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Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150, Jan M. Ziolkowski, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, 0812231619, 9780812231618, 354 Pages

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Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150, Jan M. Ziolkowski, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, 0812231619, 9780812231618, 354 Pages Talking animals: medieval Latin beast poetry, 750-1150, Jan M. Ziolkowski, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, 0812231619, 9780812231618, 354 pages. DOWNLOAD HERE In quest of Marie de France, a twelfth-century poet , Chantal Anne-Marie MarГ©chal, 1992, Literary Criticism, 294 pages. Aviani Fabulae Accedit eiusdem dissertatio de aetate et stilo Flavii Aviani, Avianus (Poeta), Hendrik Cannegieter, 1731, , . Socrates , , 2005, , 416 pages. Babrius and Phaedrus , Babrius, Phaedrus, Ben Edwin Perry, 1965, Literary Criticism, 634 pages. Babrius is the reputed author of a collection (discovered in the 19th century) of more than 125 fables based on those called Aesop's, in Greek verse. He may have been a .... LittГ©rature d`Occident : histoire des lettres latines du Moyen Age , Maurice HГ©lin, 1949, Literary Criticism, 130 pages. Latin Epics of the New Testament Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, Roger P. H. Green, Nov 23, 2006, Literary Criticism, 443 pages. An exploration of the way in which early Christians engaged with the Roman intellectual elite and its highly sophisticated Graeco-Roman tradition. Roger Green examines the .... The fable as literature , Harold John Blackham, 1985, , 280 pages. Fables and children form & function, Angela Yannicopoulou, 1993, Literary Criticism, 191 pages. A history of secular Latin poetry in the middle ages, Volume 1 , Frederic James Edward Raby, 1934, , 796 pages. Miracles of the Virgin Mary, in verse , Nigellus Wireker, Jan 1, 1986, History, 101 pages. Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal , Peter Abelard, 2008, Biography & Autobiography, 232 pages. Comprehensive and learned translation of these texts affords insight into Abelard's thinking over a much longer sweep of time and offers snapshots of the great twelfth-century .... The Wandering Scholars , Helen Waddell, 1989, Poetry, 330 pages. A study of the Goliards, itinerant Latin lyricists of the 12th and 13th centuries. A Cosmos of Desire The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts, Thomas C. Moser, 2004, Literary Criticism, 485 pages. A groundbreaking illumination of the creation and reception of extant erotic poetry written in Latin during the Middle Ages. The Romanesque lyric studies in its background and development from Petronius to The Cambridge songs, 50-1050, Philip Schuyler Allen, 1928, Literary Criticism, 373 pages. Encyclopedia of fable , Mary Ellen Snodgrass, 1998, Reference, 451 pages. Entries include authors, titles, sources, characters, and subcultures of fables, exemplary tales, and storytelling.. Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages , Jan M. Ziolkowski, 2007, Literary Criticism, 362 pages. Nota Bene explores a little-known juxtaposition of verbal text and musical notation in the Middle Ages. This particular intersection deserves attention from those interested in .... Lions, goats, wolves, and flies ululate (and buzz) in this work, dispelling views of medieval Latin poetry as staid or dull. Asserting that the poems offer more than an entree to the Roman de Renart, Ziolkowski (medieval Latin, comparative literature; Harvard U.) explores their likely inspirations, and surveys what is known and speculated about them. He appends his own translations of 32 poems spanning the 10th through 12th centuries. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) JSTOR uses cookies to maintain information that will enable access to the archive and improve the response time and performance of the system. Any personal information, other than what is voluntarily submitted, is not extracted in this process, and we do not use cookies to identify what other websites or pages you have visited. It must be admitted at the outset that I am not a specialist in any of the three dozen or so poems dealt with by this book. But it must also be admitted that such specialists do not seem to be the book's intended audience, and are, indeed, unlikely to find the book entirely satisfactory. From a marketing standpoint, given the paucity of such specialists, this is probably a good thing. Medieval Latinists, however, should note that Z.'s shorter discussions, usually accorded the shorter poems, are for the most part too brief, general, non-technical, and perhaps unoriginal to please someone looking for (say) a metrical analysis of Alcuin's +"The Cock and the Wolf" or an innovative literary reading of the beast poems of Theodulf of Orleans. Z.'s longer discussions, on the other hand, such as he gives the more substantial poems like the Echbasis Captivi or Ysengrimus, valuable and marked as they are by Z.'s familiar exactness and philological thoroughness, compete against a correspondingly larger and more substantial monograph- and article-literature—among the latter of which, moreover, some of his discussions