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This is a study on the literary relation between Beckett and Dante. It is a reading of Samuel Beckett and Dante's works and a critical engagement with contemporary theories of intertextuality. The book gives a reading of Beckett's work, detecting previously unknown quotations, allusions to, and parodies of Dante in Beckett's fiction and criticism. It is aimed at the scholarly communities interested in literatures in English, literary and critical theory, comparative literature and theory, French literature and theory and Italian studies.
can be risky because the impact of a refashioned work is difficult to foresee. Medieval authors who set out to recreate the discourses of the holy were particularly vulnerable to criticism. The most ‘risky’ genre in this context was perhaps hagiography, the patterns of which were well-established for centuries and took their validation from the Church.19 In practice, however, late medieval authors such as Lydgate or Capgrave were very successful in introducing innovative changes to saints’ legends, which altered the ways in which saintly exemplarity were depicted
This chapter explores the ways in which medieval authors imagined their own pasts as voiced and embodied artefacts through a comparative analysis of two very dissimilar works, the alliterative Middle English St Erkenwald and the Old Norse saga Egils saga Skallagrímssonar . Although the two works stem from different cultural contexts
the most familiar sources to check the terminology of landholding, lordship and clientage to see whether early medieval authors used the words and terms associated with ‘feudalism’, which modern historians read into them. And she is very nearly always right: only very rarely is any so-called ‘feudal’ terminology to be found in eighth-century sources, that is to say, in the period in which in which ‘feudalism’ was supposedly born. 7 As for the watershed, and the pivotal role of the new dynasty, she teaches us to resist teleology, and calls for each moment to be
, and distinction, between annals, chronicle and history; the particularising impact of Aristotle’s inductive empiricism; and the distinctiveness of a specifically ‘Renaissance’ or ‘humanist’ historiography. Annals, chronicles and history Modern commentators have long looked for consistency of classi fication and distinction in the various ways in which medieval authors categorised their different types of historical writing. There is, in consequence, tangible frustration at the apparent permeability of the three most pervasive terms – annals, chronicles and
This chapter considers what voice has to do with the ways medieval people thought about personhood. Personification allows medieval authors to round out an abstract quality or thing (whether fitfully or at length) so that it acquires human characteristics and a body, an imagined ‘other mind’ subject to emotions and sensations, or a role in a narrative, whether very briefly or at more length. As if those rich and complex features of personification were not enough, however, medieval people seem to have found it most necessary to comment on personhood in texts when the person they are imagining has a voice. They populate the moments when someone speaks in the first person, especially if what they say is emotionally difficult or hard to explain, with comments that X is ‘speaking in the person of’ someone else. Here I consider the interpretative act of disidentification involved in any claim that an ‘I’ voice speaks in the person of someone else. Why did medieval writers and readers feel the impulse to make up people such as this, sometimes in the most evanescent or fungible way, in order to explain the ‘I’ voices they fashioned or encountered in texts?
This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.
tribuens . 17 Yet, for all this acknowledged continuity, Lottin was right to say that the reception of Aristotle did fundamentally alter the way in which medieval authors dealt with justice, and, further, with the relationship between justice and mercy. This was the result of two distinctive innovations brought about by Aristotelian thought. 18 The first is general, and stems from the orientation of Aristotle’s political philosophy: it is ordered primarily towards the good of the community. This is a fact noted by Albertus Magnus in his Commentary
II (d. 1039) and Otto of Freising’s Deeds of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (d. 1190). 2 In addition, gesta is a term used to label biographical sources about many other leading members of European society more generally, including popes, dukes, bishops and abbots. 3 On rare occasions, medieval authors wrote about the ‘deeds’ of lords of lesser rank as well, and two of the texts translated here belong to this category. 4
certainly appear more striking than the differences, and a response to very similar theoretical questions – where to draw a line of demarcation between history and poetry and, by extension, how much argument and verisimilitude to accommodate within a narrative whose truthfulness was always acknowledged to rest on credibility rather than certainty, fides rather than scientia. Modern commentators have long looked for consistency of classification and distinction in the various ways in which medieval authors categorised their many and diverse types of historical writing, not