Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-313
Author(s):  
Ricardo Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
General Study ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Narrative Frame ◽  
Love Lyric ◽  
The Middle Ages

Studying the medieval prosimetrum, a genre that mixes narrative with lyric, could have important ramifications for the general study of poetics. By disrupting transhistorical theories of the lyric, which proceed from a presumed continuity between ancient Greece and modernity, the prosimetrum situates the Middle Ages at the center of our understanding of modern lyric poetry. Instead of beginning with a late-eighteenth-century understanding of lyric poetry as a self-expressive voice, which scholars must then localize in a poem's historical conditions, language, and genres, the prosimetrum begins with a conventional, rhetorical poem in a variety of stated genres and then, by including a narrative frame, stages that poem as a heartfelt song sung by lovesick knights or clerks. In the prosimetrum, the playful game of conventional art, which defines the medieval love lyric in isolation, suddenly becomes a way to imagine fictional subjectivities.

The Origins of Western Dermatology

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 255-266
Author(s):  
J. Barrie Ross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Defining Moments ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Objective: On the premise that historical background makes the present more understandable, this review covers the origins of Western dermatology from its Greek and Roman origins through the Middle Ages to the defining moments in the late eighteenth century. Background and Conclusion: The development of major European centers at this time became the background for future centers in the eastern United States in the midnineteenth century and, finally, to the West Coast of the United States and Canada by the midtwentieth century.

Trends in the Study of Medieval Hebrew Literature

AJS Review ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Dan Pagis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Medieval Hebrew

The vast body of premodern Hebrew literature is usually termed “medieval“—a somewhat misleading term, partly based on the assumption that in most countries the Jewish Middle Ages lasted until the Emancipation in the eighteenth century. However, as is well known, this literature was by no means monolithic. It comprised such disparate schools and styles as portions of the liturgy dating back to late Roman times, the Palestinian and Eastern piyyut (liturgical poetry) of the Byzantine and Moslem periods, the famed Hebrew-Spanish school and its ramifications or parallel schools in Provence, North Africa, Turkey, and the Yemen, other important centers like Germany and France, and an entire millennium of Hebrew poetry in Italy whose later stages coincided with, and were influenced by, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Israel Davidson's monumental bibliography, entitled in English Thesaurus of Hebrew Mediaeval Poetry, actually spans more than a millennium and a half, or, as its Hebrew title states, “from the canonization of the Bible to the beginning of the period of Enlightenment” (in the late eighteenth century). Alternative terms to “medieval” seem scarcely clearer; “postbiblical” tacitly and misleadingly excludes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while “premodern” includes the Bible.

A Classical Cathay and a Real China

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Chris Murray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The State ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Classical imagery and allusion in narratives of the 1793 Macartney Embassy to China demonstrate the importance of classical reception in Anglophone engagements with Chinese culture. Concepts from ancient Greece and Rome helped to interpret what was foreign or, as critics of the Macartney Embassy noted, denoted utter incomprehension. Classics offered a lens through which Westerners viewed China, although definitions of what was classical or Chinese were in perpetual flux. Anglophone readers derived their ideas of China primarily from translations of Jesuit scholarship mixed with the Orientalist generalizations of Arabian Nights. This chapter considers the state of British Sinology in the late eighteenth century (which relied primarily on Jean-Baptiste du Halde’s General History of China), the disastrous outcome of the Macartney Embassy, the inadequacy of conceptualizing China according to European models, and recent attempts to theorize Sino-British cultural exchange in light of Edward W. Said’s work.

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