have already appeared. Finally, one's expectation that in a comprehensive work like this, devoted to an entire corpus of poems taken together, one might find new insight into the literary relations within the corpus, an appreciation for the connectedness of the poems that it comprises, and a sense of the group as a coherent whole, though not entirely dashed, does rather run aground on the hard fact that such relations, connectedness, and cohesion do not exist to any significant degree. This, at least, is the conclusion to which Z. repeatedly, and perhaps ruefully, comes. To be more exact, Z. finds that particular pairs and groups of poems exhibit some odd and suggestive similarities. Several poems make use of the same underlying fable, for example that of the "sick lion and flayed bear (wolf)." Several make use of the same (stock?) figures of the cowled wolf and the cunning fox. Several are centos or pastiches of classical and antique Christian poetry. Several use such quotation to produce the effect of a burlesque or mock-epic, others, (as Z. would have it) to supply meaning and context for their own verse, so that a true understanding of it requires immediate recognition of the original contexts from which the individual lines are quoted. Several adopt the guise of a poem about animals to protect what amounts to personal abuse or political complaint. Several draw heavily on the same authors, especially Horace, or on the same genres or techniques. Several do none of these things and are wholly sui generis. None can be shown to depend on any of the others. Aside from the rather arbitrary criteria which justified their inclusion in Z.'s corpus to begin with, what all of these poems can be said to share is a common dependence on more traditional texts in more traditional genres, many or all of these laboring under the disadvantage of being familiar school texts or the subjects of school exercises (fable, physiologus and bestiary, riddles, animal testaments, epitaphs, and flytings), —and a common mindset: a willingness to experiment, to recast and combine traditional texts and genres, as well perhaps as traditional oral tales and genres (though Z.'s references to these are less than persuasive, not least in their assumption that folk tales are told only by "peasants" (236, elsewhere)) to suit present needs or amusement. Z. explicitly rejects attempts to see these poems merely as immature forerunners of the later medieval Renard literature, or as late and degenerate descendants of Aesopic fable. They are too individual and too interesting to be worthily treated as either. Z. suggests that we look at them as we do at the airplanes of the first decade of the age of flight (6): all strangely different, all experimental, and all designed to accomplish the same end. Aside from that,The medieval Latin poems have few immediately discernible traits in common with one another. They were not the products of the same time or region. They range greatly in length.... In structure, a beast poem can be as humble as one speech by a bird struggling to fly home safely..., but then again it can intertwine a dozen main stories and another dozen visions, reminiscences, and divagations.... The beast poems were created for many occasions and audiences..., to be pored over in the library..., read aloud, sung, and staged.... Some were perhaps scripts for schoolroom performances..., others for recitation in the refectory. (5)Such an elusive commonality amongst such a diverse variety is really as much as can be expected from a group of poems chosen on negative criteria: poems, that is, that predate the high-medieval explosion of beast poetry, but that are not native to the ongoing traditions of fable or physiologus. Z.'s conclusions may thus be said to spring from the conception of his project, which means in this case that they arise from the inception of the project as a proposed Cambridge doctoral dissertation, supervised by Peter Dronke. For Talking Animalsrepresents the arrival in print of a ten-year-old graduate dissertation (even as Z.'s Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex(1985) represented a revision of his undergraduate thesis). The origin of the book as a dissertation, and that dissertation's initial decision on a corpus of poems (with the consequent need to create a coherent discourse about an inherently incoherent subject) have both had some evident consequences for the book's argument and style. The transitions and connections often seem forced—and therefore to lack force—and probably for that reason tend to be a chief source of the book's occasional prolixity and repetitiveness, as if stating and restating the connections (or lack of connections!) would produce connection, and as if emphasizing the structure of the book and the cohesiveness of the material would make either argument cogent. One is tempted to attribute the book's occasional descent into pedantic philological plodding (e.g. the irrelevant list of Indoeuropean cognates for "fable" in Chapter One (p.16)) likewise to its origins as a dissertation. The book's sense of straining for coherence and its occasional pedanticism are, however, two of the very few flaws in its presentation.
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