging the Revolution builds upon these findings to examine ways in which drama negotiated the political moment to explore the way in which drama was appropriated as a means of responding to the civil wars and reinventing the recent past and how drama was also reinvented as a consequence of theatre closure. The often cited notion that 1660 marked the return to monarchical government and the rebirth of many cultural practices that were banned under an austere, Puritan, regime was a product of the 1650s and 1660s and it was fostered in some of the dramatic output of the period. The very presence of these dramas and their textual transmission challenges the notion that all holiday pastimes were forbidden. Covering some of the work of John Dryden and William Davenant as well as lesser-known, anonymous and non-canonical writers, the book examines contemporary dramatic responses to the civil war period to show that, far from marking a new beginning, the Restoration is focused upon the previous thirty years.
of the language of the text. Vernacular texts, in other words, do not adapt the alphabet to local linguistic needs, probably because the book to be consulted at random (mostly the psalter) will have been in Latin. Major developments in the transmission of dream divination In order to make sense of developments in dream divination, it is worth tracking textual transmission across time. The following analysis is based on the corpus of oneiromantic texts I have identified with the help of existing surveys and
authorship and textual transmission. We see the importance of keeping a dialectical model of early modern women’s textuality alive here, one in which gender is one of a number of determinants that influence a writer’s engagement with form. Such a model, alert to the possibility of both difference and similarity, allows early modern women’s writing to be read in conversation with the male-authored field. It retains gender as a category of potential difference that might transform our understanding of the largely male-authored field at the same time as it might also
cultural activities of chaplains also draws on recent scholarship on the role of secretaries – similarly pivotal figures within early modern cultures, with whom chaplains had much in common.14 Chaplains and their patrons, like secretaries and theirs, operated within ‘the complex ethics of obligation and reward’, and were active participants in the kinds of household knowledge economies familiar to scholars of textual transmission, patronage and the early modern household.15 The bibliographical sources available for reconstructing the lives and activities of chaplains are
place on a national scale. In particular this manuscript will be related to the increased appeal of the vernacular penitential lyric and the political discourse of penitence in the latter part of the fifteenth century. In what follows, I develop a model of textual transmission and reception that sheds new light on the correlations between transformations 202 202 Raluca Radulescu in the political discourse of kingship and the devotional literature of repentance, as well as on the geographical scope of these phenomena. I thus suggest that the ‘microcosm’ of this